A set of patches that continue to be worked on for the Linux kernek is reconciling NUMA balancing decisions with the load balancer. Ultimately this series is about reducing unnecessary task and page migrations and other NUMA balancing overhead.
Last week I looked at the Windows vs. Linux scaling performance on the Threadripper 3990X at varying core/thread counts followed by looking at the Windows 10 performance against eight Linux distributions for this $3990 USD processor running within the System76 Thelio Major workstation. Now the tables have turned for our first look at this 64-core / 128-thread processor running on the BSDs, FreeBSD 12.1 in particular. With this article is looking at the FreeBSD 12.1 performance and seeing how the performance scales compared to Ubuntu 20.04 Linux and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 based CentOS Stream.
GNOME Shell and Mutter saw a set of patches land today for GNOME 3.36 that have been around for a few months and deal with the tracking of software rendering and VNC usage where GNOME Shell should in turn disable animations to ease the rendering workload.
While web-based GUIs for system management on server platforms with BMCs is far from anything new, Raptor Computing Systems with their libre POWER9 systems does now have a full-functioning web-based solution for their OpenBMC-powered systems and still being fully open-source.
We are learning more about the media engine capabilities with the forthcoming Intel "Gen12" (Xe) Tiger Lake graphics.
For those still running the AMD "Stoney Ridge" mobile APUs from 2016 that were launched aside Bristol Ridge with Excavator-based CPU cores and GCN 1.2 graphics, the Linux kernel has a fix finally for flickering issues when driving a 4K display off the APU.
It was not even two full weeks ago that Rav1e 0.3 was released with speed optimizations and other AV1 encoding enhancements while released on Tuesday was Rav1e 0.3.1 with a change to boost encode speeds at lower levels.
As written about last week, in the works for the Linux 5.7 kernel this spring is open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" acceleration for the GeForce 16 series. That code is currently sitting in the Nouveau development tree until landing in DRM-Next for Linux 5.7, but NVIDIA has now posted the necessary firmware binaries needed for enabling the hardware acceleration on these Turing GPUs.
Mesa 20.0 is now released as the first quarter 2020 update to the Mesa 3D open-source graphics driver stack.
Added to the LLVM source tree today is mlir-vulkan-runner as a new utility for testing with some interesting possibilities.
Google has made their first public developer preview release of the forthcoming Android 11.
While GNOME 3.36 will be released in just a few weeks, GNOME 3.34.4 is out today as the latest stable update in the current series.
With the release of Mesa 20.0 being imminent, here is a look at all of the new features for this first quarter update to the Mesa 3D stack for open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers.
Oracle today has released Solaris 11.4 SRU18 as the newest version of the long-running Solaris 11.4 series.
AMD has expanded their 7002 series "Rome" family with the availability today of the EPYC 7662 as their latest 64-core / 128-thread offering and the EPYC 7532 as a new 32-core part but with a full 256MB cache to offer more per-core L3 cache than other 32-core processors.
Landing last November in the LibreOffice development code was Skia drawing support to replace Cairo and in turn that opens up for Vulkan rendering of this cross-platform, open-source office suite.
With C++20 now being deemed complete from the recent ISO C++ meeting in Prague, the GNU Compiler Collection went ahead and added the -std=c++20 flag where as up until that change this weekend relied upon the -std=c++2a switch. LLVM's Clang compiler now has similar treatment on its codebase.
Added to the Vulkan API last summer was VK_EXT_line_rasterization for line rasterization like employed by CAD applications. The open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver is now supporting this extension.
Longtime Linux kernel developer David Howells of Red Hat sent out his latest patch revision exposing new capabilities for exposing more VFS and mount information to user-space along with notification support for any file-system mount topology changes.
It has been one month and a few days since Intel first made public the need for graphics driver patching of Gen 7/7.5 graphics for older Ivybridge / Haswell hardware to fix a graphics hardware flaw. That vulnerability also affected the common Intel Gen9 graphics but there the mitigation was uneventful and quickly merged without causing any performance hit. But for Ivybridge/Haswell one month later the graphics driver mitigation for CVE-2019-14615 is still being addressed.
GNOME 3.35.91 is out today as the second beta ahead of next month's GNOME 3.36 desktop release.
With Python 2 having been end-of-life since the start of the year and Ubuntu 20.04 being a long-term support release, Ubuntu developers are working hard to ensure Python 2 isn't shipped as part of this next Ubuntu LTS release.
