Phoronix

Imagination today announced the IMG A-Series as their next-generation GPU cores and architecture that deliver 2.5x faster performance for the same area and same power to their current-generation PowerVR graphics processors...

While originally Intel planned to transition their OpenGL driver default to the modern "Iris" Gallium3D driver rather than the longstanding "i965" DRI driver for Mesa 19.3, that was pushed back to Mesa 20.0 for introduction in Q1'2020. In aiming to make that revised milestone a reality, a new option has been added to Mesa 20.0 with the Meson build system for being able to indicate the Intel OpenGL driver preference...

While there has been the Libre RISC-V community-driven effort to create a RISC-V graphics processor that basically amounts to a RISC-V core with vector extensions/improvements and running a Vulkan software implementation (though they are now reportedly eyeing POWER instead of RISC-V), Think Silicon has announced the first actual RISC-V ISA based 3D graphics processor...

For those of you interested in AMD's new Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X processors with TRX40 motherboards for running FreeBSD, the experience in our initial testing has been surprisingly pleasant. In fact, it works out-of-the-box which one could argue is better than the current Linux support that needs the MCE workaround for booting. Here are some benchmarks of FreeBSD 12.1 on the Threadripper 3970X compared to Linux and Windows for this new HEDT platform.

NetBSD 9.0 is around the corner and finally presenting 64-bit Arm (AArch64) support as well as other long overdue hardware support like Intel Kabylake graphics...

While there is the KDE Frameworks that offers a wonderful set of complementary extensions/add-ons to the Qt5 tool-kit, for those looking for more Qt5 extensions, The Qt Company has launched "The Qt Marketplace" as a source for both free and paid extensions...

With the Linux 5.4 cycle we saw mainline support beginning to come together for some Qualcomm ARM Linux laptops while with Linux 5.5 another milestone is being achieved. There has been out-of-tree support in the works for getting the various consumer Snapdragon laptops working with Linux while those changes are slowly getting into the mainline kernel...

With the IOMMU updates for the Linux 5.5 kernel there is a major rework to the AMD IOMMU driver to make use of more common DMA IOMMU code for implementing the DMA API but with an admitted risk of potential new regressions...

With approaching another year closer to the Year 2038 problem, where on 19 January 2038 the number of seconds for the Unix timestamp can no longer be stored in a signed 32-bit integer, Linux 5.5 is bringing more Y2038 preparations...

With the start of a new month always comes the excitement of seeing what Valve's Steam Survey is pointing at for gaming trends as to the percentage of Linux gamers...

While there still is a week to go in the Linux 5.5 merge window with more feature code still landing, due to scheduler changes and other work already having landed, I already started running some Git benchmarks. Linux 5.5 at this stage appears quite volatile with some really nice improvements in some workloads but also regressions in others...

A month ago at the Open-Source Summit Europe 2019 in Lyon, France, Intel's Kelly Hammond who serves as the company's Senior Director of System Platform Software talked up their open-source contributions with a particular emphasis on performance. The video from that keynote was recently published for those curious about Intel's open-source work in the name of performance, including Clear Linux...

It's not often there are features to report on with regard to GNU Debugger (GDB) performance, but a new feature in place is multi-threaded symbol loading...

The Linux 5.5 block changes landed earlier this week with a wide variety of driver and core improvements. There are some I/O optimizations to make the pull exciting as well as the NVMe HWMON drive temperature reporting integration...

It seems like the feature would have been wired up long ago, but with the Linux 5.5 kernel guest virtual machines running on Microsoft Hyper-V should be able to successfully hibernate...

There is an exciting improvement to the GTK client side decoration handling ahead of the KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS release due out in February...

It's been nearly a decade now that we have been tracking Genode as an interesting open-source operating system framework...

Looking back on November there was the exciting release of new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X processors, Intel Core i9 10980XE Cascadelake-X also released, various new CPU vulnerabilities were disclosed, Linux gaming performance continued getting better with Mesa, the Linux 5.4 got buttoned up and released with its many new features, and other open-source milestones achieved. And there's a new Phoronix worker in-training...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) improvements were sent in earlier this week for the Linux 5.5 kernel and they appear to be busier than usual on the x86 (Intel / AMD) side for the open-source virtualization stack...

When the Raspberry Pi 4 launched earlier this year it was quickly realized active cooling was almost required if wanting to run the quad-core Cortex-A72 SoC at full performance without thermal throttling. Fortunately, the latest Raspberry Pi 4 firmware has improved the thermal/power behavior to lessen the need for extra cooling although it's still recommended for achieving peak performance potential out of this popular low-cost ARM SBC...

With the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X benchmarks on Windows 10 and Linux, Ubuntu 19.10 and other common distributions were just ~2% faster than the Microsoft OS and Clear Linux was just ~10% faster, based on 80+ benchmarks carried out. Those margins are much closer than we have seen with past iterations of Threadripper, but is that due to the Zen 2 microarchitecture and the improved topology of the new Threadripper CPUs or due to Microsoft's scheduler changes and other software improvements made in Windows 10 November 2019 Update? Here are some benchmarks...

