Phoronix

Linus Torvalds just issued the Linux 5.3-rc5 kernel test release as we are now just a few weeks out from the official Linux 5.3 kernel debut...

Now that the new AMD Ryzen 3000 series are running great with the latest Linux distributions following prominent motherboard vendors issuing BIOS updates that correct the "RdRand" issue, we're moving on with looking at the performance of the rest of the Ryzen 3000 series line-up while having freshly re-tested the processors under Ubuntu 19.04. Up for exploration today is the AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, the six-core / 12-thread processor retailing for about $250 USD.

Intel previously tried auto-enabling GuC and HuC functionality within their Linux kernel graphics driver but ended up reverting the support since the driver didn't gracefully handle the scenarios of missing/corrupt firmware files. The driver should now be more robust in such situations so they will try again for turning on the automatic behavior, possibly for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle...

Following the feature freeze and code branching for Qt 5.14, the Qt "Dev" branch will likely be shifting immediately to Qt 6 development. A Qt 5.15 release is still expected to happen before Qt 6.0, but that 5.15 milestone will likely just be a polished release derived from Qt 5.14...

Going back a decade one of the interesting open-source FPS games of its time was Warsow. Development on Warsow has seemingly been tremulous over the past few years (edit: though the core developer has recently released a new beta) for this Qfusion (Quake 2 code base) engine powered game that started in 2005, but now there is Warfork as a fork of Warsow that is being developed and also available via Steam...

The KDE Usability and Productivity Initiative to solve various problems in the KDE software stack to make it easier to use to more individuals and to do so more efficient will be coming to an end. But other KDE goals are being envisioned and the usability and productivity elements will continue to be worked on outside of this initiative...

Knoppix 8.6 is out this weekend as the newest version for this one of the original Linux distributions supporting Live CD/DVD booting...

Vulkan 1.1.120 is out as the newest weekly update to the Vulkan graphics API...

Among many different Linux/open-source benchmarks being worked on for the AMD EPYC "Rome" processors now that our initial launch benchmarks are out of the way are Linux distribution comparisons, checking out the BSD compatibility, and more. Some tests I wrapped up this weekend were seeing how recent Linux kernel releases perform on the AMD EPYC 7742 64-core / 128-thread processors...

While most major hardware vendors have been adopting LVFS+Fwupd for firmware updating on Linux, Linux PC vendor System76 has notably been absent from the party for a variety of reasons. Today they announced their new Firmware Manager project that bridges the gap between their lack of LVFS support and their own hosted firmware service...

Git 2.23 was released on Friday with more than 500 changes on top of the previous release...

Re-based against yesterday's Wine 4.14 release, Wine-Staging 4.14 is now available with nearly 850 extra patches...

Back in May we wrote about Oracle's initial plans for introducing an eBPF back-end to GCC 10 to allow this GNU compiler to target this general purpose in-kernel virtual machine. Up to this point LLVM Clang has been the focused compiler for eBPF but those days are numbered with Oracle on Friday pushing out the newest GCC patches...

The next Linux kernel version will expose the real-time sources of what's keeping the system awake via Sysfs compared to existing source information that previously was only available via DebugFS...

Based on last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 is now Oracle Linux 7 Update 7 with many of the same changes...

On Wednesday marked the release of AMD's Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise driver package for Windows and Linux...

AMD's official open-source Vulkan driver code had fallen off its roughly weekly code push / release cadence with not having a new release in nearly three weeks, but that changed today with the availability of AMDVLK 2019.Q3.4...

The KDE community has delivered the release of KDE Applications 19.08 as their newest feature updates to the core collection of KDE programs...

Microsoft's newest specification is the "Component Firmware Update" that they envision as a standard for OEMs/IHVs to be able to handle device firmware/microcode updating in a robust and secure manner. While nice in theory, the actual implementation has a number of issues that complicate the process and could quickly evolve into another troubling specification from Microsoft in the hardware space...

Intel has released a new version of their SYCL compiler and run-time code for single-source C++ programming and allowing offloaded computations to accelerators via OpenCL...

Not directly related to the recent AMD Zen 2 BIOS update needed to fix an RdRand problem (though somewhat related in that the original systemd bug report for faulty AMD RdRand stems from these earlier CPUs), but AMD has now decided to no longer advertise RdRand support for Family 15h (Bulldozer) and Family 16h (Jaguar) processors under Linux...

While DTrace prospects for the Linux kernel are no longer viewed as magical or groundbreaking as they once were more than a decade ago, Oracle continues to work on its DTrace port to Linux and extending its reach beyond just their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" for their RHEL-cloned Oracle Linux. Oracle now says they are working towards upstreaming more work as well as getting an eBPF-based implementation for the kernel...

LLVM 9.0 Release Candidate 2 is now available for testing while LLVM 10.0 has switched its code-base over to supporting C++14...

Last week AMD sent out their initial Linux graphics driver support for next-gen Renoir APUs. Those Linux kernel bits will land with AMDGPU in the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle while the RadeonSI changes were merged today marking that OpenGL support as a new feature for the upcoming Mesa 19.2...

While Arch Linux remains the gold standard for quality Linux documentation, Intel's Clear Linux has rolled out a new documentation web-site to assist new/existing users in making use of this performance-optimized and security-oriented Linux operating system...

EPEL 8.0 is now ready for users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and the eventual CentOS 8 for complementing the standard repositories with extra packages for what is found in Fedora...

