Todd Weaver of Purism has provided an update on the planned Librem 5 smartphone hardware components and that with a development board they do have Debian booting...
I've just wrapped up trying out nine different Linux distributions on AMD's EPYC in the form of the EPYC 7601 housed in the TYAN Transport SX TN70A-B8026. Like our initial testing with Ubuntu on EPYC, the other modern Linux distributions all played nicely with AMD's re-entry into the server market with their Zen-based offerings. But as with any new CPU platform, the out-of-the-box performance can vary greatly depending upon the Linux operating system being used. Here are benchmarks including Fedora, Ubuntu, CentOS, openSUSE, Debian, Clear Linux and Antergos.
For those wanting to see some fresh Linux CPU benchmarks with various AMD Ryzen and Intel Core processors, here are some benchmarks with Ubuntu 17.10 paired with its Linux 4.13 kernel build...
LEDE 17.01.3 is the newest release of the Linux Embedded Development Environment that is derived from OpenWRT and intended as a complete firmware replacement for various routers and other devices...
With the upcoming release of Ubuntu 17.10, I was curious to see how its performance compares to that of the three-year-old Ubuntu 14.10. Here are some benchmark results showing how an Intel ultrabook/laptop performance has evolved on Linux during that time.
Numba is designed to allow for high performance Python JIT-compiled code designing for C/C++ levels of performance while using LLVM for optimizations and allowing GPU offloading too. NVIDIA is promoting Numba in the context of CUDA...
It's not yet merged to mainline Mesa, but Eric Anholt of Broadcom has spent the past week wiring up more of the OpenGL functionality for the in-development VC5 driver stack for the next-generation Broadcom graphics hardware...
Last winter we covered work being done out of the Imperial College in London on the wild results when fuzzing OpenGL shaders in uncovering issues in multiple OpenGL drivers, including the Mesa drivers. The scholarly results were recently published of this testing within Automated Testing of Graphics Shader Compilers...
As mentioned last week, the S3TC patent has now expired. With the S3 Texture Compression no longer encumbered by a patent, support for it is being added to mainline Mesa...
While some bogus Linux market-share reports put the Linux desktop usage at over 6% for the month prior, the Valve-reported Steam Linux numbers decreased month over month...
During September on Phoronix, yours truly wrote 280 original news articles and 30 featured articles/reviews. There was a lot of exciting happenings last month but October and more broadly Q4 is looking to be even more exciting with a lot on the horizon...
With Ubuntu 17.10 discontinuing the 32-bit desktop ISOs, here is the last time it makes sense comparing the Ubuntu 32-bit (i686) versus x86_64 performance.
By the end of the calendar year Intel has reiterated the first 10nm Cannonlake devices are expected to market. It's looking like among the first Cannonlake designs will be a new Google Chromebook...
We've known a new DragonFlyBSD release was being worked on for release soon. That release has now been branched, the first release candidate tagged, and it's being marked as version 5.0...
For those not comfortable riding Mesa Git, Mesa 17.2.2 is set to be released early next week as the newest stable update for the open-source 3D graphics driver stack...
For fans of the Outlast first-person survival horror game that was released in 2013 and brought to Linux in 2015, you may get better performance now if using the Mesa drivers thanks to the OpenGL threading being flipped on...
Ending out September is the very exciting news that AMDGPU DC display code will likely land in Linux 4.15. Out of this excitement of finally seeing a mainline Linux kernel with modern Radeon GPUs supporting HDMI/DP audio, atomic mode-setting, and more. I decided to see how well this "drm-next-4.15-dc" code is working out for Radeon RX Vega graphics cards, where attached monitors can finally be driven by this DC code rather than having to rely upon AMDGPU-PRO or other kernel branches. So for ending out this exciting month, here are some fresh benchmarks of the RX Vega 56 / RX Vega 64 and other Radeon GPUs using this kernel paired with Mesa 17.3-dev Git built against LLVM 6.0 SVN compared to various NVIDIA Pascal graphics cards.
As part of our ongoing AMD EPYC Linux benchmarking, I've been working this week on a cross-distribution GNU/Linux comparison followed by some BSD testing... Of course, I couldn't help but to see if Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux distribution would run on the AMD EPYC server...
Linux right now offers a "Long Term Support" release where support for the kernel branch is maintained for two years, which is nice compared to kernel releases usually dropping maintenance around N+1.1 after the release. But moving forward, Linux LTS releases will now be maintained for six years...
Google's Chrome has offered virtual reality support for a while and most recently will even let you browse the web in VR while the Linux support has lagged behind...
While NVIDIA's Vulkan Linux driver performance has already been very good, it's potentially even better now with the newest NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver...