Phoronix

Mesa 19.1 is in overtime and today marks the fifth weekly release candidate as the developers try addressing the last two blocker bugs to get out this quarterly feature release...

For those still running decade and a half old ATI Radeon graphics hardware like the Radeon Xpress 200M found in numerous notebooks back in the day, a performance regression in the R300 Gallium3D driver is being sorted out after concerned users on this vintage hardware began bisecting and testing patches for a regression to this old ATI open-source driver that appears to have been adversely affected back in 2017...

While Bzip2 compression is still widely used by Linux systems, it hasn't seen an official update since 2010 and has rather stagnated as different Linux distributions have resorted to carrying their own patches and other maintenance work on this long used data compression tool. But now there is a new maintainer looking to take Bzip2 into the next decade...

When it comes to HDR display support on Linux we've seen a lot of infrastructure work being pursued by the developers at NVIDIA going back a few years while more recently Intel's open-source developers have been on it too with Icelake Gen11 graphics supporting HDR. We haven't seen much publicly on the AMD Linux front but with the upcoming 5.3 kernel cycle one of their HDR DC patches will be merged...

A change merged to Mesa 19.2 last month has the R600 Gallium3D driver officially advertising OpenGL 4.5 support...

Today marks fifteen years since I started Phoronix.com that began with a case review and some other peripheral reviews on a system running Knoppix. This day, 5 June, also marks 11 years now since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0-Trondheim. For those interested in numbers/data like I, here are some current statistics...

NetBSD 8.1 is out today as the latest feature update to this popular BSD operating system...

The very ambitious project working on an open-source RISC-V architecture to serve as a Vulkan accelerator for 3D graphics secured a minor victory last week with receiving $50k EUR from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet initiative. They will be using these funds to allow for full-time engineering work and bounty-style tasks to work on this "100% libre RISC-V + 3D GPU chip for mobile devices."..

Qt 5.13 will hopefully be released next week while for now a release candidate is available for testing...

Google today rolled out the stable release of their Chrome 75 web-browser with the newest feature additions and improvements for your summer enjoyment...

Since the Intel Cascade Lake launch in early April, the platform we've been using for our Xeon Platinum 8280 Linux/BSD testing has been the Gigabyte S451-3R0 Storage Server. Now having tested this Gigabyte server on a number of different Linux distributions as well as the BSDs and in an assortment of software configurations, we're quite confident in its abilities for those needing an Intel Xeon Scalable server platform that can accommodate a great deal of drives.

ClearFog was the name for that 16-core mini-ITX workstation development board/platform that we've been eager to learn more about with its $500~750 USD price point, extensive networking connections, M.2, SATA, socketed DDR4 memory support, and other features we've been long desiring to see out of an affordable yet powerful ARM workstation. It turns out that dream board is being renamed to the HoneyComb LX2K and its performance is increasingly competitive with AMD/Intel x86 enthusiast offerings...

The UEFI Forum today announced the release of the UEFI 2.8 specification...

Remember the Smach Z from 2015 as the portable AMD-powered Linux Steam gaming system? It went back to the drawing board but now it looks like it will actually ship in 2019...

Following last month's LibreOffice 6.3 alpha milestone, the first beta images of LibreOffice 6.3 are now up for testing...

FreeBSD had a very busy first quarter with a status report out today providing a look at to all of the ongoing development activities for this leading BSD platform...

If you have an external keyboard that features a backlight, particularly on some gaming keyboards, some issues can come up with the current Linux stack if you unplug the keyboard...

We've been quite eager to see what happens around Ubuntu 19.10's ZFS support with their plumbing this out-of-tree file-system into their new desktop installer and a lot of other Ubuntu happenings around ZFS. There is now at least a public TODO list/board outlining some of their ZFS work for the Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine cycle...

It's not often the National Security Agency (NSA) can be thanked for their contributions to society, but in the case of one of their public open-source projects it's going to be used to help the Coreboot folks in reverse-engineering system firmware...

If you want an easy way to go through the AMD Radeon GPU register descriptions, they are now storing them in a JSON format within Mesa following more than ten thousand lines of code/headers being shifted around today...

This week marks one month since the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 while the community rebuild of RHEL 8.0 in the form of CentOS 8.0 will hopefully be out within a month or so...

Oracle today announced the general availability release of their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 Update 2 that pairs with their RHEL-derived Oracle Linux for offering a Linux 4.14 based kernel with various features on top...

Back in March we wrote about industrial-grade PC manufacturer Logic Supply announcing the Karbon 300 as a compact and rugged Ubuntu/Windows system. Fast forward to last month, Logic Supply sent over the now-shipping Karbon 300 system to put it through our tests at Phoronix. This passively-cooled PC has passed our tests after weeks of benchmarking and is running great.

