Phoronix

While originally Intel planned to transition their OpenGL driver default to the modern "Iris" Gallium3D driver rather than the longstanding "i965" DRI driver for Mesa 19.3, that was pushed back to Mesa 20.0 for introduction in Q1'2020. In aiming to make that revised milestone a reality, a new option has been added to Mesa 20.0 with the Meson build system for being able to indicate the Intel OpenGL driver preference...

While there has been the Libre RISC-V community-driven effort to create a RISC-V graphics processor that basically amounts to a RISC-V core with vector extensions/improvements and running a Vulkan software implementation (though they are now reportedly eyeing POWER instead of RISC-V), Think Silicon has announced the first actual RISC-V ISA based 3D graphics processor...

For those of you interested in AMD's new Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X processors with TRX40 motherboards for running FreeBSD, the experience in our initial testing has been surprisingly pleasant. In fact, it works out-of-the-box which one could argue is better than the current Linux support that needs the MCE workaround for booting. Here are some benchmarks of FreeBSD 12.1 on the Threadripper 3970X compared to Linux and Windows for this new HEDT platform.

NetBSD 9.0 is around the corner and finally presenting 64-bit Arm (AArch64) support as well as other long overdue hardware support like Intel Kabylake graphics...

While there is the KDE Frameworks that offers a wonderful set of complementary extensions/add-ons to the Qt5 tool-kit, for those looking for more Qt5 extensions, The Qt Company has launched "The Qt Marketplace" as a source for both free and paid extensions...

With the Linux 5.4 cycle we saw mainline support beginning to come together for some Qualcomm ARM Linux laptops while with Linux 5.5 another milestone is being achieved. There has been out-of-tree support in the works for getting the various consumer Snapdragon laptops working with Linux while those changes are slowly getting into the mainline kernel...

With the IOMMU updates for the Linux 5.5 kernel there is a major rework to the AMD IOMMU driver to make use of more common DMA IOMMU code for implementing the DMA API but with an admitted risk of potential new regressions...

With approaching another year closer to the Year 2038 problem, where on 19 January 2038 the number of seconds for the Unix timestamp can no longer be stored in a signed 32-bit integer, Linux 5.5 is bringing more Y2038 preparations...

With the start of a new month always comes the excitement of seeing what Valve's Steam Survey is pointing at for gaming trends as to the percentage of Linux gamers...

While there still is a week to go in the Linux 5.5 merge window with more feature code still landing, due to scheduler changes and other work already having landed, I already started running some Git benchmarks. Linux 5.5 at this stage appears quite volatile with some really nice improvements in some workloads but also regressions in others...

A month ago at the Open-Source Summit Europe 2019 in Lyon, France, Intel's Kelly Hammond who serves as the company's Senior Director of System Platform Software talked up their open-source contributions with a particular emphasis on performance. The video from that keynote was recently published for those curious about Intel's open-source work in the name of performance, including Clear Linux...

It's not often there are features to report on with regard to GNU Debugger (GDB) performance, but a new feature in place is multi-threaded symbol loading...

The Linux 5.5 block changes landed earlier this week with a wide variety of driver and core improvements. There are some I/O optimizations to make the pull exciting as well as the NVMe HWMON drive temperature reporting integration...

It seems like the feature would have been wired up long ago, but with the Linux 5.5 kernel guest virtual machines running on Microsoft Hyper-V should be able to successfully hibernate...

There is an exciting improvement to the GTK client side decoration handling ahead of the KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS release due out in February...

It's been nearly a decade now that we have been tracking Genode as an interesting open-source operating system framework...

Looking back on November there was the exciting release of new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X processors, Intel Core i9 10980XE Cascadelake-X also released, various new CPU vulnerabilities were disclosed, Linux gaming performance continued getting better with Mesa, the Linux 5.4 got buttoned up and released with its many new features, and other open-source milestones achieved. And there's a new Phoronix worker in-training...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) improvements were sent in earlier this week for the Linux 5.5 kernel and they appear to be busier than usual on the x86 (Intel / AMD) side for the open-source virtualization stack...

When the Raspberry Pi 4 launched earlier this year it was quickly realized active cooling was almost required if wanting to run the quad-core Cortex-A72 SoC at full performance without thermal throttling. Fortunately, the latest Raspberry Pi 4 firmware has improved the thermal/power behavior to lessen the need for extra cooling although it's still recommended for achieving peak performance potential out of this popular low-cost ARM SBC...

With the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X benchmarks on Windows 10 and Linux, Ubuntu 19.10 and other common distributions were just ~2% faster than the Microsoft OS and Clear Linux was just ~10% faster, based on 80+ benchmarks carried out. Those margins are much closer than we have seen with past iterations of Threadripper, but is that due to the Zen 2 microarchitecture and the improved topology of the new Threadripper CPUs or due to Microsoft's scheduler changes and other software improvements made in Windows 10 November 2019 Update? Here are some benchmarks...