Phoronix

While already in use by Android's version of the Linux kernel, the ARM-developed Energy Aware Scheduling support is set to finally be mainlined for the Linux 4.21 kernel...

With less than one week until the new year, here is a look back at the most popular Intel Linux/open-source news of 2018, among all of our other end-of-year articles...

Mesa 18.2.8 is expected to be released before the week is through as what will likely be the final point release for the 18.2 series now that Mesa 18.3 is stable...

Zchunk is the file format announced earlier this year for delivering good compression while being delta-friendly and based upon Zsync and Casync while compression handling is done by Zstandard...

A few days back we posted initial Linux benchmarks of the NVIDIA TITAN RTX graphics card, the company's newest flagship Titan card shipping as of a few days ago. That initial performance review included a look at the TensorFlow performance and other compute tests along with some Vulkan Linux gaming benchmarks. In this article is a look at a more diverse range of GPU compute benchmarks while testing thirteen NVIDIA graphics cards going back to the GTX 680 Kepler days.

The past few years have been filled with rather big surprises by Microsoft as it pertains to Linux/open-source. During 2015 they began supporting VP9, open-sourcing more of their projects and began embracing LLVM/Clang while in 2016 they bought out Xamarin, launched SQL Server for Linux, and kept on open-sourcing. Last year was very interesting as well with Microsoft joining the OSI, continuing to advance Windows Subsystem for Linux, and doing more about .NET on Linux. But this year was arguably their most surprising year yet...

A month ago there was word that Intel wanted to contribute their Parallel STL implementation for this C++17 functionality to GCC's libstdc++ and LLVM libc++. As a wonderful open-source Christmas present, Intel's Parallel STL implementation saw its initial commit now under the LLVM umbrella...

When AMD Zen CPUs originally rolled out, the ability to monitor the CPU core temperatures under Linux didn't roll out until months later. Fortunately, for Zen 2 the AMD Linux CPU temperature driver looks like it will be ready in time...

As Linus summed it up well when he released Linux 4.20 this weekend, "have a Merry Christmas or other holiday of your choice." 2018 was certainly great for Linux and open-source at large while 2019 should be even more exciting...

The folks behind the Ruby programming language have rolled out their version 2.6.0 release for Christmas. Most notable about Ruby 2.6 is that it brings an experimental JIT compiler...

If you are still running a pre-GCN AMD graphics card and unfortunately didn't find a new graphics card under any Christmas tree this year, AMD's Michel Dänzer does have a present for you with some improvements to the xf86-video-ati driver that continues serving as the common X.Org driver for pre-HD7000 series graphics cards...

The "hwmon" hardware monitoring changes for the Linux 4.21 kernel were sent in this past weekend. There isn't any major changes for the vast majority of users, but there is a lot of smaller happenings...

The MIPS CPU architecture has suddenly become a bit more interesting now that the processor ISA will be open-sourced in 2019. With the in-development Linux 4.21 kernel there are a number of MIPS support changes inbound...

Debootstrap, the tool for bootstrapping a basic Debian system and can be done within a subdirectory of an existing system installation, is now a heck of a lot faster...

While a few months back there was what ended up being a test version of the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Alpha, for Christmas this distribution that tracks back to Mandriva/Mandrake is out with their first official alpha release...

The in-development Iris Gallium3D driver that is being developed as Intel's next-gen, open-source OpenGL Linux graphics driver started out with supporting Skylake graphics and newer. But now with the latest Iris driver code, the hardware support has been extended to cover Broadwell graphics...

If you have some downtime during the holidays and looking to setup a Linux HTPC/multimedia system, the first beta of LibreELEC 9.0 is now available as the lightweight Linux distribution built around the Kodi HTPC media playback software that also has picked up Retroplayer gaming support and other recent features...

With CPU microcode updates having become increasingly important over the past year in light of the Spectre vulnerabilities and other security updates, the Linux 4.21 kernel is bringing several improvements to the AMD CPU microcode update handling...

When Microsoft rolled out their Windows 10 October 2018 Update they also released Windows Server 2019. Now over the slower holiday period I am finally getting caught up in benchmarking Windows Server 2019. For this initial benchmark comparison is a look at the Microsoft Windows Server 2019 performance against a handful of Linux distributions as well as FreeBSD 12.0 for seeing how this latest Windows Server performance compares on a dual AMD EPYC 7601 server.

Released at the start of December was DragonFlyBSD 5.4 that brought a number of new features and improvements while now v5.4.1 is available that collected a few weeks worth of fixes...

The FreeBSD project is out with their latest status report spanning from January to September 2018. This report covers the bulk of their project changes this year granted not their very latest Q4 happenings, including the release earlier this month of the long-awaited FreeBSD 12.0...

Just in time for managing and enhancing any holiday photos, Darktable 2.6.0 was released this Christmas Eve as the latest feature release for this leading open-source RAW photography workflow software...

Alexandre Oliva on the behalf of the GNU Linux-libre folks has announced the release of GNU Linux-libre 4.20-gnu as their fresh re-spin of the newly released Linux 4.20 that removes support for loading binary-only modules and disabling driver code that tries to load non-free firmware/microcode...

XFS file-system maintainer Darrick Wong has submitted the latest work for the Linux 4.21 kernel. The XFS changes for Linux 4.21 are overall light and predominantly focused on fixes and other low-level code improvements...

