Phoronix

The KDE-developed, Qt-powered digiKam photo management software is out with its first feature update of 2018...

Even with the overhead of having both KPTI and Retpoline kernel support in place, our recent Linux distribution benchmarks have shown Intel's Clear Linux generally outperforming the more popular distributions. But if applying some basic performance tweaks, can Ubuntu 17.10 perform like Clear Linux? Here are some benchmarks looking at a few factors.

Now that Firefox's GTK3 support is finally into shape, Firefox 59 will be doing away with GTK2 tool-kit support...

LittleFS is a lightweight file-system that's being developed for embedded systems...

At the beginning of January I posted some early LLVM Clang 6.0 benchmarks on AMD EPYC while in this article is comparing the tentative Clang 6.0 performance to that of the in-development GCC 8.0. Both compilers are now into their feature freeze and this testing looked at the performance of generated binaries both for generic x86_64 as well as being tuned for AMD's Zen "znver1" microarchitecture.

Yesterday I posted some Linux hardware statistics going back to 2011 using data collected by the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. Those yearly metrics hadn't contained any GPU/driver data, but here are those numbers...

The past few months Fedora Linux has been working on shipping free software AAC audio codec support and that's moved ahead but at least initially they are calling the AAC decoder "crippled."..

Ubuntu 17.10.1 ISOs are now available as well as for most of the *buntu derivatives. The Ubuntu 17.10.1 ISO re-spin is for disabling the SPI kernel driver to avoid messing up select laptops...

With Linux distributions being patched since last week's Meltdown and Spectre disclosure, here are benchmarks on some of the prominent distributions looking at their performance impact since being patched. Tested from an Intel Core i7 8700K system was CentOS, Clear Linux, Debian, openSUSE, and Ubuntu.

The sixth weekly release candidate of the upcoming Wine 3.0 is now available for testing...

The work on adding optional Meson build system support to the Linux graphics stack and other key open-source projects continues.....

The next release of systemd, v237, will introduce support for WireGuard. WireGuard as a reminder is the effort to provide a fast, modern and secure VPN tunnel that eventually plans to be part of the mainline Linux kernel...

The PackageKit-Qt project that provides Qt bindings for PackageKit has simultaneously released versions v0.10 and v1.0...

The multi-platform, professional-grade Lightworks non-linear video editing system is getting close to releasing version 14.1...

Last week in light of the Spectre disclosure. AMD believed they were at "near zero risk" to Variant Two / Branch Target Injection. But now the company confirmed last night that's not the case: they are at least potentially vulnerable...

Here are some Linux hardware and software statistics going back to 2011...

A few days back I wrote about open-source Intel developers posting their initial GPU driver patches for Icelake "Gen 11" graphics. That first code drop was just the tip of the iceberg unlike code drops for previous generations where they published the whole stack at once. But now the developers have already moved on to publishing more of the code...

For those sticking to Firefox Extended Support Releases, the Firefox 60 branch will be the next ESR version...

Ongoing Wayland/Weston release manager Bryce Harrington of Samsung's Open-Source Group has laid out plans for the next releases of Wayland and the reference Weston compositor...

It's not any re-clocking code or magical improvements for Nouveau's Pascal support, but on the Tegra side a NVIDIA developer has volleyed some new open-source patches...

For fans of the pfSense-forked OPNsense FreeBSD-based firewall/network operating system, the first release candidate of OPNsense 18.1 is available for testing...

Yesterday I posted some fresh GPU/driver benchmark results for discrete AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. These were some of the most competitive numbers yet we've seen out of the open-source RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV drivers while using the latest Linux 4.15 kernel, especially for the GTX 1060 vs. RX 580 battle. In the comments were requests to see some CPU utilization numbers, including from one of the Radeon Linux developers, so here is a look at how the CPU usage compares...

Over the past week and a half of running many benchmarks looking at the performance impact of the Linux KPTI and Retpoline patches for Spectre and Meltdown mitigation, one of the most common test requests is some thorough benchmarks on older systems. Why that's important is with older (pre-Westmere) CPUs there isn't PCID (Process Context Identifier) support that's used by KPTI, which helps offset some of the performance loss. So for some test results to share today are two old ThinkPads from the Clarksfield and Penryn days compared to a newer Broadwell ThinkPad in looking at the performance difference.

The KDE/Qt-aligned Krita digital painting program has released its first beta release of the major 4.0 update that also marks its string freeze. Now marks the period of bug fixing before shipping Krita 4.0 within a few months...

