Phoronix

August 2018 was the busiest month in the open-source/Linux space and hardware in many months... So busy in fact your's truly wrote a combined total of 352 original articles over the course of August. Here's a look back at what made this month so exciting...

The latest Linux kernel patch coming to light in the Spectre space is by SUSE's Jiri Kosina for enabling cross-hyperthreaded Spectre V2 STIBP mitigation...

NVIDIA today released new Vulkan beta drivers in the form of v399.17 for Windows and v396.54.02 for Linux...

Announced back in May by Dell was an Ubuntu option for their new (2018) xx30 series Precision laptops. They previously began shipping the Ubuntu-loaded Dell Precision 3530/7530/7730 mobile workstations while beginning to ship as of today is the Precision 5530 Developer Edition...

Wine 3.15 is out today as the first development release since last week's landmark announcement of Valve's Steam Play to run Windows games on Linux using the Wine-forked "Proton" with the help of CodeWeavers...

This week Intel opened up a newly-completed Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM2) stack with support for Linux and Microsoft Windows...

Last week I posted some initial tests and benchmarks of DragonFlyBSD/FreeBSD on the AMD Threadripper 2990WX. While that went well and the BSDs scale with this 32-core / 64-thread processor better than Windows, lead DragonFly developer Matthew Dillon had picked up a 2990WX system and has been tuning the kernel ever since. Here are some benchmarks looking at some of his recent optimizations...

If you are a fan of Linux Mint and their GNOME/GTK-forked Cinnamon desktop but prefer not having the Ubuntu base, Linux Mint Debian Edition 3 "Cindy" is now available...

With some out-of-tree code of Firefox Nightly with a modified version of Gecko using GFX-RS, it's possible to use the web-browser powered by the Vulkan API on Linux...

ARM developer Adenilson Cavalcanti has been working on optimizing the Zlib compression/decompression performance on ARM systems...

With KDE4 not having seen an upstream release in years and the old KDE4 code beginning to break under newer C++ compilers, the KDE-FreeBSD team has announced a four-month deprecation period after which they are dropping the KDE4 ports from the operating system...

Sean Paul of Google who herds the drm-misc-next code into DRM-Next sent the first pull request of new material targeting the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.20 but more likely to be known as Linux 5.0...

Godot has been on a roll lately with this 2D/3D open-source game engine having seen lots of well-deserved attention. Following their big Godot 3.0 release in January, Godot 3.1 is on the way as another significant update...

The latest work being sought by Google's Chrome OS team for inclusion into the upstream Linux kernel is high-resolution scrolling for Logitech mice...

If you tend to routinely ride the latest Linux Git code and are still using 32-bit (x86) hardware, you may want to watch out for problems around the new Kernel Page Table Isolation (K/PTI) functionality...

The GCC Steering Committee is accepting OpenRISC as the newest architecture port for inclusion into the GNU Compiler Collection...

Raptor Computer Systems began their open-source hardware expedition with the POWER8-based Talos Secure Workstation that was quite expensive but last year launched the Talos II platform with IBM POWER9 processors and earlier this year launched the Raptor Talos II Lite systems at a cheaper price-point but still quite a significant investment compared to x86_64 AMD/Intel products. They've been pushing ahead on making their platform more viable for Linux users as well as more affordable and it looks like they will soon be launching a new product...

It's just been over one month since the release of ReactOS 0.4.9 while the next version is beginning to formulate...

While still waiting on the ROCm 1.9 release to happen, version 1.8.3 of the Radeon Open Compute stack was released for Linux systems...

One of the most frequent test requests recently has been to look at the overall performance cost of Meltdown/Spectre mitigations on the latest Linux kernel and now with L1TF/Foreshadow work tossed into the mix. With the Linux 4.19 kernel that just kicked off development this month has been continued churn in the Spectre/Meltdown space, just not for x86_64 but also for POWER/s390/ARM where applicable. For getting an overall look at the performance impact of these mitigation techniques I tested three Intel Xeon systems and two AMD EPYC systems as well as a virtual machine on each side for seeing how the default Linux 4.19 kernel performance -- with relevant mitigations applied -- to that of an unmitigated kernel.

The Genode Operating System Framework is out with its latest release as well as an updated SculptOS that they are forging as their general purpose operating system...

The VLC media player was one of the big recipients of this year's Google Summer of Code with seeing several students work on some pretty interesting projects...

Mesa 18.2 will be slipping into September with two open Intel driver bugs still blocking the official release...

GNOME's Usage application that allows visualizing processor, memory, disk, and network usage may soon be able to report your system's power consumption data...

The work done by Valve open-source Linux GPU driver Timothy Arceri to implement OpenGL 4.5 compatibility profile has been merged into Git master for next quarter's Mesa 18.3 release...

Purism shared today about the work they are engaged in on supporting SMS messaging with their in-development Librem 5 smartphone...