We are seeing more cloud providers now offering AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" series processors with the latest being Google now offering the new N2D VM family in beta for their public cloud.
It's already been six years since the collapse of Calxeda as the first promising ARM server company. With that, the Linux kernel upstream developers are looking at dropping the Calxeda platform support.
The third and likely last test release of Phoronix Test Suite 9.4-Vestby is now available for your cross-platform, open-source benchmarking needs.
With a new patch series for the Linux kernel, memory access performance by one measurement can improve by 116% on a dual socket Intel server with Optane DC Persistent Memory.
More high-end audio gear is finally transitioning from Firewire to USB-C and one of these new high-end audio interfaces will be supported by the Linux 5.7 kernel this spring.
Intel's open-source ConnMan software for managing Internet connections on Linux particularly for embedded systems has seen a new release.
The release of LLVM 10.0 is now upon us with the second and last planned release candidate issued at the end of last week.
Issues with Fedora's 32-bit ARM Xfce desktop spin will no longer be treated as a release blocker for the Linux distribution but instead the Fedora Workstation for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) will be considered a blocking issue.
While the open-source Intel and Radeon OpenGL drivers within Mesa have long employed an on-disk shader cache to help with game load times by being able to load previously compiled shaders from disk, the Nouveau "NVC0" Gallium3D driver is on the heels of finally seeing similar support.
Most probably didn't even realize LLVM had a Go language front-end, but this past week it was dropped from the official source mono repository.
Motivated by last week's Windows vs. Linux benchmarks with the 128-thread AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X here are Windows 10 Pro and Enterprise benchmarks on the 32-core / 64-thread AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X up against eight Linux distributions.
If you have been looking for a simple dock/launcher that natively supports Wayland, LavaLauncher 1.6 is available as one such solution.
With BUS1 not looking like it will come to fruition anytime soon as an in-kernel IPC mechanism and the kernel module for it not being touched since last March, the same developers continue pushing ahead with Dbus-Broker as the user-space implementation focused on D-Bus compatibility while being higher performing and more reliable than D-Bus itself.
Arm has been developing the ASTC encoder as the texture compressor for Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) as open-source but until last week was carrying a restrictive license.
Valve open-source driver developer Samuel Pitoiset has contributed some improvements to Mesa 20.1's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver benefiting GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards.
While GCC 10 will be releasing in the next month or two as the annual feature update to the GNU Compiler Collection, GCC 8.4 is expected for release soon along with GCC 9.3.
With the Linux 5.7 kernel cycle in two months there is some "spring cleaning" within the staging area that is leading to almost twenty-nine thousand lines of code being removed thanks to removing a deprecated feature.
It's been a while since last having any news to report on Mesa's Lima Gallium3D driver for old Mali 400/450 series hardware, but an important optimization was merged today.
The second weekly release candidate of Linux 5.6 is now available and overall it's quite a calm test release.
Wine 5.2 is out as the second bi-weekly development release of Wine following the recent Wine 5.0 stable debut. This post-5.0 unstable series is ultimately leading up to Wine 6.0's release early next year.
With Blender 2.82 having released on Friday, this weekend we've begun our benchmarking of this new Blender release as the leading open-source 3D modeling solution currently available. Here are some preliminary v2.81 vs. v2.82 figures on different higher-end Intel and AMD processors.
It's been nearly one month since the release of Vulkan 1.2.132 and that came shortly after the big Vulkan 1.2 milestone, but out today is now Vulkan 1.2.133.
If the likes of GIMP and Krita aren't satisfying your digital drawing/painting needs, MyPaint 2.0 has finally been released as a big update to this simplicity-minded, cross-platform and open-source program.
Not scheduled to go live until Monday but up this weekend is the NVIDIA 440.58.01 Linux beta driver that offers a few Vulkan updates.
While this week marked the release of KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS, KDE developers haven't let up on their bug fixing activities and other improvements to this open-source desktop environment.
With C++20 now effectively complete, GCC developers have made a rather late change for GCC 10 that is also long overdue and that is introducing the -std=c++20 switch for targeting C++20.
Linux has supported the Apple Magic Keyboards since 2018 handling the Bluetooth connectivity and also needing some special handling for the numeric keypad. While that normally would be the end of the story, recent firmware updates to the Apple Magic Keyboard have caused problems.
Following last week's release of Chrome 80, Google this week promoted Chrome 81 into their beta channel.