Linux 4.8, AMDGPU, RADV & Google's Fuchsia OS Dominated This Month

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 31 August 2016 at 09:00 PM EDT. 1 Comment
PHORONIX
This month on Phoronix there were 22 featured Linux reviews and 242 original news articles, here were the most interesting ones.

Below is a look at the most popular news and articles on Phoronix for the month. As always, if you appreciate all of the work invested in this open-source/Linux hardware and driver resource plus the work we do on advancing open-source benchmarking, etc, please consider joining Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip, and please don't use an ad-blocker when viewing this site. You can also help out by using our Amazon and NewEgg affiliate links when making your online purchases; those links are always found at the bottom of the right hand menu on the site. Thanks and here's to a great September!

Btrfs RAID 5/6 Code Found To Be Very Unsafe & Will Likely Require A Rewrite
It turns out the RAID5 and RAID6 code for the Btrfs file-system's built-in RAID support is faulty and users should not be making use of it if you care about your data.

Systemd Rolls Out Its Own Mount Tool
Systemd-mount is the newest tool added to systemd by Lennart Poettering.

Google Working On New "Fuchsia" Operating System, Powered By Magenta / LK Kernel
Google appears to be working on a new operating system that's written from scratch and appears to be target both phones and PCs, among other form factors.

ReactOS 0.4.2 Officially Released
Version 0.4.2 of ReactOS, the open-source Windows re-implementation, is now officially available.

Fedora 25 To Run Wayland By Default
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has decided that Fedora 25 will indeed ship the Wayland display server by default in place of the X.Org Server.

CryENGINE Is Planning To Deliver Its Vulkan Support In About Two Months
The middle of October is when Crytek should be publicly rolling out their Vulkan API support in the CryENGINE.

Linux 4.7 - Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. XFS vs. NTFS Benchmarks
Continuing on from yesterday's Linux 4.4 To 4.7 - EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. Btrfs Benchmarks comparison, here is a wider look at mainline file-systems on the Linux 4.7. File-systems tested on the NVMe SSD included Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, XFS, and NTFS.

Secure Boot Isn't So Secure After All: The Golden Key Is Out
So much for Secure Boot being so secure... After a mistake by Microsoft, the "golden key" is now out in the wild.

Direct3D 11 vs. OpenGL vs. Vulkan Radeon Benchmarks On Windows & Linux
After making the Direct3D 11 vs. Vulkan vs. OpenGL benchmarks available to Phoronix Premium subscribers this weekend, these results are now available to everyone. Enjoy.

It's Really Worthwhile For AMDGPU Users On Ubuntu 16.04 To Upgrade Their Kernel, Mesa
For those of you using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in conjunction with the stock AMDGPU driver for open-source driver support on newer graphics cards like the Radeon R9 Fury and R9 285/380, here are some benchmarks showing out the performance you are missing out on by not upgrading your kernel or Mesa after just a few months of development.

BioShock Infinite Can Run More Than 23% Faster With New RadeonSI Patches
Marek Olšák at AMD continues optimizing the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for offering much better Linux gaming performance when using this open-source AMD graphics driver code. The latest are double-digit gains for at least the BioShock Infinite game.

The Speed Of Ubuntu 16.10 Currently Versus Ubuntu 16.04, Clear Linux
Being mid-way through Ubuntu 16.10's development cycle, here are some fresh benchmarks showing how its performance has changed (if at all) compared to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS as well as compared to Intel's high-performance Clear Linux distribution as a reference point.

And then the featured articles:

Windows 10 vs. Linux Radeon Software Performance, Including AMDGPU-PRO & RadeonSI
As alluded to earlier and on Twitter, the past few days I have been working on a fresh Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux graphics/gaming performance comparison. This time it's looking at the latest Radeon performance using an R9 Fury and RX 480. Tests on Windows were obviously done with Radeon Software Crimson Edition while under Linux were the two latest AMD/RTG Linux driver options: the hybrid AMDGPU-PRO driver and the fully open-source driver via Linux 4.8 and Mesa 12.1-dev.