A new open-source tool for helping to debug Wayland protocol messages is now available thanks to Canonical's Mir team...

Paolo Bonzini submitted the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes on Sunday for the now-open Linux 4.21 kernel merge window. The x86/x86_64 KVM changes represent most of the work this cycle but there are also POWER and ARM changes too...

As expected, Linux 4.20 is now available as the latest stable version of the Linux kernel and just in time for Christmas...

Just in time for any family-friendly, holiday gaming, the Super Mario Bros inspired SuperTux game is out with their v0.6 update after being in development for about two years...

In this guest post by Phoronix reader Max E, he has shared with us his experience and Linux benchmarking results when overclocking ECC RAM on an AMD Threadripper box. The process ended up being surprisingly easy and his results are quite compelling. Thanks to Max for this guest post, which we happily accept on Phoronix that cover interesting technical topics...

After being announced a few weeks back, the Samsung 860 QVO series is beginning to ship as a new, lower-cost SATA 3.0 SSD offering. The Samsung 860 QVO series offers four bit per cell flash memory to usher in a new era of lower-cost solid-state storage with the now-shipping 1TB model costing just $150 USD while the 2TB version coming soon at $300 USD and $600 USD for a 4TB edition.

GDB 8.2.1 was released today as the newest version of the GNU Debugger For C/C++ as well as Ada, Go, Rust, and other languages...

The AMD Platform QoS support talked about a few months ago on Phoronix is landing for the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel. While not officially confirmed, this Quality of Service system resource work appears almost surely for the next-generation 7nm EPYC processors coming out in the months ahead...

While Wine-Staging 4.0-RC2 was released just a few days ago, Wine-Staging 4.0-RC3 is now available with a quicker turnaround time stemming from Friday's release of upstream Wine 4.0-RC3...

It's been a lighter week of KDE development due to many developers taking time off for the holidays, but there still was a fair amount of new activity going into KDE around polishing it up and the never-ending process of usability improvements...

While there has long been the vkQuake hobbyist project that brought a Vulkan renderer to the original Quake game, there is now vkQuake2 for a Vulkan rendering of Quake II...

David Miller is one of the latest kernel maintainers sending in his pull requests early for the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel with its merge window expected to open during the holidays...

Debian is currently running a survey for selecting the default artwork of their upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" release...

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, or happy benchmark season... Regardless of whatever holidays you celebrate or not, it's time for the 2018 Christmas/Winter sale if you wish to join Phoronix Premium to help us out as we approach the 15th birthday of Phoronix.com and see a strong year ahead for Linux hardware performance testing, open-source news coverage, and more. Premium gets you ad-free access to the site, multi-page featured articles on a single page, and other benefits...

Another one of the pull requests sent in early for the Linux 4.21 kernel cycle due to the holidays are the ACPI and power management trees maintained by Intel's Rafael Wysocki...

Kernel changes continue flowing for addressing the "Year 2038" problem where on where on 19 January 2038 a signed 32-bit integer is no longer large enough for accommodating the number of seconds since 1970 as the 32-bit Unix time format...

Yesterday I unexpectedly found my hands on a NVIDIA TITAN RTX graphics card as the company's newest Titan graphics card built upon the Turing architecture and is now available via retail channels at $2499 USD. Here is an initial look at the NVIDIA TITAN RTX performance under Ubuntu Linux with a variety of compute workloads (including TensorFlow) as well as for entertainment are some Vulkan gaming benchmarks.

Tom Stellard of Red Hat has announced the release of LLVM 7.0.1 that incorporates a variety of fixes introduced over the past few months...

It was nearly a year ago to the day that PC/OpenSystems LLC announced they were resurrecting Linspire and Freespire from the dead. The company is celebrating that milestone for the OS previously known as "Lindows" by releasing Freespire 4.5...

In the event you need to deal with software S3TC decoding rather than on the GPU in cases of hardware limitations or running within a VM, Mesa this week picked up a faster implementation...

While Linux 4.20 isn't even expected for release until Sunday, which itself is delivering many new features and hardware support, the Linux 4.21 release is another big one that will start off the new year...

Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, part of the systemd team at Red Hat, has taken the reins from Lennart Poettering to release systemd 240 ahead of Christmas...

Valve has made available a new version of their Wine-based Proton layer that powers Steam Play for allowing many Windows games to run seamlessly on Linux via their Steam client. This new Proton 3.16-6 Beta offers up several notable improvements...

It's been over three years since the original proposal for re-licensing the LLVM compiler infrastructure and while they have reached community consensus on their new "Apache 2.0 with LLVM Exception" license, there's still a big task at hand of getting all past contributors signing off on the process...

This year the focus for modern Linux gaming really shifted to Vulkan with Feral's major new game ports being exclusively Vulkan-based, DXVK and Steam Play coming about for relying upon Vulkan for Direct3D 10/11 emulation on Linux, Vulkan 1.1 and subsequent point releases ironing out desired functionality by developers for this graphics API, and all of the open/closed-source drivers continuing to mature. But there is still a plethora of OpenGL-only Linux games out there and AMD's open-source driver team hasn't let up in continuing to improve and optimize their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Here are some benchmarks showing how the RadeonSI performance has improved over the past year on an AMD RX Vega graphics card.

We're another week closer to next month's expected Wine 4.0 debut and as such there is another release candidate out for some holiday testing...