Windows Comparisons, Linux 4.18, Wine & Alternate CPUs Were Very Popular In June

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 1 July 2018 at 08:50 AM EDT. 1 Comment
PHORONIX
June was another extremely busy month on Phoronix covering the Linux and open-source landscape with 311 original news articles and 24 featured hardware articles/reviews written by your's truly. June brought with it the start of the Linux 4.18 kernel cycle, a lot of interesting summer-time benchmarks, and more.

This past month also marked the 14th birthday of Phoronix.com with having started the site back on 5 June 2004. Also marked on 5 June was ten years of the Phoronix Test Suite since the launch of 1.0-Trondheim in 2008.

The 311 news articles and 24 featured reviews/benchmark articles continues the trend of roughly 10 original news articles each and every day along with around one featured article each day. That trend has continued going now for over five years since the last time there has been an entire 24 hour period without any new content on Phoronix. If you enjoy all of the new content on Phoronix and all of the work done on benchmarking, performance testing, etc, consider showing your support this summer by joining Phoronix Premium. Premium gets you ad-free access to the site, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits. PayPal tips are also much appreciated as is liking us on Facebook and Twitter.

With that out of the way, here were the ten most viewed Linux/FLOSS news articles for last month:

It Turns Out RISC-V Hardware So Far Isn't Entirely Open-Source
While free software/hardware advocates have been ecstatic about the RISC-V open-source, royalty-free processor architecture, hardware so far hasn't been as open as desired.

Hygon Dhyana: Chinese x86 Server CPUs Based On AMD Zen
While there are the VIA/Centaur-based Zhaoxin desktop CPUs targeted for the Chinese market, it turns out there is another x86 Chinese CPU effort but this time is a collaboration with AMD.

Apple Deprecates OpenGL & OpenCL
With today's announcement of macOS 10.14 Mojave, Apple quietly confirmed they are deprecating OpenGL and OpenCL within macOS.

Soon It Might Be Possible To Finally Have A Nice ARM-Powered Linux Laptop
While it's now becoming possible to run real Linux apps on Chrome OS, for those that have been dreaming of a real and pleasant GNU/Linux desktop experience on an ARM-powered laptop without much hackery, that soon may finally be a reality.

Features That Didn't Make It For The Mainline Linux 4.18 Kernel
There are many changes and new features for Linux 4.18 with the merge window having just closed on this next kernel version, but still there are some prominent features that have yet to work their way to the mainline tree.

ReactOS Is Finally Able To Build Itself
ReactOS, the "open-source Windows" operating system re-implementation, is now able to finally self-host itself in fully compile ReactOS from ReactOS.

A Look At The Features Merged So Far For The Linux 4.18 Kernel
We are about half-way through the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window, so here is a look at the most interesting work that's been merged so far for this next kernel release that should debut as stable around mid-August.

Linux 4.18 Drops The Lustre File-System
There are a lot of staging changes for the busy Linux 4.18 kernel merge window.

Systemd 239 Rolls Out With Portable Services, Merges Boot Loader Specification
The big systemd 239 feature update is now officially released.

CVE-2018-3665: Lazy State Save/Restore As The Latest CPU Speculative Execution Issue
The latest speculative execution vulnerability affecting modern CPUs has now been made public: Lazy State Save/Restore, a.k.a. CVE-2018-3665.

And the most-viewed featured articles:

macOS 10.13 vs. Windows 10 vs. Clear/Fedora/openSUSE/Ubuntu Linux Benchmarks
When running tests this week on a MacBook Pro for the Dota 2 Vulkan/OpenGL cross-OS performance I also took the opportunity as part of the fun benchmarking week for celebrating the Phoronix 14th birthday by running a broader set of system benchmarks across the latest macOS 10.13 High Sierra, Windows 10 Pro, and various Linux distributions. Here are those CPU/system performance benchmark results.

Wine 3.10 vs. Ubuntu 18.04 vs. Windows 10 Desktop Performance
Here are some fresh benchmarks comparing the performance of a variety of cross-platform Windows/Linux desktop applications when benchmarking the native Windows 10 binaries, the Windows binaries under Wine 3.10 on Ubuntu 18.04, and then the native Linux binaries itself on Ubuntu 18.04. All tests were done on the same system and these results do a good job at showing the potential (and shortcomings) of Wine from a performance perspective.

Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux With OpenGL/Vulkan On GTX 1060/1080 Ti & RX 580/Vega 64
Here are our latest benchmark numbers for looking at the performance of Windows 10 vs. Linux for OpenGL/Vulkan graphics driver performance for both NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon hardware using the latest drivers as of June 2018 for OpenGL and Vulkan.

Intel Hyper Threading Performance With A Core i7 On Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Following the news yesterday of OpenBSD disabling Intel Hyper Threading by default within its OS over security concerns and plans to disable Simultaneous Multi Threading for other processors/architectures too, here are some fresh Intel HT benchmarks albeit on Ubuntu Linux. The OpenBSD developer involved characterized HT/SMT as "doesn't necessarily have a positive effect on performance; it highly depends on the workload. In all likelihood it will actually slow down most workloads if you have a CPU with more than two cores." So here are some benchmarks using a current-generation Intel Core i7 8700K six-core processor with Hyper Threading.

Using W10Privacy To Boost Ubuntu WSL Performance On Windows 10
While Microsoft is working on low-level improvement to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to yield better I/O performance, it is possible to dramatically increase some disk workloads by removing a number of running Windows services via the independent W10Privacy application. Here are some benchmarks of W10Privacy on the overall performance impact to Microsoft Windows 10 Pro x64 itself and of Ubuntu 18.04 running on the Windows 10 installation via WSL.

29-Way GPU Comparison On Linux From Kepler & Cypress To Today's Pascal & Vega
Last week was a look at the latest Linux graphics drivers with current-generation graphics cards while for your viewing pleasure this Friday is a 29-way graphics card comparison. Using the very latest Linux graphics drivers, 29 distinct graphics cards were tested from current and recent generations of GPUs all the way back to the GeForce GTX 600 "Kepler" series on the NVIDIA side and on the AMD side was back to the Radeon HD 5800 "Cypress" hardware with a range of Linux games.

13-Way IBM POWER9 Talos II vs. Intel Xeon vs. AMD Linux Benchmarks On Debian
Back in April we were able to run some IBM POWER9 benchmarks with remote access to the open-source friendly Talos II systems by Raptor Computer Systems. We were recently allowed remote access again to a few different configurations of this libre hardware with three different POWER9 processor combinations. Here are those latest benchmarks compared to Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server processors.

A Look At How The AMD EPYC Linux Performance Has Evolved Over The Past Year
This month marks one year since AMD returned to delivering high-performance server CPUs with the debut of their EPYC 7000 series processor line-up. It's been a triumphant period for AMD with the successes over the past year of their EPYC family. Over the past year, the Linux support has continued to improve with several EPYC/Zen CPU optimizations, ongoing Zen compiler tuning, CPU temperature monitoring support within the k10temp driver, and general improvements to the Linux kernel that have also helped out EPYC. In this article is a comparison of a "2017" Linux software stack as was common last year to the performance now possible if using the bleeding-edge software components. These Linux benchmarks were done with the EPYC 7351P, 7401P, and 7601 processors.

The NVIDIA vs. Open-Source Nouveau Linux Driver Benchmarks For Summer 2018
It has been some months since last delivering any benchmarks of Nouveau, the open-source, community-driven for NVIDIA GPUs. The reason for not having any Nouveau benchmarks recently has largely been due to lack of major progress, at least on the GeForce desktop GPU side, while NVIDIA has continued to contribute on the Tegra side. For those wondering how the current performance is of this driver that started out more than a decade ago via reverse-engineering, here are some benchmarks of the latest open-source Nouveau and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers on Ubuntu.

Radeon Software 18.20 vs. Mesa 18.2 RadeonSI/RADV Linux Driver Performance
Last week AMD released the Radeon Software 18.20 driver "AMDGPU-PRO" with support for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. If you are curious how their closed-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver performance is comparing to the latest Mesa-based open-source driver, here are performance metrics using the latest drivers.
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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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