Phoronix

While .NET applications have been supported on Linux for a while now via the .NET Core, using performance profiling tools really haven't working out but that is now changing...

Word this week of the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier Development Kit being up for pre-order reminded me of some benchmarks I had been meaning to do of seeing how the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 developer kit's performance has evolved since its launch a year and a half ago. There's actually a quite measurable improvement in performance with the latest software/drivers compared to it was at launch.

For those looking at affordable metal server racks / open rack cabinets, I continue to be quite impressed by the StarTech.com four-post server racks. Recently I commissioned two more of their 12U racks in order to accommodate the latest Threadripper 2 systems in our Linux benchmarking farm...

At this week's Open-Source Summit in Vancouver is a presentation by an Activision developer talking about Call of Duty performance but sadly it's not what may come to mind...

You should likely be familiar with WebAssembly as the binary format for executing code within web pages that can be nearly as fast as running native machine code -- and certainly much faster than JavaScript. A new research project has been exploring running WebAssembly in the CPU's Ring 0 -- yes, the highest privileged state of the processor -- in the name of better performance...

Thanks to Google Summer of Code 2018, student developer Danil Iashchenko devoted the past several months to writing more filters within FFmpeg's Libavfilter library in OpenCL...

Facebook developers maintaining the HHVM interpreter for running PHP and Hack code have announced the HHVM 3.28.0 update...

The performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution out of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center started out with Xfce as its lone desktop option and then added and moved over to the GNOME Shell as the default desktop. While GNOME Shell remains the default desktop choice for this rolling-release Linux distribution, KDE components have begun appearing in recent days.

Linux firmware updating is on a roll with the fwupd updating utility and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for the distribution of these firmware files recently seeing AKiTiO Thunderbolt device support and NVMe SSD firmware updating being the next big task. Richard Hughes of Red Hat has also revealed he's been working on USB3 hub firmware support in conjunction with Realtek...

Imad Sousou of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has announced their plans to develop a safety-critical Linux distribution. This Linux distribution will be geared for running on safety-compliant solutions from autonomous vehicles to drones and more...

Intel has announced their new U-series "Whiskey Lake" and Y-series "Amber Lake" processors for laptops, 2-in-1s/convertibles, and other low-power devices...

As a P.S.A. for those tending to quickly upgrade to new major kernel releases but are doing so on older hardware, there appears to be a show-stopping bug that made it into the stable Linux 4.18 series...

Two years after Solaris 11.3 and Oracle opting for a "continuous delivery" model of 11.next updates instead of a "Solaris 12", Solaris 11.4 is out the door today...

One of the most interesting projects we've seen attempted for Google Summer of Code 2018 was adding Vulkan support to VirGL for allowing Vulkan access within guest virtual machines...

Last week NVIDIA released the 396.54 driver that has a significant performance fix for OpenGL/Vulkan Linux performance due to a resource leak regression introduced at the start of the 390 driver series. With that updated driver (also as of yesterday back-ported to 390.87 too), there is a measurable boost in performance after running a few games on NVIDIA Linux systems. But at the same time, the Mesa 18.3-dev open-source graphics driver stack with RadeonSI/RADV continues improving on the open-source AMD front. Here is a fresh look at how the latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards compare using these latest drivers.

Given Valve's now public Steam Play for Linux using the Wine-derived Proton and their ongoing relationship with Code Weavers to improve the experience for Windows games on Linux, it perhaps adds better context why this summer for GSoC there was the automated Direct3D game benchmarking work with mentorship by a CodeWeavers developer...

In addition to the VKMS driver for virtual kernel mode-setting, the other successful Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project this summer under the X.Org umbrella was improving the DRM GPU scheduler...

While the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window just ended this past weekend and the development cycle for Linux 4.20 (or most likely to be called Linux 5.0) won't kick off until around the middle of October, AMD has already begun staging a ton of changes for this next kernel version. In particular, it looks like with this next kernel release their Vega 20 enablement will be in order...

Ubuntu's Mir display server that has been chasing Wayland support and earlier this year introduced EGMDE as the example Mir desktop environment has picked up some extra functionality on its "edge" channel...

One of the features sadly not making it into the in-development Linux 4.19 kernel is the support for Intel's SGX -- the Software Guard Extensions...

