Phoronix

A premium patron recently asked about testing the open-source Radeon driver performance when testing the forced "high" dynamic power management state rather than the default "auto" mode. Here are some benchmarks...

Thunar 1.8 is now available as the latest stable release of the Xfce desktop's file manager...

For over six years now has been the Intel DRM driver's "Fastboot" support for eliminating unnecessary mode-set operations during the boot process, with an original focus on improving the laptop/ultrabook boot experience. While there have been attempts at getting Fastboot enabled by default, it hasn't happened to date but now a Red Hat developer is hoping to get it turned on for at least some generations of Intel hardware to benefit the work going into improving the Fedora boot experience...

Adding to the growing list of kernel changes for Linux 4.18 are a great deal of sound driver/subsystem updates...

DXVK 0.54 is available today as the latest version of this Direct3D-11-over-Vulkan translation layer to benefit Wine gamers looking to enjoy faster D3D11 gaming performance on Linux...

While 64-bit ARM (AArch64) has been mitigated for months with the mainline Linux kernel against Spectre Variant One and Two, with the upcoming Linux 4.18 kernel is finally Spectre V1/V2 treatment for 32-bit ARM...

When running tests this week on a MacBook Pro for the Dota 2 Vulkan/OpenGL cross-OS performance I also took the opportunity as part of the fun benchmarking week for celebrating the Phoronix 14th birthday by running a broader set of system benchmarks across the latest macOS 10.13 High Sierra, Windows 10 Pro, and various Linux distributions. Here are those CPU/system performance benchmark results.

The FUSE updates have been sent in for allowing file-systems in user-space, what Linus Torvalds previously referred to as being for toys and misguided people...

It's not a CPU-based Vulkan implementation or along those lines, but Intel's newest open-source project allows converting SPIR-V into optimized instructions for running on modern CPUs...

Going back to when TrueOS was known as PC-BSD, the operating system has generally been known as a desktop-friendly version of FreeBSD that currently ships with its own Qt5-powered Lumina Desktop Environment while also having a server installer, etc. The folks working on TrueOS at iXsystems are now planning to take TrueOS into a new direction...

SQLite 3.24.0 was quietly released earlier this week as the newest version of this widely-used embedded database library...

A Phoronix reader has written in with some exciting updates for the open-source Haiku operating system, the project continuing where BeOS left off...

Linux hardware manufacturer Purism is reaffirming their commitment this morning to shipping the Librem 5 smart-phone in January...

The X-Plane cross-platform flight simulator has been depending upon OpenGL for nearly two decades since the program first came into existence, but a port of its rendering engine to use the Vulkan API has been a work-in-progress...

David Airlie, the subsystem maintainer for the Direct Rendering Manager, has submitted the big feature pull request today for the Linux 4.18 kernel. All of the DRM feature work yields a net gain of close to fifty-thousand lines of code for this cycle...

Overnight was the AMD press conference at Computex 2018. Here are the highlights...

HarfBuzz 1.8 was released on Tuesday, the same day as the Unicode 11 release. HarfBuzz is the text shaping library born out of the FreeType project that is now widely used across many applications from Firefox to Inkscape and Java...

The Linux kernel has already been prepping for years for Year 2038 and that work is still ongoing with the in-development Linux 4.18 kernel...

The Etnaviv Gallium3D driver for providing reverse-engineered, open-source 3D graphics driver support for Vivante graphics hardware is currently pursuing NIR intermediate representation support...

Here is a look back at the most popular Linux and open-source achievements and other covered news over the past 14 years...

The mature XFS file-system has seen yet more feature work happen in time for the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window...

Linux kernel developer veteran Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk at Oracle has posted a set of experimental/debug patches for dealing with AMD "Speculative Store Bypass Disable" (SSBD) support for mitigating the Spectre Variant Four vulnerability...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has begun submitting the v4.18 pull requests for the multiple subsystems he maintains within the Linux kernel...

Last week Valve released their long-awaited Vulkan renderer for Dota 2 on macOS by making use of the MoltenVK driver they facilitated its open-sourcing of earlier in the year for bringing Vulkan to macOS/iOS via this wrapper layer to map Vulkan calls to Apple Metal drivers. The initial benchmarks of Vulkan'ized Dota 2 on Mac were quite compelling while for your viewing pleasure today are some additional data points.

