ZFS On Linux, Intel Cascadelake, Linux 5.1/5.2 Excited Phoronix Readers In April

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 1 May 2019 at 06:36 AM EDT. 1 Comment
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Of the 298 original pieces of content on Phoronix during April, here is a look back at the most popular open-source news and Linux hardware reviews.

April brought the release of Intel 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable "Cascadelake" servers, Linux 5.1 wrapping up while Linux 5.2 features coming to light, Mesa 19.1 feature development scrambling towards the finish line, ZFS On Linux making more progress, and many other open-source/Linux milestones.

Below is a look at the most popular content on Phoronix from April. As a reminder, if you enjoy all of the content on Phoronix at the very least please do not view Phoronix with any ad-blocker or consider joining Phoronix Premium for ad-free access to the site, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits. PayPal tips are also happily appreciated.

Linux 5.2 Is Introducing The Fieldbus Subsystem
A new subsystem queued for introduction in the upcoming Linux 5.2 cycle is the Fieldbus Subsystem, which is initially being added to the staging area of the kernel.

Ubuntu 19.04 Released As A Big Linux Desktop Improvement Thanks To GNOME 3.32
The Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" has been officially released as the latest non-LTS, six-month installment to Ubuntu Linux.

In 2019, Most Linux Distributions Still Aren't Restricting Dmesg Access
Going back to the late Linux 2.6 kernel days has been the CONFIG_DMESG_RESTRICT (or for the past number of years, renamed to CONFIG_SECURITY_DMESG_RESTRICT) Kconfig option to restrict access to dmesg in the name of security and not allowing unprivileged users from accessing this system log. While it's been brought up from time to time, Linux distributions are still generally allowing any user access to dmesg even though it may contain information that could help bad actors exploit the system.

It Looks Like AMD Is About To Post The Open-Source Radeon "Navi" Driver Code
It looks like the AMD posting of the open-source Radeon driver enablement code for next-gen "Navi" GPUs is imminent. In fact, the first bits of it quietly were pushed out today.

New Raspbian Brings Performance Improvements, Updated Packages To Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released a new version of Raspbian, its Debian-based operating system for Raspberry Pi devices.

ZFS Indications Have Us Already Eager For Ubuntu 19.10
While Ubuntu 19.04 isn't even coming out until tomorrow, the indications around Ubuntu desktop ZFS support and functionality likely debuting the next cycle has us already quite eager for the Ubuntu 19.10 release coming out in October.

Facebook Is JIT'ing C++ Code To Treat It Like A Crazy Fast Scripting Language
Facebook has worked on various programming language innovations over the years from all their work on HHVM at a time when PHP was slow to working on a super fast C/C++ pre-processor to other open-source language work. Their latest work in this area is on supporting just-in-time compilation of C++ code to treat it like a scripting language.

Linux 5.2 Will Be A Huge Release: EXT4 Case Insensitive, NVIDIA AltMode, Fieldbus + More
Assuming Linux 5.1 manages to ship next weekend, the Linux 5.2 merge window will immediately kick off following that release. In our close monitoring of the different development branches in recent weeks, the Linux 5.2 kernel is shaping up to be an outright massive release.

Debian 10 "Buster" Has Around 150 Release Critical Bugs At The Moment
Debian developer Jonathan Wiltshire who is part of the project's release team issued a Buster freeze status update on Sunday concerning the readiness of Debian 10.

Mozilla Preparing To Test WebRender With "Qualified" Linux Users
While Linux users can today manually enable WebRender support for their Firefox installations, Mozilla is making the necessary adjustments to begin experimenting with enabling this Rust-written GPU-based rendering element for "qualified" Linux devices.

And the most popular reviews / featured articles from April:

The Current Windows 10 vs. Linux Browser Performance For Google Chrome + Mozilla Firefox
Last week were tests looking at the Firefox/Chrome web browser performance on eight Linux distributions but how does the situation look if adding Microsoft Windows 10 to the equation? Well, this article addresses that question as we looking at how well Chrome and Firefox compare Windows 10 vs. Linux on the same system and using the latest releases of these web browsers.

