Ryzen, Linux Laptops, Ethereum, & Graphics Drivers Marked Phoronix's 13th Birthday
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The most popular featured articles on Phoronix this month included:
51 GPUs Tested, From The Radeon HD 2900XT To RX 580 & R9 Fury: Testing The 2017 Linux Driver Stack
It's that time of the year where we see how the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack is working on past and present hardware in a large GPU comparison with various OpenGL games and workloads. This year we go from the new Radeon RX 580 all the way back to the Radeon HD 2900XT, looking at how the mature Radeon DRM kernel driver and R600 Gallium3D driver is working for aging ATI/AMD graphics hardware. In total there were 51 graphics cards tested for this comparison of Radeon cards as well as NVIDIA GeForce hardware for reference.
Radeon's Open-Source Linux GPU Driver Has Nearly Caught Up With Windows' Driver
Over the past few months we have seen some incredible progress made to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as well as AMDGPU (and the RADV Vulkan driver, though not the focus of today's article) as well as the Mesa 3D stack as a whole. The open-source Radeon Linux driver is much faster now than where it was last year and is becoming competitive with NVIDIA's Linux driver performance. For seeing how close the AMDGPU+RadeonSI stack is now to Windows, here are some fresh benchmarks.
Vulkan vs. OpenGL On Linux With Core i5, Core i7, Ryzen 7
For those curious about the state of the Radeon Vulkan (RADV) vs. OpenGL (RadeonSI) performance with different Intel and AMD CPUs, here are some fresh benchmark results with the current Vulkan-supported prominent Linux game titles of Dota 2, Mad Max, Talos Principle, and Dawn of War III. During this opportunity for the tests across Core i5 / Core i7 / Ryzen 7 hardware were also CPU usage analytics.
15-Way NVIDIA/AMD OpenCL GPU Linux Benchmarks Of Ethereum Ethminer
With the Ethereum cryptocurrency generating lots of buzz recently due to its rising valuation and being excellent for mining on GPUs, here are some Ubuntu Linux benchmarks when testing many different GeForce and Radeon graphics cards with the Ethminer OpenCL support, including performance-per-dollar and performance-per-Watt metrics.
Linux 4.12 Ubuntu Benchmarks With AMD Ryzen, Intel Kabylake - 12 Systems
While waiting for my motherboards to arrive for the new Core i7 7740X and Core i9 7900X, I've been re-testing many of my AMD/Intel boxes with Ubuntu 17.04 on the latest Linux 4.12 kernel for comparison to Intel's new high-end processors. Here is a look at 12 of the existing systems when running on the Linux 4.12 kernel as well as all of the systems have the latest BIOSes, etc.
Debian 6.0 Through Debian 9.0 Benchmarks
Continuing in our benchmarks of Debian 9, here is a comparison when re-testing 6.0.10 "Squeeze", Debian 7.11 "Wheezy", Debian 8.8 "Jessie", and the newly-released Debian 9.0 "Stretch".
Windows 10 vs. Linux OpenGL Performance On Kabylake - Summer 2017
With last week having posted some fresh macOS Sierra vs. Linux OpenGL benchmarks, here are some more interesting tests to compare the Intel OpenGL driver on Windows 10 Pro x64 to the open-source Intel OpenGL driver used by Linux. Linux beating macOS wasn't too much surprise considering that Apple has been neglecting OpenGL for years, but the Linux vs. Windows OpenGL comparison is a much tougher battle.
18-Way NVIDIA/AMD Linux Performance For Dawn Of War III
Today marks the highly anticipated debut of Dawn of War III for Linux (and macOS) ported by Feral Interactive. Here are a number of OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards running Ubuntu Linux with this game.
12-Way RadeonSI OpenGL Comparison vs. NVIDIA On Ubuntu Linux
After posting a number of NVIDIA GPU Linux benchmarks this week using their latest drivers, here is similar treatment on the Radeon side using their newest open-source driver code.
Intel OpenGL Performance On macOS 10.12 vs. Clear Linux, Ubuntu
In addition to having some fresh Radeon Linux vs. Windows GPU driver numbers as an added bonus as we celebrate Phoronix's 13th birthday this week are some fresh macOS vs. Linux OpenGL performance figures.
While the most popular news included:
Some Ryzen Linux Users Are Facing Issues With Heavy Compilation Loads
I haven't encountered this issue myself on any of my Ryzen Linux boxes, but it seems there are a number of Ryzen Linux users who are facing segmentation faults and sometimes crashes when running concurrent compilation loads on these Zen CPUs.
Google Is Exploring Potentially Using Btrfs In Android
Google is looking at potentially supporting Btrfs on Android devices.
2017 Linux Laptop Survey
It has been a few years since last running any Linux hardware surveys on Phoronix, as overall the ecosystem has rather matured nicely while of course there are still notable improvements to be had in the areas of GPUs and laptops. (Additionally, OpenBenchmarking.org provides a plethora of analytic capabilities when not seeking to collect subjective data / opinions.) But now we are hosting the 2017 Linux Laptop Survey to hopefully further improvements in this area.
Mozilla Firefox 54 Now Available
Additional web browser news this week is Mozilla's launch today of Firefox 54.
AMD Begins Cutting Prices On Ryzen CPUs
If you have been waiting to pick up an AMD Ryzen CPU until the prices drop, they are beginning to do so.
Debian Warns Of Hyper Threading Issue With Intel Sky/Kaby Lake CPUs
The Debian project is warning Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake users to disable Hyper Threading (HT) on their CPUs due to a possible issue affecting those with out-of-date microcode.
LZ4m: Taking LZ4 Compression To The Next Level
While LZ4 can be very fast with its compression and decompression speeds, there's a new kid on the block that appears to be even faster: LZ4m.
Firefox 55 Beta Prepping Numerous Changes
With Firefox 54 having shipped this week, Firefox 55 is now in beta.
Ubuntu 17.10 Begins Transition To GNOME Shell Desktop By Default
Those downloading the very latest Ubuntu desktop ISO of 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" for testing will find that it now boots to the GNOME Shell desktop and also provides an option for running GNOME on Wayland.
Lennart Poettering Announces New Project: casync
Following his work on PulseAudio, Avahi, and systemd, Lennart Poettering has a new project to announce: casync.
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