18-Way GPU Linux Benchmarks, Including The Radeon RX 460 & RX 470 On Open-Source
Yesterday I published early open-source benchmarks of the Radeon RX 470 while today is a full 18-way graphics card comparison including the newly-launched Radeon RX 460 and Radeon RX 470 graphics cards alongside the RX 480 Polaris graphics card. All of the AMD graphics cards tested for this article were running the very latest open-source driver stack on the Linux 4.8 kernel and Mesa 12.1-dev Git.

Ubuntu 14.04/16.04 vs. Ubuntu Bash On Windows 10 Anniversary Performance
When Microsoft and Canonical brought Bash and Ubuntu's user-space to Windows 10 earlier this year I ran some preliminary benchmarks of Ubuntu on Windows 10 versus a native Ubuntu installation on the same hardware. Now that this "Windows Subsystem for Linux" is part of the recent Windows 10 Anniversary Update, I've carried out some fresh benchmarks of Ubuntu running atop Windows 10 compared to Ubuntu running bare metal.

Linux 4.4 To 4.7 - EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. Btrfs Benchmarks
I've been a bit behind on my file-system benchmarking the past few months but for your viewing pleasure today are some EXT4 vs. Btrfs vs. F2FS file-system tests on an NVMe SSD when testing the Linux 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7 kernels.

Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu + Linux 4.7 + Mesa 12.1 Intel OpenGL Tests
With Microsoft having recently released the Windows 10 Anniversary update I've been running some fresh Windows vs. Linux performance comparisons. The first of these comparisons for your viewing pleasure is looking at the latest Windows 10 build with the latest Intel driver compared to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS while also comparing the performance when manually upgrading to the Linux 4.7 kernel and Mesa 12.1-dev for delivering the latest OpenGL performance potential.

AMDGPU-PRO vs. Open-Source Gallium3D OpenGL Performance On Polaris Is A Very Tight Race
For those wondering how AMD's hybrid "AMDGPU-PRO" Linux driver stack compares to the latest pure open-source driver stack of the AMDGPU kernel driver and RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, here are side-by-side results for the Radeon RX 460, RX 470, and RX 480 Polaris hardware as well as the R9 Fury (Fiji) graphics card.

Testing The Open-Source "RADV" Radeon Vulkan Driver vs. AMDGPU-PRO
With word coming out last week that the RADV open-source Vulkan driver can now render Dota 2 correctly, I've been running some tests the past few days of this RADV Vulkan driver compared to AMD's official (but currently closed-source) Vulkan driver bundled with the AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan driver.

Early Benchmarks Of FreeBSD 11.0 vs. DragonFlyBSD 4.6 vs. Linux Distributions
Following last week's DragonFlyBSD 4.6 benchmarks I carried out a fresh comparison of FreeBSD 10.3 vs. FreeBSD 11.0 (Beta 4 at the time) along with the DragonFlyBSD results and a few of the popular Linux distributions. Here are those numbers.

AMDGPU-PRO Radeon RX 460/470/480 vs. NVIDIA Linux GPU Benchmarks
Last week I published an 18-way GPU Linux comparison featuring the new Radeon RX 460 and RX 470 graphics cards along with other AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs. The Radeon tests were done using the very latest open-source Linux driver stack while in this article are similar benchmarks done but using the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver stack.

The Many Exciting Features To The Linux 4.8 Kernel
Today marks the closure of the Linux 4.8 kernel merge window so as usual here is our recap of all the features we've been monitoring over the past two weeks. Among the highlights for Linux 4.8 are AMD GPU OverDrive overclocking, initial NVIDIA Pascal support, a new ARM Mali display driver, mainline support for the Raspberry Pi 3 BCM SoC, HDMI CEC support, big reworks to Btrfs and XFS file-system code, and a number of new security features, among other changes.

What were your favorite articles of the month? Let us know by commenting on this article in the forums.
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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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