Forum Spam/Filtering Redesign; 300+ Linux News/Articles/Reviews For November

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 1 December 2016 at 08:03 AM EST. 24 Comments
PHORONIX
Just a few notes to get December kicked off on Phoronix, including good news for Phoronix Forums participants.

First up, the most common complaint in the forums should finally be addressed... What should be much better spam filtering. The previous plugin configuration yielded far too many false positives, resulting in long-time user posts often going into the moderation queue while other times legitimate forum spam getting through. I've overhauled the configuration to dramatically reduce the likelihood of false positives. While to combat the ever-growing forum spam epidemic, all new users with less than five posts will automatically go into the moderation queue while I try my best to frequently empty it out during my long workdays. Hopefully this should balance things out to nearly eliminate the likelihood of frequent contributors facing moderation.

With the holiday season in full swing, this PSA is also a great time to remind those who aren't already members to consider joining Phoronix Premium to have access to our ad-free site, view multi-page articles on a single page, and much more. The few dollars per month it costs to join are re-invested into Phoronix for allowing the purchasing of more hardware, offsetting my operating costs, working more on the Phoronix Test Suite, etc. Thanks for considering showing your support this holiday season by joining premium, making a PayPal tip, and/or using our Amazon.com and NewEgg.com when making your holiday purchases. It's going to be a fun month ahead, especially with some forthcoming Linux driver news... ;)

Onto the usual monthly recap... For November on Phoronix there were 283 original news articles and 21 featured multi-page articles/reviews. As usual, there's around 10 original articles on Phoronix per day, regardless of weekends or even holidays as was the case last week in the US. Just another reason to join Phoronix for enjoying new original content coming out 365 days per year! Of those 304 original content last month, all but one of them were written by your's truly (thanks to EricG for his post about the GTX 1060!).

The most popular news on Phoronix in November included:

Intel Vulkan Linux Driver Lands Color Compression Support For Skylake
It's been another busy day in Mesa Git for Intel's "ANV" Vulkan open-source Linux driver.

Fedora 25 Is Quite Possibly My Most Favorite Release Yet
Fedora 25 is nearly complete and this afternoon we should hear whether it will be formally released next week or will be pushed back one week due to lingering blocker bugs. Nevertheless, I've been carrying out more tests on Fedora 25 on multiple test systems in recent days and have been very pleased with this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution release.

HTTP-SS: "A New Faster Internet Protocol"
A German company is promising a new protocol dubbed "HTTP-SS" that "should be able to double Internet speed, decrease data volume almost by 90% and get rid of the other general issues" compared to HTTP/HTTPS, at least that's what they claim.

Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver Gets ~30% Performance Boost, Now Faster Than OpenGL
With our past Intel Vulkan benchmarks the Vulkan driver was slower than the mature OpenGL driver but this is about to change with an important patch-set published today: a big performance boost is in store.

Fedora 25 Officially Released & I Highly Recommend It
Fedora 25 was officially christened this morning.

Intel's Recent Noteworthy Vulkan Patches Hit Mainline Mesa
It's been a busy week for Intel's open-source developers working on their Vulkan "ANV" Linux driver with a number of the recent patch series having been merged a short time ago into mainline Mesa Git.

LLVM 4.0 Causes Slow Performance For RadeonSI?
Several times in the past few weeks I've heard Phoronix readers claim the LLVM 4.0 SVN code causes "slow performance" or has rendering issues. Yet it's gone on for weeks and I haven't seen such myself, so I decided to run some definitive tests at least for the OpenGL games most relevant to our benchmarking here.

Fedora 25 Cleared For Release Next Week
Today's Go/No-Go meeting for Fedora 25 turned out much better than last week and has been cleared for release.

Project Darling Is Still Trying To Run macOS/OSX Software On Linux
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.

GNOME Lands Mainline NVIDIA Wayland Support Using EGLStreams
While waiting for a new API that can succeed GBM and is agreed upon by both NVIDIA and the open-source community, GNOME developers have gone ahead and merged support for using EGLStreams into their Mutter compositor so that the current proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver will work with GNOME on Wayland.

