Phoronix

Like us, many of you have probably been anxious for weeks to see a plethora of benchmarks featuring AMD's EPYC processors. An EPYC-equipped server arrived today courtesy of AMD and TYAN and is now in the process of being tested at Phoronix. Next week we should have some initial comparison numbers to feature of the AMD EPYC 7601 processor under Linux while in the weeks ahead will be more extensive numbers in looking at the Linux performance in different areas followed by FreeBSD/BSD results and other interesting tests. Here's our first look at this Tyan Transport SX TN70A-B8026 server.

As we've been expecting, Zstd compression for Btrfs is coming with the Linux 4.14 along with Zstd support in SquashFS...

Chrome/Chromium supports GPU sandboxing for security purposes and now it will work fine with the AMD graphics on Linux...

Elivepatch is a new means of live kernel patching of Gentoo Linux and works in a distributed manner...

Linux's support for the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor for server virtualization is seeing some performance tuning in the Linux 4.14 kernel...

As we previously reported on, there was a Google Summer of Code project this year optimizing FFmpeg's VP9 decoder particularly around AVX2 instructions and threading. The project was a success and VP9 decoding should be much faster with FFmpeg as a result...

There's more good news about work-in-progress patches for those GCN 1.0 owners that have been looking to get your graphics card running full-featured under the AMDGPU DRM driver rather than the existing Radeon Direct Rendering Manager driver...

Linus Torvalds has pulled in the block layer updates for the Linux 4.14 kernel merge window...

Michel Dänzer of AMD has released updated stable versions of their AMDGPU and Radeon X.Org DDX drivers today...

With the Outreachy Summer 2017 internship period wrapping up, the application period has opened for the Outreachy Winter 2017 internship program...

For those wanting to use the Reiser4 file-system with the just-released Linux 4.13 kernel, patches are already available...

Curious around the GNOME Shell desktop and improvements made during the Ubuntu 17.10 cycle in transitioning away from Unity 7 and X.Org to GNOME and Wayland, I took the recently-reviewed Razer Blade Stealth laptop and tried out the very latest Ubuntu desktop daily ISO on this Intel laptop. Here are my initial impressions of the current Ubuntu 17.10 desktop experience as well as some power/boot/performance benchmarks of 17.10 in its daily state compared to Ubuntu 17.04 on this Kabylake system.

For the many of you Linux users that have been desiring an AMD laptop, things could get interesting with Lenovo having just announced the ThinkPad A-Series...

GNOME 3.25.92 is available today, marking the last development release before the official GNOME 3.26 debut...

After delays pushed its release back by about one month, LLVM 5.0 was just released a few minutes ago along with its associated sub-projects like the Clang 5.0 C/C++ compiler...

In two weeks now Purism has managed to raise over $200,000 USD towards their dream of building a privacy/free-software-minded smartphone running their own custom Linux-based software stack. But they remain a long ways to go from their $1.5 MM goal...

While not for public consumption at least for now, the Electronic Arts' Frostbite game engine has seen internal Linux testing/development...

GNOME Mutter 3.25.92 has been released and it incorporates some interesting changes for the end of the GNOME 3.26 development cycle...

Linux hwmon developer Guenter Roeck has posted a patch adding support for Family 17h (Ryzen/Threadripper/Epyc) temperature monitoring support to the existing k10temp Linux kernel driver...

Building off last week's Wine 2.16 bi-weekly development snapshot, the crew working on the more bleeding-edge/experimental Wine-Staging branch have released their v2.16 update with various features tacked on...

Mauro Carvalho Chehab has sent in a big pull request of the media subsystem updates for the Linux 4.14 kernel. This time around there are multiple new drivers yielding around a net addition of around 30k lines to the Linux kernel...

Intel developers have published a new round of drm-intel-testing updates for those developers or enthusiasts wishing to begin testing this in-progress code for the Intel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver with this code eventually being queued for the Linux 4.15 cycle...

The annual GNU Tools Cauldron conference focused around the GNU compiler toolchain will kickoff tomorrow, 8 September, in Prague...

While Linux users of AMD's new Zen-based Ryzen/Threadripper/Epyc processors are still waiting for thermal driver support to hit the mainline Linux kernel, FreeBSD developers have already managed to produce the Zen "Family 17h" CPU thermal monitoring support on their own...

