Phoronix

Debian's Apt packaging system was tagged today as 1.9.0 experimental and is already in the process of being added to Ubuntu 19.10. Apt 1.9 is working towards the eventual Apt 2.0 release...

NVIDIA announced this morning for ISC 2019 that they are bringing CUDA to Arm beyond their work already for supporting GPU computing with lower-power Tegra SoCs...

With Debian 10 "Buster" due to be releasing in early July, I've begun testing the near-final Buster images on various systems. Here is a look at a common Intel Core i7 system comparing the current performance of Debian 10.0 to the current stable 9.9 release...

The FSGSBASE instruction set has been present on Intel processors going back to Ivy Bridge processors and while there have been Linux kernel patches for this feature going on for years, it looks like with the Linux 5.3 kernel cycle is this support for merging. Making us eager for this support is the prospect of better performance, especially for context switching workloads that already have been suffering as a result of recent CPU mitigations...

Debian's RISC-V support has been coming together but how's the state of affairs for the imminent Debian 10.0 "Buster" release?..

Currently NVIDIA's packaged drivers on Ubuntu can get a bit stale on Ubuntu stable releases since they aren't updated in-step with the latest driver releases. But a new stable release update (SRU) policy/exception similar to the Firefox approach is being made for Ubuntu so that new releases will end up working their way into currently supported Ubuntu series...

Arm's Wilco Dijkstra landed some more optimizations this past week in the Glibc development code for the upcoming GNU C Library 2.30 release...

NetworkManager 1.19.4 is the newest snapshot of this widely used Linux networking library on its road to version 1.20...

With Linux 5.2-rc5 providing no upsets and the release candidate smaller than the one last week, things are looking good for seeing the stable Linux 5.2 kernel release happen in early July...

Details are light up to this point but in fifteen days EndeavourOS will be announced as a new Arch-based Linux distribution aiming to continue where Antergos Linux left off...

Landing this week in the LLVM Clang 9.0 development code-base is the new clang-scan-deps tool for much faster scanning of files for dependencies compared to the traditional pre-processor based approach...

New to the GCC 10 compiler code-base this week is a port for the Texas Instruments Programmable Real-Time Unit (PRU) processor found on various boards, including the likes of the BeagleBone Arm SBCs...

The long-awaited OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 distribution update has set sail this weekend...

Making KDE's Baloo file indexing/searching framework really efficient appears to be a never-ending task. Baloo is already much less bloated recently than it's been hungry for resources in the past and with KDE Frameworks 5.60 will be slightly more fit...

For those wondering how Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux is comparing to the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution, here are a number of benchmarks on the same Intel Core i7 8700K in seeing how these rolling-release distros are competing for summer 2019...

In time for those planning to spend some time this weekend gaming, DXVK lead developer Philip Rebohle announced the release of DXVK 1.2.2 that will hopefully soon be integrated as part of a Proton update for Steam Play but right now can be built from source...

In hoping to catch more bugs quickly, systemd now has continuous fuzzing integration via the new "Fuzzit" platform that provides continuous fuzzing as a service...

Since the release of WSL2 as a Windows 10 Insider Preview update this week, we've been putting the new Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 under some benchmarks compared to WSL1 and bare metal Linux. While WSL2 has improved the I/O performance thanks to the new Hyper-V-based virtualization approach employed by WSL2, the performance has regressed in other areas for running Linux binaries on Windows 10. Here are our preliminary benchmark results.

Last year we looked at the Spectre mitigation cost on POWER9 using the high-end Talos II server while now several kernel releases later and also having the desktop Blackbird system in our lab, here is a look at how the Spectre/Meltdown mitigation impact is for an IBM POWER9 4-core processor running Ubuntu 19.04.