Phoronix

PHP 7.2 has matured past the alpha and beta stages and is now out with its first release candidate...

If you missed out on one of the past Valve hardware sales, the Steam Controller and Steam Link are back to their reduced prices...

With having the Apple MacBook Air out for the Razer Blade Stealth Linux testing comparison, I decided to see how the latest releases of macOS Sierra and Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus were competing.

Many Phoronix readers have written in over the past day being excited over the prospects of being able to disable a newer version of Intel's Management Engine...

One of the first follow-on requests from this morning's Razer Blade Stealth Linux testing was for on top of all the other data-sets shared in that article to also look at the RAM usage, battery power draw, and boot times for the different desktop options on Ubuntu 17.04. As the request came in from a Phoronix Premium supporter, I jumped on that and here are some of those numbers.

QEMU 2.10 is now available as the latest release for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Earlier this year Razer co-founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan announced that Razer is planning better laptop support on Linux. He noted that more customers are requesting Linux support and they formed a goal of figuring out how to make "the best notebook in the world that supports Linux." Razer doesn't have any Linux laptop announcement to make yet, but for seeing the current state of affairs, they sent over the Razer Stealth laptop so we could put it through our Linux testing paces at Phoronix. Here is a look at the Razer Stealth ultrabook on Linux as well as a variety of interesting performance metrics, including some power metrics compared to Windows.

Version 17.08 of the Genode open-source operating system framework is now available with a variety of changes...

One of the unique test requests coming in as part of our Threadripper on Linux testing is to see how well the LLVMpipe and OpenSWR CPU-based OpenGL implementations within Mesa perform for this 16 core / 32 thread single-socket processor. Here are those results...

With Google Summer of Code 2017 now in the books, the final reports on the various projects carried out within the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system are now available...

LLVM 5.0 was supposed to be officially released last week, but instead another release candidate was warranted while the stable debut is expected in the days ahead...

While we routinely run various Linux distribution / operating system comparisons at Phoronix, they tend to be done on desktop class hardware and the occasional servers. This is our look at the most interesting enterprise-focused Linux distribution comparison to date as we see how Intel's Xeon Scalable platform compares on different GNU/Linux distributions when using the Tyan GT24E-B7106 paired with two Dual Xeon Gold 6138 processors. The tested configuration has 96GB of DDR4-2666 memory and 40 cores / 80 threads to see how different modern Linux distributions are affected with the latest-generation Xeon platform.

It has been a few months since the last Cairo 2D graphics library update, which is used by programs ranging from Firefox to GTK and WebKit, but today the notable 1.15.8 release is now available...

Taking a brief break from their Librem 5 smartphone campaign, there's a new Purism blog post today that explains at length why this summer's Librem laptop shipments were delayed due to a pesky Coreboot bug lasting weeks and what it took to come to a workaround...

For those craving to see some fresh OpenGL and Vulkan Linux gaming benchmarks with the recent high-end Intel/AMD CPUs at Phoronix, this article is for you.

Google Summer of Code participant Jacob Lifshay has written his final recap about the work he did this summer on starting the "Vulkan-CPU" project for writing a soft/CPU-based implementation of the Vulkan API...

Lead Intel ANV Vulkan driver developer Jason Ekstrand has landed support for the VK_KHR_external_fence extension within this open-source Linux Vulkan driver...

Since earlier this year NVIDIA posted their work on "Flang", an LLVM-based Fortran compiler, to GitHub while now they have done a formal announcement and update about its status...

For those interested in the work being done to the HAMMER2 file-system that's being developed by Matthew Dillon for DragonFlyBSD, it is indeed getting closer to being a working reality...

Introduced in the Linux 4.13 kernel for the Direct Rendering Manager drivers was the concept of DRM synchronization objects while for Linux 4.14 this feature will be improved upon...

While there are an array of interesting AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Linux benchmarks in this morning's review, after hitting a 36 second Linux kernel compilation time with this 16 core / 32 thread processor, I spent this afternoon seeing what I was getting for some other compile times of popular programs...

The third and perhaps final development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 7.4-Tynset is now available for your open-source, cross-platform benchmark evaluation needs...

Eric Anholt of Broadcom has been working on a new VC5 Gallium3D driver for supporting a new generation of Broadcom 3D graphics hardware that goes beyond the "VC4" 3D notably used by the current Raspberry Pi boards. So far he's been working on this new VC5 Gallium3D driver but now he's beginning work on the related Direct Rendering Manager kernel driver for this next-gen hardware...

AmanithVG is a new library implementing the Khronos OpenVG 1.1 vector graphics 2D API. This library supports OpenVG rendering using a software/CPU-based approach or in turn using OpenGL / OpenGL ES 1.1...