The HID area of the kernel is always eventful when it comes to improving the input device support for newer hardware. With Linux 5.5 the HID story means a new Logitech driver and other enhancements...

With LibreOffice 6.4 branched ahead of its release next year, feature development is open on what will be the next follow-on release for later in 2020. And this week one big underlying code change was merged... Using Skia for drawing the interface in an effort to ultimately replace the Cairo usage...

Built off yesterday's release of Wine 4.21 is now a new Wine-Staging release that continues shipping over 800 patches on top of upstream Wine for offering an experimental/testing blend that often works out much better for gaming on Linux...

Sent in on Thursday were the platform-drivers-x86 updates targeting the Linux 5.5 kernel...

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the char/misc changes earlier this week and were already merged for Linux 5.5...

The Rust-based "rav1e" AV1 video encoder continues picking up performance optimizations...

Earlier this week as part of his series of pull requests, Greg Kroah-Hartman has submitted the USB subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.5 kernel...

Wine 4.21 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release as the feature freeze approaches for the Wine 5.0 release in early 2020...

The new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X is performing faster on Linux than Microsoft Windows 10. When carrying out more than 80 different tests on Windows 10 compared to five Linux distributions, Windows 10 was beat out by the open-source competition. However, the performance loss for Windows isn't as dramatic as we have seen out of earlier generations of Ryzen Threadripper HEDT workstations. Here are those benchmarks of Windows 10 compared to Ubuntu 19.10, CentOS 8, Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation 31, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Systemd has a present for you with a new release that comes bearing more features for this Linux init system...

As we've known for a long time, VirtIO-GPU / Virgl Vulkan support to allow accelerated Vulkan within virtual machines is in the works but still has a long road ahead. A number of other VirtIO-GPU features are also in the works or at least planning stages...

When X.Org Server 1.21 finally lands those relying upon XWayland for running various Linux games should find less (or ideally, none at all) stuttering or tearing...

Just a friendly reminder that our Black Friday / US Thanksgiving / Cyber Monday promotion ends on Tuesday. Show your support for Linux hardware benchmarking and daily open-source news coverage...

Reported on earlier this month is the decision by Linux kernel developers to disable HPET for Intel Coffee Lake systems. The High Precision Event Timer was being disabled since on some Coffee Lake systems at least this timer skews when entering the PC10 power state and that makes the time-stamp counter unstable...

The Cedrus video decode driver developed by Bootlin after successful crowdfunding for creating an open-source Linux video decoder for Allwinner SoCs now has H.265 support!..

This week Microsoft released Windows Terminal Preview 0.7 with some groundbreaking features... Well compared to Command Prompt and the existing PowerShell terminal, but capabilities many Linux terminal emulators have offered for years...

While EXT4 is the most common Linux file-system among distributions and is quite mature at this stage, it does continue seeing noteworthy improvements every so often with new kernel releases. With Linux 5.5 there are more notable improvements on deck...

Even with all the light shed on Spectre over the past nearly two years, with the Spectre RSB (Return Stack Buffer) disclosure that did affect IBM POWER processors it turns out the mitigations applied didn't cover all of the CPUs that should have been in place until this week...

Canonical's Ubuntu engineers in cooperation with community members have figured out their 32-bit support adjustments for the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release...

The W3C put out an interesting status update this week on web games technologies and the various standardization efforts at play...

More Mesa drivers continue to be embracing NIR as the modern intermediate representation shared between these OpenGL and Vulkan open-source implementations...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver updates were sent out last night for the Linux 5.5 kernel and quickly landed into the mainline tree...

Over a decade ago all the Linux desktop rage was over the likes of Compiz, Beryl, Compiz Fusion, and the like... Ah the memories. But to much surprise, Compiz saw a new release today. Compiz 0.9.14.1 isn't the most exciting update, but the project is still alive...

PHP 7.4 is out this US Thanksgiving day as the newest feature release for the PHP scripting language. PHP 7.4 comes with a number of prominent language additions while, yes, also having even better performance on the PHP series...

The ACPI and power management updates were sent in back on Tuesday for the Linux 5.5 kernel and punctually landed in the mainline tree...

While Mesa 19.3.0 was supposed to be out last week, it didn't happen nor is it happening this week due to blocker bugs. Given the US holiday week, it's looking like Mesa 19.3's blocker bugs might not be cleared in time for releasing next week either, but in any case the Mesa 19.3 Release Candidate 5 is now available for testing...

Coming together just over a day ago was the Google folks working on Golang figuring out many Go issues stemmed from a bug on the Linux 5.2 kernel and newer that was worked out to be some sort of a register corruption issue. That issue is now sorted out and fortunately it's a one-line kernel fix and boils down to being a caching issue...

The Linux 5.5 kernel is set to finally eliminate the code backing the sysctl system call, which has been deprecated for about a decade and should have no impact on modern systems of any architecture...

The OpenGL 4.6 extension is nearly two and a half years old while finally the open-source Mesa OpenGL drivers are catching up to this latest OpenGL revision that offers Vulkan/SPIR-V interoperability and other additions...