Phoronix

For those not following the BSD operating systems on a daily basis, here is a look back at the biggest highlights in the BSD land for 2018 ranging from OpenBSD's continued security conscious decisions, NetBSD 8.0 bringing USB 3.0 and other hardware support improvements, DragonFlyBSD running great on Threadripper 2, FreeBSD 12.0 making its highly anticipated debut, and much more...

One of the recent leading requests by new Phoronix Premium members was to see some current Linux gaming benchmarks across a variety of desktop environments and with Wayland and X.Org where applicable. Here are those tests with KDE, GNOME, Xfce, LXQt, and MATE when testing with a Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics card.

Besides the launch of their successful RTX "Turing" graphics cards, releasing the exciting Jetson AGX Xavier board, and other hardware initiatives, the green giant continued work on their flagship Linux graphics driver that while proprietary continues offering effectively the same feature set and performance as their Windows driver. They did make some open-source surprises this year, but not nearly as many as many in the community would have liked to see...

There were a lot of accomplishments for Ubuntu users and developers in 2018 ranging from the successful 18.04 LTS release to Ubuntu shipping on more Dell systems to continuing to polish their GNOME Shell based desktop experience. But, also, there were a number of letdowns...

With the release earlier this month of Oracle VirtualBox 6.0, besides running some benchmarks of its VMSVGA 3D graphics support, I also ran some basic benchmarks to see how a similarly configured VM under both VirtualBox 6.0 with Linux KVM setup via virt-manager would compare for performance as we hit the end of 2018. This quick round of Linux virtualization tests was done on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX system.

Initially rolled out in November, the Linux 4.21 merge window is the first time that Linus Torvalds' new helper has been pushed to its limits for assisting both him and those sending in pull requests to the kernel...

This year was filled with accomplishments from the KDE camp ranging from the KWin/Plasma Wayland support maturing a lot, Krita 4.0 being released, the refactored Kdenlive video editor being in much better shape, a ton of polishing and bug fixing going into all of the different KDE components, continued work on Kirigami and Plasma Mobile, and also NVIDIA starting work on an EGLStreams back-end for KWin...

This coming May will mark sixteen years already since the release of the legendary Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory game built atop the ioquake3 engine. Continuing to let this game live on and advance as open-source is ETLegacy, which continues work on its new renderer for this once popular first person shooter...

With the Windows Server 2019 vs. Linux benchmarks this week on a dual socket Intel Xeon Scalable server and testing six different Linux distributions and three Windows Server configurations, Intel's open-source Clear Linux was the winner in nearly half of the dozens of benchmarks carried out across these Linux and Windows operating system tests. But the results did yield some areas they could improve upon for better performance and as a result have already landed some more performance optimizations.

Local Display Direct Flip is a feature being worked on by the Intel developers working on the GVT-g graphics virtualization technology for Linux for more efficient display handling...

A few days back the DRM feature updates landed in Linux 4.21 with AMDGPU FreeSync support and a variety of other improvements. With all of the AMDGPU changes at play, it's now time to fix up the code with some early fallout...

Greg KH on Friday submitted the staging changes for the Linux kernel where many drivers and other code continues maturing before being elevated to the normal area of the kernel...

The Gentoo-based Calculate Linux distribution is out with a final release before ringing in the new year...

The open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver stack saw some nice RADV Vulkan performance improvements over the course of this year as well as to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver performance, but how did the NVIDIA Linux driver stack perform this year for gaming? Here are some benchmarks showing it too saw some nice Linux gaming performance boosts this year with subsequent driver updates.

Should you not be familiar with it already, PulseEffects is a program that provides an equalizer and other effects controls for Linux systems running on PulseAudio...

The GNOME desktop environment advanced in 2018 especially when it came to its rather mature Wayland compositor support plus a lot of minor usability fixes ("paper cuts"), the PipeWire remote desktop/recording capabilities, continuing to mature Flatpak, performance improvements, and other changes to polish off the "GNOME 3" experience this year...