Last week I was able to finally get my hands on a Threadripper 1950X system thanks to AMD for being able to deliver some Linux tests from this high-end desktop platform. The Threadripper 1950X as a reminder is a 16-core processor with 32 threads via SMT, 3.4GHz base frequency, 4.0GHz boost frequency, quad-channel DDR4 support, and support for 64 PCI-E lanes. Threadripper sits between the Ryzen 7 desktop processors and the AMD EPYC server/workstation processors, which are still soon to be tested at Phoronix. The Ryzen Threadripper 1950X will set you back $999 USD, but compared to the Core i9 7900X at the same price, has six more cores / 12 threads and a slightly higher base clock frequency of 3.4GHz vs. 3.3GHz but a lower boost frequency of 4.0GHz vs. 4.3GHz.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has been working to firm up the release schedule for the Fedora 28 Linux operating system update due out in Q2'2018...

Werner Koch has announced the release of GNU Privacy Guard's GnuPG 2.2 stable series...

Last month in LLVM there was new Sandy Bridge scheduler information to improve the instruction scheduling and other hardware detail changes so LLVM can generate more efficient code for those older CPUs. At that time we learned Intel developers were also planning improvements too for LLVM with newer Haswell / Broadwell / Skylake / Skylake-X CPUs. Improvements have now landed for Haswell...

Landing within the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Library) code-base over night is initial Vulkan API support...

Just days after Linux turned 26 years old, Linus Torvalds has announced the seventh weekly test candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.13 kernel...

While we've seen the Radeon Linux OpenGL driver get competitive to the Windows Radeon OpenGL driver and the NVIDIA Windows/Linux OpenGL binary drivers have long been on a level playing field, how's the Intel HD Graphics performance? Here are some quick and fresh benchmarks this weekend.

While there has been VirGL as one of the options for allowing 3D/OpenGL acceleration of Linux guests within QEMU/KVM virtual machines to allow the calls to be directed to the host system's OpenGL driver, that support hasn't been available when Windows is running as QEMU/KVM guest. That is changing though thanks in large part to this year's Google Summer of Code...

Following the news this week that RadeonSI may switch to NIR completely in the future, in the forums a number of questions were raised about why the Linux graphics drivers are using multiple forms of intermediate representation and whether this would still make RadeonSI a Gallium3D driver if it doesn't default to TGSI...

With testing out a Tyan 1U server featuring dual Intel Xeon Gold 6138 CPUs, one of the uncommon test requests we have received but understandable given our audience is curiosity about the performance of OpenGL software rendering on this 40 core / 80 thread Xeon Scalable server when making use of Mesa's LLVMpipe software rasterizer and the newer OpenSWR driver from Intel.

This week Purism announced their plans for the Librem 5 smart-phone as a GNU/Linux smartphone that is privacy-respecting, as open as possible, and costs $599 USD. The company believes they can have the phone ready for release by early 2019 if they raise $1.5 million USD over the next two months. In just about three days they have raised nearly $100,000, but it's not clear if the pacing will continue to reach the milestone in time...

Not only is GSoC wrapping up now as school nears for many of the involved student developers, but the Outreachy internship program is also ending this coming week...

KDE saw more than one dozen student developers interact on various projects this summer thanks to the Google Summer of Code 2017...

Another GSoC 2017 project worth highlighting now that Google's annual Summer of Code has finished is the AVX2 optimizations being done to the VP9 decoder within FFmpeg...

Thanks to this year's Google Summer of Code, there is a branch pending for allowing game controllers to be re-assigned within GNOME Games...

Student developer Jente Hidskes' work this summer on improving the Piper GTK3 user-interface for configuring gaming mice on Linux via libratbag is now the latest example of a very successful Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project...

For those looking for a very capable ARM developer board but have previously been put off by the Jetson TX1 at $579 USD, they now have a $199 developer board...

System76 continues working on their Ubuntu fork called Pop!_OS that they intend to ship on their future laptops and desktops. They have now decided on some of the default applications as well as the decision to not yet ship Wayland by default...

Ubuntu 17.10, the Artful Aardvark, has crossed into the feature freeze this week...

One of the Google Summer of Code projects this summer for the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system was on porting the Btrfs file-system...

Qt/KDE developer Daniel Nicoletti has written "Sticklyst" to show how KDE Frameworks 5 code can be used to construct web sites/applications...

The QupZilla open-source web-browser built using Qt WebEngine and in development for the past seven years is now part of the KDE project and has renamed itself to Falkon...

It's only the in-progress SPIR-V and KHR_no_error work left preventing the RadeonSI and Intel OpenGL drivers in Mesa from exposing OpenGL 4.6...

Will Cooke of Canonical is out with another weekly update on the latest happenings for the Ubuntu 17.10 desktop as the "Artful Aardvark" release continues getting closer...

RadeonSI developers have been working on supporting the NIR intermediate representation within their Gallium3D driver as a means to support ARB_gl_spirv for being able to load SPIR-V shaders in OpenGL and interact with the RADV Vulkan driver code paths, which is making use of NIR. It's looking like in the future the RadeonSI driver could end up using NIR completely by default...

As some more Linux phone news this week besides Android Oreo and Purism's Librem 5 smartphone effort, Jolla has just announced their plans for shipping Sailfish X...