With the newly released openSUSE Leap 15.1 they have added an option to their installer for toggling the CPU mitigations around Spectre / Meltdown / Foreshadow / Zombieload to make it very convenient should you choose to retain maximum performance while foregoing the security measures. But it also allows disabling SMT/HT from the installer should you prefer maximum security.
NVIDIA today released the 418.52.07 Linux driver as an updated build intended for Vulkan developers with it introducing support for two more extensions.
Last week we wrote about a "Wayland Itches" program being devised by prolific open-source contributor Hans de Goede of Red Hat. The goal of this program is to address itches/paper-cuts/problems in using GNOME Shell atop Wayland. He's received a fair amount of feedback so far and has some early indications to share.
It's been three months now since the AMD Radeon VII 7nm "Vega 20" graphics card was released and while we hopefully won't be waiting much longer for Navi to make its debut, for the time being this is the latest and great AMD Radeon consumer graphics card -- priced at around $700 USD. Here are some fresh benchmarks of the Radeon VII on Linux and compared to various high-end NVIDIA graphics cards while all testing happened from Ubuntu 19.04.
The initial PHP 7.4 Alpha 1 release is just two weeks away already... Curious about the performance of this yearly update to PHP7, I ran some benchmarks on the latest development code as of this morning compared to the earlier PHP7 releases and even PHP-8.0 that is in development on Git master.
OpenSUSE Leap 15.1 is now available as the latest openSUSE released that is in turn based off SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 1 sources.
For those making use of Intel's OpenCL "NEO" Compute Runtime, a new tagged release is now available.
While the Linux support for Intel's long awaited Icelake support has been out there for months and all fundamentals seemingly mature, there have been a few last-minute additions around some non-essential functionality. One of the latest Linux kernel patch series around Icelake is adding support for new Top-Down performance counters for these next-generation Intel processors.
Being past the Linux 5.2 kernel merge window, AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver developers have already begun queuing changes anticipated for Linux 5.3 via a work-in-progress tree.
While it was just earlier this month that the OpenSolaris/Illumos-based OmniOS saw a big LTS release, it's already been succeeded by a new release given the recent Intel MDS / Zombieload CPU vulnerabilities coming to light.
In helping to speed-up game load times when switching to the new Intel "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver and smooth out frame-rates for games sporadically loading shaders, Mesa 19.2-devel has added on-disk shader cache support for the driver.
Five years ago today was the story on Phoronix how the systemd source tree was approaching 550k lines so curiosity got the best of me to see how large is the systemd Git repository today. Well, now it's over 1.2 million lines.
Mesa 19.0.5 is now available as what is expected to be the second to the last release in the Mesa 19.0 series.
The Arch-based Antergos Linux distribution that aimed to make Arch Linux more accessible to the Linux desktop masses is closing up shop.
Adding to the list of positive changes with GNOME 3.34 due out this September is lowering possible output lag when running GNOME's Mutter on X11/X.Org.
If all goes well the Mesa 19.1 release will be happening in the next week or two. But for those wanting to help test this open-source graphics driver stack, Mesa 19.1-RC3 was released today as the newest weekly release candidate.
Since the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 at the start of May we've been running various benchmarks of this latest enterprise Linux platform. Our tests to date have been with Intel Xeon hardware where it's been performing well and a nice speed-up over RHEL 7 with modern Xeon Scalable CPUs. Similarly, AMD EPYC is also much faster with RHEL 8.0 thanks to the much newer Linux kernel, compiler, and other software updates.
Mozilla set sail Firefox 67.0 this morning as the newest version of this web browser and the update is heavy on the feature front.
Nicolas Saenz Julienne of SUSE has been working on CPUFreq support for the Raspberry Pi single board computers to allow for the Linux kernel to provide CPU frequency scaling controls.
Following the recent desktop CPU benchmarks and server CPU benchmarks following the MDS/ZombieLoad mitigations coming to light and looking at the overall performance cost to mitigating these current CPU vulnerabilities, there was some speculation by some in the community that the older dual-core CPUs with Hyper Threading would be particularly hard hit. Here are some benchmarks of a Lenovo ThinkPad with Core i7 Broadwell CPU looking at those mitigation costs.
Of the many new features in Linux 5.2 there are various Logitech mouse and keyboard support improvements particularly for the wireless devices.
If you want a SiFive SoC for the royalty-free, open-source RISC-V architecture it's now possible to pair it with graphics. Unfortunately, the graphics option is about as far from open-source as possible.
DragonFlyBSD 5.4.3 was released on Monday with just a hand full of changes over last month's 5.4.2 point release.
X.Org's annual event, the X.Org Developers' Conference, is running like a well-oiled machined these days. While there are still months to go until XDC2019 in Montreal, a Call for Proposals has been issued for those wishing to speak at this annual gathering that pertains to Wayland, Mesa, libinput, Cairo, and related components as well, yes, the X.Org Server.
