Phoronix

Today the quarterly update to the collection of KDE software applications has shipped with its newest features...

ARM has made public an aggressive CPU forward-looking road-map and some performance expectations. ARM is hoping to deliver year-over-year performance improvements of more than 15% through 2020...

On Monday when the launch embargo expired on the Threadripper 2950X and Threadripper 2990WX I hadn't run any gaming benchmarks since, well, most games even on Windows can't scale out to 32 threads let alone 64 threads... Especially on Linux. It's far more practical getting these Threadripper 2 processors if you want to compile with 32 or 64 make jobs -- among many other common multi-threaded Linux workloads -- versus using this $899 or $1799 processor for a Linux gaming system. But if you are curious how Linux games scale with the Threadripper 2950X, here are some benchmark results when testing both AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics.

Last month I wrote about lazy TLB mode improvements on the way to the mainline kernel and this week the changes were indeed merged for the in-development Linux 4.19 kernel...

Linux stable maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has released new updates across the Linux 4.18, 4.17, 4.14, 4.9, and 4.4 kernel channels to address the recently exposed L1 Terminal Fault "L1TF" / Foreshadow Meltdown-like CPU vulnerability affecting Intel processors...

In a controversial move, the Linux kernel will be pushing the question off to distribution vendors on whether to put trust in CPU hardware random number generators...

Here is a look at some of the smaller features landing in the Linux 4.19 kernel this week in a variety of different subsystems...

Today marks 21 years since the GNOME desktop environment project was started by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena. Coincidentally, released today is GNOME 3.29.91 that is the GNOME 3.30 desktop's second beta release...

Don't expect the Intel discrete gamer graphics card to come until 2020, but with the SIGGRAPH graphics conference happening this week in Vancouver, they have begun teasing their first PCI Express graphics card...

The second development snapshot of the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 8.2-Rakkestad to benchmark to your heart's delight on Linux, macOS, Windows, Solaris, and BSD platforms from embedded/SBC systems to cloud and servers...

One of the student summer coding projects that ended up being a cross between Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreachy was the VKMS driver to provide a virtual KMS implementation for headless systems and other interesting use-cases...

The Linux kernel's crypto subsystem updates were sent out today with its new feature work for the Linux 4.19 kernel. One change we were curious to see was whether they were going to nuke the Speck cipher code, but they did not...

Mesa 18.2 as the next quarterly feature release to the contained OpenGL/Vulkan drivers is about two weeks out if all goes well, but today for testing Mesa 18.2-RC3 is now available...

Yesterday the latest speculative execution vulnerability was disclosed that was akin to Meltdown and is dubbed the L1 Terminal Fault, or "L1TF" for short. Here are some very early benchmarks of the performance impact of the L1TF mitigation on the Linux virtual machine performance when testing the various levels of mitigation as well as the unpatched system performance prior to this vulnerability coming to light.

QEMU 3.0 is now officially available. This big version bump isn't due to some compatibility-breaking changes, but rather to simplify their versioning and begin doing major version bumps on an annual basis. As an added bonus, QEMU 3.0 comes at a time of the project marking its 15th year in existence...

Will Deacon submitted the 64-bit ARM (ARM64/AArch64) changes on Tuesday for the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window...

David Airlie has submitted the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates for the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window with these various open-source graphics/display driver updates...

While I haven't posted any new Threadripper 2950X/2990WX benchmarks since the embargo expired on Monday with the Threadripper 2 Linux review and some Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks, tests have continued under Linux -- as well as FreeBSD...

In addition to the many technical accomplishments of Khronos this week at SIGGRAPH 2018, they were also celebrating the milestone of crossing 140 members to this industry standards group...

David Miller sent in the networking subsystem updates today for the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window...

Back in May AMD posted initial open-source "Vega 20" patches and support for that yet-to-launch graphics processor was subsequently merged for the Linux 4.18 kernel. More of the Vega 20 AMDGPU kernel driver enablement has now been posted...

Intel's Rafael Wysocki has submitted the ACPI and power management updates today for the Linux 4.19 kernel which were subsequently merged by Linus Torvalds...

The xf86-video-v4l v0.3.0 driver was announced today as the first new release for this DDX driver in ten years...

We've known libinput 1.12 is going to be a significant release and that's still holding true in looking at the second release candidate for this Wayland/X.Org input handling library...

Details are still light but a new vulnerability is coming out called the L1 Terminal Fault. It's been described as a "train-wreck" and is another big deal in the security space as the latest speculative side-channel attack vector...

"The Speck [Spectre slang, not to be confused with the controversial NSA algo] brigade sadly provides yet another large set of patches destroying the perfomance which we carefully built and preserved," began the latest x86/pti pull request by kernel maintainer Thomas Gleixner...

An Intel engineer has published the "Intel FPGA Video and Image Processing Suite" DRM driver today for Linux. This Direct Rendering Manager is intended for use with their Arria 10 FPGA system when combined with Intel DisplayPort IP...

