Phoronix

GNOME Shell and Mutter today saw their v3.33.92 releases as their second and final release candidates ahead of next week's GNOME 3.34 stable release. While usually things are very quiet at this stage, there have been some prominent last minute performance fixes...

The current AMD EPYC 7742 2P benchmarking that is happening at Phoronix is an interesting Linux/BSD operating system performance comparison. That's in the works while so far are some Ubuntu and Clear Linux numbers. Yes, Intel's open-source Clear Linux platform does run fine generally on AMD hardware -- including the new AMD "Rome" processors -- and generally does still run damn fast. Here is a look at Clear Linux on this 128 core / 256 thread server with Clear Linux against Ubuntu 19.04 as well as the upcoming Ubuntu 19.10.

As we approach the end of Q3, Purism has been quiet whether they will make their revised target of shipping the Librem 5 Linux smartphone this quarter after passing their original plan to ship at the start of 2019. Well, Purism has just published an update and they will begin shipping the phones in batches beginning at the end of the month but the quality isn't yet up to scratch...

Intel announced at IFA 2019 in Berlin that their Core i9 9900KS processor will be releasing next month...

Given the recent talk about the Schedutil CPU frequency scaling governor and its future along with CPU frequency scaling behavior in general on AMD Zen 2 processors, here are some benchmarks of the Ryzen 9 3900X when tested with the different Linux "CPUFreq" governor options.

While most games/engines and software in general are moving from OpenGL to Vulkan, NVIDIA is still investing in their OpenGL driver stack and even adding new multi-GPU/SLI functionality to their driver and as part of that introducing new extensions...

While not officially released yet, support for the ASpeed AST2600 is coming to the Linux 5.4 kernel...

Not included as part of our original EPYC 7742 / EPYC 7002 "Rome" Linux benchmarks was the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) developed by NASA. While an MPI testing favorite, there were build issues with the older version of NPB packaged by the Phoronix Test Suite. But with recently having updated that test profile against the latest NPB upstream, here are some results for the EPYC 7742 2P, EPYC 7601 2P, and dual Xeon Platinum 8280 benchmark results. Separately, there's also results now for NeatBench 5 with this video editing plug-in test case now part of the Phoronix Test Suite...

Red Hat's David Airlie has been refocusing efforts recently on improving the state of the LLVMpipe driver that implements OpenGL / OpenGL ES on top of CPUs using LLVM. In the past few weeks he's been wiring up more GL4 / GLES 3.1 extensions and this morning the latest achievement is supporting OpenGL compute shaders!..

The Schedutil CPU frequency scaling governor has been around for a few years and has gotten better over time but in our own tests we still find it frequently not being as competitive to the "performance" governor and others. However, in the future Schedutil might become the default and perhaps only governor...

Next year's GNU Compiler Collection 10 (GCC 10) compiler release is doing away with support for IBM's Cell Broadband Engine SPU support...

While atomic mode-setting has been around for several years now and to provide a modern mode-setting interface that can test modes prior to the actual operation and reduce possible flickering during mode-setting events and also being faster, the common xf86-video-modesetting driver has at least temporarily disabled the support by default...

Following the recent hype of Intel's Windows graphics driver introducing integer mode scaling support, their open-source Linux graphics driver is receiving similar treatment with nearest-neighbor integer scaling support...

Go 1.13 was released today as Google's latest update to their language and run-time/toolchain...

Google has officially released Android 10 today, what formerly was known as "Android Q" during development...

As expected after Intel provided Thunderbolt 3 to the USB Promoter Group royalty-free earlier this year, the USB 4.0 "USB4" specification was published today and indeed based on the Thunderbolt protocol specification...

Continuing on from last week's testing that found the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X + ASUS CROSSHAIR VIII HERO WiFi consuming more power on Linux compared to Windows 10, here are some additional metrics after spending a good deal of time over the weekend on further tests...

There has been a lot of talk recently of AMD Ryzen 3000 series processors reportedly not hitting their boost clock frequencies, whether stock coolers are adequate for hitting the boost frequencies, and other concerns around the boost behavior on these new Zen 2 processors. AMD issued a statement today they are rolling out a new BIOS/firmware update to help with boost clock frequency optimizations...

Adding to the growing list of features for Linux 5.4 with its cycle officially kicking off in mid-September is a kernel scheduler optimization designed to improve load balancing on AMD EPYC servers...

Oreboot has been in development for a number of months now and while at first may have sounded like a novelty downstream of Coreboot is now proving its usefulness and taking shape...