Phoronix

For those curious about the performance of IBM's POWER9 processors against the likes of today's AMD Threadripper and Intel Core i9 HEDT processors, here are some interesting benchmarks as we begin looking closer at the POWER9 performance on the fully open-source Raptor Talos II Secure Workstation. This open-source, secure system arrived for Linux testing with dual 22-core POWER9 CPUs to yield 176 total threads of power.

The OpenMP ARB has announced the release today of the major OpenMP 5.0 specification. OpenMP 5.0 has been three years in the making and is a big update to this parallel programming specification relative to past updates...

The big FreeBSD 12.0 release still is expected to happen in December but will be a bit later than originally planned...

NVIDIA today released their first beta release for Linux/Solaris/BSD users in the 415 release stream...

PostgreSQL 11.1 is out today with fixes over last month's PostgreSQL 11 introduction but there are also updates to the 10.6, 9.6, 9.4, 9.4, and 9.3 release streams due to a new security issue...

Published back in September was some Mesa RadeonSI tuning for AMD Zen CPUs. That tuning to pin the application thread and driver execution thread to the same L3 cache benefits the Zen micro-architecture with its multiple core complexes (CCX). That code was merged a short time later unconditionally but it looks like that behavior needs to be refined for delivering maximum performance...

With this week's announcement of the Radeon Instinct MI60 and MI50 as what we previously knew as Vega 20, here's a look at what is likely required from the Linux software side for making use of these professional GPUs that will begin shipping in early 2019...

Linux Mint's Cinnamon desktop environment derived from GNOME/GTK components has tagged its v4.0.0 release in source and is already beginning to appear in distribution repositories from the likes of Manjaro...

The Qt Company has announced the release of Qt 5.12 Beta 4 as the final beta release for this upcoming LTS tool-kit update...

As it had been two weeks since AMD developers last pushed out new source updates to their AMDVLK Vulkan Linux driver, rather than their normal weekly release cadence, today's driver updates are a bit on the heavier side than some of their past light updates...

Of the announcements from yesterday's AMD Next Horizon event, one that came as a surprise was the rolling out of current-generation EPYC processors to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Available so far are the AMD-powered M5a and R5a instance types to offer Amazon cloud customers more choice as well as being priced 10% lower than comparable instances. Here are some initial benchmarks of the AMD performance in the Amazon cloud.

Unreal Engine 4.21 is out today as the last feature release for Epic Games' engine of 2018. This is an exciting game engine update for Linux and Vulkan fans...

A new patch-set proposed by one of the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developers would allow power-savings under load of roughly up to 3%...

With the Linux 4.20 merge window having ended this past weekend, the first big batch of new feature material to DRM-Next from the "DRM-Misc" area has been submitted for the follow-on Linux 4.21 cycle...

While Clear Linux augments their package/bundle archive with Flatpak support on the desktop, they are currently deciding whether to also support Snaps that are commonly associated with Ubuntu Linux...

It's been a few years since "Ares" first appeared on the ARM road-map and it looks like this high performance core might be close to finally shipping...

The GCC steering committee decided earlier this year they will accept the OpenRISC port for this processor ISA while the patches for it are still being prepped...

Wayland founder Kristian Høgsberg Kristensen who has been on Google's Chrome OS graphics team the past few years is continuing to help advance the open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics support...

Ahead of the GCC 9 feature freeze later this month, support for several newer Loongson processors have been picked up by this leading open-source compiler...

GNOME's Mutter window manager / compositor picked up Meson build system support today and in the process received various clean-ups like dropping OpenGL ES 1.x support...

Last month Vulkan picked up an unofficial Vulkan transform feedback extension solely to help out efforts like DXVK that map Direct3D or other graphics APIs on top of Vulkan. Separately, another Vulkan extension is in the works to also help out DXVK and D3D-over-Vulkan-like use-cases and can assist in better performance...

The initial release candidate of the upcoming QEMU 3.1 is now available for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

AMD's "Next Horizon" investor day event is taking place right now in San Francisco. Here are the highlights from this AMD event as we approach the end of 2018...

Following last week's Mesa 18.3 branching, the first release candidate to this final quarterly feature update of 2018 is now available...

While Steam Play is still of beta quality on Linux for running Windows games on Linux using their Wine-based Proton compatibility layer, Steam Play has been fast maturing since it was rolled out to the public in late August. The game list continues growing and with regular updates to Steam Play / Proton / DXVK (Direct3D 10/11 over Vulkan), more games are going online for running on Linux and doing so with decent performance and correct rendering. Given the most recent Steam Play beta update vastly improving the experience in our tests, here are the first of our Steam Play Proton benchmarks with Ubuntu Linux and using sixteen different NVIDIA GeForce / AMD Radeon graphics cards.

ReactOS, the open-source operating system striving for binary compatibility with Windows software -- including drivers -- for Windows Server 2003 and newer, is out with its latest quarterly feature release...

