Jetson TX1, One Second Linux & Other Open-Source Jollies From This Month
This month on Phoronix there were 31 featured articles/reviews (just over one per day!) and 270 original news articles written by your's truly! There was a lot of interesting information this month from the Linux 4.4 merge window to readying up Mesa 11.1 and more. Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 was also delivered this month as the latest version of our open-source benchmarking software.
Before getting to the recap of the most popular content on Phoronix this month, there's a reminder that today is the last day for taking advantage of the Black Friday Phoronix Premium deal! You can get a year's worth of ad-free, multi page articles on a single page viewing, and more for just $25 USD, compared to the normal $35+ price. The funds go to support the site and ensure more interesting content in the future. While this deal is officially running just through the end of the day before the price goes back up for Phoronix Premium, if you read this news post late (and due to time zone differences) and still follow through with the sign-up process mentioned in the aforelinked articles, I will still honor the price for the next day or two! From the bottom of my heart and easing the situation for this ~100 hour per week devotion, thanks for your support over the past 11+ years and those who have taken advantage of this sale to subscribe.
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The most popular news on Phoronix this month was:
Booting Linux In Just One Second
One of the most interesting presentations from this year's Embedded Linux Conference Europe was how-to boot Linux in under one second!
Jolla Lays Off "A Big Part" Of Its Personnel, Goes For Debt Restructuring
Months after Jolla announced its split and intent to focus on Sailfish OS licensing, its financial situation has not improved. Jolla's latest financing round has been delayed and so they've had to file for debt restructuring in Finland. As part of that, they are temporarily laying off "a big part" of its personnel.
Report: Feminists Trying To Frame Open-Source Leaders For Harassment
According to well-known open-source contributor Eric S Raymond, various "feminists" are trying to frame Linus Trovalds for sexual harassment.
Microsoft Open-Sources Visual Studio Code
It's already been a surprising year with Microsoft's many open-source/Linux-related announcements and 2015 isn't even over yet! There's another interesting announcement today.
Firefox Enables FFmpeg Support By Default
For those with FFmpeg present on their system, Mozilla developers have finally enabled FFmpeg support to be used by default.
Btrfs In Linux 4.4 Has Many Improvements/Fixes
Chris Mason sent in the pull request today for updating the Btrfs file-system for Linux 4.4.
Developer Claims: "A New, Fast & Unbreakable Encryption Algorithm"
An unheard of independent developer has proclaimed designing a new, fast, and unbreakable encryption algorithm. While he admits to not being a mathematician or cryptoanalyst, he's wanting to get this encryption algorithm in the mainline Linux kernel and distributions.
AMDGPU PowerPlay Is Working Great So Far; Here's An Ubuntu PowerPlay Kernel
With AMD having published PowerPlay support for AMDGPU I've been busy today running tests on this new power management code that finally allows Tonga and Fiji GPUs to operate at their full-speed when using the open-source Linux graphics driver.
The Best $90 Spent For My Home-Made Server Room
Earlier today I wrote about how reusing the heat from the 60+ system Linux benchmarking server room can heat a home in the winter. The free heat is nice, but it came with a bit of noise; however, thanks to purchasing one product for less than $100 USD the noise level has been significantly reduced.
Wireshark 2.0 Released, UI Rewritten In Qt5
Wireshark, the well known open-source network packet analyzer, has finally reached version 2.0!
The most popular featured articles were:
Everything You Need To Know About The NVIDIA Jetson TX1 Performance
While last week we were able to write about the NVIDIA Jetson TX1 development board, at that time we weren't able to share any benchmarks or hands-on experience with this ARM board powered by NVIDIA's Tegra X1 SoC. The embargo on that has now expired and as such this morning there are a lot of benchmarks to share with you. There are many benchmarks looking at different areas of the Jetson TX1 including power consumption and thermal. For kicks I've also done some comparisons against the Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 as well as other ARM hardware like the now defunct Calxeda ARM server and Raspberry Pi 2.
NVIDIA JTX1: Finally An Exciting 64-bit ARM Board!
NVIDIA's embargo has just expired on the Jetson TX1: a 64-bit ARM development board that's worth getting excited about for Linux enthusiasts, those wishing to build their own ARM-powered devices, or just wanting a powerful ARM Linux desktop. The Jetson TX1 powered by the Tegra X1 is shaping up to be a splendid device; NVIDIA is even comparing the performance of the JTX1 to that of an Intel Core i7 6700K in certain tasks.
Intel Skylake Graphics: Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance
As it's been a while since my last Windows vs. Linux graphics comparison and haven't yet done such a comparison for Intel's latest-generation Skylake HD Graphics, the past few days I was running Windows 10 Pro x64 versus Ubuntu 15.10 graphics benchmarks with a Core i5 6600K sporting HD Graphics 530.
Antergos, Manjaro, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora & OpenSUSE Performance Showdown
With Ubuntu 15.10, Fedora 23, and openSUSE 42.1 Leap all having been released in the past week, for your open-source benchmarking pleasure today is a comparison of these Linux distributions along with some other modern Linux distributions: Antergos 2015.10-Rolling, Debian 8.2, CentOS 7, and Manjaro 15.11.
NVIDIA OpenGL: Windows 10 Pro vs. Ubuntu Linux Benchmarks
Published yesterday was a test of Intel Skylake graphics on Ubuntu 15.10 vs. Windows 10 with a focus on the OpenGL performance. In today's article is a similar cross-operating-system comparison but this time being featured are three NVIDIA graphics cards to see how the latest NVIDIA drivers are running.
A Look At The New Features Of The Linux 4.4 Kernel
If all goes according to plan, the Linux 4.4 kernel merge window will end today with the release of the 4.4-rc1 kernel. As all of the major subsystem updates have already landed for Linux 4.4, here's my usual look at the highlights for this kernel cycle.
DRI2 vs. DRI3 Radeon Linux OpenGL Performance
Following the recent Phoronix article about the state of DRI3 for X.Org drivers, many in the forums began discussing DRI3. While the Intel and Radeon X.Org drivers don't yet enable Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 by default, I decided to run some fresh OpenGL benchmarks with a few Radeon graphics cards to compare the performance of DRI2 and DRI3.
AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition Is A Letdown On Linux
While leaked slides indicate AMD was planning better gaming on Linux for Crimson, in the end they really didn't deliver. Even for their mentioned games, when testing various Linux OpenGL games on three different systems the performance was largely unchanged.
Intel Pentium G4400: Benchmarking A ~$60 Skylake Processor
The Pentium G4400 is currently the cheapest available Skylake socketed processor with a retail price of under $70 USD. Curious about the performance for this dual-core Skylake CPU, I decided to buy one for some Linux benchmarking at Phoronix for looking at the dual-core Skylake performance and the HD Graphics 510 capabilities.
AMD Tonga & Fiji Open-Source Performance Boosted By PowerPlay Patches
Yesterday AMD finally posted power management support for the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver when it comes to supported discrete graphics cards like Tonga and Fiji. I've been testing these PowerPlay Linux patches since yesterday to great success. In this article are results from a Radeon R9 285 and Radeon R9 Fury when testing these kernel patches along with the latest Mesa 11.1-devel Git drivers.
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