Linux (en)

• Project Trident Reaches Beta For Its ZFS-Based Void Linux Powered OS (Phoronix)
  Making rounds in Q4 of last year was the little known Project Trident open-source operating system switching from its TrueOS/FreeBSD base to in turn moving to Void Linux as a base for their platform. Towards the end of the year they offered some initial images of their reborn OS while now Project Trident based on Void Linux has reached beta...
• Jolla Making Plans For Sailfish OS In 2020 (Phoronix)
  Jolla has been working on Sailfish OS for nearly a decade now and for 2020 they are planning more improvements to their Linux-based smartphone OS as well as working to push Sailfish into new markets...
• KDE Devs Fix Several Wayland Bugs, Annoying KWin Issues Plus Easier To Toggle Night Color (Phoronix)
  KDE developers fixed a number of Wayland and KWin bugs this week along with a number of other annoying bugs as well as making several other noteworthy refinements to the growing KDE ecosystem...
• AMDGPU VRAM Improvements Could Help DiRT Rally, Dying Light (Phoronix)
  A patch series posted on Friday could help games suffering from visible video memory pressure when using the AMDGPU DRM driver...
• Marvell Is Plumbing Octeon TX2 Support Into The GCC Compiler (Phoronix)
  Marvell has been preparing the Octeon TX2 processor support for the GCC compiler, their next-generation version of the (originally Cavium) infrastructure/network processors now based on their ThunderX2 line...

• Mesa 12.0.4 Being Prepped For Ubuntu 16.10/16.04 (Phoronix)
  Ubuntu is preparing Mesa 12.0.4 for Ubuntu Xenial and Yakkety users. It's not as great as Mesa 13, but at least there are some important fixes back-ported...
• The Massive Linux Benchmarking Setup Is Chugging Along (Phoronix)
  It's going on one month now that our massive new server/benchmarking Linux and open-source benchmarking farm has been operational. So far things are going great and continuing to churn out a lot of performance data for the very latest Git code of the Linux kernel, Mesa, LLVM/Clang, and other projects on a daily basis...
• More HDR Display Bits On The Way For The Linux 5.3 Kernel (Phoronix)
  For years there have been open-source developers working on plumbing support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays into the Linux desktop stack and it looks like the Direct Rendering Manager driver support is slowly but surely getting there...
• AMD/GPUOpen Compressonator 2.7 Brings Linux Builds, glTF 2.0 Support (Phoronix)
  AMD's GPUOpen team has announced the release of Compressonator 2.7, the newest version of their tools for dealing with compressed assets and for testing the impact of different compression techniques...
• F2FS For Linux 4.15 Brings Some Enhancements, Changes For Android (Phoronix)
  The F2FS file-system changes have been submitted for the Linux 4.15 kernel merge window...

• Benchmarking VirtIO Performance Within DigitalOcean's Cloud (Phoronix)
  How does toggling VirtIO affect the performance of virtual machines / droplets within DigitalOcean's public cloud? Here's some benchmarks...
• Benchmarks Of LLVM Clang 6.0 Through Clang 10.0 Compilers (Phoronix)
  At the end of 2019 I ran some GCC 5 through GCC 10 compiler benchmarks while here are the similar tests conducted on the LLVM side for seeing how the Clang C/C++ compiler performance has evolved over the past few years...
• LLVM Picks Up 3DNow! Improvements In 2017 (Phoronix)
  As a flashback to the past, hitting the LLVM Git/SVN code today were improvements for those still running with processors supporting AMD's 3DNow! extensions...
• Etnaviv DRM Updates Submitted For Linux 4.10 (Phoronix)
  Etnaviv is the latest DRM driver having its code ready for DRM-Next to in turn land for Linux 4.10...
• Project Darling Is Still Trying To Run macOS/OSX Software On Linux (Phoronix)
  Back in 2012 I wrote about Project Darling as an effort to run Mac OS X software on Linux -- to Wine is for Windows software on Linux, Darling is for Mac software on Linux. Work on Darling seems to have picked up recently after a brief hiatus...

