With DragonFlyBSD 5.4 having been recently released, development is back onto full-swing in Git master. DragonFlyBSD/HAMMER2 lead developer Matthew Dillon has been landing HAMMER2 file-system improvements that he hopes to back-port to stable in the coming weeks.
The GNU Debugger (GDB) now has support for OpenRISC Linux debugging.
The Khronos Group is looking for feedback on its KTX2 specification that is used for storing textures for OpenGL (including GLES) and Vulkan while being a simple format and an extension of the original KTX with improvements for Vulkan and other graphics APIs.
With FreeBSD 12.0 running great on the Dell PowerEdge R7425 server with dual AMD EPYC 7601 processors, I couldn't resist using the twenty Samsung SSDs in that 2U server for running some fresh FreeBSD ZFS RAID benchmarks as well as some reference figures from Ubuntu Linux with the native Btrfs RAID capabilities and then using EXT4 atop MD-RAID.
Fedora developers are working on trying to figure out the best default behavior moving forward for their I/O scheduler selection.
The 64-bit ARM architecture code (a.k.a ARM64 / AArch64) with the Linux 4.21 kernel is seeing pointer authentication added as a new security feature.
With the end of the year quickly approaching, it's time for our annual look at how the Linux performance has evolved over the past year from graphics drivers to distributions. This year was a particularly volatile year for Linux performance due to Spectre and Meltdown mitigations, some of which have at least partially recovered thanks to continued optimizations landing in subsequent kernel releases. But on the plus side, new releases of Python, PHP, GCC 8, and other new software releases have helped out the performance. For kicking off our year-end benchmark comparisons, first up is a look at how Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution evolved this year.
Initially during the Linux 4.20 kernel merge window with the STIBP addition for cross-hyperthread Spectre V2 mitigation it was turned on by default for all processes. But that turned out to have a sizable performance hit so the behavior was changed to only turn it on for processes under SECCOMP or when requested via the PRCTL interface. However, AMD is landing a patch that for select CPUs will have an always-on mode as evidently that's preferred for some AMD processors.
A new framework queued for introduction with the Linux 4.21 kernel is the ARM-developed Energy Model Management Framework.
The Radeon Software for Linux 18.50 driver release (a.k.a. "AMDGPU-PRO" 18.50) is now officially available
Released just one week after Qt 5.12 LTS, The Qt Company on Thursday published Qt 3D Studio 2.2 as the newest version of this development environment for designing 3D user interfaces and adding 3D content to Qt5 programs.
After being announced last week, Valve's Steam Link application for the Raspberry Pi is now officially available.
In addition to AMD's year-end Radeon driver updates issued today, their GPUOpen crew has also carried out some new open-source software releases.
AMD today released their Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition geared for Windows gamers while Linux users should have AMDGPU-PRO 18.50 available shortly for those wanting to use this hybrid Vulkan/OpenGL driver component that does also feature the AMDGPU-Open components too in their stable but dated composition.
Following the GeForce RTX 2080 Linux gaming benchmarks last week with now having that non-Ti variant, I carried out some fresh GPU compute benchmarks of the higher-end NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards. Here's a look at the OpenCL performance between the competing vendors plus some fresh CUDA benchmarks as well as NVIDIA GPU Cloud TensorFlow Docker benchmarks.
The KDE community is out with an early holiday presents for its users: KDE Applications 18.12 is shipping today.
For those not yet prepared to move over to the Mesa 18.3 series, Mesa 18.2.7 is out today with the latest batch of fixes.
Unity Tech is ending out the year with their Unity 2018.3 game engine update that brings a number of new features and improvements to its many supported platforms.
Complementing all of the AMDGPU feature work already staged for the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel, another (small) batch of material was sent out on Wednesday.
Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed some fresh patches in Mesa 19.0 (and also marked for back-porting to the stable branch) to help out the DXVK gaming experience for Windows games using Direct3D 11 that are re-mapped to run on top of the Vulkan graphics API.
The QEMU emulator that is widely used by the open-source Linux virtualization stack is out with its version 3.1 feature release. This is the QEMU update that is adding multi-threaded Tiny Code Generator support, display improvements, adds the Cortex-A72 model and other ARM improvements, and various other enhancements.
Complementing the Meson build system support for Wayland itself, the Weston reference compositor now has been Meson-ized.
AMD has published their latest batch of "DC" Display Core patches for the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver.
