Phoronix

For fans of the desktop-focused, easy-to-use, and elegantly designed Elementary OS Linux distribution, their beta of the upcoming 5.0 "Juno" is now available for public testing...

With the BUS1 in-kernel IPC mechanism continuing to be off in the distance as a potential successor to the current form of D-Bus, the BUS1 developers continue working on Dbus-Broker as the "Linux D-Bus Message Broker" that retains compatibility with the D-Bus specification while offering higher performance and greater scalability...

For those currently making use of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with its default graphics stack (Linux 4.15 + Mesa 18.0) and are wondering if it makes sense upgrading to a newer version of the Linux kernel and/or Mesa, here is an extensive Mesa+AMDGPU comparison testing four graphics driver configurations across three popular AMD Radeon graphics cards.

Announced back in May were several new Dell Precision laptops pre-loaded with Ubuntu Linux. The Dell Precision 7530 and 7730 from that batch are now shipping with Ubuntu as a factory option...

The end of July marks one year since the release of OpenGL 4.6 but sadly it doesn't look like the Mesa drivers will meet that anniversary for having working open-source OpenGL 4.6 compliance in the mainline Mesa code-base...

In late May Spectre V4 was made public and coinciding with the public reveal was the Linux kernel patches for the Speculative Store Bypass Disable (SSBD) mode for mitigating this latest side-channel attack. For SSBD on Intel CPUs, updated microcode is required and those patched microcode files are now being delivered down through new BIOS updates from motherboard vendors. In recent days with seeing ASUS motherboards get the updated supported, I decided to run some initial Core i7 Coffeelake benchmarks with/without the SSBD support being enabled in the Linux kernel.

With the Linux 4.18 kernel development settling nicely, I've been ramping up tests lately on the Linux Git state. For those curious, here are some fresh benchmarks using the current AMD flagship EPYC processor of Linux 4.16, 4.17, and 4.18 Git...

Yet another notable change proposal for Fedora 29 is to "remove excessive linking", which could help program start-up times, but may be too late for happening with the current Fedora Linux release cycle...

We are now half-way through 2018 and the work on GNU Hurd and related components like GNU March have been very light...

It looks like the Linux kernel's SCSI code may soon switch away from its legacy code-path to the multi-queue (MQ) code by default...

It's been a while since last benchmarking the Liquorix kernel that is a modified version of the Linux kernel. Liquorix was recently updated against Linux 4.17 and a premium patron requested some fresh benchmark results...

It's been a busy day for the Intel "ANV" open-source Linux Vulkan driver as besides new (NIR) optimizations, they also enabled support for the on-disk shader cache...

It had been over three weeks since AMD last pushed out the latest open-source code to the AMDVLK Vulkan Linux driver, but that changed today with the latest XGL/LLPC/PAL code updates along with making public their SPVGEN library...

The second release candidate of the upcoming NetBSD 8.0 is now available...

A few days back I wrote about some Intel open-source Vulkan "ANV" driver optimizations that really help the Skyrim game under DXVK with Wine to allow for a playable experience with Intel onboard graphics. Those patches have now been merged into Mesa 18.2...

Fresh from the Mir 0.32 release, Canonical developers working on the Mir display server are settling on their approach to supporting more Wayland extensions...

Jan Grulich and other developers at Red Hat have been making progress on screen-sharing support using WebRTC as found within web-browsers like Firefox and Chrome. With their experimental work, Wayland screen-sharing is working both for GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma...

Haiku OS continues working towards its long-awaited beta and there continues to be other improvements made for this BeOS-inspired platform...

It's been about three years since last carrying out any file-system performance benchmarks of Reiser4, but being curious how it stacks up against the current state of today's mainline Linux file-systems, here are some fresh performance tests of Reiser4 using the Linux 4.17 kernel. The Reiser4 performance was compared to Reiserfs, EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS.

Fedora is planning to discontinue the POWER PPC64 architecture support within their Linux distribution as far as the big endian flavor is concerned. But PPC64LE (little endian) is where they will exclusively focus their POWER architecture attention...

It was just shy of four years that SUSE was effectively acquired by Micro Focus as yet another changing of the guard for this long-standing German enterprise Linux distribution. Now today it's been announced that a Swedish private equity fund will be acquiring SUSE...

Fedora 29 continues looking like a rather ambitious release with a growing number of changes, including at some of the lowest levels of the system. The latest feature proposal is on changing the compression scheme used by the DNF package manager's repository metadata...

Sean Davis of the Xubuntu project has provided a status update about the ongoing work by this Xfce-focused spin of Ubuntu Linux...

Vulkan 1.1.79 is now the latest revision to this graphics/compute API...

