In improving the power-savings of NVIDIA GeForce 600/700 "Kepler" GPUs running on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver, Red Hat developer Lyude Paul has published a set of patches allowing for full clock-gating with these older graphics cards...
Last week I provided a fresh look at the NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance using the latest drivers at the start of 2018. That testing included the latest NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, but for those curious how these numbers compare for older NVIDIA GPUs, here's a look with the Kepler and Maxwell graphics cards added to the comparison.
While initial support for Retpoline was merged into the Linux 4.15 Git kernel last week and is now being backported to some supported Linux kernel series, there is still additional work ongoing for properly mitigating Spectre v2 on Intel Skylake CPUs and newer...
Igalia has sent out the fourth version of their patches for wiring in ARB_gl_spirv support into the Mesa OpenGL driver. This extension is the last main blocker from Intel having OpenGL 4.6 support and allows for SPIR-V ingestion support for better interoperability between OpenGL and Vulkan...
While solid-state drives have generally been quite reliable in recent years and even with all the benchmarking I put them through have had less than a handful fail out of dozens, whenever there's a bargain on NVMe SSDs, it's hard to resist. The speed of NVMe SSDs has generally been great and while it's not a key focus on Phoronix (and thus generally not receiving review samples of them), I upgrade some of the server room test systems when finding a deal. The latest is trying an ADATA XPG SX6000 NVMe SSD I managed to get for $49.99 USD.
The crew responsible for the open-source Godot cross-platform game engine have announced the 3.0 Release Candidate ahead of the imminent stable release of this major update...
A new Phoronix Premium member was hypothesizing in the forums whether Ubuntu's low-latency kernel would be performing better in the wake of the Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) support in the kernel for fending off the Meltdown CPU vulnerability. With always aiming to deliver on test requests by premium members, I ran some benchmarks of the Ubuntu low-latency vs. generic kernels and I also tossed in the Liquorix kernel for benchmarking too.
Earlier this week ongoing Wayland/Weston release manager Bryce Harrington at Samsung laid out plans for Wayland 1.15 and Weston 4.0. There's been some push-back on the proposed dates to try to allow some more work to land in these upcoming six month releases to Wayland/Weston, but long story short, these next releases will be here in the near future...
With the Linux 4.15-rc8 kernel that is expected for release today as the final step before Linux 4.15, it's still seeing continued security improvements in the wake of the Spectre CPU vulnerabilities...
Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) landed at the start of the year for x86/x86_64 systems for fending off the much talked about CPU attacks while the AMD64 / 64-bit ARM code is still a work-in-progress but looks like it will be squared away for the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel cycle...
It seems to be a busy weekend for KDE news... The latest is that the Flatpak app sandboxing support formerly known as XDG-App is considered production ready within KDE Discover...
Even with the overhead of having both KPTI and Retpoline kernel support in place, our recent Linux distribution benchmarks have shown Intel's Clear Linux generally outperforming the more popular distributions. But if applying some basic performance tweaks, can Ubuntu 17.10 perform like Clear Linux? Here are some benchmarks looking at a few factors.
At the beginning of January I posted some early LLVM Clang 6.0 benchmarks on AMD EPYC while in this article is comparing the tentative Clang 6.0 performance to that of the in-development GCC 8.0. Both compilers are now into their feature freeze and this testing looked at the performance of generated binaries both for generic x86_64 as well as being tuned for AMD's Zen "znver1" microarchitecture.
Yesterday I posted some Linux hardware statistics going back to 2011 using data collected by the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. Those yearly metrics hadn't contained any GPU/driver data, but here are those numbers...
The past few months Fedora Linux has been working on shipping free software AAC audio codec support and that's moved ahead but at least initially they are calling the AAC decoder "crippled."..
Ubuntu 17.10.1 ISOs are now available as well as for most of the *buntu derivatives. The Ubuntu 17.10.1 ISO re-spin is for disabling the SPI kernel driver to avoid messing up select laptops...
With Linux distributions being patched since last week's Meltdown and Spectre disclosure, here are benchmarks on some of the prominent distributions looking at their performance impact since being patched. Tested from an Intel Core i7 8700K system was CentOS, Clear Linux, Debian, openSUSE, and Ubuntu.
The next release of systemd, v237, will introduce support for WireGuard. WireGuard as a reminder is the effort to provide a fast, modern and secure VPN tunnel that eventually plans to be part of the mainline Linux kernel...
Last week in light of the Spectre disclosure. AMD believed they were at "near zero risk" to Variant Two / Branch Target Injection. But now the company confirmed last night that's not the case: they are at least potentially vulnerable...
A few days back I wrote about open-source Intel developers posting their initial GPU driver patches for Icelake "Gen 11" graphics. That first code drop was just the tip of the iceberg unlike code drops for previous generations where they published the whole stack at once. But now the developers have already moved on to publishing more of the code...
Ongoing Wayland/Weston release manager Bryce Harrington of Samsung's Open-Source Group has laid out plans for the next releases of Wayland and the reference Weston compositor...
It's not any re-clocking code or magical improvements for Nouveau's Pascal support, but on the Tegra side a NVIDIA developer has volleyed some new open-source patches...
For fans of the pfSense-forked OPNsense FreeBSD-based firewall/network operating system, the first release candidate of OPNsense 18.1 is available for testing...
Yesterday I posted some fresh GPU/driver benchmark results for discrete AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. These were some of the most competitive numbers yet we've seen out of the open-source RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV drivers while using the latest Linux 4.15 kernel, especially for the GTX 1060 vs. RX 580 battle. In the comments were requests to see some CPU utilization numbers, including from one of the Radeon Linux developers, so here is a look at how the CPU usage compares...
Over the past week and a half of running many benchmarks looking at the performance impact of the Linux KPTI and Retpoline patches for Spectre and Meltdown mitigation, one of the most common test requests is some thorough benchmarks on older systems. Why that's important is with older (pre-Westmere) CPUs there isn't PCID (Process Context Identifier) support that's used by KPTI, which helps offset some of the performance loss. So for some test results to share today are two old ThinkPads from the Clarksfield and Penryn days compared to a newer Broadwell ThinkPad in looking at the performance difference.
The KDE/Qt-aligned Krita digital painting program has released its first beta release of the major 4.0 update that also marks its string freeze. Now marks the period of bug fixing before shipping Krita 4.0 within a few months...
Phoronix