Phoronix

In addition to looking at system boot times from Linux 4.6 to Linux 4.15, while doing this kernel testing session on the Lenovo ThinkPad I also took some battery power consumption measurements...

If you are looking out for a SATA 2.5-inch HDD/SSD to USB3 adapter, the Sabrent EC-SS31 is quite simple, works with Linux, supports USB 3.1, and retails for about $10 USD...

Phoronix Test Suite 7.6 Milestone 3 is now available as the last planned development release ahead of the stable debut of 7.6.0-Alvdal...

If you are using the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver and anxious to try out the Linux 4.15 kernel for its many new features/improvements, unfortunately you will need to wait a few days as the current public driver is broken against this latest code...

Marek Olšák's latest project has been adding support for multi-context applications to the Gallium3D Heads-Up Display (HUD)...

Last week we presented our initial benchmarks of the Intel Optane SSD 900P on Linux and it offers mighty performance potential for those using I/O heavy workloads thanks to the use of 3D XPoint memory. But is a solid-state drive like this really worth the price if you are just a Linux gamer? Here are some tests comparing load times and boot times between a HDD, SATA 3.0 SSD, NVMe SSD, and this 3D XPoint NVMe U.2 SSD.

It's been a while since last doing any Linux boot speed comparisons while this morning I have some numbers to share when looking at the boot performance from the Linux 4.6 kernel through Linux 4.15 Git to see how it's changed over time,..

After apologizing how they handled the EGLStreams proposal for NVIDIA Wayland support, James Jones of NVIDIA is trying to get the development of their proposed generic device memory allocator library back on track...

Here are some early AMD Radeon Linux gaming benchmarks using the in-development Linux 4.15 kernel. Unfortunately, there are a few performance regressions...

Intel continues bringing up support for the 2019 Icelake processors within the open-source compiler toolchains...

Just days after David Airlie landed R600g image shader support and other patches for this Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series open-source driver, he's enabled support for another GL4 extension...

As some additional work past the KVM changes for Linux 4.15 submitted last week, a few more feature items have been queued...

Of the many changes coming for Linux 4.15, as detailed this weekend Radeon GPU and AMD CPU customers have a lot to be thankful for with this new kernel update currently in development. Here are some initial benchmarks of the Linux 4.15 development kernel using an AMD EPYC 7601 32-core / 64-thread setup...

Here's our latest Linux distribution comparison with this time looking at the out-of-the-box performance of six Linux distributions while running a range of enterprise/workstation-focused benchmarks while using two systems. One system is a high-end Core i9 7980XE desktop system and the other a Tyan 1U Xeon Scalable server with dual Xeon Gold 6138 processors.

The Mesa 17.3 release game is in overtime but it should be wrapping up in the days ahead...

If you have been wanting to build a new system before the end of the year, AMD Ryzen CPU prices -- including the high-end Threadripper -- have been dropping in recent days in at least the US and EU...

Feature development on the GCC 8 compiler is over with it now entering stage three of its development process...

A new release is available of the Lightweight Java Game Library 3 (LWJGL) that is popular among game developers using the Java programming language...

There was the release candidate back for Halloween while now officially available is SuperTuxKart 0.9.3, the latest installment of the Tux-themed racing game...

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has put out their quarterly Linux graphics driver stack upgrade in what they are calling the latest recipe...

Today the Phoronix Test Suite's OpenBenchmarking.org crossed its 27,000,000th test profile / test suite download!..

Intel Ironlake "Gen 5" graphics have been around for seven years now since being found in Clarkdale and Arrandale processors while finally now the patches are all worked out for enabling RC6 power-savings support under Linux...

We are now through week one of two for the merge window of the Linux 4.15 kernel...

This year at the FOSDEM open-source/Linux event in Brussels there wasn't the usual "X.Org dev room" as it's long been referred to, but for 2018, Luc Verhaegen is stepping back up to the plate and organizing this mini graphics/X.Org developer event within FOSDEM...

The Linux kernel is still working to rectify the Year 2038 problem whereby the time values stored as signed 32-bit integers will wrap around...

The Tritium is a new ARM single board computer from the Libre Computer Board project...

