With the hype this week around Firefox Quantum Beta with its user-interface refinements and more noticeably the performance improvements, I decided to run some benchmarks on my end with a variety of tests comparing Firefox 52 ESR, Firefox 56 stable, Firefox 57 Quantum beta, and Chrome 60. Here are those web browser benchmark results from the Linux x86-64 desktop.
System76 is today announcing the beta release of their Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS Linux operating system.
We are just hitting the end of Q3, but already this calendar year Microsoft has continued their trend of the past few years of engaging with open-source and Linux in different aspects.
Earlier this week we published our launch-day benchmarks of the Core i9 7960X and Core i9 7980XE. Those Linux benchmarks were done with Ubuntu, but for those wondering what the maximum performance looks like for these high-end desktop processors, here are some comparison results with Intel's own Clear Linux distribution.
Landing in Mesa 17.3-dev Git yesterday is initial support for the Meson build system! Initially, this Meson build support just works for the Intel ANV and Radeon RADV Vulkan drivers.
The final Firefox 56.0 binaries have hit the mirrors ahead of its official announcement to come. Firefox 56.0 brings more improvements while Firefox 57 "Quantum" will be a huge update.
Knoppix 8.1 is now available although no release announcement has yet to hit the wire. As it's been some years since last trying out Knoppix, I decided to fire up this new release.
It's been known another USB spec update was being worked on as "USB 3.2" while a few days ago this specification update was made official.
Ubuntu will no longer be producing a desktop i386 ISO beginning with the soon-to-be-released Ubuntu 17.10.
Apple this week released macOS 10.13 "High Sierra" as the latest version of its operating system. Of course, curiosity got the best of me so here are benchmarks of macOS 10.12.6, macOS 10.13, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 17.10 from a MacBook Air to see how the performance compares.
A new feature being considered for Fedora 28 is Annobin as a new GCC plugin that would implant extra information into generated binaries.
Following my Linux benchmarks of the newly-launched Core i9 7960X and Core i9 7980XE processors, here are benchmarks of the 18 core / 36 thread Extreme Edition processor when running on Linux 4.14.
Less than two months after hitting 25 million benchmark test/suite downloads, OpenBenchmarking.org has crossed the threshold this morning of 26,000,000 downloads!
More than three years after the initial release of KDE Plasma 5 for Linux, the support on FreeBSD is getting into shape.
Not only is AMDGPU DC finally aligning for Linux 4.15, but the RISC-V Linux kernel port might also be merged for this next kernel cycle.
Peter Hutterer of Red Hat has announced the first release candidate of libinput 1.9, the input handling library now widely used by both Wayland and X11 Linux systems.
AMD is currently looking to hire more LLVM compiler engineers to work on their ROCm open-source compute stack.
Christmas looks like it may be coming early this year for Radeon Linux users... The AMDGPU DC pull request is finally out!
HHVM 3.22 is now available as this alternative PHP implementation and what serves as the basis for Facebook's Hack programming language.
This shouldn't come as a big surprise given Microsoft's Linux/open-source moves in the past couple of years, including joining the Linux Foundation and more, but their latest sponsorship comes down to joining the Open Source Initiative.
The Spring cross-platform open-source real-time strategy game engine is out with its first major release in more than one year.
Alex Deucher has submitted the initial AMD Direct Rendering Manager updates for pulling into DRM-Next that in turn will hit the Linux 4.15 kernel.
For squeezing maximum performance out of Linux systems with source-based workloads, most of you know there can often be tweaks to be had to the compiler stack for greater performance. As well with the never-ending advancements to the leading open-source code compilers, between releases can be measurable performance benefits but sometimes not without regressions too. With AMD's EPYC line-up still being very fresh and the underlying Zen microarchitecture (or "znver1" as referred to by the compiler toolchains), here are a variety of benchmarks under recent releases of the GCC and LLVM Clang compilers.
