Phoronix

Following all of the feature updates to the open-source GPU/DRM drivers for Linux 5.9 that included a lot of new material, the first batch of fixes have now been sent in for mainline in addressing early fallout from these many changes...

The second weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Mesa 20.2 is now available for testing...

Sent in last week for the Linux 5.9 kernel merge window were the initial batch of changes to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) while today some additional interesting changes were sent out...

Ubuntu developers are looking at using Intel IWD as the iNET wireless daemon to potentially replace WPA_Supplicant for offering a better WiFi experience...

AMD has released their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 20.Q3 driver as their quarterly update to this enterprise-rated driver for their professional/workstation graphics offerings. In step with the new Windows driver release is also the 20.Q3 packaged Linux driver for enterprise distributions including RHEL/CentOS 8.1, RHEL/CentOS 7.8, Ubuntu 18.04.4, and SUSE SLED/SLES 15...

While Mesa 20.2 isn't even releasing for a few weeks, Mesa 20.3 is already seeing new feature work that will debut next quarter...

QEMU 5.1 is now available for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

It was just one week ago that LibreOffice 7.0 was released and it has already seen around a half-million downloads for this leading open-source, cross-platform office suite...

With the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, the Flatpak sandboxing and app distribution tech is ready to shine and there is also the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux Flatpak runtime...

For a while now Intel has been quietly been working on "mOS" as the "multi-OS" that is a modified version of the Linux kernel that in turn is running lightweight kernels for high-performance computing purposes...

If you are more of an artistic type than programmer, there still is plenty of valuable assistance that can be provided to free software projects... The latest call for help is that of the Debian project in looking for the Debian 11 "Bullseye" desktop artwork...

Go 1.15 is out as a rather significant update to this popular, modern programming language...

Last month was the proposal for Fedora to make DXVK their default back-end for Direct3D 9/10/11 usage with their packaged Wine build rather than WineD3D. That's now been approved for Fedora 33!..

Since leaving stealth last year and hiring some prominent Linux/open-source veterans to complement their ARM processor design experts, we have been quite eager to hear more about this latest start-up aiming to deliver compelling ARM server products. Today they shared some early details on their initial "Phoenix" processor that is coming within their "Orion" SoC...

It is Intel's August 2020 disclosure day with 18 new advisories being issued for covering 52 vulnerabilities...

Mozilla today announced they are laying off around 250 of their employees with Mozilla Corporation and closing up their Taipei, Taiwan operations...

There are a few changes worth mentioning out of the VirtIO updates submitted today for the Linux 5.9 kernel...

For Intel NVDIMMs like DC Persistent Memory there is support on the way with Linux 5.9 to support firmware updates to the non-volatile memory device without the need for a system reboot...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) changes have been sent in for the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel...

For those wanting to experiment with an actively-maintained BSD-powered, desktop-focused operating system, GhostBSD remains a great choice powered off FreeBSD...

The Document Foundation that is behind the cross-platform LibreOffice open-source office suite has published their 2019 annual report...

If looking for a text editor that offers more features than the recent release of Nano 5.0, GNU Emacs 27.1 is out...

The FSGSBASE support that was finally mainlined a few days ago for Linux 5.9 is off to providing a nice performance boost for both Intel and AMD systems. Looking at FSGSBASE is one of the first areas I've dived into for Linux 5.9 kernel testing with this article serving as some preview/teaser data points.

The NFS code going into Linux 5.9 is finally presenting support for user extended attributes (user xattrs)...

The open-source Fwupd firmware updating utility paired with LVFS as the Linux Vendor Firmware Service has seen explosive growth for vastly improving the BIOS/firmware updating experience on Linux. Many major hardware vendors distribute their firmware updates on LVFS for consumption by Fwupd and more than 17 million firmware files have been served. Now though there is a new "large hardware vendor" willing to distribute their firmware updates this way but they want a end-user license agreement (EULA) added...

Fedora developers continue embracing the work on making the Btrfs file-system the default for F33 desktop variants. Their latest progress report indicates new installation options being wired up for the Btrfs support...