NVIDIA has been shipping the Jetson AGX Xavier Developer Kit the past few months while now they are beginning to ship the AGX Xavier Module intended for use in next-generation autonomous machines.
With just over one week to go until the expected Linux 4.20 kernel release, Alex Deucher of AMD today sent in the latest batch of fixes to the DRM tree for landing at the end of this cycle.
GNOME 3.31.3 was released today as the latest development stepping stone towards next March's GNOME 3.32 desktop environment update.
Besides seeing Icelake demos at the Intel Architecture Day that were running on Ubuntu, with closely tracking the Linux kernel's development most of the new features presented for Sunny Cove and Gen11 graphics have already been merged or at least available in patch form for some months within the Linux ecosystem. Here's a look at the features talked about yesterday and their state on Linux.
AMD developers today outed their latest "AMDVLK" open-source Vulkan driver code drop dubbed AMDVLK 2018.Q4.4.
It was just last week NVIDIA released the 415.22 driver while out today is the 415.23 update.
Intel's Architecture Day on Tuesday was delightfully filled with an overwhelming amount of valuable hardware information, but Intel's software efforts were also briefly touched on too. In fact, Raja Koduri reinforced how software is a big part of Intel technology and goes in-hand with their security, interconnect, memory, architecture, and process pillars and that's where their new oneAPI initiative will fit in. But what learning afterwards was most exciting on the software front.
Intel's 2018 Architecture Day was primarily focused on the company's hardware architecture road-map, but one of the software (pre)announcements was their oneAPI software stack.
At Intel's architecture day, the company finally detailed their "Gen 11" graphics that we've been seeing open-source Linux graphics driver patches for many months (Intel OTC posted their initial open-source display driver code in early January and has continued the enablement work since) albeit elusive in substantive user details and hardware until Icelake. But today at least we can share more about the significant improvements with Gen11 graphics.
The Btrfs file-system hasn't supported Swap files on it in early a decade, but that support will be restored again with the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel.
Mesa 18.3 was released less than a week ago while today Mesa 18.3.1 was issued due to an error in the Vulkan specification.
Intel's promising IWD open-source wireless daemon continues picking up additional functionality in its trek towards potentially replacing wpa_supplicant. Out this week is IWD 0.13.
FreeBSD 12.0 has made its debut as the latest stable version of this popular BSD operating system.
Firefox 64.0 is available today as the last major feature update to Mozilla's web browser for 2018.
A new beta relase of Proton 3.16 is now available, the Wine-based software that powers Valve's Steam Play for running many Windows games on Linux.
Hardkernel recently sent over the ODROUD-XU4 for benchmarking. This ARM SBC that just measures in at about 82 x 58 x 22 mm offers much better performance than many of the sub-$100 ARM SBCs while also featuring dual USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, eMMC storage, and is software compatible with the older XU3 ARM SBCs. Here's a look at the performance of the ODROID-XU4 compared to a variety of other single board computers.
It was just several years ago that the open-source ecosystem began supporting the x32 ABI, but already kernel developers are talking of potentially deprecating the support and for it to be ultimately removed.
One of the most exciting developments in the open-source Intel driver space this year was the Iris Gallium3D driver taking shape as what's destined to eventually succeed their "classic" i965 Mesa driver. With Iris Gallium3D maturing, here's a look at how the performance currently stacks up to their mature OpenGL driver.
Out today is DAV1D as the first official (v0.1) release of this leading open-source AV1 video decoder.
Just in time for the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel, the developers working on the reverse-engineered, open-source support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX "Turing" GPUs have published their preliminary code. But before getting too excited, there isn't GPU hardware acceleration working yet.
Following the move by upstream Mozilla in switching their Linux builds of Firefox from being compiled by GCC to LLVM Clang, Fedora is planning the same transition of compilers in the name of compilation speed and resulting performance.
For hopefully helping out with code reviews and getting code staged in a timely manner before being upstreamed to the mainline Linux kernel, Daniel Vetter of the Intel Open-Source Technology Center is set to become a co-maintainer.
Good news for those using the LLVM Clang compiler on OpenBSD or DragonFlyBSD: the OpenMP run-time should now be supported with the latest development code.
Red Hat developers have proposed a new VirtIO-FS component to provide better support for shared folders/files between the host and guest virtual machines.
It should come as no surprise since it was deprecated in this year's GCC 8 release, but the PowerPC SPE code has been removed.