Phoronix

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...

AVX-512 is being further extended with future Intel CPUs. LLVM Clang is now the first open-source compiler seeing support for Tiger Lake's VP2INTERSECT instructions...

With hardware these days from Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory to HBM being stacked on chips for specialized use-cases, the Linux kernel has been preparing support for the new EFI Special/Specific Purpose Memory specification for knowing about such specialized memory use-cases it shouldn't be treating as normal RAM...

Christian Hergert of GNOME Builder IDE fame has been working on a round of improvements recently to the Sysprof tool he also leads development on for system profiling in determining the hot functions of a program and related profiling mostly around GNOME components...

Support for Qualcomm's Adreno 540 series display/graphics could potentially be on the table for the Linux 5.3 kernel series. Patches are at least being reviewed for this A540 open-source support...

It's been very fascinating to watch the speed improvements of Intel's SVT-AV1 open-source AV1 video encoder since in February when being made aware of Intel's new SVT video projects. The SVT-AV1 project is ending out May with another step-up in performance for what is already one of the fastest CPU-based AV1 video encoders...

As it's been a while since our last comparison of the two AMD Vulkan drivers for Linux gaming and with getting the Radeon VII situation straightened out here are some fresh benchmarks of the latest AMDVLK and RADV Vulkan drivers when running various Ubuntu gaming benchmarks with Radeon RX Vega 64 and Radeon VII graphics cards.

With no X.Org Server 1.21 release being imminent, Red Hat's Adam Jackson today issued xorg-server 1.20.5 as a very small point release to the existing 1.20 stable series...

For those using the Unity game engine wishing to develop on Linux, the new Unity Editor for Linux is now deemed ready for game development on Ubuntu and CentOS...

Fedora has been using XZ-compressed RPMs for the past decade but with the Fedora 31 release due out later this year they are currently evaluating a switch over to Zstd compression...

Next week will mark 11 years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 (and 15 years since the start of Phoronix.com) while out today is version 8.8.1 for our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software...

If you have begun disabling Intel Hyper Threading on your systems over security concerns in light of MDS/Zombieload and other vulnerabilities making HT look increasingly unsafe, you may have noticed your system doesn't resume properly after hibernation. Fortunately, a fix is on the way...

Intel's Sapphire Rapids is the Icelake successor not looking to be released until 2021 but thankfully the open-source compiler support is already seeing initial work on enabling the new instruction set extensions...

At the start of May Dell announced an Ubuntu Linux option for their entry-level ~$700 Precision laptop while now they are closing out May by offering up Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on their higher-tier Precision laptop models...

While the Linux 5.2 kernel won't see its debut until July followed by the opening of the Linux 5.3 kernel cycle, the AMD developers sent in today their initial set of staged changes to DRM-Next for queuing their preliminary AMDGPU/AMDKFD driver changes they want to get into this next kernel cycle. There are some notable additions but what we are expecting/hoping for and haven't seen yet is the Navi support...

While Oracle has control of DTrace following their acquisition of Sun Microsystems, it turns out Oracle developers are quite interested in adding eBPF support to the GNU toolchain with GCC support as an alternative to the LLVM-focused path currently relied upon for targeting this in-kernel Linux virtual machine...

Plymouth, the Linux graphical boot splash screen system/interface used by most Linux distributions out there, now has a "firmware upgrade mode" for offering a tighter level of integration with Fwupd when performing system BIOS/firmware updates...

Mesa 19.1 was due to be released by now but instead it's been another cycle been drawn out by blocker bugs delaying the final release. Instead, Mesa 19.1-RC4 was outed today as an extra release candidate...

While right now PCI Express 4.0 is only really found in Raptor's Blackbird and Talos II systems or coming up with AMD X570 systems, the PCI SIG today announced PCI Express 5.0...

Joshua Ashton has just released D9VK 0.12 of his project mapping Direct3D 9 functionality on top of Vulkan for accelerating Windows/Wine games...

As we reported was on the horizon last week, GParted 1.0 has been released after fourteen years of being the leading GUI-based Linux utility for partition/file-system management...

Similar to Intel Graphics user metrics shared last December, user/customer interest in Intel graphics continues to lean heavily in favor of seeing continued Linux improvements...

One of the projects in development the past two years that's been less trumpeted by Ubuntu maker Canonical has been Multipass, but this utility has reached a new milestone today with new capabilities...

OpenSUSE/SUSE has always tended to perform well on AMD hardware given the close collaboration between the two companies for many years on numerous fronts going back to the original Linux AMD64 kernel upbringing to the RadeonHD driver days, compiler collaboration, and numerous other activities between SUSE and AMD. With last week's release of openSUSE Leap 15.1, the performance on AMD EPYC servers is even more competitive thanks to various upgrades.

Qt 5.13 had originally been slated to ship last week and then revised to this week, but instead the fourth and final beta shipped today while the official release has been pushed to next month...

While we are just at the RC2 stage for the Linux 5.2 kernel, already queuing in net-next for Linux 5.3 are some 100GbE networking driver improvements...

For those intrigued by the Genode open-source operating system framework and its microkernel abstraction layer, Genode OS 19.05 is out this morning as the newest quarterly feature release...

Krita 4.2 is out today as the newest feature release for this feature-rich, multi-platform open-source digital painting software...

For those with DisplayLink adapters for USB-driven display docks or devices like the ZenScreen, the support for Wayland should be in better standing with GNOME 3.32.1 (or newer) including if using the DisplayLink proprietary drivers...

Nearly a year ago we reported on the initial work done by Intel's Linux team on adding new CPU instructions for Tremont CPU cores, in particular the new UMWAIT instructions for enhancing power-savings during idle periods. That code continues to be revised for the UMWAIT kernel support but it has yet to be mainlined...

One of my personal biggest issues with using the GNOME Shell on Wayland has been the sluggish multi-monitor performance with driving dual 4K displays on my main workstation. Fortunately, GNOME is moving closer to resolving the fundamental issue and that could happen possibly with this current GNOME 3.34 cycle...

The Blackbird has arrived for testing! As written about last week, the Blackbird has begun shipping and is in mass production as the micro-ATX POWER9 system that is the little brother to Raptor Computing System's long-standing, high-performance, fully open-source Talos II workstation. The Raptor Blackbird is lower-cost while being able to handle up to 160 Watt Sforza 8-core processors, dual DDR4 ECC memory modules, one PCI Express 4.0 x16 slot, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and other common features of desktop/workstation motherboards.

Google has another experienced open-source graphics driver developer on its staff and could mean further Linux graphics ecosystem improvements...

If you have been curious about Intel's Clear Linux distribution given its stellar performance, usability improvements now with its new desktop installer and forming of the Clear Linux Developer Edition, and growing industry adoption, tomorrow they are hosting a public event in Santa Clara, California...

Mesa 19.1 should be out any day now as the new quarterly feature release for this collection of open-source graphics drivers predominantly used on Linux systems. While we cover the Mesa development features on a near daily basis, here is a recap of all the exciting changes and new features to find with the upcoming Mesa 19.1.

Purism just published a monthly summary of their activities pertaining to the Librem 5 smartphone this month. They continue working on their software stack with the Librem 5 developer kit but there still is no sign of their production hardware design yet or if they'll be able to ship next quarter as planned...

Red Hat's Alexander Larsson has just released Flatpak 1.4.0 as the new stable version of this Linux application sandboxing tech formerly known as XDG-App...