The HID changes for Linux 5.9 aren't too many but there are a few worth mentioning for improving input device support on Linux...

If you are still rocking a pre-GCN AMD Radeon graphics card on the R600g driver for the HD 2000 through HD 6000 series, you really ought to consider upgrading in 2020, but otherwise at least from the open-source community there continues to be improvements...

The XFS file-system has many improvements ready for the Linux 5.9 kernel...

The PCI subsystem updates have been sent in for the Linux 5.9 kernel. Peer-to-peer DMA support is now solid for all AMD CPUs of the Zen family or newer...

Not much is publicly known about Intel's Emmitsburg chipset. Prior to noticing some Linux patches recently referencing Intel Emmitsburg, the only other public mentions of it has been in the context of the Windows HWiNFO program mentioning it in their change-log. With Linux 5.9, Intel has begun adding Emmitsburg support...

NihAV is a new open-source, multimedia framework being pursued by FFmpeg/Libav developer Kostya Shishkov...

While a lot of interesting changes are coming for the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel, sadly a long overdue change isn't going to make the merge window and that is the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub driver...

With Linux 5.8 there is initial support for booting POWER10 CPUs while with Linux 5.9 there is more POWER10 work underway. Additionally, Linux 5.9 is bringing support for the newer and faster system call ABI for POWER9 and newer with the SCV instruction...

Going back to last year Fedora has been working to enable link-time optimizations by default for their packages. That goal wasn't achieved for Fedora 32 but for Fedora 33 this autumn they still have chances of marking that feature off their TODO list...

The Fujitsu A64FX ARM processor that has 48 cores per node and 32GB of HBM2 memory that currently powers the fastest supercomputer is beginning to see GCC compiler support...

The "staging" area of the kernel, where new drivers and other code live that has yet to prove itself or live up to kernel code quality standards, saw a few drivers graduate into Linux mainline proper for the current 5.9 cycle...

There are many improvements in LLVM/Clang 11.0 due out in the weeks ahead though an interesting change merged prior to last month's code branching that slipped under our radar... If using the clang-cl driver for MSVC or when otherwise making use of pre-compiled headers (PCH) functionality, there is a new option that can offer significant build time speed-ups...

Intel's Cloud Hypervisor focused on being a Rustlang-based hypervisor focused for cloud workloads is closing in on the 1.0 milestone. With this week's release of Cloud-Hypervisor 0.9 there is one very exciting feature in particular but also a lot of other interesting changes...

Kodi 19 "Matrix" Alpha 1 has been released for this very popular, cross-platform open-source HTPC software...

The Linux kernel continues supporting a lot more audio devices and much more punctual than a decade or two ago...

This week Mesa developers began drafting plans for transitioning their primary Git branch to "main", following the naming plans of other open-source projects using Git...

Each kernel cycle the networking subsystem sees a lot of churn given the importance of network interconnect performance and reliability especially in high performance computing environments where Linux dominates...

Getting KDE's Wayland session into shape remains a priority for developers this year and it's looking like the support should be quite slick come Plasma 5.20...

The "char/misc" area of the kernel continues to be quite busy for Linux 5.9 included as a sort of "catch-all" for the Linux kernel drivers not properly jiving within other areas. While there previously was talk of formally making a hardware accelerator subsystem for the Linux kernel for fitting some of the drivers currently living under char/misc, as of Linux 5.9 that still has not materialized...

The first beta of the forthcoming Mageia 8 is now available, the Linux distribution that traces its roots back to Mandriva/Mandrake...

There are a number of notable power management changes to find with the Linux 5.9 kernel...

Following the recent Intel Comet Lake Celeron and Pentium CPU benchmarking against other x86_64 Intel/AMD CPUs, here was a bit of fun... Seeing how these budget Intel CPUs compare to a Raspberry Pi 4 in various processor benchmarks, all tested on Debian Linux...

For those using Wine in a production environment for running Windows software on Linux, Wine 5.0.2 is out as the latest stable update...

There are a few driver core changes for the Linux 5.9 kernel worth mentioning...