SUSE's Takashi Iwai sent in the pull request this morning of the sound subsystem updates for the Linux 4.19 kernel and it includes a lot of new hardware support and other improvements for Linux's audio capabilities...

Linus Torvalds has merged a rather significant set of patches for improving the CIFS/SMB3 support in the mainline kernel...

For helping out the RADV Vulkan driver in cases where no shader cache is available, this open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver now supports the on-demand compilation of built-in shaders...

The pull requests updating the XFS and EXT4 file-system driver code have been sent in for the recently started Linux 4.19 kernel merge window...

NVIDIA is capitalizing upon SIGGRAPH 2018 as now in addition to launching the Quadro RTX GPUs and open-sourcing the MDL SDK they have announced their work on CUDA 10...

The first alpha release of FreeBSD 12.0 was quietly uploaded a few days ago to the project's download servers as the first step to shipping this next major update to the FreeBSD operating system...

As expected, Linux 4.19 is getting STACKLEAK as a GCC plug-in for the Linux kernel that will fend off various form of stack attacks...

In addition to announcing the Turing-based Quadro RTX GPUs with GDDR6 memory, NVIDIA used SIGGRAPH 2018 to announce their open-sourcing of the MDL SDK...

Mesa 18.1.6 is now available as the latest point release for Mesa 18.1 as the Q2'2018 release of this collection of open-source graphics drivers/infrastructure...

This morning AMD announced the Vega-based Radeon Pro WX 8200 graphics card as the "best workstation GPU under $1,000 USD" while tonight NVIDIA is trying to steal the thunder by announcing the Quadro RTX series as the "world's first ray-tracing GPU" that is also based on their new Turing architecture...

Matthew Wilcox who most recently has been employed by Microsoft is looking to get the new XArray data structure added to the Linux 4.19 kernel...

Complementing the extensive Linux benchmarks done earlier today of the AMD Threadripper 2990WX in our review (as well as on the Threadripper 2950X), in this article are our first Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks of this 32-core / 64-thread $1799 USD processor. Tests were done from Microsoft Windows 10 against Clear Linux, Ubuntu 18.04, the Arch-based Antergos 18.7-Rolling, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

DaVinci Resolve 15 has been released by Blackmagic Design as the company's professional-grade video editing, visual effects, motion graphics, and audio post-production software...

David Sterba of SUSE sent in the Btrfs file-system updates today for the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window...

The Blender 3D modeling software is facing a slight set-back in their release schedule for the big Blender 2.80 release, but it's moving along and they intend to have it ready by early next year...

The Khronos Group has released Vulkan 1.1.83 as a routine maintenance update to the Vulkan 1.1 graphics/compute API to coincide with the start of ACM SIGGRAPH 2018 in Vancouver...

Separate from the "DXUP" initiative, the popular DXVK project for accelerating Direct3D 11 atop Vulkan now has support itself for Direct3D 10...

Whether you are compiling a lot of code, rendering models with Blender, or running various scientific workloads with OpenMP or MPI, the AMD Threadripper 2990WX is capable of delivering immersive Linux performance with its 32-cores and 64 total threads. While coming in at $1800 USD, the AMD Threadripper 2990WX can deliver better performance than the more expensive Intel Core i9 7980XE. Beyond being mesmerized about the performance today with this high-end desktop/workstation processor with the many thread-happy Linux workloads we encounter daily, this 32-core Zen+ processor has us even more eager to see AMD's next-generation Zen2-based EPYC CPUs next year.

The 32-core / 64-thread AMD Threadripper 2990WX carries a 250 Watt TDP rating, thus the cooling performance is quite important especially if you don't want to hit any thermal throttling with this $1799 USD processor. Fortunately, the 2990WX doesn't require water cooling but actually can work quite well with high-end air heatsinks too. For adding some perspective on the cooling requirements of the Threadripper 2990WX, here are benchmarks of five heatsinks and two all-in-one water cooling systems.

The embargo has expired now for talking about Threadripper 2 performance figures... First up are our initial Threadripper 2950X Linux benchmarks. In this article are the most interesting metrics for this 16-core / 32-thread processor while in the just-published AMD Threadripper 2990WX Linux Benchmarks are a lot more figures complemented by the 2950X and other CPUs plus power consumption numbers, etc. This article is most useful if specifically focused on the performance of the Threadripper 2950X that comes in at $899 USD.

It's a busy week folks as besides the AMD Threadripper 2 performance embargo expiring, it is also SIGGRAPH 2018 week in Vancouver and as well the start of the Linux 4.19 kernel cycle... No longer under wraps are the Khronos announcements from this annual graphics conference. Continue reading to learn about the latest happenings for the various Khronos industry-standard APIs and efforts like Vulkan and OpenCL-Next.

The Wine project once again participated in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for furthering their open-source agenda of better support for Windows programs on Linux and other operating systems...

The IBM System/390 "s390" architecture code has seen a number of improvements for Linux 4.19...