The Nextcloud cloud hosting software forked from ownCloud now has audio/video/chat abilities...

For those curious about the financial aspect of porting games to Linux and macOS, Feral Interactive has published their 2017 fiscal year results...

David Airlie and Bas Nieuwenhuizen's work on the RADV open-source Vulkan driver is quite relentless. David has posted yet another patch working on further optimizing the performance of this unofficial Radeon Vulkan driver living within Mesa...

The xf86-video-intel DDX driver now has support for the first "Coffee Lake" processors...

Freedreno open-source Qualcomm Adreno driver creator Rob Clark has sent in the set of updates for the MSM DRM driver targeting the Linux 4.16 kernel...

Unity Technologies has rolled out their first public beta for the Unity 2018.1 release. Exciting us about this game engine update is their Scriptable Render Pipeline...

AMD sent in a fair number of AMDGPU updates slated for Linux 4.16 but now hitting the cut-off for major feature updates for DRM-Next code looking to make it into 4.16, AMD has submitted some fixes...

Here is a fresh look at the NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon Linux graphics card performance as we start 2018. Testing was done using the latest Linux 4.15 Git kernel -- including the KPTI page table isolation support -- as well as using the newest Mesa 17.4-dev driver code for RadeonSI/RADV and on the NVIDIA side is their brand new 390.12 beta driver.

There's still a week and a half to go until the Linux 4.15.0 stable kernel release is expected and that rings in the Linux 4.16 merge window. On top of various Linux 4.16 changes already talked about, here's a look at some of the other kernel features/additions expected for this next release cycle...

Adam Jackson of Red Hat has sent out the second version of the ongoing patches for providing server-side GLVND functionality for the X.Org Server...

If your system has been impacted by the overhead of KPTI and Retpoline support for patching against Spectre and Meltdown, fortunately, Intel's new microcode update for Linux systems is not making the situation worse...

RADV co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen has landed support for the Vulkan VK_EXT_discard_rectangles extension within Mesa 17.4-dev...

For those NVIDIA Linux users reliant upon the proprietary driver and wanting to upgrade to the Linux 4.15 kernel that will be officially released within the next two weeks, the 390.12 driver is playing nicely...

One of the features exciting us the most about GTK4 is the Vulkan renderer that will make its premiere. This Vulkan renderer continues getting worked into shape for GTK+ 4.0...

As upstream Glibc is working on deprecating libcrypt for its eventual removal from the codebase, Fedora developers are looking at using libxcrypt for their hashing/encoding crypto library...

If you are still running with a pre-GCN AMD graphics card, a number of R600 Gallium3D commits landed in Mesa Git over night as well as an interesting patch series on the Mesa mailing list...

Last week DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon posted initial patches for addressing Meltdown on this popular BSD distribution. Dillon has now posted his initial patch for targeting the Spectre CPU vulnerability...

In the wake of Meltdown and Spectre, Intel yesterday released new microcode binaries for Linux systems...

While Intel Cannonlake processors aren't out yet with their new "Gen 10" graphics hardware, Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has published their first graphics driver patches for Linux enablement of Icelake "Gen 11" hardware...

Over the past week I have posted many KPTI and Retpoline benchmarks for showing the performance impact of these patches to combat the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. But with my testing so far I haven't done any showing the combined impact of KPTI+Retpoline on Ubuntu versus a completely unpatched system. Here are some of those results...

NVIDIA issued a security bulletin today regarding their GPU drivers and the Spectre speculative side-channel attacks...

While Mesa 18.0 will premiere later this quarter as the first feature update of 2018, Mesa 17.3.2 is now available as the second bug-fix release for last quarter's Mesa 17.3 series...

Razer's concept device being shown off at the Consumer Electronics Show this year is an Android-powered laptop/hybrid device...

While it took LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler initially a long time to supporting OpenMP, the code continues to mature in supporting the latest updates to this parallel programming specification...

Yesterday Intel landed KPTI page table isolation and Retpoline support in their Clear Linux distribution. Given that one of the pillars of this Intel Open-Source Technology Center platform is on delivering optimal Linux performance, I was curious to see how its performance was impacted. Here are before/after benchmarks on seven different systems ranging from low-end Pentium hardware to Xeon servers.

Users of the openSUSE rolling-release Linux distribution will soon find an improved installer thanks to Libstorage-NG landing soon and improvements to YaST...