Theodore Ts'o at Google submitted the feature updates today for the EXT4 file-system and FSCRYPT file-system encryption framework updates for the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window...

The AMD GPUOpen engineers maintaining the ROCm "Radeon Open Compute" driver stack with OpenCL support have today rolled out the ROCm 1.8.1 point release...

The NVIDIA 390.67 Linux driver is now available as the latest "long-term" series driver release for those sticking to that over the newer but short-term NVIDIA 396 driver series...

Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 has premiered today as the latest quarterly update to our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software. This also happens to be our largest release ever and also commemorates ten years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 and fourteen-years since the start of Phoronix. Here is a look at some of the many enhancements to find in this open-source benchmarking software.

As part of the Phoronix 14th birthday benchmarking this week, I have carried out a fresh comparison to see how the RadeonSI and RADV open-source AMD Linux graphics driver performance has evolved over the past year in Mesa. Tests were done using a Radeon RX 580 and testing every release branch from Mesa 17.2 to the current 18.2-devel.

It was on 5 June 2004 that I founded Phoronix.com for developing a Linux hardware review site while today also marks ten years since the public release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 for what would end up pushing forward open-source, cross-platform benchmarking...

With Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS there is a new server installer that is completely redone compared to the Debian Installer it's been relying upon to this point. But it is missing some basic features for traditional server administrators like RAID, encryption, and LVM partitioning...

The Qt Company has issued its first public beta today of the Qt Creator 4.7 Qt/C++ integrated development environment...

Feral Interactive has just announced that A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA will be launching for Linux this Thursday...

Libinput 1.11 is out today as a significant update to this generic input handling library for Linux systems that is used by both X.Org (in the form of xf86-input-libinput) as well as Wayland systems for their unified input needs. The Libinput 1.11 release offers several new features...

Following weeks of rumors, today at Computex Taipei 2018 Intel officially announced the limited edition Core i7 8086K that commemorates the 40th anniversary of Intel's x86 architecture...

Another one of the hardware support additions for the now in-development Linux 4.18 kernel is finally the mainlining of the Chromebook Tablet Switch Driver...

A new version of the Jailhouse partitioning hypervisor for Linux systems is now available...

A Gentoo user has revised his kernel patch allowing the mainline Linux kernel to be built with the GCC "-march=native" compiler optimizations for targeting the kernel build against your particular CPU...

With today's announcement of macOS 10.14 Mojave, Apple quietly confirmed they are deprecating OpenGL and OpenCL within macOS...

KDE developer Alessandro Longo has penned a response about the KDE "Visual Design Group" with Martin Flöser announcing earlier today he is stepping away as KWin maintainer in part due to his frustrations with the VDG...

Apple today lifted the lid on macOS 10.14 "Mojave", the next installment of their operating system. If you are curious about what's coming to macOS 10.14 either due to being a multi-OS user or curious what the Linux desktop distributions will be going up against later this year, here's the quick overview...

For those making use of Btrfs' incremental send/receive functionality for efficient backups or other reasons for moving data between Btrfs volumes, the directory deletion performance for Btrfs send is now much faster...

The scheduler updates submitted today for the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window include a few notable changes...

Last week I posted benchmarks of a big Linux distribution and Windows 10 / WSL benchmark comparison while in this article for kicking off the Phoronix birthday benchmarking week are results when seeing how the various BSDs are comparing against the Linux distributions and Windows 10 Pro itself. The BSDs for this comparison were TrueOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFlyBSD.

For years Fedora has been demoting 32-bit x86 and there's been efforts to drop 32-bit kernel builds and related efforts while the latest x86 proposal causing some controversy is the "i686 is for x86-64" feature proposal...

As reported a few months ago, the new Chinese x86 CPU venture formed between the government of Shanghai and VIA has been working on Linux support for these new x86 CPUs and that onboarding has continued with Linux 4.18...

Microsoft has publicly announced their acquisition of GitHub and they paid billions more than anticipated...

Based on yesterday's upstream Linux 4.17 kernel release, the FSF-approved GNU Linux-libre 4.17-gnu kernel is now available for a fully free software kernel on capable hardware configurations...

Rafael Wysocki has submitted the ACPI and power management updates already for the newly-opened Linux 4.18 merge window...

For fans of the Linux Mint distribution, their 19 "Tara" release based upon Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is now available in beta form...