Ubuntu 19.04 Radeon Linux Gaming Performance: Popular Desktops Benchmarked, Wayland vs. X.Org
Leading up to the Ubuntu 19.04 release, several premium supporters requested fresh results for seeing the X.Org vs. Wayland performance overhead for gaming, how GNOME Shell vs. KDE Plasma is performing for current AMD Linux gaming, and related desktop comparison graphics/gaming metrics. Here are such benchmarks run from the Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" while benchmarking GNOME Shell both with X.Org and Wayland, Xfce, MATE, Budgie, KDE Plasma, LXQt, and Openbox.

AMDVLK vs. RADV Radeon Vulkan Driver Performance For Linux Gaming On Ubuntu 19.04
With the continuously evolving RADV Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver and near-weekly updates to the AMD's official "AMDVLK" open-source tree Vulkan driver, how are these competing AMD Vulkan Linux drivers comparing these days? As it's been a while since our last benchmarking comparison of the official AMDVLK driver against the open-source and more common/popular Mesa RADV driver, here are some fresh benchmarks of RADV from Mesa 19.0 on Ubuntu 19.04 as well as 19.1-devel compared to the latest AMDVLK driver code.

Intel Xeon Scalable "Cascade Lake" Processors Launch - Initial Xeon Platinum 8280 Linux Benchmarks
Intel's 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable Cascade Lake processors are officially launching today! Last month we were briefed out at one of Intel's campuses in Oregon and have been testing the new Xeon Platinum 8280 processors in recent days. In this article is a look at what's new with Cascade Lake as well as our preliminary Ubuntu Linux performance figures for the Xeon Platinum 8280 processors.

The RadeonSI/RADV Linux Gaming Performance With Ubuntu 19.04 vs. 18.10
With Ubuntu 19.04 due for release next week, here is a look at how the AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance is looking out-of-the-box on the Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" compared to the current Ubuntu 18.10 release.

The Current Intel "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL Performance Against i965 Mesa, Windows 10 OpenGL
It's been quite fascinating to watch the development of the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver that has now been in development by their open-source team for more than one year while back in February is where this currently experimental driver was merged into Mesa. It's been over one month since last looking at the Intel Iris Gallium3D performance relative to Intel's default "i965" Mesa OpenGL driver. Here are fresh benchmarks looking not only at their current and next-gen OpenGL Linux driver options but also how that performance compares to their current Windows 10 OpenGL driver.

ODROID-N2 Offer Six Cortex-A73/A53 Cores For $65~82, Good Performance In Linux Benchmarks
Hardkernel's newest single board computer is the ODROID-N2 that they sent over a few weeks ago for benchmarking. The ODROID-N2 is built around the Amlogic S922X SoC and features four Cortex-A73 cores and two Cortex-A53 cores, options for 2GB or 4GB of DDR4 system memory, eMMC connectivity, Gigabit Ethernet, and four USB 3.0 ports for starting out just above $60 USD.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Linux Gaming Performance & Benchmarks
This week NVIDIA introduced the $149 USD Turing-powered GTX 1650 graphics card. On launch day I picked up the ASUS GeForce GTX 1650 4GB Dual-Fan Edition (Dual-GTX1650-O4G) graphics card for Linux testing and have out now the initial GTX 1650 Linux performance benchmarks under Ubuntu compared to an assortment of lower-end and older AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Intel Xeon Cascade Lake Running Even Faster With Clear Linux - Six Linux Operating Systems Benchmarked
Following the initial launch benchmarks earlier this week of the Intel 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable "Cascade Lake" 8280 processors, I proceeded to run some benchmarks of different Linux distributions (operating systems) to ensure the Linux support panned out across the major platforms and while at it also comparing the performance between these different flavors of GNU/Linux. With this powerful Gigabyte Server sporting dual Xeon Platinum 8280 processors for a combined 56 cores / 112 threads, 12 x 32GB DDR4-2933MHz memory, and Samsung NVMe storage, Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu 19.04 Beta, Fedora 29, CentOS 7, Debian 9.8, and Clear Linux were tested to look at the performance of the brand new Cascade Lake.

Fedora 30 Is Performing Great - Intel Core i9 & AMD Threadripper Benchmarks
As the first of our benchmarks for Fedora 30 that is set to be released on Tuesday, here are some benchmarks comparing Fedora 29, Fedora 29 with current updates, and Fedora 30 on Intel Core i9 7980XE and AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX HEDT platforms. Fedora 30 benchmarks on other systems are coming as well.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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