And the most popular featured articles:

Intel Kaby Lake Linux Testing With MSI's Cubi 2 Mini PC
Kaby Lake mobile processors began shipping last month and while we've seen a number of laptop designs using these processors that succeed Skylake, so far the Intel NUCs haven't surfaced nor many other SFF PCs making use of the next-generation hardware. That changed last week with MSI's Cubi 2 powered by Kaby Lake CPUs beginning to ship. I've been testing an MSI Cubi 2 with Core i5 Kaby Lake processor under Ubuntu Linux and so far the experience has been pleasant. In this article are our first Kaby Lake Linux benchmarks.

GCC 6.2 vs. Clang 3.9 Compiler Performance On Clear Linux With Intel Kaby Lake
For the latest benchmarking off MSI's Cubi 2 with Core i5 Kaby Lake CPU are some GCC and LLVM Clang compiler benchmarks on Intel's Clear Linux distribution.

AMDGPU-PRO vs. NVIDIA On Linux With OpenGL & Vulkan
With Croteam recently having released an updated Talos Principle with better Vulkan performance and the NVIDIA 375.20 and AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 both having come out recently, here is a fresh OpenGL and Vulkan graphics API performance comparison when using Valve's Dota 2 and The Talos Principle, both of which games on Linux offer both graphics API renderers.

OpenSUSE Leap 42.1 vs. Leap 42.2 vs. Tumbleweed Benchmarks
For those curious how openSUSE Leap 42.2, which was released last week, compares performance-wise to Leap 42.1 and the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed, here are some benchmarks today for your viewing pleasure. Also included with this openSUSE performance comparison was Intel's Clear Linux distribution as an independent metric of a distribution that's generally among the fastest thanks to the aggressive optimizations by default.

Docker Benchmarks: Ubuntu, Clear Linux, CentOS, Debian & Alpine
The latest target of our Linux benchmarking at Phoronix are running various performance benchmarks under different Docker operating system images. The images used for benchmarking were the latest of Ubuntu, Clear Linux, CentOS, Debian, and Alpine while comparing the benchmark results to running on the bare metal host.

Editorial: Using NVIDIA On Linux For The First Time In 10 Years
Anyone who read any number of my reviews from a few years ago, when I interned here at Phoronix, should know that I have been a fan of AMD and their open source efforts for a very long time. I remember the years of trying to get Catalyst to work under Arch or Fedora, usually only to have it blow up in my face. I remember the struggle holding back kernel and X server updates, hoping that none of those updates contained security fixes that were pertinent to me.

AMDGPU+RadeonSI With Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, One Week Later
Last week marked the highly anticipated release of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for Linux. At launch it only offered official support for NVIDIA GPUs on Linux with the AMD support being less than stellar. While the open-source Linux graphics driver Git code is quick to move along and adapt for new games, a new Phoronix Premium member requested some tests for seeing how the latest code is now working for this demanding AAA Linux game ported by Feral Interactive.

RadeonSI Benchmarks On Budgie, GNOME Shell, KDE Plasma 5, LXDE, MATE, Unity, Xfce
Last month when Ubuntu 16.10 was released I ran some desktop gaming benchmarks with Intel Skylake graphics under Unity, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, KDE, Openbox, and MATE. Following that article a few Phoronix Premium readers requested similar tests be done under the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver stack, so here are those numbers.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided NVIDIA Linux Benchmarks - 13-Way GPU Comparison
Just a few months after the Windows release of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, the Linux port to OpenGL carried out by Feral Interactive was released this morning. Here are many different GPU benchmarks of Deus Ex: Mankind Divded if you are wondering whether or not your system will perform well with this game under Linux, given that the requirements are stiffer than the Windows build. For this launch-day comparison are thirteen NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards tested. The AMD Radeon cards were left to rest this time around since the current open-source Mesa stack struggles currently for this game and is not officially supported yet by Feral.

Intel Kaby Lake HD Graphics 620 OpenGL/Vulkan Performance On Linux
Now having my initial Intel Kaby Lake Core i5-7200U MSI Cubi 2 benchmarks with Ubuntu 16.10 out of the way, this second article is focusing upon the HD Graphics 620 Kaby Lake performance with this latest stable Ubuntu release as well as when trying out Linux 4.9 and Mesa 13.1-dev.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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