Zstd (also known as Zstandard) is a lossless data compression developed by Facebook that has been open-source since last year. This BSD-licensed compression algorithm aims to offer compression similar to zip/gzip but with faster speeds both for compression and decompression. Facebook developers are now looking at adding this support to the Linux kernel...
Debian developers are evaluating whether to continue producing "Debian Live" images or not. Should they go away, there would no longer be a Live DVD/CD/USB environment to try out the operating system short of going through the Debian Installer process...
Following my recent Windows 10 WSL CPU scaling benchmarks to see how well Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux for running native Linux binaries compared to various distributions, I did a comparison of Ubuntu and openSUSE on WSL compared to running these distributions bare metal.
With running a number of new Ryzen Linux tests lately, a number of readers requested I take a fresh look at the reported Ryzen segmentation fault issues / bugs affecting a number of many Linux users. I did and still am able to reproduce the problem...
Nouveau developers continue working to support the GeForce GT 1030 "GP108" graphics processor that unfortunately is lagging behind the other Pascal GPUs in their open-source NVIDIA driver coverage...
Intel developer Jason Ekstrand has posted a set of patches for implementing the Vulkan VK_KHR_external_semaphore extension within the open-source "ANV" driver...
Khronos' glTF 2.0 standard for the "OpenGL transmission format" or a standardized means of exchanging 3D assets continues seeing wide adoption. From Microsoft demonstrating glTF 2.0 support in their products this week at SIGGRAPH to many programs and game engines picking up support for this format, Godot Engine is now the latest...
It's been a while since last having anything to report on the OpenChrome project for providing open-source Linux graphics support for vintage VIA x86 graphics hardware. But it's still going and what is one of the only contributors left on the project has issued an update...
The massive set of AMDGPU "DC" (formerly "DAL") display code has been re-based against their work-in-progress Linux 4.14 DRM code and is residing in amd-staging-drm-next...
Facebook developers have released HHVM 3.21 as their alternate PHP implementation that also powers their Hack programming language. HHVM 3.21 is a long-term support release that will make it maintained for nearly one year...
At the end of July AMD began shipping the Ryzen 3 entry-level Zen processors. While it may not be as exciting as a 16-thread Ryzen 7 or Threadripper, the Ryzen 3 1200 and Ryzen 3 1300X offer surprising value with being quad-core parts priced at just above $100 USD. With Linux users especially craving multi-core systems if running Arch or other distributions where you are frequently compiling your own packages, the Ryzen 3 CPUs can make for a low-cost but practical Linux system. Here are my initial benchmarks of these first two Ryzen 3 processors.
DragonFlyBSD 4.8.1 has been released by Justin Sherrill with various minor updates -- particularly for Intel DRM graphics and other kernel improvements -- over the recent v4.8 milestone...
There has been some mixed messages by Ubuntu developers in recent weeks about the default GNOME Shell session planned for Ubuntu 17.10 and whether Wayland would be used. The latest is that Wayland-by-default is still on...
It's been an interesting week for Linux storage with Red Hat deprecating Btrfs and Stratis being their next-gen Linux storage bet. Independent of that is now the announcement of NOVA, a new Linux file-system coming out of university research into file-systems for persistent memory...
Intel's Jordan Justen has added to Mesa's features.txt the current Vulkan extensions as well as indicating the current state of each Mesa Vulkan driver regarding their support...
A very special milestone is being celebrated today for our open-source, Linux-driven benchmarking efforts... Earlier today, OpenBenchmarking.org crossed the milestone of having served more than 25 million test profile and test suite downloads by the Phoronix Test Suite!..
In the past few days I have posted benchmarks showing how AMD's latest open-source Radeon Linux driver code is faster than their hybrid/proprietary driver for OpenGL and perhaps most excitingly is finally how AMD Radeon GPUs are beginning to really compete with NVIDIA GPUs on Linux and in some cases performing better against the GeForce competition than they do under Windows. This comes after years of work on their open-source driver stack and especially a lot of work done over the past year not only by AMD but also Valve and other open-source contributors to Mesa, their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, their AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end continues to be refined for compute and graphics, and the AMDGPU kernel driver. So here are the latest Windows vs. Linux gaming benchmarks on the Radeon side to see where things stand now with this latest code.
Yesterday at Phoronix we were the first to broadcast about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 deprecating Btrfs and since then it's become more clear what their "next-gen" Linux storage focus has become...
Last week was KDE's annual Akademy conference where developers and enthusiasts came together to recap the past year of KDE software development as well as some of what's ahead...
Following last week's Linux/BSD CPU core scaling tests when seeing how different operating systems competed with going between one and twenty threads with the Intel Core i9 7900X, my latest benchmarking target of curiosity was seeing how Windows 10 with its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) would compare on this system against the other Linux distributions.
While there is no big Vulkan update this week for SIGGRAPH17, The Khronos Group has gone ahead and issued Vulkan 1.0.57. Besides fixes, there are some new extensions...
While Mesa Git is looking very good for RadeonSI performance, AMD developer Marek Olšák continues working on more micro-optimizations to this Gallium3D driver...
Independent commentator Artem S. Tashkinov is back at it again with his latest thoughts on GNU/Linux and its problems in a post entitled "Why Linux/GNU might never succeed on a large scale"...
AMD Ryzen continued to be a very popular area of interest by Phoronix readers as did our Linux vs. Windows benchmarks, among other hardware tests in July. Last month on Phoronix your's truly authored 23 featured articles/reviews and 290 news articles...
With the Radeon RX Vega 56 and Vega 64 shipping in two weeks, here are some benchmarks of the latest Radeon and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers with an assortment of modern GPUs. With these latest Linux GPU results are also the current performance-per-Watt and thermal metrics as recorded automatically via the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. This Radeon vs. NVIDIA Linux comparison should be particularly interesting given the very good Mesa Git performance results posted yesterday that show RadeonSI performing well beyond the AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL levels.
While covered in our OpenGL 4.6 overview from when the embargo expired this morning on this updated graphics API, the Mesa feature list has been updated to reflect the state of OpenGL 4.6 support...
One month after the Phoronix Test Suite 7.2.1 release, the first development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 7.4-Tynset is now available for cross-platform, open-source benchmarking evaluation...