Initial support for Intel's Icelake microarchitecture that's a follow-on to Cannonlake has been added to the LLVM/Clang compiler stack...

Linux 4.15 is shaping up to be a massive kernel release and we are just half-way through its merge window period. But for AMD Linux users especially, the 4.15 kernel release is going to be rocking...

Intel is planning to end "legacy BIOS" support in their new platforms by 2020 in requiring UEFI Class 3 or higher...

The platform-drivers-x86 updates have been sent in for Linux 4.15 and include a range of improvements for Intel hardware support. One of the bigger items is support for Skylake CPUs with Turbo Boost Max 3.0...

GNU Nano 2.9 is now available as the latest feature release of this popular CLI text editor and it's bringing several new capabilities...

Our latest Linux file-system benchmarking is looking at the performance of the mainline Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS file-systems on the Linux 4.14 kernel compared to 4.13 and 4.12.

It's been one year and a few days when last researching a status update on "Project Darling" for running macOS/OSX applications on Linux. While the project hasn't been generating too much buzz this year, it still is being developed...

With our review this week of the Intel Optane SSD 900P 280GB U.2 SSD there was a discussion in the forums about using U.2 SSDs in desktop systems, etc. If your system doesn't have a U.2 slot, an adapter like the Funtin SFF-8639 makes it easy to pop the SSD into a PCI-E x4 slot...

There are a ton of exciting improvements building up in Linux 4.15, but not too much on the virtualization front...

HHVM 3.23 has been released as their high performance virtual machine for powering their Hack programming language and current PHP support...

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver that provides reverse-engineered OpenGL support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics processors is able to handle quite a bit of OpenGL 4...

We are just through week one of two for the Linux 4.15 merge window followed by eight or so weeks after that before this next kernel is officially released. But Intel's open-source driver developers have already begun building up a growing stack of changes for Linux 4.16 when it comes to their DRM graphics driver...

Linus Torvalds has accepted the AMDGPU DC display code pull request for the Linux 4.15 kernel. AMD Linux users can now rejoice!..

It's an exciting day for open-source Radeon Linux users today as besides the AMDGPU DC pull request (albeit still unmerged as of writing), Radeon VCN encoding support has landed in Mesa Git...

Intel's Maarten Lankhorst has sent out what could be the final patches for enabling "fastboot" support by default within their DRM graphics driver...

A change recently in the Linux kernel led the CPU MHz reported value via /proc/cpuinfo to either be the nominal CPU frequency or the most recently requested frequency. This behavior changed compared to pre-4.13 kernels while now it's been fixed up to report the current CPU frequency...

Earlier this week I presented out initial Linux benchmarks of the Intel Optane 900P SSD with this 3D XPoint memory U.2 solid-state drive delivering incredible performance figures. Those tests were done with EXT4 while in this article are more tests with other mainline Linux file-systems and also testing some of the different mount options.

The developers behind the Pale Moon web-browser that's been a long standing fork of Firefox have rolled out their first public beta release of their new "Basilisk" browser technology...

The beta of KDE Applications 17.12 is now available ahead of next month's official debut for this quarterly update to the collection of official KDE programs...

In our benchmarks of Windows Subsystem for Linux that allows a Linux environment to run atop Windows 10 via this new WSL kernel subsystem, the performance overall has overall been very good and often performing better than virtualized options. But the main area of poor performance is I/O, except now it's being worked on by Microsoft for greater improvements...

One day after submitting the main DRM feature pull request for Linux 4.15, David Airlie of Red Hat has submitted the secondary pull request that would feature the long-awaited introduction of AMDGPU DC into the mainline kernel...

While Intel Coffee Lake hardware is shipping already, a few bits of tardy kernel code for these "8th Gen Core" CPUs is only hitting the Linux 4.15 kernel. The Intel DRM driver is most notably enabling Coffee Lake graphics by default in 4.15, but there's also some thermal code now landing among other changes now happening...

Frequent Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver contributor Karol Herbst has posted his latest patch series in working towards GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell 2" graphics processor re-clocking...

As a follow-up to OpenGL 4.2 Support Could Soon Land For AMD Cayman GPUs On R600g, the patches have landed in Mesa 17.4-dev Git! Plus other R600g patches are on the mailing list for review...