LLVM Quitter, Ryzen & Git Were Most Popular Linux News So Far This Year
For the first six months of the year on Phoronix there have been 1,847 original news articles and 150 featured articles (benchmarks) and Linux hardware reviews / performance comparisons. That is continuing the trend I have been maintaining for years of around 10 original pieces of new FLOSS/Linux content each and every day of the year.
As a quick reminder before getting to the H1'2018 highlights, if you enjoy all of the content on Phoronix consider showing your support by joining Phoronix Premium. Premium gets you access to the ad-free version of the site, multi-page articles shown on a single page, priority feedback/requests to me, and other benefits. Or tips are also much appreciated or also through Liberapay.
Of the 1,800+ original news articles on Phoronix this year so far, the most popular include:
One Of LLVM's Top Contributors Quits Development Over CoC, Outreach Program
Rafael Avila de Espindola is the fifth most active contributor to LLVM with more than 4,300 commits since 2006, but now he has decided to part ways with the project.
Sony Is Working On AMD Ryzen LLVM Compiler Improvements - Possibly For The PlayStation 5
One of Sony's compiler experts has taken to working on some tuning for the AMD Ryzen "znver1" microarchitecture support within the LLVM compiler stack. This begs the question why Sony is working on Ryzen improvements if not for a future product.
Git Issues Batch Of New Releases To Fix Security Issues
Git 2.13.7, 2.14.4, 2.15.2, 2.16.4, and 2.17.1 were all released today in order to fix two new CVE security disclosures.
Jade: New Linux Desktop Built On Python, HTML5 & JavaScript
The Jade Desktop Environment is a new effort at delivering another Linux desktop option.
Systemd Introduces "Portable Services" Functionality, Similar To Containers
The past several months Lennart Poettering has been working on a "portable services" concept and that big ticket new feature has now landed in Systemd. Portable services are akin to containers but different.
The Shiny New Features Of X.Org Server 1.20
With the release of the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.20 finally being imminent, here is a look at the many features that were merged over the past year and a half for this long drawn out release process. While more of the Linux desktop continues moving towards Wayland, X.Org Server continues evolving as shown by the 1.20 release and as part of that is also plenty on the XWayland side.
AMD Zen CPU Microcode Added To Linux-Firmware Tree, Bulldozer Updated
Ensuring your CPU microcode is kept up-to-date for Zen processors is now a little bit easier with the microcode files being added to the linux-firmware.git collection.
Git Has A New Wire Protocol Yielding Much Greater Performance
The Git Protocol Version 2 was announced today by Google as a major update to the distributed revision control system's wire protocol. Git protocol version 2 is much more efficient and yields significant performance benefits.
Firefox Developers Still Hesitant About Using EGL Over GLX On X11 Linux
While Wayland support depends upon EGL and there has been EGL support within Mesa and the other graphics drivers on Linux for a number of years now, Firefox developers are still hesitant about shipping EGL support by default for Firefox on X11.
Purism's FSP Reverse Engineering Effort Might Be Stalled
Purism has been working on reverse-engineering the Intel Firmware Support Package (FSP) module but it looks like that work may have taken a turn.
And the most viewed featured Phoronix articles for H1'2018:
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS vs. Fedora 28 vs. Clear Linux Benchmarks
Given last week's release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and then Fedora 28 having debuted earlier this week, I decided to see how these popular tier-one Linux distributions now compare to Intel's own Clear Linux platform. This three-way Linux distribution comparison was carried out on six systems comprising both of Intel and AMD CPUs.
Ubuntu 16.04 vs. 18.04 Performance On Six Systems
Continuing on with our benchmarking of the recently released Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, here are some reference benchmarks on a total of six systems with AMD and Intel hardware while looking to see how the out-of-the-box performance compares to the previous Long Term Support release, Ubuntu 16.04.
Raven Ridge With The Ryzen 5 2400G On Mesa 18.2 + Linux 4.17 Is Finally Stable
Depending upon the motherboard and other factors, the Raven Ridge Linux support has been a bit of a mess since its February launch. Fortunately, with time various Linux driver fixes have landed for improving the stability and performance of these APUs with Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics. During my recent testing of the AMD Ryzen 5 2400G, it was completely stable and running fine with the newest open-source driver code but the Ryzen 3 2200G was still a stability nightmare.
AMD Ryzen 5 2600 / Ryzen 7 2700 Benchmarks On Linux, 9-Way Ubuntu CPU Comparison
Last month we delivered launch-day Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 7 2700X for these new "Zen+" processors while recently we received the non-X Ryzen 5 2600 and Ryzen 7 2700 processors for Linux testing as well. In this article are benchmarks of these new AMD Ryzen processors as well as other Intel/AMD CPUs for delivering a fresh nine-way Linux distribution comparison using the very latest software components.
Radeon Software 18.10 vs. Mesa 18.2 RADV/RadeonSI Benchmarks
Last week AMD released Radeon Software 18.10 as their latest official Linux driver release for what previously was referred to as "AMDGPU-PRO" while now also offers the "All-Open" driver option too. For our latest Linux GPU benchmarking is a look at how Radeon Software 18.10 with its closed-source OpenGL/Vulkan driver builds compare to that of the RadeonSI and RADV open-source drivers when testing from the Mesa 18.2-devel state.
KDE vs. GNOME, X.Org vs. Wayland Radeon Linux Gaming Performance With Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
For those wondering how the Radeon Linux gaming performance is changed between desktop environments when testing Ubuntu 18.04 LTS out-of-the-box, here are some benchmarks. Not only is it looking at the performance between GNOME Shell 3.28.1 and KDE Plasma 5.12.4, but it's also comparing each desktop environment with its X.Org and Wayland session support. Additionally, these tests were done with both AMD Radeon Polaris and Vega graphics cards.
Linux 4.17 I/O Scheduler Tests On An NVMe SSD Yield Surprising Results
With the Linux 4.17 kernel soon to be released, I've been running some fresh file-system and I/O scheduler tests -- among other benchmarks -- of this late stage kernel code. For your viewing pleasure today are tests of a high performance Intel Optane 900p NVMe SSD with different I/O scheduler options available with Linux 4.17.
RADV vs. AMDGPU-PRO vs. AMDVLK Vulkan Linux Driver Performance
While last week I published some initial Radeon Software 18.10 vs. Mesa benchmarks there was interest by some premium supporters in seeing a three-way comparison of Mesa RADV versus AMDGPU-PRO / Radeon Software 18.10 PRO components vs. the official open-source AMDVLK driver. Here are those results using both Polaris and Vega graphics cards.
15-Way Linux Distribution / Operating System Comparison, Including Windows 10 & WSL
As part of the large Linux performance tests we have begun and continuing through June with Phoronix celebrating its 14th birthday next week along with the 10th anniversary of the Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 release, for your viewing pleasure today is a 15-way Linux distribution / operating system comparison testing not only the leading and latest Linux distributions but also Windows 10 April 2018 Update and Linux on Windows WSL.
12-Way Linux Graphics Card Comparison Using The Newest May 2018 Drivers
Here is a look at twelve different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards while testing was done using the newest available graphics drivers and using an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS installation.
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