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.
While NVIDIA isn't doing much to help out Nouveau, at least the company is contributing to the open-source Linux graphics ecosystem in other ways. In addition to presenting at XDC2017 this week on the Unix device memory allocator API and DeepColor / HDR support, they also presented on server-side GLVND.
SDL 2.0.6 was released on Friday as the latest feature update for this widely-used library that allows for more cross-platform portability of applications and games centered around input, audio, and video helpers.
Longtime Nouveau contributors Martin Peres and Karol Herbst presented at this week's XDC2017 X.Org conference at the Googleplex in Mountain View. It was a quick talk as they didn't have a whole lot to report on due to their open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver efforts largely being restricted by NVIDIA Corp.
X.Org Server 1.19 is already almsot one year old and while X.Org is currently well off its six month release cadence, version 1.20 is being figured out for an early 2018 release.
Just a quick heads up for those that haven't noticed yet, HTTPS is now used by default across all of Phoronix.com as of this week.
The X.Org Foundation board announced during this week's XDC2017 summit that they have officially completed the paperwork to become a Khronos adopter.
Intel OTC developers are working on support for huge GTT pages for their Direct Rendering Manager driver.
Earlier this year Keith Packard started a contract gig for Valve working to improve Linux's support for virtual reality head-mounted displays (VR HMDs). In particular, working on Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) and X.Org changes needed so VR HMDs will work well under Linux with the non-NVIDIA drivers.
Arcan, the open-source display server powered by a game engine, is out with a new release. Its Durden desktop environment has also been updated.
It's been a few weeks since last delivering any large RADV/RadeonSI open-source AMD Linux graphics benchmark results due to being busy with testing other hardware as well as battling some regressions / stability problems within the AMDGPU DRM code and Mesa Git. But with Linux 4.13 stable and the newest Mesa 17.3-dev code, things are playing well so here are some fresh OpenGL vs. Vulkan benchmarks on three Radeon graphics cards.
The Pitivi open-source non-linear video editor has been in development for thirteen years while its v1.0 release is finally near.
While most of the talks that take place at the annual X.Org Developers' Conference are around the exciting progress being made across the Linux graphics landscape, at XDC2017 taking place this week at Google, the open-source GPGPU / compute talk is rather the let down due to the less than desirable state of the open-source OpenCL ecosystem.
Kevin Brace, the sole active developer left working on the OpenChrome driver stack for VIA x86 graphics, presented yesterday at XDC2017 about his work on this driver and how in the years to come he still hopes to work on other vintage GPU support.
While busy covering the many new features of Linux 4.14, one important change slipped by that I have long been waiting to see merged: Heterogeneous Memory Management.
Java 9 (JDK 9) has finally reached general availability! Following setbacks, Java 9 is officially available as well as Java EE 8.
Recently I wrote about a BFQ regression fix that should take care of a problem spotted in our recent I/O scheduler Linux 4.13 benchmarks while now that work has yielded a set of four patches working to improve this recently-merged scheduler.