Announced last October was a 24-core ARM developer box being worked on by Linaro/96Boards, Socionext, and Gigabyte. The specifications are appealing with twenty-four ARM 64-bit cores with the SoC on a micro-ATX sized motherboard, support for a PCI Express graphics slot, and onboard Gigabit Ethernet. Here are our first benchmarks of this Socionext 96Boards Developerbox.

The soon-to-be-released Linux 4.18.6 stable kernel will correctly report the CPU core temperatures of the new AMD Threadripper 2950X and 2990WX processors...

While .NET applications have been supported on Linux for a while now via the .NET Core, using performance profiling tools really haven't working out but that is now changing...

Word this week of the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier Development Kit being up for pre-order reminded me of some benchmarks I had been meaning to do of seeing how the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 developer kit's performance has evolved since its launch a year and a half ago. There's actually a quite measurable improvement in performance with the latest software/drivers compared to it was at launch.

For those looking at affordable metal server racks / open rack cabinets, I continue to be quite impressed by the StarTech.com four-post server racks. Recently I commissioned two more of their 12U racks in order to accommodate the latest Threadripper 2 systems in our Linux benchmarking farm...

At this week's Open-Source Summit in Vancouver is a presentation by an Activision developer talking about Call of Duty performance but sadly it's not what may come to mind...

You should likely be familiar with WebAssembly as the binary format for executing code within web pages that can be nearly as fast as running native machine code -- and certainly much faster than JavaScript. A new research project has been exploring running WebAssembly in the CPU's Ring 0 -- yes, the highest privileged state of the processor -- in the name of better performance...

Thanks to Google Summer of Code 2018, student developer Danil Iashchenko devoted the past several months to writing more filters within FFmpeg's Libavfilter library in OpenCL...

Facebook developers maintaining the HHVM interpreter for running PHP and Hack code have announced the HHVM 3.28.0 update...

The performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution out of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center started out with Xfce as its lone desktop option and then added and moved over to the GNOME Shell as the default desktop. While GNOME Shell remains the default desktop choice for this rolling-release Linux distribution, KDE components have begun appearing in recent days.

Linux firmware updating is on a roll with the fwupd updating utility and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for the distribution of these firmware files recently seeing AKiTiO Thunderbolt device support and NVMe SSD firmware updating being the next big task. Richard Hughes of Red Hat has also revealed he's been working on USB3 hub firmware support in conjunction with Realtek...

Imad Sousou of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has announced their plans to develop a safety-critical Linux distribution. This Linux distribution will be geared for running on safety-compliant solutions from autonomous vehicles to drones and more...

Intel has announced their new U-series "Whiskey Lake" and Y-series "Amber Lake" processors for laptops, 2-in-1s/convertibles, and other low-power devices...

As a P.S.A. for those tending to quickly upgrade to new major kernel releases but are doing so on older hardware, there appears to be a show-stopping bug that made it into the stable Linux 4.18 series...

Two years after Solaris 11.3 and Oracle opting for a "continuous delivery" model of 11.next updates instead of a "Solaris 12", Solaris 11.4 is out the door today...

One of the most interesting projects we've seen attempted for Google Summer of Code 2018 was adding Vulkan support to VirGL for allowing Vulkan access within guest virtual machines...

Last week NVIDIA released the 396.54 driver that has a significant performance fix for OpenGL/Vulkan Linux performance due to a resource leak regression introduced at the start of the 390 driver series. With that updated driver (also as of yesterday back-ported to 390.87 too), there is a measurable boost in performance after running a few games on NVIDIA Linux systems. But at the same time, the Mesa 18.3-dev open-source graphics driver stack with RadeonSI/RADV continues improving on the open-source AMD front. Here is a fresh look at how the latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards compare using these latest drivers.

Given Valve's now public Steam Play for Linux using the Wine-derived Proton and their ongoing relationship with Code Weavers to improve the experience for Windows games on Linux, it perhaps adds better context why this summer for GSoC there was the automated Direct3D game benchmarking work with mentorship by a CodeWeavers developer...

In addition to the VKMS driver for virtual kernel mode-setting, the other successful Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project this summer under the X.Org umbrella was improving the DRM GPU scheduler...

While the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window just ended this past weekend and the development cycle for Linux 4.20 (or most likely to be called Linux 5.0) won't kick off until around the middle of October, AMD has already begun staging a ton of changes for this next kernel version. In particular, it looks like with this next kernel release their Vega 20 enablement will be in order...

Ubuntu's Mir display server that has been chasing Wayland support and earlier this year introduced EGMDE as the example Mir desktop environment has picked up some extra functionality on its "edge" channel...

One of the features sadly not making it into the in-development Linux 4.19 kernel is the support for Intel's SGX -- the Software Guard Extensions...

AMD's GPUOpen group has released their first beta of the Vulkan Memory Allocator 2.1 release after "many months of development" and as such comes with many new features...

It has been a while since last delivering some OpenCL GPU compute benchmarks across several different graphics cards on the latest Linux drivers, so here is a fresh look...