• SteamOS: Desktop vs. Big Picture Mode Benchmarks (Phoronix)
  Curious if running Linux games via Steam's Big Picture Mode causes a performance impact over a conventional desktop session? Here's some benchmarks...
• Btrfs RAID5/RAID6 Support Finally Get Fixed (Phoronix)
  Over the summer we wrote about Btrfs RAID 5/6 code was found to be unsafe and likely would need a rewrite. Months later, patches have finally emerged to fix the faulty Btrfs RAID 5/6 code...
• Catalyst 15.9 Is Imminent With Many Steam Linux Game Fixes (Phoronix)
  A long overdue Catalyst Linux update should be out soon, in fact, potentially before the day is through...
• Modularizing GCC Gets Discussed, Again (Phoronix)
  There's yet another conversation taking place within the GCC camp about modularizing the GNU Compiler Collection...
• MSI DS502 USB Gaming Headset Works On Linux (Phoronix)
  When buying the MSI X299 SLI PLUS for our initial X299 + Intel Core X Series Linux benchmarking from NewEgg it came with the MSI DS502 Gaming Headset as a free gift. Curiosity got the best of me today, and it actually works just fine under Linux...

• EXT4 & Btrfs Regressions In Linux 2.6.36 (Phoronix)
  Recently when benchmarking the Btrfs and EXT4 file-systems we were left surprised that the performance of the next-generation Btrfs file-system had regressed against EXT4 to the point where the evolutionary file-system is measurably faster in a greater number of disk benchmarks. In fact, even with solid-state drives and Btrfs offering an SSD optimized mode, it still conceded to EXT4. It turns out that in the Linux 2.6.35 kernel, Btrfs regressed. This regression should have been fixed with the Linux 2.6.36 kernel, but recently when benchmarking EXT4/Btrfs against ZFS-FUSE on a 2.6.36 development snapshot we found its performance to still be poor for Btrfs compared to EXT4. To confirm where these two most prominent Linux file-systems are at right now, we have new EXT4 and Btrfs performance results from the Linux 2.6.34, 2.6.35, and 2.6.36-rc3 kernels.

  
  

  
• The Kubuntu Focus KDE Linux Laptop Arrives (Phoronix)
  Soft-announced earlier this week was the Kubuntu Focus as a high-end Linux laptop pre-loaded with the KDE flavor of Ubuntu. The Kubuntu Focus produced in cooperation with Mindshare Management, Kubuntu itself, and German manufacturer Tuxedo Computers will officially launch in January and begin shipping shortly thereafter while a review sample arrived in our lab today...
• GNOME 3.17.1 Released (Phoronix)
  Javier Jardón announced the official release of GNOME 3.17.1 on Sunday, the development milestone leading up to GNOME 3.18...
• Antergos: An Easy, Quick Way To Try Out Arch Linux (Phoronix)
  I decided to give Antergos a whirl to see how this Arch Linux variant works. For those pressed for time or looking at an easy path for setting up an Arch Linux installation, Antergos seems to get the job done well.
• Microsoft's Linux / Open-Source Actions Of 2017 (Phoronix)
  It's been another interesting year of Microsoft open-source/Linux announcements...

• The Size Of The Different Open-Source Linux DRM/Mesa Graphics Drivers (Phoronix)
  As there's been some discussion lately about the "size" of the different open-source Linux graphics drivers, here are some fresh looks at the rough code size of each of the main DRM/KMS kernel drivers as well as the Mesa/Gallium3D user-space drivers...
• GCC To Begin Implementing MMX Intrinsics With SSE Instructions (Phoronix)
  While current-generation Intel/AMD CPUs are still supporting the MMX SIMD instruction set from two decades ago, a set of GCC compiler patches are pending to begin implementing MMX intrinsics using SSE instructions...
• Steam's December Numbers Point To A Lower Linux Marketshare But With More Oddities (Phoronix)
  I refrained from writing about Valve's Steam Survey numbers at the start of January when they were posted for December as the numbers didn't seem up to scratch. But half-way through the month now, the same numbers are up with no edits by Valve, as we've seen in some months when they refine their measurements...
• Linux 5.5-rc6 Released With Some Notable Radeon Graphics Fixes Plus Other Random Work (Phoronix)
  Linus Torvalds has just issued Linux 5.5-rc6 as the latest test release ahead of the stable Linux 5.5 kernel due out in a few weeks...
• GFX-RS Continues Advancing For High-Performance, Portable Graphics In Rust (Phoronix)
  GFX-RS has been the Rust programming language project for a high-performance, portable graphics API that can map to Vulkan, Apple's Metal, Direct3D, etc from a single Rust API...