Phoronix

With 2019 started and also the 15th year since starting Phoronix.com, what am I most excited for in 2019 from a Linux/open-source perspective? Here is a look at what has me motivated for the year ahead...

It was another busy year for the Phoronix Test Suite in 2018, which also marked ten years since the public debut of the Phoronix Test Suite for open-source, cross-platform automated performance benchmarking...

The GIMP team has posted their 2018 redux covering the debut of GIMP 2.10 and the various improvements they focused on over the past year. Additionally, they provided a sneak peak of where they will be focusing their development efforts for 2019...

Back on New Year's Eve I shared what I viewed as some of the biggest open-source and Linux letdowns of 2018. Since then via the forum comments and elsewhere some other current shortcomings were also brought up...

The Xfce 4.14 remains long overdue for release but with Xfce4-Panel 4.13.4 being released on New Year's Day gives us hope we could see this long-awaited desktop environment out in 2019...

After being an opt-in feature since Fedora 28, this year's Fedora 30 release will enable Python generators by default to help in crafting packages around Python code...

With the start of a new month brings the Steam Survey results for the month prior where we see the Linux gaming market-share ending at a high point for the year...

FAudio, the re-implementation of the Microsoft XAudio/XAudio2 interfaces by the FNA-XNA project, is out today with its first tagged release...

Red Hat's systemd team who also work on BUS1 and D-Bus Broker announced a new version of Dbus-Broker to kick off 2019...

There hasn't been a formal Reiser4 file-system patch release since September when it was ported to the Linux 4.18 kernel, but via Git this week there is a port for the Linux 4.20 kernel should you want to utilize this once promising file-system under the latest stable patch series...

Even with the downtime by companies and developers in December around the holidays, December 2018 was action-packed with Linux 4.20 releasing, continued development controversies, talk of deprecating the Linux x32 ABI, Microsoft continuing to make surprising open-source actions, Intel's interesting Architecture Day where we learned of work to open-source the FSP, and many other events made last month interesting...

The ARM platform and board changes were sent in on New Year's Eve for the Linux 4.21 kernel...

Linux power management expert Rafael Wysocki, who is also the maintainer of the ACPI/PM subsystems, has been working on the "TEO" the past few months as the Timer Events Oriented governor for CPUIdle framework...

Open-source developer Adriaan de Groot who has done a lot of the KDE work for FreeBSD has shared an update about what's now possible with KDE Plasma on FreeBSD and what should be coming down the pipe in 2019...

GhostBSD 18.12 was released on New Year's Eve as the latest version of this FreeBSD-derived operating system that focuses on delivering a good BSD desktop experience aside from manually installing FreeBSD or any other *BSD and having to manually setup a graphical environment and desktop of your choosing...

Released last September was the PlayOnLinux 5.0 alpha with a redesigned web interface to this graphical front-end around Wine. Besides the new UI, there was also a lot of low-level work as part of its new platform while for kicking off 2019 a second alpha is available...

That's a wrap for 2018 with Phoronix this year having published 3,693 original Linux/open-source related news articles and 314 featured articles comprising of our Linux hardware reviews and multi-page benchmark specials. 2019 will bring us into the 15th calendar year since I started Phoronix and now around 4,000 featured articles in its time and more than 27,300 original news articles...

As of this New Year's Eve afternoon, the Linux kernel saw 74,974 commits this year that added 3,385,121 lines of code and removed 2,512,040 lines...

The IOMMU changes were sent in today for the Linux 4.21 kernel merge window. There are some AMD IOMMU improvements, new Qualcomm SMMUv2 IOMMU hardware support, NUMA-aware allocations in the IOMMU DMA code for some very slight performance benefits, and most notably is likely the scalable mode support within the Intel VT-d driver...

Besides the many GNU toolchain highlights for the year, LLVM developers working on that compiler infrastructure stack, Clang C/C++ front-end, LLDB debugger, and numerous other sub-projects were as busy as ever advancing this open-source, cross-platform focused compiler...

While 2018 was a grand year for open-source and Linux as we've been recapping all of the highlights in recent days on Phoronix, it wasn't without some shortcomings or areas that have yet to pan out... As we end 2018, for some interesting New Year's Eve discussions in the forums, here is a look at some of the biggest Linux/open-source letdowns of the year...

Last week I posted benchmarks of Windows Server 2019 against various Linux distributions using a Tyan dual socket Intel Xeon server. In this article are some complementary results when adding in the performance of FreeBSD 11.2 against the new FreeBSD 12.0 stable release for this leading BSD operating system. As some fun benchmarks to end out 2018, here are the results of FreeBSD 11.2/12.0 (including an additional run when using GCC rather than Clang) up against Windows Server and several enterprise-ready Linux distributions.

January should bring the release of Wine 4.0 as the annual stable release of this software for running Windows applications/games on Linux. As Wine 4.0 continued to be developed over the course of bi-weekly development releases all year, here's a look back at the notable features to find with this upcoming Wine 4.0.0 release...

It was a very exciting year for Red Hat's Fedora Linux distribution process with the successful releases of Fedora 28 and 29, each of those new Fedora releases adding in plenty of new features, achieving the long-desired flicker-free polished boot experience, and Fedora Silverblue taking shape for what was formerly their Atomic Workstation initiative. Next year though could be even more radical for the project...

It was a very busy year in kernel space from mitigating security vulnerabilities to preparing new features. Here is a look back at the most popular kernel topics of this year...

It's been nearly one year to the day since the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities were made public. While the security vulnerabilities were quickly buttoned up in the Linux space, kernel developers continue working to offset the performance overhead introduced by these mitigations. They made a lot of overhead reductions in 2018 while still there are some patch-sets pending still for bettering the experience. One of these patch-sets was known as "Relpolines" but now has been updated and morphed into what is being called Optpolines...

Con Kolivas has announced a New Year's Eve release of his Linux 4.20-ck1 kernel patch-set and the newest MuQSS scheduler...

While a number of BSDs already have great LLVM toolchain support and are generally quite fond of this liberally licensed compiler alternative to GCC, the NetBSD support has lagged behind a bit for LLVM but that is continuing to improve...

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...