Phoronix

Last week AMD's open-source Linux engineers published the initial Linux kernel driver patches for the "Sienna Cichlid" GPU that appears to be almost definitely the big Navi 2. Now that those AMDGPU patches are public, the folks working on the user-space drivers have had the go-ahead to begin volleying their related patches for Sienna Cichlid. Out today is the RadeonSI OpenGL driver support for this next-generation Navi GPU...

Given the recent releases of Chrome 83 and Firefox 77 while Firefox 78 was promoted to beta, here are some current web browser benchmarks from the Linux desktop for these different browser releases.

On Sunday Greg Kroah-Hartman began sending in his pull requests to the different areas of the kernel he oversees for the ongoing Linux 5.8 merge window...

Longtime open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developer Chris Wilson on Sunday sent out a big patch series that introduces a new fair low-latency scheduler for the Intel kernel graphics driver...

Last week saw the main Direct Rendering Manager driver updates for Linux 5.8 with a lot on the open-source graphics front while a secondary pull request was submitted today with the Freedreno "MSM" DRM driver changes for this open-source Qualcomm Adreno driver implementation...

While more laptops are shipping these days finally with Icelake "Gen 11" graphics and Tiger Lake with "Gen 12" graphics are expected soon, there still is an incredible amount of hardware out there making use of Intel Gen 9 graphics that have been in use since Skylake. It's looking like for the Ubuntu 20.10 cycle, there is going to be an emphasis on offering better performance for this very common generation of Intel UHD Graphics...

Normally the NTB patches for new kernel cycles aren't particularly noteworthy but this time around for Linux 5.8 is Icelake support...

Consulting firm KDAB has released Kuesa 3D 1.2 as the newest version of their 3D integration workflow open-source software...

It was just over a week ago that Reiser4 was updated for Linux 5.6 support while now it's been updated for the newly-minted Linux 5.7 stable kernel along with updating the experimental Reiser5 file-system for this latest kernel series...

GNOME 3.37.2 is out as the latest development snapshot in the quest towards the stable GNOME 3.38 desktop environment this September...

NVIDIA has yet to formally announce the 450 Linux driver series in beta or stable form, but the first pre-release builds in the 450 branch did manage to creep out this past week alongside the CUDA 11.0 release candidate...

Adding to the Linux 5.8 changes is the landing of modernization work for the proc special-purpose file-system...

One week after the release of the big Linux 5.7 kernel release with its many new features, the first point release is now available and overall it's quite light for being the first point release in a new series...

The RISC-V architecture code in the Linux kernel continues seeing more improvements for running on real hardware and seeing other capabilities introduced...

The German-based 9elements Cyber Security has ported Coreboot to another newer Intel server motherboard...

As part of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS exclusively using its newer "Subiquity" server installer is a new means of supporting automated installations of the operating system in a server environment...

Following last week's 64-bit ARM architecture updates for Linux 5.8, the Arm SoC/platform changes have now been submitted...

It was just back in late April that the Panfrost Gallium3D driver began rendering with Arm Mali "Bifrost" graphics processors while now it has most of OpenGL ES 2.0 working, some of the desktop OpenGL 2.1 functionality, and is capable of running software like GNOME on Wayland...

Linux 5.8 has merged all of the PCI/PCIe subsystem updates and there are a number of notable changes...

Some Fedora spins have already made use of swap on zRAM for serving as a compressed RAM drive while with Fedora Workstation 33 they are looking to make use of zRAM by default...

The SMB3/CIFS updates for the Linux 5.8 kernel from the Samba camp can offer better performance...

It's another busy week in the KDE land from their Wayland session finally supporting middle-click paste to Konsole now able to display image thumbnail previews when hovering over filenames with this KDE terminal emulator...

Following the recent release candidate, the Valve and CodeWeavers developers have officially promoted this latest Wine-based downstream for empowering Steam Play to their latest stable release...

Wine Staging 5.10 is out today as the latest version of this experimental blend of Wine that is re-based off yesterday's Wine 5.10 codebase...

LunarG in cooperation with The Khronos Group has released Vulkan SDK 1.2.141...

POWER10 is the forthcoming IBM + OpenPOWER processor expected to be shipping in 2021 and manufactured on a 7nm process and offer big improvements over the existing POWER9 microarchitecture...

Wine 5.10 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source project for allowing Windows games and applications to run generally gracefully on Linux (and other) platforms...

Today marks sixteen years since I started Phoronix.com for Linux hardware reviews as well as twelve years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0...