The Blender 2.80 release arrived at the end of July that unfortunately was too late for using that big new release in our launch-day testing of AMD's EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors but as a follow-up here are AMD EPYC 7742 performance benchmarks up against the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 Cascade Lake as well as the AMD EPYC 7601 2P. Blender 2.80 performance is the focus of this article along with some other renderer benchmarks.

Continuing on from the recent technical vision for the Qt6 tool-kit, The Qt Company has now announced their new high-level 3D API they are developing for this next major release of Qt...

GCC 4.2.1 has been out since 2007 and while there have been many big updates to the GNU Compiler Collection over the past decade, that version remains somewhat common in the BSD land due to being the last version under the GPLv2 license. GCC 4.2.2 and newer switched over to GPLv3+ and that is why several BSDs have stuck to using GCC 4.2.1 or at least keeping it in their base repository. But now for FreeBSD 13, this old version of GCC is set to be retired with FreeBSD already being quite focused on LLVM Clang as its default compiler while also offering newer GCC versions via its package management system...

It's now been one week since the launch of AMD's EPYC Rome processors with up to 64 cores / 128 threads per socket and better IPC uplift compared to their previous-generation parts. Rome has outperformed Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs in their class while offering better power efficiency and way better performance-per-dollar. One of my favorite metrics has been how quickly the new EPYC 7742 2P can build the Linux kernel...

With TrueOS (formerly PC-BSD) no longer focused on delivering a quality BSD desktop as they once did, while there still are options out there for a desktop-focused BSD like MidnightBSD, for those wanting to use a vanilla FreeBSD installation can now setup a desktop easier using a new script...

The Apache Software Foundation has published their 2019 fiscal year report highlighting their more than 350 open-source projects/initiatives and this also marks their 20th anniversary...

Up until today the newest Linux kernel version supported by the official Reiser4 out-of-tree file-system driver patch was Linux 5.0, but that has now changed with the belated Linux 5.1 kernel support arriving as well as a separate patch for Linux 5.2 kernel support...

With the Raspberry Pi 4, a passive heatsink is an absolute minimum for running this new ARM SBC unless you want to deal with potentially drastic performance limitations based upon your operating conditions. However, if you will be enduring the Raspberry Pi 4 with significant load for any measurable length of time, an active cooler is almost warranted or otherwise a very capable passive cooler. In this article we're looking at the Raspberry Pi 4 performance with a Fan SHIM as an active fan designed for running on the Raspberry Pi off the GPIO pins as well as the FLIRC as a metal case that passively cools the device.

NVIDIA this morning introduced their 435 Linux driver series currently in beta form with the release of the 435.17 Linux build. With this new driver comes finally the best PRIME/multi-GPU support they have presented to date...

The Khronos Group has posted their material from the SIGGRAPH 2019 graphics conference and includes some interesting updates on Vulkan and their ongoing efforts...

NVIDIA engineers continue to be among those in the Vulkan technical sub-group working to advance machine learning for this API...

Similar to the recent upstream Linux kernel discussions over the poor Linux desktop experience when in memory pressure situations particularly with systems having limited amounts of RAM, Fedora developers are discussing ways to improve this experience as well...

Knut Omang of Oracle is working on integrating the Kernel Test Framework into the Linux kernel source tree/repository...

The Canonical team led by Alan Griffiths for maintaining the Mir display server with Wayland support today rolled out Mir version 1.4...

Being evaluated for Qt 5.14 is shipping Qt PDF that allows PDF documents to be rendered/viewed inside QWidget-based applications...

Queued now for Linux 5.3 and also marked for back-porting to existing kernel stable series is a fix to address distorted and crackling analog audio input that has affected AMD systems for at least the past two years with certain Realtek audio codecs...

At $39 to $66 USD depending upon model, the ROCK Pi 4 is evolving to offer nice open-source support down to the Arm Mali graphics thanks to the Panfrost Mesa driver and also works nicely with Wayland...

Last week was the Intel Gallium driver one line patch to boost performance by 1%. Today's code churn within Mesa for Intel's open-source Linux graphics drivers were larger but also with a more profound performance impact with some workloads now being faster by around 20%. Making this more exciting is that today's round of driver optimizations apply to the very common and mature "Gen 9" graphics hardware...

DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 is out today as the newest version of this popular BSD operating system...

AMD Mesa lead developer Marek Olšák has landed a set of improvements to the TGSI-to-NIR pass today for Mesa 19.2 to enhance the RadeonSI driver's support for using this intermediate representation...

One month ago we were told that AMD released a BIOS fix to their motherboard partners for addressing the systemd boot issue with Ryzen 3000 series processors that stems from an RdRand instruction issue. Finally over the past week we've seen motherboard vendors pushing out BIOS updates for the prominent motherboards and indeed this takes care of the issue...

Gentoo's AArch64/ARM64 support for 64-bit ARM should now be in good shape...

With last week's dramatic EPYC "Rome" launch where AMD has blown past Intel Xeon "Cascadelake" performance in a majority of server benchmarks, helping the successful launch of these Zen 2 server processors has been Intel's repeated delays of 10nm/Icelake CPUs and also the Spectre / Meltdown / Zombieload / Foreshadow mitigations. Out of curiosity, I've run some unmitigated benchmarks for the various relevant CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities on both the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 Cascadelake and AMD EPYC 7742 Rome processors for seeing how the performance differs.

We have seen Intel's compiler gurus contributing new enablement patches for Tiger Lake support with GCC 10 due out next year while now they have also landed their initial Tiger Lake support into the LLVM Clang 10 code compiler also due out in H1'2020...