Phoronix

Last month I posted benchmarks looking at the Windows 10 vs. Linux OpenGL and Vulkan graphics performance for the Ice Lake "Gen11" graphics. But for those wondering about the CPU/system performance between Windows and Linux for the Core i7-1065G7 with the Dell XPS 7390, here are those benchmarks as we compare the latest Windows 10 to Ubuntu 19.10 and Intel's own Clear Linux platform.

Longtime Linux game developer Timothee Besset has outlined the support introduced by Valve this week in their latest Steam Linux client beta for supporting Linux namespaces / containers. This experimental functionality may in the end provide better support for 32-bit compatibility as more Linux distributions focus solely on x86_64 packages, reducing some of the fragmentation/library conflicts between some Linux distributions and Steam, and other headaches currently plaguing the Steam Linux space...

While Linux 5.4 is rolling out in about two weeks, the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system has just been updated for Linux 5.3 support...

Over the past year and a half the VKMS Linux DRM driver has come together as the "virtual kernel mode-setting" implementation for headless systems and other environments not backed by a physical display. Interestingly being tacked on their TODO list now is VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) support. Separately, the prominent VKMS developer is now employed by AMD...

Pardon for the rather slow pace of new Phoronix content over the past week (in particular, the lack of big benchmark articles) due to my wife giving birth early and being in the hospital for a few days, but the remainder of November is set to be quite exciting on the Linux/open-source performance front. Here is some of what else is on tap for November...

Taking place 4 and 5 November in San Francisco was the OpenZFS Developer Summit. This two-day open-source ZFS developer summit made possible by Intel, Delphix, Datto, and OSNexus had a lot of interesting presentations from the state of ZFS TRIM/Discard to debugging topics...

The Thunderbolt changes have been merged to char-misc ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 merge window...

The first alpha release of the forthcoming OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 is now available for testing with this Clang-built Linux distribution that originates back to the days of Mandrake...

It's been another busy week in KDE land with developers working through the massive code-bases comprising the KDE desktop environment on a variety of features and fixes...

Besides X-Plane being one of the most realistic PC-based flight simulators, this flight simulator from Laminar Research has long supported Linux. Out this weekend is X-Plane 11.40 as the latest update and the last major release before they roll-out their long-awaited Vulkan graphics API support...

With Ubuntu 19.10 bringing some CPU/system performance changes compared to earlier Ubuntu releases as a result of compiler/toolchain upgrades, the newer kernel, and more, here is a quick weekend look at how the Ubuntu 19.10 performance compares across ten different AMD Ryzen and Intel Core systems...

As an alternative to PulseAudio's existing RTP implementation, a new GStreamer-based Real-Time Transport Protocol has been introduced...

Taking place this past week in San Francisco was the annual OpenZFS Developer Summit. As usual, Matthew Ahrens as the co-founder of Sun ZFS and current OpenZFS contributor at Delphix talked about the state of the open-source ZFS efforts in his keynote...

Among other EXT4 file-system changes en route for the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel is a new direct I/O read implementation...

Coming out Friday night was a series to address a "critical" scheduler issue with the Linux kernel...

While the Linux 5.4 cycle is quickly winding down and with DRM-Next's cut-off crossing, AMD has sent in a last minute batch of changes it's targeting for the upcoming Linux 5.5 merge window...

Intel's HMEM DAX driver is being added to Linux 5.5 for use-cases like their Optane DC Persistent Memory...

Rav1e has been in development for more than one year now as the "safest and fastest AV1 encoder" thanks to being written in Rust while now their first official release is available...

Radeon Software for Linux 19.30 has been the driver release branch since July for the AMD Linux packaged driver stack. That 19.30 driver was introduced with the AMD Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" support while now a slightly updated stack was released...

Valve earlier today pushed out Proton 4.11-8 as the newest update to their Wine-based software powering Steam Play for handling Windows games on Linux...