AMD's GPUOpen group has released their first beta of the Vulkan Memory Allocator 2.1 release after "many months of development" and as such comes with many new features...

It has been a while since last delivering some OpenCL GPU compute benchmarks across several different graphics cards on the latest Linux drivers, so here is a fresh look...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on plans to drop packages with consistently bad security records...

After being in alpha since March, today the first beta of the upcoming Kodi 18 "Leia" release is now available for your open-source HTPC needs...

With all of the confusion last week over Intel's short-lived CPU microcode license change that forbid benchmarking only for them to change it a short time later -- to a much nicer license in that the microcode files can be easily redistributed and don't curtail it in other manners (and also re-licensing their FSP too), here are some performance benchmarks when trying out this latest Intel microcode on Linux.

NVIDIA has today shipped the 390.87 Linux driver as their latest update to the 390 "long-lived" driver series..

Mes is the newest project under the GNU umbrella and this package is intended to help bootstrap GNU/Linux distributions like GuixSD...

X.Org/X11 veteran Keith Packard has started working on better support for independent window scaling with the X.Org stack that would also allow for input handling with the scaled windows...

AMD used VMworld 2018 to announce the Radeon Pro V340 graphics card, which features two Vega GPUs...

The newest OpenGL extension being sought for inclusion into the graphics API's registry is the NV_memory_attachment...

Independent Linux kernel hacker Con Kolivas has announced his 4.18-ck1 kernel as well as the latest release of his MuQSS scheduler...

As expected, Linus Torvalds has closed the merge window for 4.19 and released Linux 4.19-rc1...

For those still having the desire to run Ubuntu on mobile devices, the UBports community today shipped their Ubuntu Touch OTA-4 release that migrates their base system from Ubuntu 15.04 to 16.04...

The Linux 4.19-rc1 kernel is expected to be released today and with that marks the end of feature development on this next kernel version. Here is a look at the new and improved features to be found in Linux 4.19.

KDE developers remain on their spree of various usability enhancements and polishing. KDE contributor Nate Graham also continues doing a great job summarizing these enhancements on a weekly basis...

DRM is causing a lot of vibrant discussions this week on the FreeBSD mailing list... And no, it's not even Digital Rights Management but rather colorful commentary about their Direct Rendering Manager code and plans for FreeBSD 12...

Earlier this year MIPS rolled out the I7200 processor core built on the new "nanoMIPS" architecture. The open-source enablement of this new CPU ISA continues to settle down while the latest accomplishment is support for this new architecture in QEMU...

Following Friday's release of Go 1.11, a Phoronix reader pointed out a new open-source Internet router software package written entirely in Go...

Systemd will now resort to using Intel's RdRand hardware random number generator directly if the Linux kernel is unable to provide the init system with sufficient entropy...

Longtime Red Hat developer Jerome Glisse has published his latest patches concerning the Heterogeneous Memory Management support, a.k.a. HMM...

The popular Solus Linux distribution has experienced a busy week of updates but more changes are on the way to this desktop-focused OS...

With many of the FreeDesktop.org projects having already transitioned from their CGit and hodgepodge of services over to Gitlab, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) trees appear to be up next...

Something I have seen asked in our forums and elsewhere -- most recently on the kernel mailing list -- is whether there is a single kernel option that can be used for disabling all of the Spectre/Meltdown workarounds and any other performance-hurting CPU vulnerability workarounds...

Jason Donenfeld who has now spent years working on WireGuard as an in-kernel, secure network tunnel sent out a second version of his kernel patches on Friday...

IBM developers on Friday posted their initial Linux kernel patches for enabling Secure Virtual Machine (SVM) support with POWER hardware...

There's been a number of recent Linux/open-source conferences but more are right on the horizon, including some with video streams for those interested...

LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg tagged the second release candidate this week of LLVM and its associated sub-projects like Clang...

Just in time for the weekend Linux gamers, Valve has made available a Proton beta update channel for testing out the latest enhancements for their fork of Wine that also bundles in DXVK for accelerated D3D11-over-Vulkan and other performance/compatibility enhancements to optimize the Linux gaming experience...

Version 1.11 of the Go programming language is out this Friday as the newest feature update...

Current Wayland/Weston release manager Derek Foreman of Samsung OSG today announced the release of Wayland 1.16 as well as the Weston 5.0 reference compositor...