The high-end, Linux-friendly Unigine engine for powering games but seemingly more industrial/simulator applications these days is out with their last feature release of 2018...

While there are existing ways of manipulating Linux console fonts/sizes from user-space, with the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel there is a new in-tree console font...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) has some new features for the current Linux 4.21 development cycle but it's mostly fixes stemming from increased testing with Google now supporting this flash-focused file-system for their Pixel device line-up...

In early 2019 we will see the first stable release of GCC 9 as the annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection that is bringing the D language front-end, more C2X and C++ additions, various microarchitecture optimizations from better Znver1 support to Icelake, and a range of other additions we'll provide a convenient recap of shortly. But for those wondering how the GCC 9 performance is looking, here are some fresh benchmarks when benchmarking the latest daily GCC 9.0 compiler against GCC 7.4 and GCC 8.2 atop Clear Linux using an Intel Core i9 7980XE Skylake-X system.

Taking a break from our various year-end recaps, here is a look at the most popular Linux/open-source news from the quarter that's about to wrap up. So far there were more than 1,200 original news articles on Phoronix over the past three months and topping out reader interest in this time has been the latest Linux kernel happenings, various community controversies, new hardware fun, and several prominent new software releases...

Lead Wine developer Alexandre Julliard has just posted the fourth weekly release candidate of the upcoming Wine 4.0 stable release for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

With the FreeSync support for AMD GPUs having been merged this week into Linux 4.21, the associated user-space patches are landing now for rounding out this AMD Radeon FreeSync / Adaptive-Sync / VRR support as we enter 2019...

Last week AMD officially released ROCm 2.0 as the newest major release of the Radeon Open Compute stack. Here are some initial benchmark figures for that Radeon Linux compute component on Polaris and Vega hardware.

Greg Kroah-Hartman began sending in his pull requests on Friday morning for the kernel code he maintains. With the char/misc changes does come the Binderfs file-system...

While it's been ten years now that Wayland has been in development, a majority of the Linux desktops at the end of 2018 are still relying upon the X.Org Server. In 2018 we saw much better Wayland support out of GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma, but many Linux distributions -- including Ubuntu -- haven't transitioned over (or in the case of Ubuntu, back-over) to running a Wayland session. While the xorg-server remains at the heart of most Linux desktops, its development pace remains very slow...

Complementing our initial NVIDIA TITAN RTX Linux benchmarks and follow-up collection of more GPU compute benchmarks on the TITAN RTX compared to other NVIDIA hardware going back to the GeForce GTX 680, here is an expansive collection of side-by-side tests to the RTX 2080 Ti in more workloads...

With the end of the year upon us, the latest project we're looking at the GitStats on and most popular milestones of the year is for systemd...

Early in the year with Linux 4.17 the kernel saw a port to the Andes NDS32 CPU architecture. With Linux 4.21, that CPU architecture is seeing a number of improvements...

With the newly released DragonFlyBSD 5.4.1 having a lot of HAMMER2 file-system work on top of all of the changes introduced by DragonFlyBSD 5.4 at the start of December, here is a fresh look at the HAMMER versus HAMMER2 file-system performance on this BSD operating system...

Jente Hidskes, the developer who last year overhauled the Piper mouse configuration utility as part of libratbag via GSoC 2017, announced that he recently began developing his own Wayland compositor to fill a void...

Earlier this month were the FreeBSD ZFS vs. Linux EXT4/Btrfs RAID With Twenty SSDs. Besides interest in seeing ZOL tests (they're already planned upon the ZFS On Linux 0.8 release), there was also some interest by readers in seeing some XFS RAID tests side-by-side. Here are some of those XFS RAID benchmarks up against Btrfs and EXT4 from Ubuntu Linux...

The Apache NetBeans 10.0 release is now available as the latest release for this integrated development environment under the Apache incubator umbrella...

Mesa 18.2.8 was released today as what is the final planned point release for the Mesa 18.2 series. In order to continue receiving OpenGL/Vulkan open-source driver updates, users are encouraged to transition to Mesa 18.3...

