Phoronix

Going back to the start of December with the Linux 5.5 merge window we have encountered several significant performance regressions. Over the weeks since we've reproduced the behavior on both Intel and AMD systems along with large and small CPUs. Following some holiday weekend bisecting fun, here is the cause at least partially for the Linux 5.5 slowdowns.

Linus Torvalds just released the fourth weekly release candidate of Linux 5.5 following a fairly light week due to the Christmas holidays...

With the recently launched Threadripper 3960X / 3970X processors there was a workaround needed to boot them on Linux until an AMD MCE driver issue was resolved. That patch was upstreamed last week into the Linux 5.5 development kernel while now is getting ready to make its debut into supported Linux stable release branches...

Last week were some benchmarks showing LLVM Clang hitting ~96% the performance of GCC using Intel Ice Lake while now for the recently released Zen2-based AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X we are seeing results where overall LLVM Clang is now at performance parity to GCC.

While open-source software development activity was light this week due to the Christmas holiday, some new features still landed this week for KDE...

The 2010s saw the release of Wayland 1.0, Ubuntu's Mir initially being a "competitor" to now embracing Wayland, desktop environments like GNOME and KDE now having good support for it as an alternative to X11, and other functionality continues to be added to Wayland compositors and its standard protocols...

Last week I posted benchmarks looking at seven years of Ubuntu Linux performance in re-testing the releases of Ubuntu 13.04 through Ubuntu 19.10 stable and even the latest Ubuntu 20.04 LTS daily development image. A question that came up was how much better that performance would have been without any CPU vulnerability mitigations in place for Ubuntu 20.04... Well, here's that answer...

Libre RISC-V, the project aiming to create an open-source accelerator that would run a Vulkan software renderer in being an "open-source GPU" aiming for just 25 FPS @ 720p or 5~6 GFLOPS, has managed to secure 300k EUR in grants for their work...

With the Wraith Prism heatsink fan included with many modern AMD Ryzen processors there is configurable RGB lighting, which unfortunately AMD hadn't publicly documented or offered a Linux utility for manipulating the RGBs under Linux. Fortunately, there is now a straight-forward solution for dealing with those Wraith Prism RGB LEDs thanks to the open-source and independent CM-RGB project...

With our various ending-2019 and end-of-2010s articles, the standout on the Linux performance front has certainly been Intel's Clear Linux in consistently delivering the leading Linux x86_64 performance throughout all of our testing on many different tests and hardware platforms. Here's a look back at some of the Clear Linux highlights...

Back in November was the first of several KDE Frameworks 6 developer sprints as plans begin to formulate for this evolutionary frameworks upgrade due out not until well after the Qt 6.0 tool-kit release. While Qt6 itself is still in flux, KDE Frameworks 6 efforts continue moving along by focusing on porting code away from deprecated KF5 functionality...

Here's a look back at the most popular news over the past decade on X.Org out of our one thousand plus articles on the topic during the 2010s. Even with Wayland taking off in recent years and effectively reaching parity to the X.Org Server for common use-cases, the X.Org Server has continued seeing new development especially in the areas of GLAMOR and XWayland. Sadly though we're ending the 2010s without a major stable release of the xorg-server since May 2018...

Going back a number of years has been various out-of-tree front-ends for GCC toying with the ability to compile Rust code with GCC while a new discussion has started up about the prospects of theoretically mainlining one of those efforts or otherwise developing a new GCC Rust front-end...

For server administrators with extra downtime around the holidays, phpMyAdmin 5.0.0 is now available for this widely-used web interface for administering MySQL/MariaDB databases...

Recently a Phoronix reader inquired about seeing some fresh hard drive RAID benchmarks on the current kernel release and using Btrfs / EXT4 / XFS. While we don't often look at HDD RAID performance these days compared to speedier SSD testing, since the reader was a generous Phoronix Premium member I was happy to oblige to his test request. Here is a look at the Linux 5.4 HDD RAID performance per his request with Btrfs, EXT4, and XFS while using consumer HDDs and an AMD Ryzen APU setup that could work out for a NAS type low-power system for anyone else that may be interested.

For the Linux 5.5 kernel that's about half-way through its development phase we have been pointing out some rather significant performance regressions affecting both AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon servers but there are also regressions to be found with desktop class systems too...

Last month I wrote about AMD working on TEE driver support to load "trusted applications" onto the AMD Secure Processor under Linux. That work is now queued for introduction with Linux 5.6 and wired through for Raven Ridge APUs...

Based on Wine 5.0-RC3 released yesterday is now Wine-Staging 5.0-RC3 with its 800+ patches on top and it comes with two new additions this week...

MPV, the open-source cross-platform media player derived from MPlayer/mplayer2 long ago, is out with a new feature release before closing out 2019...

With all but the very first Google Chromebook devices running Coreboot in place of traditional proprietary BIOS, this has been a big win for Coreboot during the 2010s but there has also been notable offshoots like LinuxBoot and Libreboot...