Phoronix

At the end of June I posted some Vulkan vs. OpenGL Linux Game CPU Core Scaling using RADV/RadeonSI with a Polaris graphics card. At that time I also carried out some NVIDIA CPU core scaling results in a Vulkan vs. OpenGL manner, but simply forgot to post those numbers until now...

Needing to replace a failed hard drive in one of the older benchmarking systems, I decided to try out my first DREVO brand solid-state drive with frankly the I/O performance on this particular system not being too important and being curious how well this sub-$40 SSD performs...

I previously reported on Btrfs RAID 5/6 fixes for Linux 4.12 to work on fixing some potentially bad Btrfs RAID 5/6 problems. These changes for Linux 4.12 were enough to elevate the rating of this functionality...

Will Cooke of Canonical has shared another weekly status update for the work going into the GNOME desktop for Ubuntu 17.10 and their other efforts this cycle...

Endless OS 3.2 is now available as the newest feature release for this GNOME-based Linux operating system that ships on the budget-friendly Endless Computers and is also available for free to all users...

A variety of POWER architecture updates have been submitted for the Linux 4.13 kernel merge window...

When comparing differences between the RADV Vulkan driver and the AMDGPU-PRO still-proprietary Vulkan driver, David Airlie has uncovered a new area to explore for potentially getting closer performance out of the open-source driver...

Emil Velikov of Collabora has reiterated his release plans for Mesa 17.2 in making it the latest quarterly release to this growing 3D graphics stack...

The Free Software Foundation has endorsed fifteen "new" devices under their Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification...

Wine 2.12 is now available as the latest bi-weekly snapshot leading up to the Wine 3.0 release late into the year or early 2018...

The Qt tool-kit has merged support for WebGL streaming...

With having carried out a new Windows 10 install this week for the latest Windows 10 WSL / VirtualBox benchmarking, I used this as a fresh opportunity for some new Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmark figures.

Glibc has added a per-thread cache to malloc and enabled it by default...

Valve developer Andres Rodriguez has updated his patch-set for wiring in support for OpenGL External Objects (EXT_external_objects) into Mesa...

Following the two week survey process, here are the results from our inaugural Linux Laptop Survey. There are 30,171 responses, a lot of data to now sift through while in this article is an overview of the initial findings. There may be some additional follow-up articles in the days/weeks ahead when sifting through more of the data.

OpenSUSE Leap 42.3 has the finish line in sight and it's scheduled to cross that line by the last week of July. Here's a look at the new features...

With Fedora 27 we are likely to see broader support for Flatpaks and more of Fedora's graphical applications distributed in Flatpak form...

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) now has support for the ARMv8-R architecture...

The Device Mapper (DM) updates have been pulled into mainline Git for the Linux 4.13 merge window...

The RADV Vulkan driver now has an option for being able to enable the LLVM SI machine scheduler...

Fedora 26 will be officially released next week!..

NIR expert Connor Abbott who is working for Valve this summer and in particular RADV Vulkan features has published a new patch series today that also confirms another upcoming Feral Linux game using Vulkan...

If the latest change proposal is approved by FESCo, Fedora Workstation 27 will play nicer out-of-the-box with Oracle VM VirtualBox...

Eric Anholt has announced a new driver stack he's begun working on for Broadcom: VC5...

Patches are pending for GStreamer that provide the first public client and server implementation of the RTSP 2.0 protocol, Real Time Streaming Protocol 2.0...

While Fedora was among the first Linux distributions shipping with UEFI support, it's only been supported with 64-bit UEFI as is the vast majority of the systems out there capable of. But there remains a minority of systems with 64-bit CPUs that only support 32-bit UEFI and Fedora 27 is looking to finally support that combination...

If you are looking to get an AMD Zen CPU on a budget, the cheapest Ryzen 5 CPU in the current line-up is the 1400 model, which for $160 USD will get you a quad-core processor plus Hyper Threading and clocks up to 3.4GHz. Here are some benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 5 1400 on Ubuntu 17.04 compared to various other Intel and AMD CPUs over the years.

PHP 7.2.0 Alpha 3 is now available as the latest test release ahead of the official PHP 7.2 debut later in the year. This release offers various fixes and improvements over the earlier alphas...

Consulting firm KDAB has announced their newest research and development project, Hotspot. The Hotspot program is a Qt-powered GUI to the Linux perf subsystem...

Patches are pending to provide OpenGL hardware acceleration support for Wayland's Weston compositor RDP back-end...

The Xen feature updates have been submitted for the Linux 4.13 kernel merge window...

Christoph Hellwig has called on Linus Torvalds to pull a new "dma-mapping" subsystem into the Linux 4.13 kernel...

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) support has been worked on within Linux drivers in the past while now with Linux 4.13 WMI has been reworked into its own proper bus...

Alex Deucher of AMD has submitted some AMDGPU driver fixes to queue up in DRM-Next for the Linux 4.13 merge window...

Olivier Fourdan of Red Hat is proposing a new protocol extension for Wayland, XDG-Output...

Going beyond last week's Intel Core i9 7900X Skylake-X Linux distribution comparison, here are some complementary tests when trying out the latest Windows 10 Insider Build with its Bash/Windows Subsystem for Linux featuring Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Additionally, some comparison results when running Windows 10 with VirtualBox and then an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS guest, all from this i9-7900X high-end desktop.

Tom Stellard of Red Hat (formerly AMD) has released LLVM 4.0.1 as the first bug-fix / point release to the LLVM4 compiler stack...

It looks like the SPARC M8 processor will end up getting released as an Oracle engineer today posted patches implementing support for the M8 with GCC...

Nicolai Hähnle has published his updated massive patch-set for implementing an external NIR back-end in RadeonSI...

David Miller submitted the Linux 4.13 networking subsystem updates, which he describes as a reasonably busy cycle but it might not be as massive as all the changes queued for Linux 4.12...

KDE's Aleix Pol was among the developers participating in last week's Canonical/Ubuntu Snap Sprint in London. Aleix Pol is working on improvements to Discover, the KDE application center / installer, around supporting Snaps...

Arnd Bergmann has sent in his seven pull requests of the many ARM SoC and platform changes targeting the Linux 4.13 kernel...

Takashi Iwai's sound updates is the latest pull request worth mentioning on Phoronix as part of the two-week merge window for Linux 4.13...

A ROCm (Radeon Open Compute) developer at AMD has shared some of their background work on their OpenCL compiler stack, including the LLVM focus, as well as some of their current performance focuses for this open-source compute offering...

The first release candidate for Samba 4.7 is now available for testing...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) has seen a wide assortment of updates for the Linux 4.13 kernel merge window...

The Btrfs file-system updates for the Linux 4.13 kernel have been submitted...

Richard Hughes of Red Hat has announced the release of the fwupd 0.9.5 firmware update utility for the Linux desktop...

RISC-V developers have posted their fourth revision to the kernel patches porting the Linux kernel to this royalty-free CPU instruction set architecture. The developers are hoping this code will be pulled into Linux 4.13, but it's not yet clear if that will happen...

Karol Herbst has added support for GPU temperature readouts for GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell2" GPUs to the open-source, reverse-engineered Nouveau DRM driver...