Phoronix

The Blender 2.81 release cycle has entered its "bcon2" development phase of development with the focus shifting to bug fixing and stabilizing new features with now being past the initial window of merging in the big ticket items...

As was anticipated, PostgreSQL 12.0 is now officially available...

If you are a user of AMD Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" graphics and don't mind riding Mesa Git, the latest 19.3-devel code as of yesterday has several more GFX10 fixes/improvements...

Flatpak 1.5 is the newest pre-release for this Linux app sandboxing and distribution tech...

The lossy ASTC texture compression algorithm has been widely adopted in recent years with it being official extensions to both OpenGL and OpenGL ES. While it may not be as messy as the S3TC patent situation of the past, it turns out Arm's license on Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression actually is quite restrictive outside of the context of Khronos' APIs...

While initially queued as a work-in-progress feature for Linux 5.5, AMD has now submitted a batch of "fixes" to the current Linux 5.4 cycle that include enabling of the LRU bulk moves performance-boosting functionality...

Igalia is working on supporting OpenGL ES' GLSL marking of variables as "mediump" when the precision involving those variables can be lowered to half-float 16-bit registers. That in turn can help with performance when honoring that precision marking, which to date Mesa has ignored...

One of the contributions Google is working on for the upstream Linux kernel is a new "sanitizer". Over the years Google has worked on AddressSanitizer for finding memory corruption bugs, UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer for undefined behavior within code, and other sanitizers. The Linux kernel has been exposed to this as well as other open-source projects while their newest sanitizer is KCSAN and focused as a Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer...

Here is our recap of the most popular content on Phoronix for Q3. This is also the first time any one vendor has nearly dominated the charts thanks to multiple successful product launches and growing embrace for Linux/open-source...

The Linux kernel will begin doing a basic sanity check of x86_64 CPUs with the RdRand instruction to see if it's at least returning "random looking" data otherwise warn the user at boot time. This stems from a recent issue where AMD's RdRand behavior with some hardware (particularly, buggy motherboards) could have borked RdRand issues...

Samba 4.11 was just released a few weeks back with big scalability improvements, but looking ahead to Samba 4.12 will be some big performance improvements for those leveraging encryption...

Given the recent AMD "ABBA" Ryzen 3000 boost fix, the upcoming release of Ubuntu 19.10 powered by Linux 5.3, here is a fresh round of AMD Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Intel Core i9 9900K benchmarks in a side-by-side matchup . It's just not any comparison but our largest i9-9900K vs. 3900X comparison ever: 112 gaming benchmarks and 321 system/CPU benchmarks carried out for our most extensive look yet at how these ~$500 CPUs are competing in this fierce race.

Tomorrow is when PostgreSQL 12.0 should meet the world for this popular open-source SQL database server...

Details have emerged on Intel's forthcoming Core i9 10900 X-Series processors...

At last month's GNU Tools Cauldron was an update on the Radeon GCN back-end state for the GCC compiler, which is likely to see more code land around year's end...

One of the benefits of upgrading to Ubuntu Server 19.10 this month is for a newer version of PHP7 providing new features and better performance. While that took close to one year to land PHP 7.3 in Ubuntu 19.10, it looks like next spring's Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will be pulling in PHP 7.4 that is shipping later this year...

While there hasn't been too much to write on it in recent weeks, the Panfrost Gallium3D driver within Mesa for Arm Midgard/Bifrost graphics continues chugging along. The latest work on it is switching over to a new scheduler for Midgard...

The Steam Linux marketshare measurement for September ticked up slightly and to the highest point we have seen in a a number of months...

Last week we began our belated NVIDIA GeForce RTX SUPER benchmarking by looking at the RTX 2060 / 2070 / 2080 SUPER Linux gaming performance in a 26-way graphics card comparison. For those more interested in the RTX SUPER graphics cards for their OpenCL compute performance potential, these benchmarks today are for you.

While announced some months ago, today in-step with the OSPray 2.0 Alpha ray-tracing release is the inaugural development release of the Open Volume Kernel Library (OpenVKL)...