Phoronix

The embargo has expired now for talking about Threadripper 2 performance figures... First up are our initial Threadripper 2950X Linux benchmarks. In this article are the most interesting metrics for this 16-core / 32-thread processor while in the just-published AMD Threadripper 2990WX Linux Benchmarks are a lot more figures complemented by the 2950X and other CPUs plus power consumption numbers, etc. This article is most useful if specifically focused on the performance of the Threadripper 2950X that comes in at $899 USD.

It's a busy week folks as besides the AMD Threadripper 2 performance embargo expiring, it is also SIGGRAPH 2018 week in Vancouver and as well the start of the Linux 4.19 kernel cycle... No longer under wraps are the Khronos announcements from this annual graphics conference. Continue reading to learn about the latest happenings for the various Khronos industry-standard APIs and efforts like Vulkan and OpenCL-Next.

The Wine project once again participated in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for furthering their open-source agenda of better support for Windows programs on Linux and other operating systems...

The IBM System/390 "s390" architecture code has seen a number of improvements for Linux 4.19...

As expected, the CPU temperature monitoring support within the "k10temp" hwmon driver has seen the patches sent in today to be updated for the AMD Threadripper 2900 series CPU support. These patches are going into the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window but slated to be back-ported to the currently supported stable kernel series...

Hot off the release of the upstream Linux 4.18 kernel, the GNU folks have released GNU Linux-libre 4.18-gnu that is their deblobbed version that strips out any "non-free" device driver support, removes the ability to load binary-only kernel modules and not being able to load firmware blobs either...

It's SIGGRAPH week and AMD has used this annual graphics conference to announce the Radeon Pro WX 8200, which they are saying is able to offer the best workstation graphics card performance in the sub-$1,000 USD category...

Following the one week setback, the Linux 4.18 kernel is now officially available just a little more than two months since the cycle officially began...

If you have been less than satisfied with the user-interface of the Pitivi non-linear open-source video editor for Linux, you may want to try out their next release...

Hardware support improvements coming for Linux 4.19 aren't limited to the x86 space but a lot of new ARM hardware support is also being introduced in this imminent kernel cycle...

Just over one month away is XDC2018 as the annual X.Org Developers' Conference where a variety of X.Org, Wayland, Mesa, Vulkan, and OpenGL talks will take place. This year's schedule is particularly packed and full of interesting information...

The Linux 4.19 kernel updates for the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) should bring much faster performance for multi-threaded sequential reads -- as much as multiple times faster...

With KDE Plasma 5 right now it turns out that if you have relied upon CPU-based software rendering, when hitting Plasma's lock-screen it would actually go CPU-wild -- as far as maxing out the CPU to 100% utilization, thereby consuming a lot of power and generating excess heat. That will be fixed for KDE Plasma 5.14.0...

For those weekend Linux gamers, DXVK 0.65 is available today as the newest feature update to this library for running Direct3D 11 games under Wine via Vulkan...

Back in Linux 4.16 the SoundWire subsystem was added to the staging area as the MIPI standard for a low-power, two-wire sound bus that can support multiple audio streams and primarily utilized by small audio peripherals like IoT and mobile devices. With the next Linux kernel cycle, the SoundWire support is being improved upon...

Patches have been revised for the Linux kernel to support the initial Hygon Dhyana server CPUs that are the licensed AMD Family 17h "Zen" technology, basically the EPYC server CPUs for the Chinese market...

The latest monthly update to the KDE Frameworks is now available that complement the offerings of the Qt5 tool-kit...

While a bit late, Freedreno lead developer Rob Clark is hoping to see the Qualcomm Adreno 600 series bring-up happen for the Linux 4.19 kernel cycle...

Flatpak now has access to an updated FreeDesktop SDK runtime that is built on their new BuildStream build system rather than Yocto and has other improvements...

Derek Foreman of Samsung's Open-Source Group put out the release candidates on Friday for the upcoming Wayland 1.16 release as well as the Weston 5.0 reference compositor...

While Mesa 18.2 is baking for release later this month, Mesa 18.1 remains the currently supported stable series. Final release preparations are underway for Mesa 18.1.6 as the latest bi-weekly point release...

Canonical developers continue working on advancing the Mir display server's support for Wayland...

While the Microsoft Xbox One S Controller has been supported under Linux for a while now, its rumble mode has not been supported by the mainline Linux kernel. That's now in the process of changing with the upstreaming of up until now out-of-tree patches...

Out today is a new version of IWD, the Intel-developed wireless daemon for Linux systems. IWD v0.6 is the latest version which is actually a quick follow-up release to address bugs from IWD v0.5 issued this morning...

The latest Linux kernel patch is for supporting ECC error detection via the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) code with AMD's Great Horned Owl...