Plymouth 0.9.4 is now available as the graphical boot system widely used by most desktop Linux distributions. This update to the Red Hat led project is the first new release in 15 months and as such there are a fair amount of changes...

While WireGuard didn't make it for Linux 4.20 to the mainline kernel, if you are using an Apple tablet or phone, there is now an app that allows you to use WireGuard on iOS...

With the Linux 4.20 merge window past, DRM developers are already busy on their feature work for the next cycle -- AMD developers included. With this follow-on kernel release among the AMD Radeon driver features will be "AMDKFD" support for the Vega 12 and Polaris 12 graphics processors...

It's been just about one year since the last patch series was sent out while on Monday marked a new revision to KTask, the effort that provides a generic framework to parallelize CPU-intensive kernel work...

The crew responsible for the FFmpeg audio/video library today released version 4.1 of this open-source project...

It's now been six years since Valve began their beta roll-out of the Steam client on Linux and beginning to support their own titles natively on Linux...

Earlier this year when Google added Speck-based file-system encryption support to the Linux kernel they intended it to be used by low-end Android phones/smartwatches with older ARM processors lacking the dedicated ARM cryptography extensions. Speck is fast enough to provide disk encryption on the low-end hardware, but ultimately they decided against Speck due to public outcry with the algorithm potentially being compromised by the US NSA. Instead Google engineers decided to pursue HPolyC as their new means of encryption on low-end hardware while now that has evolved into a new technology dubbed Adiantum...

While sadly there aren't any major I/O performance improvements to note for the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with the recent Windows 10 October 2018 Update, there are a number of other new WSL features...

While there are several vendors working on open-source hardware systems with goals of fully open designs and open-source software down to the firmware, there is only one vendor that has achieved that mission while delivering server/workstation class performance as we approach the end of 2018... Raptor Computing Systems' Talos II. We finally have this dual POWER9 system in our labs for some interesting benchmarks ahead...

Apple's MacBook Pro laptops have become increasingly unfriendly with Linux in recent years while their Mac Mini computers have generally continued working out okay with most Linux distributions due to not having to worry about multiple GPUs, keyboards/touchpads, and other Apple hardware that often proves problematic with the Linux kernel. But now with the latest Mac Mini systems employing Apple's T2 security chip, they took are likely to crush any Linux dreams...

The second development release of the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 8.4-Skiptvet is now available for driving open-source benchmarking on Linux, macOS, Windows, Solaris, and BSD systems...

For those looking to have an all-in-one water cooling setup where the pumps and lighting can be controlled under Linux, there is now a viable option thanks to the open-source GKraken project...

For fans of the i3 tiling window manager, version 4.16 was released this weekend as the project's newest feature release...

KDE Connect is the interesting project allowing communication/sharing between your KDE desktop and an Android smartphone/tablet whether it be multimedia content, text messages, or files and more. KDE Connect 1.10 further enhances this interesting effort to bridge Android mobile devices to the KDE desktop...

Intel has reaffirmed shipping their next-gen Xeon "Cascade Lake" processors in the first half of 2019 while revealing today some initial performance details...

The next kernel release was either going to be Linux 4.20 or Linux 5.0 and today Linus Torvalds decided it would be the "4.20" kernel version...

With Linus Torvalds having just released Linux 4.20-rc1, here is our original feature overview looking at the major changes merged over the past two weeks for this new kernel. The Linux kernel will be ending 2018 on a high note with this kernel bringing more than 350 thousand lines of new code!

If you are looking for more solid-state storage to suit a growing collection of Linux games especially now with Steam Play allowing for many Windows games to run rather nicely on Linux, the Samsung 860 EVO 2TB SATA 3.0 SSD is a nice contender and what I ended up going with for the purpose of the Steam Linux game collection...

The DXVK project mapping Direct3D 10/11 atop Vulkan for a faster Wine / SteamPlay Windows-games-on-Linux experience is finishing out this weekend with the version 0.91 update...

Greg Kroah-Hartman this morning released Linux 4.19.1 as the first point release to Linux 4.19 that debuted two weeks ago today...

It was just days ago that AMD published their Zen 2 compiler patch for the GCC compiler but with the race on to merge new feature code before the feature freeze happening later this month, that "znver2" tuning patch has now been merged to mainline...

Endless Computers, the company behind the Linux GNOME/Flatpak-aligned Endless OS and that over the years has worked on various low-cost Linux PCs primarily for developing markets, is now pursing The Hack Computer as a low-cost laptop for teaching kids to code...

Unfortunately nothing has panned out from previous remarks made by AMD about potentially open-sourcing their Qt-based Radeon Settings control panel used on Windows so that it could be ported to Linux. The latest we've heard from AMD is that they aren't officially pursuing a GUI control panel for their Linux graphics driver but leaving it up to the different desktop environments to implement their own driver user-interfaces. One of the new community solutions in the absence of an official Radeon GUI for Linux is WattmanGTK...

Another Sunday update to the Vulkan API is now available with the stabilized NVIDIA ray-tracing extension and a new AMD vendor-specific extension...