Mozilla developers working on the Servo browser engine code have begun implementing hardware-accelerated video playback for Linux...

AMD today announced a new licensing deal with Samsung around low-power, high-performance graphics technologies...

The Qt Company has released Qt Design Studio 1.2, the newest version of their commercial-focused software package aimed at both designers and developers for rapidly prototyping user-interfaces...

Three months after the release of Sway 1.0, Sway 1.1 is now available as the next feature update for this i3-inspired and increasingly popular Wayland compositor...

Mesa 19.1 had been aiming to ship before the end of May but blocker bugs once again have dragged out the release cycle. The current plan is to now issue a fifth release candidate this week with hopes of the final release being in store for next week...

Intel's "ICE" Linux kernel driver for supporting their high-end network cards has new features on tap come Linux 5.3 later this summer...

NVIDIA issued the 418.52.10 Linux beta driver this weekend (and version 425.62 for Windows) that offers their latest Vulkan API support...

Usually for a Linux kernel cycle's third weekly release candidate, it tends to be a bit noisy with a fair amount of regressions getting noticed and ultimately addressed. That's really not been the case with Linux 5.2-rc3 that Linus Torvalds noted is a rather calm release...

A Phoronix reader pointed out to us this weekend that Intel support for live migration with their graphics virtualization technology is nearing mainline support...

Vulkan 1.1.110 made it out today as a small update to this graphics/compute API specification and this minor update does bring with it two new extensions...

Canonical's Daniel van Vugt continues doing a lot of interesting performance investigations and optimizations around improving the experience of GNOME not only for Ubuntu but the upstream components. His latest focus has been on NVIDIA enhancements and now for the X.Org session there is a merge request pending to provide for a smoother experience...

Next month will be two years since Mageia 6 shipped while the long Mageia 7 release cycle is just about over with the availability this weekend of the release candidate...

KDE developers were busy as ever as they closed out their work in May on prepping KDE Plasma 5.16 and other improvements to KDE Frameworks and KDE Applications...

With the start of a new month, Valve has published their software/hardware survey numbers for the month prior. For May 2019, the Steam Linux usage did tick-up slightly on a percentage basis...

Most Linux distributions allow unfettered access to dmesg for seeing the kernel log outputs, but seeing as kernel addresses can be dumped to this output and could be exploited by bad actors, Clear Linux is joining the select few Linux distributions so far blocking non-root users from seeing this output mostly used for debugging purposes...

The 5th of June marks 15 years since the start of Phoronix.com and 11 years since the Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 release, so let's celebrate!..

If there's one Arm hardware launch I am looking forward to this year of known products in the pipeline, it would certainly be SolidRun's ClearFog mini-ITX workstation product...

While there is Godot and other 2D game engines out there, nCine has been quietly developed since 2011 as an interesting 2D cross-platform game engine...

As good news considering how much longer it takes to perform a full context switch on Intel CPUs due to various vulnerability mitigations, the Go programming language run-time now has the ability for performing cheaper context switches...

While we've seen a lot of performance optimizations land in GNOME over the past year or two, we're likely to see more optimizations come now that Sysprof integration for GNOME Shell and Mutter has been merged that will allow profiling closely for missed frames and other performance metrics...

The second weekly beta of FreeBSD 11.3 is now available for testing...

This month on Phoronix there were 316 original news articles and 25 featured/multi-page hardware reviews and benchmark articles. There was a lot of interesting happenings this month from the release of Linux 5.1 to the 5.2 kernel cycle then kicking off, MDS / Zombieload as the latest major Intel CPU vulnerability, GCC 9 saw its first stable release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 was finally christened, and my personal favorite this month was the Intel Open-Source Technology Summit (OSTS) 2019 event...

For the past number of months Linux PC maker System76 has been beginning to work on Coreboot support for their products and over the course of May they addressed more obstacles in order to begin having this open-source firmware implementation work on some of their laptops...

WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld has released a new snapshot of this secure network tunnel software to close out May...

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has been working on a big VM rework in the name of performance and other kernel improvements recently. Here is a look at how those DragonFlyBSD 5.5-DEVELOPMENT improvements are paying off compared to DragonFlyBSD 5.4 as well as FreeBSD 12 and five Linux distribution releases. With Dillon using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper system, we used that too for this round of BSD vs. Linux performance benchmarks.

The Linux kernel will likely soon see a lot of old ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) subsystem/driver code deprecated and ultimately removed considering there aren't even many (or any in some places) ISDN public data networks...

As I've been saying for weeks now since the initial AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end support was posted and based upon the release cadences for the various projects: AMD's next-gen "Navi" GPU support is likely to come with Linux 5.3 and Mesa 19.2. That's now been further firmed up and does appear AMD will be posting those kernel and Mesa/OpenGL driver changes in early to mid June for meeting those release windows...