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Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 48 min ago

Picolibc 1.1 Released With POSIX File I/O Support

Fri, 11/15/2019 - 20:21
Longtime X11 developer Keith Packard has spent a lot of time in recent months while being employed by SiFive working on Picolibc as a new C library for embedded systems...

Canonical Finally Discovers "--no-install-recommends" Is Worthwhile For Docker

Fri, 11/15/2019 - 20:15
Debian's APT package manager has supported the --no-install-recommends for years so only the main dependencies are installed and not the "recommended" packages. Seemingly it's taken Canonical until now to figure out how practical that option is for reducing the size of their Docker containers...

Oracle Linux 8 Update 1 Announced With Udica, Optane DCPM Support

Fri, 11/15/2019 - 19:56
Fresh off the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 at the beginning of November, Oracle is now shipping Oracle Linux 8 Update 1 as their spin of RHEL 8.1 with various changes on top -- including their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" option...

PHP 7.4 Aims For Release In Two Weeks With FFI, Performance Improvements

Fri, 11/15/2019 - 05:19
The sixth and final release candidate of PHP 7.4 is now available with it being on track for the general availability release before month's end...

Zombieload V2 TAA Performance Impact Benchmarks On Cascade Lake

Thu, 11/14/2019 - 21:28
While this week we have posted a number of benchmarks on the JCC Erratum and its CPU microcode workaround that introduces new possible performance hits, also being announced this week as part of Intel's security disclosures was "Zombieload Variant Two" as the TSX Async Abort vulnerability that received same-day Linux kernel mitigations. I've been benchmarking the TAA mitigations to the Linux kernel since the moment they hit the public Git tree and here are those initial benchmark results on an Intel Cascade Lake server.

Darktable 3.0 RC1 Released With Greater Undo/Redo Support, More SSE Optimizations

Thu, 11/14/2019 - 20:29
Darktable 3.0 is coming soon as the next major release for this open-source RAW photography workflow software...

GCC 7.5 Released With 215+ Bug Fixes As The Last Update To GCC7

Thu, 11/14/2019 - 20:17
For those still on the GCC 7 series, GCC 7.5 was released this morning as the final point release to this compiler series with that branch that saw its original release in 2017 now closed...

Intel's Assembler Changes For JCC Erratum Are Not Hurting AMD

Thu, 11/14/2019 - 17:23
When writing about the Intel Jump Conditional Code (JCC) Erratum and how Intel is working to mitigate the performance hit of the CPU microcode update with patches to the GNU Assembler, there was some concern expressed by readers that it might hurt AMD performance. That does not appear to be the case...

NVIDIA 435.27.06 Vulkan Linux Driver Has Useful Display Improvements

Thu, 11/14/2019 - 13:54
Released on Wednesday was the NVIDIA 435.27.06 Linux driver as their newest beta build focused on offering better Vulkan driver support...

Mesa 19.2.4 Released As Emergency Update After 19.2.3 Broke All OpenGL Drivers

Thu, 11/14/2019 - 13:04
Mesa 19.2.4 was released on Wednesday as an "emergency release" after a bug was discovered that made last week's Mesa 19.2.3 version buggy for all OpenGL drivers...

CodeWeavers Is Hiring Another Graphics Developer To Help With Wine D3D / Steam Play

Thu, 11/14/2019 - 04:35
CodeWeavers is looking to hire another developer to work on Wine's graphics stack and in particular the WineD3D code while having an emphasis that it's part of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) efforts...

The Firefox + Chrome Web Browser Performance Impact From Intel's JCC Erratum Microcode Update

Thu, 11/14/2019 - 04:19
With yesterday's overview and benchmarks of Intel's Jump Conditional Code Erratum one of the areas where the performance impact of the updated CPU microcode exceeding Intel's 0~4% guidance was on the web browser performance. Now with more time having passed, here are more web browser benchmarks on both Chrome and Firefox while comparing the new CPU microcode release for the JCC Erratum compared to the previous release. Simply moving to this new CPU microcode does represent a significant hit to the web browser performance.

LibreOffice 6.4 Branched - Beta Release Underway With QR Code Generator, Threading Improvements

Thu, 11/14/2019 - 02:57
As of this morning LibreOffice 6.4 was branched from master and the beta release tagged with those LO 6.4 Beta binaries expected out shortly...

Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 19.Q4 for Linux Released

Thu, 11/14/2019 - 00:50
AMD on Tuesday released their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 19.Q4 for Linux package as their newest quarterly driver release intended for their professional graphics card offerings...

Khronos Next Pursuing An Analytic Rendering API

Wed, 11/13/2019 - 23:34
The Khronos Group has been expanding into a lot of new areas in recent times from OpenXR to 3D Commerce to NNEF and now forming an exploratory group for creating an analytic rendering API...

Phoronix Test Suite 9.2 Milestone 2 Released

Wed, 11/13/2019 - 21:12
The second development release of Phoronix Test Suite 9.2-Hurdal is now available for open-source, cross-platform and fully-automated benchmarking...

The Linux Kernel Disabling HPET For Intel Coffee Lake

Wed, 11/13/2019 - 20:46
Another Intel change being sent off for Linux 5.4 and to be back-ported to current stable series is disabling of HPET for Coffee Lake systems...

AMD GCN OpenMP/OpenACC Offloading Patches For The GCC 10 Compiler

Wed, 11/13/2019 - 16:48
Over the past year Code Sourcery / Mentor Graphics has been working extensively on the new AMD Radeon "GCN" back-end for the GCC code compiler. With the code that is found in GCC 9 and up to now in GCC 10 hasn't supported OpenMP/OpenACC parallel programming interfaces but that could soon change with patches under review...

GNU Assembler Patches Sent Out For Optimizing The Intel Jump Conditional Code Erratum

Wed, 11/13/2019 - 15:40
Now that Intel lifted its embargo on the "Jump Conditional Code" erratum affecting Skylake through Cascade Lake processors, while Intel's own Clear Linux was first to carry these patches they have now been sent out on the Binutils mailing list for trying to get the JCC optimization patches into the upstream Binutils/GAS code-base...

VirtualBox SF Driver Ejected From The Linux 5.4 Kernel

Wed, 11/13/2019 - 13:06
Merged to the mainline Linux kernel last week was a driver providing VirtualBox guest shared folder support with the driver up to now being out-of-tree but important for sharing files between the host and guest VM(s). While the driver was part of Linux 5.4-rc7, Linus Torvalds decided to delete this driver on Tuesday...

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