It's been one year since last testing BCache as a means in the Linux kernel's block layer to allow an SSD to serve as a cache for a larger but slower rotational hard drive. So I have carried out some fresh benchmarks using the Linux 4.14 Git kernel to provide not only fresh benchmarks of BCache but also MDADM SSD RAID on Linux and some other fresh SSD/HDD benchmarks.
It hasn't been this exciting watching the Mir Bazaar repository since Mir was first announced.
I'm currently running some macOS 10.13 vs. Linux benchmarks for publishing within the next day or two on Phoronix. But so far in my macOS 10.12 Sierra vs. macOS 10.13 High Sierra benchmarks, what has stood out the most is the file-system performance due to HFS+ file-systems automatically being converted to the Apple File-System (APFS).
NVIDIA has kicked off their GTC world tour and in beginning that, they have launched the CUDA 9.0 toolkit.
It looks like the upstream Linux 4.14 kernel may end up playing nicely with the ROCm OpenCL compute stack, if you are on a Kaveri or Carrizo system.
Dell is now the latest company joining The Khronos Group as a contributing member.
The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system is finally gearing up for its long-awaited beta milestone.
Mesa 17.1.10 just hit the wire and is the last planned update for the Mesa 17.1 series.
While Google Summer of Code ended one month ago, Jacob Lifshay has continued working on his "Vulkan-CPU" project now known as Kazan. He's certainly making progress on this CPU-based Vulkan implementation.
While not particularly relevant to Linux gamers at this point in time, AMD is dropping their CrossFire branding in favor of just calling it their mGPU technology.
With FreeType 2.8.1 having been released last week, a lot of new code landed in the early hours of today to its Git repository.
Besides the embargo expiring this morning on the Intel Core i9 7960X, the Core i9 7980XE Extreme Edition processor is also now fair game. Here is our look at the Linux performance for this 18 core / 36 thread processor within a single 165 Watt package.
While Intel previously announced the expanded Intel Core X-Series line-up including the Core i9 7960X and Core i9 7980XE processors, only today is the performance embargo expiring as these CPUs begin to ship to further battle AMD's Ryzen Threadripper line-up. Here is today's launch-day Linux benchmarks of the Core i9 7960X.
OpenSSH 7.6 will be hitting the streets soon.
The annual X.Org Developers' Conference wrapped up on Friday as the meeting of key contributors to components including the xorg-server, Wayland, Mesa, and other crucial components of the Linux desktop stack.
Intel has rushed up the announcement of their 8th Gen Intel Core desktop processors following a recent leak. We can now confirm that these new Intel CPUs are en route to retailers, they have already arrived for testing, and will be benchmarked under Linux on Phoronix once that secondary embargo expires.
Linus Torvalds has announced the release of the second weekly test candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.14 kernel.
Martin Flöser (nee Gräßlin) has announced the "XFree KWin" project. This isn't to be confused with XFree86 but rather is about ridding KWin optionally of X11/X.Org dependencies.
Earlier this year ASUS announced the Tinker Board as their first step into the ARM single board computer world. Earlier this month I finally received a Tinker Board for testing and it has been quite interesting to say the least. The Tinker Board with its Rockchip SoC has been among the most competitive ARM SBCs we have tested to date in its price range and the form factor is compatible with the Raspberry Pi.
DragonFlyBSD today picked up direct input support within the kernel's polling code. This can boost the networking performance though for now is just supported by the IX4 driver, what is used as the Intel 10Gb Ethernet driver.
A Norwegian developer has developed a new Qt platform abstraction plug-in to let Qt applications make use of GTK+ for windowing system integration. The Qt apps rely upon GTK+ as a host toolkit to provide GTK menus, GTK for input, and other integration bits.
While I usually look at the Linux kernel code size following each merge window, I am a few days late this time around due to busy Xeon/EPYC benchmarking and XDC2017. Anyhow, Linux 4.14 is showing some weight gains but nothing too bad.
Wrapping up our XDC2017 coverage for this annual X.Org developer event that took place this past week in Mountain View, Zhenyu Wang of Intel presented on their ongoing work for mediated GPU virtualization pass-through support on Linux, Intel GVT.