Western Digital Has Been Developing A New Linux File-System: Zonefs

Western Digital has been contributing a lot more to the Linux kernel in recent years from RISC-V architecture bits to storage enhancements. The most recent code they have been working on in recent weeks is a brand new Linux file-system...


A Look At How Some Video Encoders Saw Their Performance Shift This Year With SVT AV1/VP9 Ascending

Since March of this year I began benchmarking various open-source video encoders every other day in our lab. Here is a look at how Intel's SVT encoders and other popular options saw their performance evolve over the course of the year...


Virtual DCN / SR-IOV Display Support Being Worked On For AMDGPU In Linux 5.6

In going through the AMDGPU kernel driver changes currently queuing ahead of the Linux 5.6 cycle, "virtual DCN" support is coming in working on SR-IOV display support...


FreeBSD Along With The Other BSDs Had A Pretty Good Run This Decade

While not attracting as much interest as Linux in the cloud, AI, and other growing markets, the BSDs have seen their share of adoption in many of these areas too as well as the likes of powering some of today's video game consoles. FreeBSD is also well known for powering much of the networking infrastructure of Netflix and other large enterprises. The BSDs advanced a lot from hardware support to new security features and other capabilities this decade setting them on a good trajectory as we get into the 2020


LLVM Began Its Dominance Of The Compiler Landscape This Decade

Not only has LLVM's Clang compiler proven to become a viable alternative to C/C++ and is now widely used by many different vendors for building production software and nearly at parity for performance to GCC, but the LLVM compiler infrastructure has proven to be a huge success. Beyond Apple as one of the original stakeholders, LLVM is also used by multiple software projects within Intel, AMD is making extensive use of it for their graphics compiler and other purposes, and many other companies leveraging the LLVM projects for various


Eric S Raymond Believes Reposurgeon Is Finally Ready For Full & Correct GCC Conversion

After many delays, and seemingly as a Christmas miracle, Eric S Raymond now believes his Reposurgeon utility is officially ready to convert GCC's SVN repository over to Git...


Intel

AMD Athlon 3000G Linux Performance Benchmarks - The New $50 Processor

Announced last month was the Athlon 3000G as a ~$49 processor based on Zen and featuring two cores / four threads and Vega 3 graphics. This 35 Watt TDP processor has finally begun appearing at more Internet retailers in stock last week and I was able to pick up one of these budget CPUs for $55 USD. Here are benchmarks of the Athlon 3000G on Ubuntu Linux compared to other low-end and older processors.


Open Source LLM

Purism Has Librem 5 Audio Routing Working, Other Software Progress

Purism has shared an update on their software work for the Librem 5 Linux smartphone over the course of last month...


GCC 10 PGO Benchmarks On AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X + Ubuntu 19.10

For those looking for some fresh reference numbers on the impact of using GCC's Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO), here are some benchmark runs looking at the GCC 10 PGO performance on an Ubuntu 19.10 workstation built around the Ryzen Threadripper 3960X...


From Botched Releases To Exciting New Features, Fedora Saw A Lot Of Changes During The 2010s

Fedora continued serving at the forefront of many Linux distribution innovations over the past decade and the largely Red Hat driven platform continued contributing their work back upstream from countless GNOME features to hardware improvements/fixes, UEFI "flicker-free boot" crossing the finish line, good hardware firmware updating support, and much more...