August Has Been A Super Exciting Month So Far For Linux / Open-Source Users
Given everything exciting that's been happening this month, I decided to do a quick recap of the most-viewed news so far on Phoronix this month, in case you've been out enjoying the summer and are behind on your reading.
So far this month on Phoronix there have been 153 original news articles and the 12 most viewed include:
Btrfs RAID 5/6 Code Found To Be Very Unsafe & Will Likely Require A Rewrite
It turns out the RAID5 and RAID6 code for the Btrfs file-system's built-in RAID support is faulty and users should not be making use of it if you care about your data.
Google Working On New "Fuchsia" Operating System, Powered By Magenta / LK Kernel
Google appears to be working on a new operating system that's written from scratch and appears to be target both phones and PCs, among other form factors.
Linux 4.7 - Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. XFS vs. NTFS Benchmarks
Continuing on from yesterday's Linux 4.4 To 4.7 - EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. Btrfs Benchmarks comparison, here is a wider look at mainline file-systems on the Linux 4.7. File-systems tested on the NVMe SSD included Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, XFS, and NTFS.
Secure Boot Isn't So Secure After All: The Golden Key Is Out
So much for Secure Boot being so secure... After a mistake by Microsoft, the "golden key" is now out in the wild.
Systemd Rolls Out Its Own Mount Tool
Systemd-mount is the newest tool added to systemd by Lennart Poettering.
CryENGINE Is Planning To Deliver Its Vulkan Support In About Two Months
The middle of October is when Crytek should be publicly rolling out their Vulkan API support in the CryENGINE.
BioShock Infinite Can Run More Than 23% Faster With New RadeonSI Patches
Marek Olšák at AMD continues optimizing the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for offering much better Linux gaming performance when using this open-source AMD graphics driver code. The latest are double-digit gains for at least the BioShock Infinite game.
The Speed Of Ubuntu 16.10 Currently Versus Ubuntu 16.04, Clear Linux
Being mid-way through Ubuntu 16.10's development cycle, here are some fresh benchmarks showing how its performance has changed (if at all) compared to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS as well as compared to Intel's high-performance Clear Linux distribution as a reference point.
Fedora 25 To Run Wayland By Default
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has decided that Fedora 25 will indeed ship the Wayland display server by default in place of the X.Org Server.
Reboot Mode Driver Added To Linux 4.8 Kernel
The power supply updates for Linux 4.8 adds a "reboot mode" driver to the kernel.
Lumina Desktop 1.0 Released
The PC-BSD/TrueOS developers have announced the release of the Lumina Desktop Environment 1.0.
XFS Reverse-Mapping Proposed For Linux 4.8: Getting Ready For New File-System Features
Last week was the main XFS feature pull for Linux 4.8 while one day before the 4.8 merge window is expected to close, XFS maintainer Dave Chinner is hoping to land a big new feature.
The most popular featured articles include:
18-Way GPU Linux Benchmarks, Including The Radeon RX 460 & RX 470 On Open-Source
Yesterday I published early open-source benchmarks of the Radeon RX 470 while today is a full 18-way graphics card comparison including the newly-launched Radeon RX 460 and Radeon RX 470 graphics cards alongside the RX 480 Polaris graphics card. All of the AMD graphics cards tested for this article were running the very latest open-source driver stack on the Linux 4.8 kernel and Mesa 12.1-dev Git.
Ubuntu 14.04/16.04 vs. Ubuntu Bash On Windows 10 Anniversary Performance
When Microsoft and Canonical brought Bash and Ubuntu's user-space to Windows 10 earlier this year I ran some preliminary benchmarks of Ubuntu on Windows 10 versus a native Ubuntu installation on the same hardware. Now that this "Windows Subsystem for Linux" is part of the recent Windows 10 Anniversary Update, I've carried out some fresh benchmarks of Ubuntu running atop Windows 10 compared to Ubuntu running bare metal.
Linux 4.4 To 4.7 - EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. Btrfs Benchmarks
I've been a bit behind on my file-system benchmarking the past few months but for your viewing pleasure today are some EXT4 vs. Btrfs vs. F2FS file-system tests on an NVMe SSD when testing the Linux 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7 kernels.
Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu + Linux 4.7 + Mesa 12.1 Intel OpenGL Tests
With Microsoft having recently released the Windows 10 Anniversary update I've been running some fresh Windows vs. Linux performance comparisons. The first of these comparisons for your viewing pleasure is looking at the latest Windows 10 build with the latest Intel driver compared to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS while also comparing the performance when manually upgrading to the Linux 4.7 kernel and Mesa 12.1-dev for delivering the latest OpenGL performance potential.
Early Benchmarks Of FreeBSD 11.0 vs. DragonFlyBSD 4.6 vs. Linux Distributions
Following last week's DragonFlyBSD 4.6 benchmarks I carried out a fresh comparison of FreeBSD 10.3 vs. FreeBSD 11.0 (Beta 4 at the time) along with the DragonFlyBSD results and a few of the popular Linux distributions. Here are those numbers.
AMDGPU-PRO Radeon RX 460/470/480 vs. NVIDIA Linux GPU Benchmarks
Last week I published an 18-way GPU Linux comparison featuring the new Radeon RX 460 and RX 470 graphics cards along with other AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs. The Radeon tests were done using the very latest open-source Linux driver stack while in this article are similar benchmarks done but using the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver stack.
The Many Exciting Features To The Linux 4.8 Kernel
Today marks the closure of the Linux 4.8 kernel merge window so as usual here is our recap of all the features we've been monitoring over the past two weeks. Among the highlights for Linux 4.8 are AMD GPU OverDrive overclocking, initial NVIDIA Pascal support, a new ARM Mali display driver, mainline support for the Raspberry Pi 3 BCM SoC, HDMI CEC support, big reworks to Btrfs and XFS file-system code, and a number of new security features, among other changes.
DragonFlyBSD 4.6 vs. Linux Benchmarks
With DragonFlyBSD 4.6 having been released this week, here are benchmarks comparing its performance to that of the previous DragonFlyBSD 4.4 release as well as seeing how it compares to some Linux distributions.
4-Disk Btrfs RAID Benchmarks On Linux 4.7
Going along with the recent Linux 4.7 file-system benchmarks, here are some tests of Btrfs' built-in RAID functionality when tested on the Linux 4.7 kernel across four SATA SSDs.
AMDGPU-PRO vs. Open-Source Gallium3D OpenGL Performance On Polaris Is A Very Tight Race
For those wondering how AMD's hybrid "AMDGPU-PRO" Linux driver stack compares to the latest pure open-source driver stack of the AMDGPU kernel driver and RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, here are side-by-side results for the Radeon RX 460, RX 470, and RX 480 Polaris hardware as well as the R9 Fury (Fiji) graphics card.
What else do you hope will happen before the month ends as further excitement for the Linux/open-source communities? Let us know in the forums.
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