The Steam Survey numbers are now available for June 2018 and indicate at least on a percentage basis a small decline in the Linux gaming market-share...

Linus Torvalds is back to his regular release timing for new Linux 4.18 kernel release candidates...

Being squared away for the NetBSD 8.1 release are audio improvements within the kernel...

Three years after Kolab Systems raised more than $100k USD to develop "RoundCube Next" as a next-generation mail and communication platform, there is little to show for it and no active development...

Last week we noted how some of the code to boot the RISC-V SiFive HiFive Unleashed development board was closed-source. That upset some in the Coreboot community with hoping for a more open development board built around the RISC-V open-source processor ISA. The good news is that SiFive will soon be releasing the necessary code for initialization as open-source...

June was another extremely busy month on Phoronix covering the Linux and open-source landscape with 311 original news articles and 24 featured hardware articles/reviews written by your's truly. June brought with it the start of the Linux 4.18 kernel cycle, a lot of interesting summer-time benchmarks, and more...

The latest USB Type-C work for the Linux kernel adds support for alternate modes in order to begin offering USB Type-C DisplayPort alternate mode support...

HarfBuzz is the open-source text shaping library that supports various font technologies and is used by a variety of toolkits and more. The latest addition for HarfBuzz is supporting Dfonts, as is common to macOS systems...

KDE finally has an on-by-default easy way global shortcut for launching the Konsole terminal application...

After a relatively long period of silence, OpenShot 2.4.2 was released today as the latest version of this open-source, non-linear video editing software...

A few days back I wrote about workarounds for getting FreeBSD running stable on AMD Ryzen via a script to adjust some of the CPU's MSRs based upon a recently-updated AMD revision guide. That script, which was making use of FreeBSD's cpucontrol utility for adjusting the bits, has now morphed into a kernel patch...

Earlier this month the Laminar Research crew responsible for the realistic, cross-platform X-Plane flight simulator presented at the FlightSimExpo about their work on porting the flight simulator to Vulkan and other ongoing improvements...

One of the additions we have been looking forward to seeing in the mainline Linux kernel in 2018 is WireGuard. WireGuard is the open-source, performance-minded, and secure VPN tunnel. WireGuard is designed to be run within the Linux kernel but has also been ported to other platforms...

While the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has supported a shader cache going back to early 2017 for helping out Linux game load times and performance, OpenGL compute shaders up to now were not handled by this shader cache...

With the first half of the year just about in the books, here is a recap of the most popular open-source/Linux news, benchmarks, and Linux hardware reviews so far for H1'2018...

Intel open-source graphics driver developer Jason Ekstrand has published a set of patches that help with playing Skyrim Special Edition with Intel graphics hardware under Linux when using the DXVK layer...

While Intel's Clear Linux platform has already been making use of GCC 8.1 since shortly after its release in early May, one of their developers has now published a blog post highlighting three performance and security features enjoyed and that helps benefit their performance-oriented Linux distribution...

It was just four days ago that Valve Linux GPU driver developer Timothy Arceri was thinking it could take a while before having OpenGL 4.4 compatibility profile support for RadeonSI, but tonight that milestone is checked off the list...

It has been a while since last having anything to report on the Nouveau Gallium3D driver's effort to support the NIR intermediate representation as part of their effort to re-use existing code-paths for helping to bring-up SPIR-V compute support for this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver and ultimately working towards Vulkan support. But the latest version of these Nouveau NIR patches are now available and almost ready to be mainlined...

A few weeks back I posted benchmarks of EXT4 fscrypt vs. eCryptfs vs. LUKS dm-crypt benchmarks for showing the EXT4 file-system performance encryption performance for these kernel-based approaches. That testing was done with a SATA 3.0 SSD while in this article is a look at the performance in another popular choice: if using a USB 3.0 external enclosure with a hard drive.

For those planning to enjoy some Linux games this weekend while using the RadeonSI / RADV / Intel / Nouveau drivers, Mesa 18.1.3 is now out as the newest stable point release...

NetworkManager 1.12 is now available as the latest stable release of this widely-used Linux network management software...

Given Clear Linux is a "rolling release" Linux distribution with new releases often being put out multiple times per day, and a lot of the emphasis by Intel on their open-source Linux distribution being performance, I decided it would be fun to start providing a monthly look at how their performance has been evolving...

The Linux Mint crew has delivered on their goal of shipping Linux Mint 19 "Tara" in June...

Last week I posted a number of Wine vs. Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks focusing mostly on the CPU/system performance for various cross-platform applications/programs. For those interested in the graphics/gaming performance, here are a number of Direct3D and OpenGL benchmarks...

Canonical's Alan Griffiths has just announced the release of the huge Mir 0.32 update...