Linux 4.16, Ubuntu 18.04 & Raspberry Pi 3 B+ Have Been Definitely Exciting
Below is a look at the most popular content on Phoronix for March 2018. This month all of the content was written by your's truly. If you appreciate all of the content on Phoronix that continues to be produced every single day -- with the last day-long break being more than five years ago now, consider showing your support by ensuring that no ad-blocker is enabled when viewing this site otherwise by subscribing to Phoronix Premium to enjoy ad-free viewing and multi-page articles on a single page, among other benefits. PayPal tips are also happily appreciated for allowing this daily and extensive benchmarking to continue with my ~100 hour work weeks between this and Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org development.
When it comes to the most popular Linux/open-source news on Phoronix for March it comes down to:
Linux 4.17 Will Be Another Exciting Kernel Cycle
While the Linux 4.16 kernel release is still three weeks or so away, the Linux 4.17 kernel is already shaping up to be another exciting cycle.
PostgreSQL Begins Landing LLVM JIT Support For Faster Performance
The widely-used PostgreSQL database software may soon become much faster thanks to a work-in-progress LLVM JIT back-end that has begun to land.
AOMedia Announces Public Release Of AV1 Video Format
Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, NVIDIA, and others making up the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) have today announced the public draft release of the AV1 royalty-free video format!
LG Announces webOS Open-Source Edition
What was Palm webOS nearly a decade ago is seeing its latest incarnation as LG webOS Open-Source Edition.
GNOME 3.28 Is Being Released This Next Week With Many Features & Improvements
Assuming no last minute snafu, the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment will see its official release happen on 14 March, incorporating the past six months worth of improvements to this open-source desktop stack.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Enters Its Feature Freeze
The Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" is now under its feature freeze. This marks the period now by which Ubuntu developers should be focusing on bug fixes rather than new features.
Checking Out Ubuntu 18.04's Minimal Desktop Install Option
Besides the Ubuntu 18.04 minimal spin that is around to 30MB compressed, the Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" installer recently added an option for a "minimal installation" from the desktop Live DVD/USB environment. Here's a look at what that means for desktop users.
Benchmarks Of Russia's "Baikal" MIPS-Based Processors, Running Debian Linux
A few years back was the news of Russia wanting to get into the CPU business and at the time were aiming for ARM-based processors but ended up settling for MIPS. It turns out those "Baikal" processors are still around and being worked on as indicated by some fresh benchmarks this week.
AMD Posts Open-Source Driver Patches For Vega 12
It's been a while since last hearing anything about the rumored "Vega 12" GPU but coming out this morning are a set of 42 patches providing support for this unreleased GPU within the mainline Linux kernel.
Linux 4.17 To Enable AMDGPU DC By Default For All Supported GPUs
Since the introduction of the AMDGPU DC display code (formerly known as DAL) in Linux 4.15, this modern display stack has just been enabled by default for newer Radeon Vega and Raven Ridge devices. With Linux 4.17 that is changing with AMDGPU DC being enabled by default across the board for supported GPUs.
And for the featured articles/reviews:
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ Benchmarks
Last week on Pi Day marked the release of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ with a slightly higher clocked Cortex-A53 processors, dual-band 802.11ac WiFi, faster Ethernet, and other minor enhancements over its predecessor. I've been spending the past few days putting the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ through its paces the past few days with an array of benchmarks while comparing the performance to other ARM SBCs as well as a few lower-end Intel x86 systems too. Here is all you need to know about the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ performance.
Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux With Radeon / GeForce GPUs On The Latest 2018 Drivers
Given how fiercely the latest open-source AMD Linux driver code is running now up against NVIDIA's long-standing flagship Linux GPU driver, you might be curious how well that driver stacks up against the Radeon Software driver on Windows? Well, you are in luck as here are some fresh benchmarks of the Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 as well as the GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 1080 Ti while being tested both under Microsoft Windows 10 Pro x64 and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS while using the latest AMD/NVIDIA drivers on each platform.
Radeon GPUs Are Increasingly Competing With NVIDIA GPUs On Latest RadeonSI/RADV Drivers
As it's been a few weeks since last delivering a modest Linux GPU comparison and given the continuously evolving state of the Linux kernel Git tree as well as the Mesa project that houses the RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers, here are our latest benchmarks showing the current state of the AMD Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver performance relative to NVIDIA's long-standing and high-performance but proprietary driver using several different graphics cards.
A Look At Ubuntu 10.04 To Ubuntu 18.04 Linux Performance
With the Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" release fast approaching and it being the latest Long-Term Support release, the latest benchmarking at Phoronix has been looking at how the Ubuntu LTS performance has evolved going as far back as the Ubuntu 10.04.0 LTS "Lucid Lynx" release. On three systems where supported Ubuntu 10.04 / 12.04 / 14.04 / 16.04 / 18.04 were tested each time.
Ubuntu 18.04 Versus Six Other Linux Distributions On AMD EPYC
With Ubuntu 18.04 LTS set to be released next month and its final package configuration quickly falling into place, we have begun firing up some benchmarks for seeing how this Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" release is comparing to various other Linux distributions. Up first as part of this series of benchmarks is using an AMD EPYC workstation/server for seeing how the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS performance compares to six other Linux distributions.
Windows 10 Pro vs. Five Linux Distributions In Various Benchmarks
Here are our latest Windows 10 versus Linux benchmarks for the week. This benchmarking dance is looking at the Windows performance compared to Ubuntu, Clear Linux, Fedora, Antergos, and Solus Linux in various workloads. Among the tests this time around were looking at the performance with Go, Java, Perl, Python, FFmpeg, and more.
A Look At The Relative Spectre/Meltdown Mitigation Costs On Windows vs. Linux
The latest in our Windows versus Linux benchmarking is looking at the relative performance impact on both Linux and Windows of their Spectre and Meltdown mitigation techniques. This round of tests were done on Windows 10 Pro, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and Clear Linux when having an up-to-date system on each OS where there is Spectre/Meltdown protection and then repeating the same benchmarks after reverting/disabling the security functionality.
CompuLab Fitlet 2 Is A Mighty Fine, Low-Power PC Preloaded With Linux Mint
Over the past decade we have looked at many interesting PCs from CompuLab, a vendor capable of delivering Linux-friendly PCs that are originally designed and often catered to meet demanding industrial requirements. The latest Linux PC we have been putting through its paces the past several weeks has been the Fitlet2, which CompuLab describes as being designed "from the ground-up to minimize size and maximize capabilities, durability and thermal performance." After running our plethora of benchmarks on this mini Linux PC, we can say with confidence they have succeeded in their mission.
An Early Look At The Linux 4.16 Kernel Performance With AMD EPYC
A few days back I provided some fresh Linux 4.16 kernel benchmarks compared to recent stable kernel releases while also toggling the KPTI and Retpoline security features on Linux 4.16 Git for seeing the impact of the Spectre and Meltdown mitigation techniques on this latest kernel while using Intel Xeon hardware. For this latest round of tests is a similar comparison while using an AMD EPYC system.
LLVM Clang 6.0 vs. 5.0 Compiler Performance On Intel/AMD Linux
Since last week's big release of LLVM 6.0 along with Clang 6.0, I have been carrying out some fresh compiler benchmarks of the previous Clang 5.0 to this new stable release that switches to C++14 by default, among many other changes to LLVM itself and this C/C++ compiler front-end.
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