The Rust programming language's "GFX-RS" initiative that is backed by Mozilla continues working on exposing a universal "Vulkan-like" graphics API within Rust that in turn would have back-ends for Vulkan, OpenGL, Metal, and Direct3D 11/12 in order to reach all major platforms. Early benchmark results are quite promising for GFX-RS...

It's been a while since having any advancements to report on the live kernel patching front for being able to deploy primarily Linux kernel security fixes without having to reboot the system. There is some new progress on that front to report on now and that is the 64-bit ARM (ARM64/AArch64) support getting squared away...

If you have held off on switching over to NVMe solid-state storage due to the associated costs, times are certainly changing. This week Intel introduced their 660p SSD series that yields 512GB of NVMe storage for $99 USD or 1TB for $200 USD.

At the end of July I outlined some of the changes queued for Linux 4.19 while since then several more notable additions have become aligned for this next kernel cycle following the one week delay of Linux 4.18...

Unigine, the beautiful and Linux-friendly engine for games as well as VR and industrial training/simulation applications, has outed their latest engine update...

The Solus Project has shared some of the work they've been engaged in this summer with their Linux distribution as well as their GTK3-based Budgie Desktop Environment...

Sam Lantinga of Valve has contributed better support for some popular game controllers to the SDL2 library...

Windows Subsystem for Linux, a.k.a. WSL or "Bash for Windows", has been an interesting creature out of Microsoft for running Linux binaries on Windows 10 and more recently Windows Server. In our benchmarks WSL has generally been quite performant but the area where it struggles is I/O / storage performance...

If you have already pre-ordered your AMD Threadripper 2990WX processor or just planning to be an early customer of that high-end desktop processor or the Threadripper 2950X, you may be wondering about Linux requirements from these new high-end AMD CPU offerings. Here's the gist of the Linux support state of AMD Zen+ CPUs for those wanting to get ready for Threadripper 2...

When it came to settling on the latest-generation Dell XPS 13 as my main production workhorse with Fedora Workstation 28, besides the laptop's own traits like its build quality, specs relative to price, and other factors, another important requirement was the ability to drive two 4K displays when at my desk. The Dell XPS 13 has no issue driving dual 4K screens via the Dell Thunderbolt TB16 dock.

One of the interesting GNU projects that doesn't receive as much attention as others is GNU Ring that is a decentralized communication platform vying to be like Skype and WhatsApp but for open-source and privacy-minded users. The related Ring-KDE project put out their version 3.0 release that is a significant rewrite to this KDE/Qt interface to Ring...

The latest high profile open-source project bitten by some fresh CVE security vulnerabilities is the PostgreSQL database server...

Julia, the LLVM-based, speed-focused, dynamic and optional typing, full-featured programming language focused on numerical computing has reached the version 1.0 milestone...

DXVK has been doing great with its Direct3D 11 support mapped to Vulkan and running a variety of games at performant speeds under Wine while now patches have emerged that would add Direct3D 9 support too...

Marek Olšák has continued his busy work on the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver by implementing more extensions and adjusting various limits/constants to match the behavior of their proprietary driver...

While DXVK is capable of running a great deal of Direct3D 11 games via Vulkan within Wine, a number of games have required various workarounds for either getting the game to properly work in the first place or to run efficiently. Those per-game settings are now being punted off into a per-game configuration system...

OpenSUSE's Kubic project that has been home to their container-related technologies as well as the atomicly-updated openSUSE "MicroOS" will be making some changes...

Shortly after writing about the Sound Blaster Recon3D finally getting Linux support yesterday, a Phoronix reader pointed out another frustrating Linux sound problem with a resolution on its way to the mainline Linux kernel...

It's not nearly as far along as DXVK that is allowing D3D11-over-Vulkan and already running great numbers of games in a performant manner under Wine, but the VK9 project for implementing Direct3D 9 over Vulkan has now hit its twenty-seventh milestone...

One week after branching Mesa 18.2 and issuing the first release candidate, the second weekly RC is now available for testing...

It looks like Valve could be prepping to finally ship a 64-bit Steam client, possibly coinciding with their long talked about Steam UI/UX overhaul...

The GNOME Software center for installing and updating of programs will begin automatically installing updates with the upcoming GNOME 3.30 release albeit limited to sandboxed Flatpak programs...

Creative Labs launched the Recon3D sound card the better part of a decade ago and finally patches have emerged providing for better Linux driver support...

The x86 platform drivers area of the Linux kernel is ready for the 4.19 kernel cycle to get underway next week...

AMD has released their Radeon Pro 18.Q3 enterprise driver update, including for supported Linux distributions, as their QA-tested professional-grade driver update for the quarter...