Given the recent release of the Windows 10 May 2020 Update, here are some fresh benchmarks showing how the latest Windows 10 software update paired with the latest AMD drivers performs against the latest 2020 Linux distribution releases. This testing was done on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X box given the interesting performance differences we have seen in the past to Linux's advantage with these HEDT processors. The Linux distributions tested against Windows 10 May 2020 Update were Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Arch-based Manjaro 20.0.2, Clear Linux 33250, and Fedora Workstation 32.

Ted Ts'o sent in the EXT4 file-system changes on Thursday for Linux 5.8 as the summer 2020 kernel release...

Following VMware making the VMWGFX kernel changes for supporting OpenGL 4.x, the SVGA Gallium3D driver is now exposing OpenGL 4.1 in compatibility profile contexts for this open-source graphics driver used as part of the VMware virtualization stack...

With today's Intel Compute Runtime 20.22.16952 release there is now OpenCL 3.0 support exposed for Tiger Lake...

There is new hardware support as part of the sound subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel...

Today AMD and Amazon announced the general availability of 2nd Gen AMD EPYC "Rome" processors available via the Elastic Compute Cloud. AMD EPYC "Rome" on EC2 with the new "C5a" instance types offer very competitive performance against the latest Intel Xeon instance types, Amazon's own Graviton2 Arm-based instances, and a big upgrade compared to the first-generation EPYC processors in the cloud.

A feature proposal raised by Red Hat's Jeff Law would allow Fedora packages to be built under the LLVM Clang compiler rather than defaulting that all packages to be built under GCC. Clang-built packages would happen where the upstream software recommends using Clang by default or for software without an upstream to let the packager(s) make their own decision...

David Miller on Tuesday sent in all of the networking subsystem updates for the Linux 5.8 kernel and there is a lot in store...

Following the initial benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U performance a few days ago, here is another more exhaustive look at the performance of this six-core Zen 2 mobile processor as well as that of the eight core Ryzen 7 4700U and several competing Intel CPUs in 140+ benchmarks.

The GNU Linux-libre 5.7-gnu kernel was released following last weekend's Linux 5.7 kernel release. But the info-gnu mailing list was slow and thus just hitting the wire today for the latest version of this sanitized version of the Linux kernel. One interesting change in GNU Linux-libre 5.7-gnu is dropping the Intel Gen7 "iGPU Leak" security mitigation over not liking the sources...

The Linux 5.8 media subsystem changes restore a previously dropped driver for supporting the cameras found on multiple generations of Intel Atom devices...

Version 2.1 of Red Hat's Stratis daemon is now available that aims to bring Btrfs/ZFS-like functionality atop the XFS file-system paired with LVM...

While there have been out-of-tree Linux patches offering this support already, with the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel comes a mainline solution for allowing the Fn and left Control keys to be swapped on Apple keyboards...

Intel has released oneAPI DPC++ Compiler 2020-05 as their latest snapshot for the current state of their LLVM-based Data Parallel C++ Compiler...

This week marks 16 years since starting Phoronix.com and 12 years since the Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 release, so what better way to celebrate than a new development release of the Phoronix Test Suite...

As part of the many areas of the kernel managed by Ingo Molnar, on Tuesday he submitted the pull request with all of the scheduler code updates for Linux 5.8...

Complementing the new AMD Energy Driver in the hwmon subsystem for Linux 5.8 to provide per-socket/core reporting, the Linux perf subsystem in this new kernel version has run-time average power limiting (RAPL) framework integration for AMD Zen/Zen2 CPUs...

Radeon Open Compute 3.5 (ROCm 3.5) is now available with a number of improvements but surprisingly still no GFX10/Navi support...

Blender 2.83 is out today as the project's first long-term support release (LTS) while still introducing many new features and improvements for existing functionality...

TPAUSE is the new Intel instruction for supporting lightweight power/performance optimized and improved power/performance states for sleeping until the timestamp counter (TSC) has reached a desired value. This new instruction with Intel's Tremont architecture will now be used by Linux 5.8+ on supported CPUs for an optimized power state while waiting on a delay event...

Valve and CodeWeavers have been preparing a new release of the Proton 5.0 series for powering Steam Play with running modern Windows games on Linux...

Besides disabling CPU security mitigations (not recommended if security is of importance), for those wanting to squeeze extra performance out of Intel CPUs like Comet Lake with the Core i9 10900K, loading Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux is one such way. Here is a look at the current performance that can be gained out of using the latest rolling-release Clear Linux on the i9-10900K in comparison to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.