It looks like the saga of converting the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) source tree from SVN to Git isn't over yet and could still take months until completion.
As a sign of the times with the Linux kernel being affected by an increasing number of CVEs (and particularly high profile ones at that), there are now more Ubuntu developers with upload rights for sending down new kernel upgrades.
This weekend I posted a number of benchmarks looking at the performance impact of the new MDS/Zombieload vulnerabilities that also included a look at the overall cost of Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF/MDS on Intel desktop CPUs and AMD CPUs (Spectre). In this article are similar benchmarks but turning the attention now to Intel Xeon hardware and also comparing those total mitigation costs against AMD EPYC with its Spectre mitigations.
The first and only anticipated release candidate for NetBSD 8.1 is now available for testing.
The past few months AMD's Marek Olšák has been working on primitive culling support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and last week that code was merged into the Mesa 19.2 development code.
Less than one month after releasing the Intel Graphics Compiler 1.0.3, the Intel team maintaining "IGC" today released version 1.0.4.
Sent out earlier this month is the second version of the Xen core scheduling patches that allow for CPU core and socket-level scheduling by this virtualization hypervisor.
Not only does this appear to be the first time Lenovo has decided to sponsor Debian's annual conference, but they have done so at the flagship "platinum" sponsorship tier.
The Qt Company today released a public beta of their upcoming Qt Design Studio 1.2, the software letting designers easily create QML-based user-interfaces and that can integrate with Photoshop and other design applications.
The GTK3-ported Xfce 4.14 might see its long-awaited official release in the near future. In preparing for a hopeful August debut, the Xfce 4.14 pre-release is now available.
Back when Linux 5.1 was released, Linus Torvalds expressed some concern that the Linux 5.2 merge window may have to be extended by a few days as it would conflict with his daughter's graduation, but he has managed still to get 5.2-rc1 out on time.
On top of all the changes queued for Linux 5.2 is an interesting last-minute performance improvement for the vmalloc code.
While we have been reporting on and benchmarking the Intel SVT video encoders since February, they were only officially announced last month and this Sunday marks their first tagged release for the AV1 encoder in the form of SVT-AV1 0.5.0.
A new release of DXVK is available for translating Direct3D 10/11 calls to Vulkan for speeding up the Windows on Linux gaming experience.
The Linux 5.2 kernel merge window has been open for two weeks now and is expected to close today or in the next few days (there is some uncertainty due to Linus Torvalds traveling this week due to his daughter's graduation). But anyhow all of the major pull requests have already been sent in so here is a look at the new features to find with the Linux 5.2 kernel and the many other changes.
Tagged at the start of the week was LibreOffice 6.3 Alpha 1 as the first step towards the next major release of this cross-platform, open-source office suite.
The much anticipated Raptor Blackbird is set to begin shipping over the days ahead. Blackbird is the lower-cost (compared to the Talos II Secure Workstation) micro-ATX motherboard for IBM POWER9 systems and offers open-source firmware as currently one of the most open, high-performance systems available.
Late updates to the Linux kernel's perf subsystem introduces support for compressed recording of traces, which can yield a three to five time reduction in file-size.
It was another busy week in KDE space with a lot of bug fixing and last minute work around KDE Plasma 5.16. In case you missed it, this week Plasma 5.16 reached beta.
Chengdu Haiguang IC Design Co with its Hygon Dhyana processor that is based on AMD Zen IP appears to be pursuing Coreboot support.
The past few days I've begun exploring the performance implications of the new Microarchitectural Data Sampling "MDS" vulnerabilities now known more commonly as Zombieload. As I shared in some initial results, there is a real performance hit to these mitigations. In this article are more MDS/Zombieload mitigation benchmarks on multiple systems as well as comparing the overall performance impact of the Meltdown/Spectre/Foreshadow/Zombieload mitigations on various Intel CPUs and also AMD CPUs where relevant.
We've had a number of articles covering the interesting news out of Intel's 2019 Open-Source Technology Summit (OSTS) held at Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, Washington. Here's a look back at the news out of the open-source event as well as some other smaller bits of information shared during the event.
Work by NVIDIA to provide separate per-client vendor mappings for GLXVND were merged to X.Org Server 1.21 Git as another step towards improving the PRIME GPU offloading support when multiple GPU drivers are at play.
Xfce's Xfdesktop 4.13.4 was released on Friday as the newest stepping stone on the long and winding journey towards Xfce 4.14.
With the Linux 5.2 kernel an AMD-supplied change by AMDGPU developer Christian König allows for supporting peer-to-peer DMA between any devices on AMD Zen systems.
The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes were sent out on Friday of the new feature updates for the Linux 5.2 kernel that is nearing the end of its merge window.