Phoronix

Phoronix Test Suite 8.8-Hvaler is now officially available as the newest quarterly feature release to our open-source, fully-automated benchmarking software for Linux / BSD / macOS / Windows systems...

Just two weeks after the corrected DXVK 1.1 re-release debuted and DXVK 1.2 is now available...

Merged today for the Linux 5.2 kernel are the IOMMU changes that contain some interesting Intel additions...

Continuing on from the initial Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 benchmarks last week, now having had more time with this fresh enterprise Linux distribution, here are additional benchmarks on two Intel Xeon servers when benchmarking RHEL 8.0, RHEL 7.6, Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, and Clear Linux. RHEL 8.0 is certainly delivering much better out-of-the-box performance than its aging predecessor but how can it compete with Ubuntu LTS and Clear Linux?

It's been almost a month since the last Vulkan spec update with Vulkan 1.1.107, which is a long time considering they go through some periods of almost weekly updates, but out today is v1.1.108 and it introduces two new extensions...

It's been a few weeks since AMD developers last updated the public source trees making up their official open-source "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver but out this morning is v2019.Q2.3 as their newest update...

Karol Herbst of Red Hat who has been working for more than the past year on providing OpenCL support in Gallium3D's "Clover" state tracker via SPIR-V so it can easily work with drivers like Nouveau seems to be approaching the finish line...

One of the latest Fedora 31 change proposals is for shipping the very latest MinGW environment and toolchain in this next Fedora Linux release for ensuring a great experience for those building Windows applications on Linux...

Both Intel and AMD laptop hardware are seeing various improvements coming with the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel...

Released this weekend was IWD 0.18 as the latest version of the Intel-developed wireless daemon for Linux systems...

While we have endless passion and fun for Linux (and BSD) benchmarking, with Phoronix Test Suite 8.8 being released there are yet more improvements for our open-source, automated and repeatable benchmarking on Microsoft Windows...

D9VK as a reminder is the open-source project implementing Direct3D 9 over Vulkan for accelerating Windows games running under Wine/Proton on Linux. D9VK today had its second release...

It seems to be the season of open-source Solaris operating system updates... In addition to a new OmniOS LTS release for that Illumos-derived platform, OpenIndiana Hipster has issued its newest quarterly update...

Following their success in stripping out the remaining Python 2 bits, the release candidate of OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 is now available...

It's been a particularly busy start to May for KDE developers...

The Intel Gallium3D OpenGL driver performance is now in good shape for this new open-source Intel Linux GL driver compared to its "classic" Mesa driver, but there are still various other features to be ironed out before this "Iris" driver can become the new default. One of the items now crossed off the list is GPU hang recovery...

While open-source operating system projects derived from the former "OpenSolaris" code now maintained by the Illumos community aren't exactly prolific these days, one of the projects that does continue cranking through and seeing commercial success as well is OmniOS. OmniOS r151030 was released this week in its "Community Edition" flavor with various improvements...

As part of the first week of changes for the Linux 5.2 merge window, a patch series providing some x86 FPU optimizations were merged though there is some concern there could be regressions on older hardware...

At first there was some concern over the practicality and use-cases for this driver, the NULL TTY driver has been merged for the Linux 5.2 kernel as part of the TTY/serial updates...

If you make use of Linux kernel live-patching or even just have CONFIG_LIVEPATCH enabled, when switching to Linux 5.2 and building with GCC 9, the performance may be impacted in select workloads...

The big GDB 8.3 feature release was just announced by Joel Brobecker. This update to the GNU Debugger comes with many improvements and new features for assisting developers...

While many other Linux distributions are still in the process of demoting Python 2 packages out of their main archive / base OS ahead Python 2 being EOL'ed at the start of 2020, OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 has now joined the class of Linux distributions having already succeeded in that tangled effort...

The change in Linux 5.0 that initially broke ZFS On Linux compatibility ends up being pretty nasty for the ZFS encryption performance... A NixOS developer reports that the functions no longer exported by Linux 5.0+ and previously used by ZoL for AVX/AES-NI support end up dropping the ZFS data-set encryption performance to 200MB/s where as pre-5.0 kernels ran around 1.2GB/s...

For those that wait until the first point release before switching over to a new stable series, Linux 5.1.1 is out this morning...

Not only does Intel's Clear Linux distribution offer stellar out of the box performance, but they seem to be making it increasingly user/desktop friendly at this stage. There's been new GUI installer work as well as the launching of their own support forums...

AFS, the Andrew File-System that serves as a distributed file-system and used by the likes of Carnegie Mellon University and has seen ports to different operating systems, can now handle more programs running on top of the file-system like Firefox and GNOME...

