AMD EPYC, Linux 4.14, Librem 5, RX Vega & The Other Linux Highlights Of September
Of the 310 original pieces on Phoronix in September '17, below is a look at the most viewed stories in case you are behind in your Phoronix reading. And for the usual PSA, if you enjoy reading all of this content on Phoronix seven days a week, 365 days per year, please consider showing your support by subscribing to Phoronix Premium, making a PayPal tip, or at the very least to please not view this website with any ad-blocker. You can also follow our content via Facebook and Twitter. Thanks for your support over the past 13 years.
The most popular news on Phoronix last month included:
Oracle Layoffs Hit Longtime Solaris Developers Hard
It looks like the Oracle layoffs just before the US Labor Day indeed hit the SPARC and Solaris groups hard.
Mozilla Firefox Finally Fixes An Awkward, 11 Year Old Linux Bug
It's taken more than a decade, but after enough user complaints, there is finally a patch queued for Firefox 57 to fix an arguably annoying default behavior of Firefox on Linux/Unix systems.
Nouveau Developers Remain Blocked By NVIDIA From Advancing Open-Source Driver
Longtime Nouveau contributors Martin Peres and Karol Herbst presented at this week's XDC2017 X.Org conference at the Googleplex in Mountain View. It was a quick talk as they didn't have a whole lot to report on due to their open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver efforts largely being restricted by NVIDIA Corp.
AGESA 1.0.0.6b Might Fix The Ryzen Linux Performance Marginality Problem
Motherboard vendors have begun pushing out BIOS updates for Ryzen motherboards using the AMD AGESA 1.0.0.6b revision and it's reported that it does resolve the "Performance Marginality Problem" affecting early Ryzen Linux customers.
Google's Fuchsia OS Magenta Becomes Zircon
For those looking to follow the development of Google's Fuchsia operating system that is written from scratch, it's low-level Magenta core has been renamed to Zircon.
Linux 4.14 Dropping In-Tree Firmware
Linux 4.14 is getting rid of its in-kernel firmware/ tree.
Linux 4.14 Gets A Driver For PWM-Controlled Vibrators
Dmitry Torokhov has sent in a second helping of input updates for the Linux 4.14 merge window that is closing this weekend.
Librem 5 Smartphone Now Plans To Ship With KDE Plasma
There's a big shift in course for Purism's proposed Librem 5 smartphone, what was originally proposed as a GNU/Linux smartphone running GNOME and HTML5 Web Apps will now be working on KDE Plasma Mobile support.
macOS' APFS File-System Performing Much Better Than The Dated HFS+
I'm currently running some macOS 10.13 vs. Linux benchmarks for publishing within the next day or two on Phoronix. But so far in my macOS 10.12 Sierra vs. macOS 10.13 High Sierra benchmarks, what has stood out the most is the file-system performance due to HFS+ file-systems automatically being converted to the Apple File-System (APFS).
IPv10 Draft Specification Published
It has been about one year since last hearing anything about the Internet Protocol v10 (IPv10) proposal while this week it's now available in draft form.
And the most viewed articles included:
Initial Benchmarks Of The AMD EPYC 7601 On Ubuntu Linux
Last week we received the AMD EPYC 7601 32 core / 64 thread processor for testing at Phoronix with the Tyan Transport SX TN70A-B8026 2U server. Since then I've had the pleasure of putting this Zen server processor through its paces. I am still early in the testing process with many more interesting benchmarks to come, but today are some initial numbers of the AMD EPYC 7601 compared to various Intel Xeon CPUs while running Ubuntu Linux.
Opteron vs. EPYC Benchmarks & Performance-Per-Watt: How AMD Server Performance Evolved Over 10 Years
By now you have likely seen our initial AMD EPYC 7601 Linux benchmarks. If you haven't, check them out, EPYC does really deliver on being competitive with current Intel hardware in the highly threaded space. If you have been curious to see some power numbers on EPYC, here they are from the Tyan Transport SX TN70A-B8026 2U server. Making things more interesting are some comparison benchmarks showing how the AMD EPYC performance compares to AMD Opteron processors from about ten years ago.
macOS 10.13 High Sierra vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance
Apple this week released macOS 10.13 "High Sierra" as the latest version of its operating system. Of course, curiosity got the best of me so here are benchmarks of macOS 10.12.6, macOS 10.13, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 17.10 from a MacBook Air to see how the performance compares.
GNOME 3.26: Wayland vs. X.Org Performance - Boot Times, Power Use, Memory Use & Gaming
While testing out the near-final GNOME 3.26 this weekend I also ran some benchmarks of it comparing the boot time, memory use, power consumption, and gaming performance when comparing GNOME Shell / Mutter running on Wayland and then an X.Org session.
Radeon RX Vega OpenGL Linux Performance For September 2017
It's been a couple weeks since running any Mesa Git benchmarks to show the latest state of the open-source Radeon Linux graphics stack, so here are some fresh numbers with the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 along with other Radeon GPUs compared to the NVIDIA Linux performance.
Trying Out Ubuntu 17.10 On A Laptop One Month Ahead Of Release
Curious around the GNOME Shell desktop and improvements made during the Ubuntu 17.10 cycle in transitioning away from Unity 7 and X.Org to GNOME and Wayland, I took the recently-reviewed Razer Blade Stealth laptop and tried out the very latest Ubuntu desktop daily ISO on this Intel laptop. Here are my initial impressions of the current Ubuntu 17.10 desktop experience as well as some power/boot/performance benchmarks of 17.10 in its daily state compared to Ubuntu 17.04 on this Kabylake system.
A Look At The New Features Of GNOME 3.26
With GNOME 3.26 due to be officially released on Wednesday, 13 September, here is a look at the new features to be found in this major desktop update and screenshots from testing the latest GNOME 3.26 packages via Fedora 27's development images.
Benchmarks Show Firefox 57 Quantum Doing Well, But Chrome Largely Winning
With the hype this week around Firefox Quantum Beta with its user-interface refinements and more noticeably the performance improvements, I decided to run some benchmarks on my end with a variety of tests comparing Firefox 52 ESR, Firefox 56 stable, Firefox 57 Quantum beta, and Chrome 60. Here are those web browser benchmark results from the Linux x86-64 desktop.
Core i9 7900X vs. Threadripper 1950X On Ubuntu 17.10, Antergos, Clear Linux
While we have already compared the Threadripper 1950X to the current top-end Core i9 7900X processor, today we are taking things a step further with our Threadripper Linux benchmarks by doing a side-by-side showdown when each system is tested across three different Linux distributions.
Linux RAID Performance On NVMe M.2 SSDs
For boosting the I/O performance of the AMD EPYC 7601 Tyan server I decided to play around with a Linux RAID setup this weekend using two NVMe M.2 SSDs. This is our first time running some Linux RAID benchmarks of NVMe M.2 SSDs and for this comparison were tests of EXT4 and F2FS with MDADM soft RAID as well as with Btrfs using its built-in native RAID capabilities for some interesting weekend benchmarks.
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