Nearly one year after the Spectre vulnerabilities were first published, Freescale/NXP PowerPC processors are being mitigated against Spectre Variant Two with the in-development Linux 4.21 kernel...

Making the rounds overnight has been word that the folks at Banana Pi are preparing to release a 24-core ARM board. On the surface it's exciting for ARM Linux enthusiasts, but the pricing has yet to be announced and that will largely determine the success of this reported next BPi product...

A few days back I delivered the first of our Windows Server 2019 benchmarks against Linux (as well as FreeBSD). That initial testing was done with a dual socket AMD EPYC server while in this article the tables have turned with using a dual Intel Xeon Scalable server while benchmarking Microsoft Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2019 with its new Windows Subsystem for Linux, Windows Server 2016, and an assortment of Linux distributions including Fedora Server 29, openSUSE Leap 15, Ubuntu 18.10, CentOS 7.6, Debian 9.6, and Intel's own Clear Linux.

Longtime Nouveau contributor Ilia Mirkin has done some holiday hacking on this open-source NVIDIA driver and enabled support for another OpenGL extension in NVC0 Gallium3D...

On a niche hardware note for Linux 4.21, should you be using a ZynqMP DDR controller, there will now be Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) ECC support...

It was another busy year for the GNU with its massive collection of software projects. Of the 124 "GNU" original news articles on Phoronix during 2018, here is a look at the most popular ones...

The platform-drivers-x86 was one of the first pull requests that landed into the now-open Linux 4.21 kernel tree. This area is primarily about various Intel laptop drivers and other x86 (x86_64) hardware bits...

While the WireGuard kernel module still hasn't been mainlined, it is becoming easier to use on other platforms. After some trialing outside of the app store, WireGuard for iOS devices is now available through the Apple App Store...

After looking yesterday at the most popular Intel Linux news of 2018, the tables have turned and this article is looking at the most popular AMD/Radeon news for the year on Phoronix...

The crypto subsystem changes for the Linux 4.21 kernel were sent in this morning and they are quite exciting...

Each year it's been quite fascinating to see the advance of NVIDIA's Tegra-powered Jetson developer boards with their increasing GPU and CPU capabilities. With the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier that began shipping at the start of this quarter (as well as the AGX Xavier Module now shipping as of this month), there is a tremendous performance upgrade compared to the previous-generation Jetson TX2. I have been benchmarking the Jetson AGX Xavier the past number of weeks and continue to be surprised by its performance potential for relatively low power that makes it suitable for robotics and other AI applications. Here is a bulk of the initial benchmarks I've been running on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX with its 512-core Volta GPU and eight ARMv8.2 Carmel CPU cores.

Mesa had another wild year with countless improvements to the multiple vendor OpenGL/Vulkan drivers, continued improvements by Valve and other companies to make these drivers better for Linux gaming, the Meson build system support took shape, new Intel and AMD Radeon graphics support was punctually added, and many other milestones achieved...

On Christmas Eve marked the long-awaited release of the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Alpha and with that new version of the Mandrake/Mandriva-derived operating system came an AMD Zen "Znver1" optimized Linux build. Of course that caught my interest and I was quickly downloading this first Linux distribution with an AMD Ryzen/EPYC optimized binaries to see how it compares to its generic x86_64 operating system installation.

Linus Torvalds began honoring pull requests on Christmas for the in-development Linux 4.21 kernel. Among the initial pull requests were the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates that for this cycle most notably has the long-awaited FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync support...

This year was interesting for Wayland with the compositor support continuing to mature for both GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma, the smaller but very interesting i3-inspired Sway nearing its 1.0 release, NVIDIA working on EGLStreams support for the KWin compositor, and other advancements. But at the same time the year was unfortunate in that Samsung let go of their Wayland developers as part of their OSG restructuring, which had contributed heavily to the upstream project. Here's a look at Wayland/Weston 2018 by the numbers...

Similar to the XFS changes for Linux 4.21, the EXT4 file-system is just seeing code clean-ups and fixes...