Phoronix

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...

The HID area of the kernel is always eventful when it comes to improving the input device support for newer hardware. With Linux 5.5 the HID story means a new Logitech driver and other enhancements...

With LibreOffice 6.4 branched ahead of its release next year, feature development is open on what will be the next follow-on release for later in 2020. And this week one big underlying code change was merged... Using Skia for drawing the interface in an effort to ultimately replace the Cairo usage...

Built off yesterday's release of Wine 4.21 is now a new Wine-Staging release that continues shipping over 800 patches on top of upstream Wine for offering an experimental/testing blend that often works out much better for gaming on Linux...

Sent in on Thursday were the platform-drivers-x86 updates targeting the Linux 5.5 kernel...

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the char/misc changes earlier this week and were already merged for Linux 5.5...

The Rust-based "rav1e" AV1 video encoder continues picking up performance optimizations...

Earlier this week as part of his series of pull requests, Greg Kroah-Hartman has submitted the USB subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.5 kernel...

Wine 4.21 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release as the feature freeze approaches for the Wine 5.0 release in early 2020...

Systemd has a present for you with a new release that comes bearing more features for this Linux init system...

The new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X is performing faster on Linux than Microsoft Windows 10. When carrying out more than 80 different tests on Windows 10 compared to five Linux distributions, Windows 10 was beat out by the open-source competition. However, the performance loss for Windows isn't as dramatic as we have seen out of earlier generations of Ryzen Threadripper HEDT workstations. Here are those benchmarks of Windows 10 compared to Ubuntu 19.10, CentOS 8, Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation 31, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

As we've known for a long time, VirtIO-GPU / Virgl Vulkan support to allow accelerated Vulkan within virtual machines is in the works but still has a long road ahead. A number of other VirtIO-GPU features are also in the works or at least planning stages...

When X.Org Server 1.21 finally lands those relying upon XWayland for running various Linux games should find less (or ideally, none at all) stuttering or tearing...

Reported on earlier this month is the decision by Linux kernel developers to disable HPET for Intel Coffee Lake systems. The High Precision Event Timer was being disabled since on some Coffee Lake systems at least this timer skews when entering the PC10 power state and that makes the time-stamp counter unstable...

The Cedrus video decode driver developed by Bootlin after successful crowdfunding for creating an open-source Linux video decoder for Allwinner SoCs now has H.265 support!..

Just a friendly reminder that our Black Friday / US Thanksgiving / Cyber Monday promotion ends on Tuesday. Show your support for Linux hardware benchmarking and daily open-source news coverage...

This week Microsoft released Windows Terminal Preview 0.7 with some groundbreaking features... Well compared to Command Prompt and the existing PowerShell terminal, but capabilities many Linux terminal emulators have offered for years...

While EXT4 is the most common Linux file-system among distributions and is quite mature at this stage, it does continue seeing noteworthy improvements every so often with new kernel releases. With Linux 5.5 there are more notable improvements on deck...

Even with all the light shed on Spectre over the past nearly two years, with the Spectre RSB (Return Stack Buffer) disclosure that did affect IBM POWER processors it turns out the mitigations applied didn't cover all of the CPUs that should have been in place until this week...