For those with Qualcomm Adreno A3xx graphics hardware and looking forward to playing with the MSM+Freedreno open-source driver stack, it's one step easier tracking down the right components with the necessary binary-only firmware blobs now living within linux-firmware.git...

For those of you still maintaining COBOL code-bases, GnuCOBOL 2.2 is now available as what was formerly OpenCOBOL and also the project's first stable release in nearly one decade...

It has been about one year since last hearing anything about the Internet Protocol v10 (IPv10) proposal while this week it's now available in draft form...

C++17 (formerly C++1z) is ready for its debut. C++17 has been formally approved by its committee and is just waiting on ISO publishing...

Jon Thomas has announced the release of the OpenShot Video Editor 2.4 released. Among the features of OpenShot 2.4 are "vastly improved stability" for this non-linear, cross-platform video editor...

The crypto subsystem updates have been pulled in for the Linux 4.14 kernel and it includes more complete AMD Secure Processor support, among other changes...

Takashi Iwai of SUSE has mailed in his sound driver updates for the Linux 4.14 kernel. This time around there isn't too many speaker-shattering changes, but a wide range of fixes and a few notable changes...

While we have tested a number of Linux distributions on Intel's new Xeon Scalable platform, here are some initial BSD tests using two Xeon Gold 6138 processors with the Tyan GT24E-B7106 1U barebones server.

Google has announced the availability today of the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) Release 16. This release is worth mentioning in that Google is now encouraging developers to start using libc++ as their C++ standard library...

For those not riding the in-development Debian "Buster" packages or the "Sid" bleeding-edge packages, the default desktop GNOME session is using Wayland by default...

With the quick F27 cycle given the Fedora 26 delays in getting that previous release out the door, this week already marks the Fedora 27 beta freeze...

While it was already widely expected that Linux 4.14 would be the "2017 Linux LTS kernel", Greg Kroah-Hartman reaffirmed the decision today...

Following word last month Oracle was looking to move Java EE off to a new (more open) steward, today developers have noticed Java EE in its entirety is available via GitHub...

LXC 2.1 is now available as the latest version of Linux Containers for OS-level virtualization in allowing multiple Linux containers to run simultaneously off the mainline Linux kernel...

Intel Cache Quality Monitoring (CQM) has been present in recent Intel Xeon CPUs as a way to allow a process or processes to be tracked for their CPU cache usage. This is part of Intel's modern quality of service (QoS) features for helping developers fully leverage modern Intel CPU architectures. With Linux 4.14, CQM has gone through a rework...

Thanks to the great work done by Dave Airlie, Bas Nieuwenhuizen, and other open-source contributors, the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver has re-enabled support for the Radeon RX Vega graphics processors...

Jiri Kosina on Tuesday submitted the HID subsystem updates for the Linux 4.14 kernel...

Landing in the Nouveau DRM tree this week is initial support for the GP100 temperature sensor used by newer NVIDIA Pascal graphics cards...

The Vulkan-CPU project that was born this summer via Google Summer of Code for running Vulkan on the CPU as a software renderer has been named to Kazan...

The GNOME Control Center was revamped this summer and even the Haiku settings area while KDE developers are also working on overhauling their System Settings user-interface...

It's taken more than a decade, but after enough user complaints, there is finally a patch queued for Firefox 57 to fix an arguably annoying default behavior of Firefox on Linux/Unix systems...

Google has pushed Chrome 61 into the stable channel today as the latest release of their cross-platform web browser...

Broadcom developer Eric Anholt who has long been working on the VC4 open-source graphics driver stack most well known for being used by the Raspberry Pi has begun working on a new driver stack, VC5, for a next-generation of Broadcom graphics hardware...

Besides releasing Qt Creator 4.4 today, The Qt Company also announced the release of Qbs 1.9, the Qt Build System...

Along with the other subsystems managed by Greg Kroah-Hartman, the staging tree was pulled today into the mainline Linux kernel Git for the 4.14 merge window...

While Razer at this time does not provide any official software support on Linux, via the OpenRazer/Polychromatic projects largely driven by the open-source community, they are making impressive headway. Last time I tried the Polychromatic UI that interfaces with the OpenRazer drivers for configuring Razer products on Linux, it wasn't working too well. But now it seems to have matured a lot and is working out quite well.