Hot off the release of Wine 4.8, Wine-Staging 4.8 has already been released with its hundreds of patches re-based atop this latest upstream Wine code for handling Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems...

For those making use of the Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) for cross-platform libraries common to games/multimedia software, version 3.2.2 is now available with nearly a half year worth of updates...

The -Wimplicit-fallthrough compiler flag has been around since GCC 7 for warning over switch fall-through cases where it could lead to potential bugs / unexpected behavior if the programmer inadvertently forgot to add a "break" statement to a case. The Linux kernel is looking to soon enable this warning by default...

Kaidan is the newest program in the KDE family, which is a Jabber/XMPP client that ultimately hopes to compete with the likes of Telegram...

Last month Intel developers began working on adding BFloat16 support to the open-source/Linux compilers for this new instruction debuting with next-generation Xeon "Cooper Lake" server processors. That support is now squared away for GCC 10, due out next year, and LLVM Clang 9, which will be released this autumn...

Wine 4.8 is now available as the latest bi-weekly snapshot for running Windows programs/games on Linux and other platforms...

With the recent release of Ubuntu 19.04, the new Intel OpenCL NEO compute stack is available in the archive as "intel-opencl-icd" for easy installation. The former Intel open-source OpenCL "Beignet" driver remains available too, for which we took it for a fun round of benchmarking comparison for seeing how these Intel OpenCL Linux drivers currently compete to just running on the CPU via POCL.

After being talked about for years, next month's release of KDE Plasma 5.16 will introduce a completely rewritten notification system for the KDE desktop...

As it stands now the upcoming release of Debian 10 "Buster" will provide a default desktop of the GNOME Shell running atop Wayland, but that still could change with a Debian developer suggesting the experience might not be good enough for this next release that they would be better off still using the X.Org Server...

It's not too often these days that new kernel updates bring changes to the pre-GCN Radeon Linux driver, but overnight a fix has been queued for helping out at least some users still running with ATI R5xx series hardware...

While it missed the main DRM pull request for Linux 5.2, the Nouveau DRM driver now has initial support for NVIDIA's Turing TU117, the GPU powering the new GeForce GTX 1650 series...

Phoronix Test Suite 8.8-Hvaler will be released in approximately one week while out now is the third and final development milestone release.Earlier development releases of Phoronix Test Suite 8.8 already brought many changes including Windows support improvements, PDF result improvements, various hardware/software detection improvements, statistics / analytic improvements, and other changes...

Mauro Carvalho Chehab sent in the media subsystem updates on Wednesday for the Linux 5.2 kernel and that new work has already been merged to mainline...

The much anticipated ZFS On Linux 0.8 release with its many new features isn't yet officially available but a fifth release candidate materialized today for testing...

While Mesa 19.1 will be released in a few short weeks, Mesa 19.0.4 is now available as the latest stable version of this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers...

With Scientific Linux bowing out, CentOS 8 will be the primary community/non-commercial re-spin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. That is, once CentOS 8.0 is ready to be released...

Earlier this week Microsoft announced Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) as a more performant implementation of this Linux binary compatibility layer for Windows. Following that news, during their annual Build Conference, was a more detailed presentation on the WSL2 architecture...

Unity Tech today released their public beta of the forthcoming Unity 2019.2 game engine update...

Back at the Embedded Linux Conference in March 2018, Sound Open Firmware (SOF) was announced by Intel Open-Source Technology GM, Imad Sousou. The kernel-side patches to this open-source sound firmware were published shortly thereafter while now finally after going through several rounds of public code review, the kernel changes have been merged for Linux 5.2...

With Mesa 19.1 now under its feature freeze, here is a look at how the new Intel "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL driver is performing for its debut in this next quarterly Mesa feature release. Benchmarks from a Skylake NUC with Intel Iris Pro 580 graphics just wrapped up for looking at the performance of the Intel Gallium3D driver against its existing open-source "i965" Mesa OpenGL driver.

While "just a point release", libinput 1.13.2 was released today as the newest update to this widely-used X11/Wayland Linux input handling library. With libinput 1.13.2 are two notable fixes...

Shipping today is the "Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 19.Q2 for Linux" driver package as the newest hybrid driver update for Linux systems with AMD Radeon Pro (and consumer) graphics, aiming to increase performance against NVIDIA Quadro hardware...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem and driver updates have now been submitted and merged for the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel...

The Linux kernel's legacy IDE driver has been officially deprecated as of Linux 5.2 and is expected to be removed entirely in 2021...