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Updated 2025-07-04 03:45
New + Updated Benchmarks For December 2020
In ending out a strong year for OpenBenchmarking.org growth in 2020, there were also many test profile updates and some new test profiles (benchmarks) that were made available in December for Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org users...
LLVM Adds Initial Support For PowerPC LE
LLVM has added support for PowerPC LE (32-bit) as its newest target...
Valve Revises Steam's December 2020 Linux Marketshare To 0.74%
The numbers Steam posted on New Year's Day for the December 2020 Linux gaming marketshare showed a drop of 0.33% down to just 0.57%. That is a rather large drop but now Valve has updated their numbers and point to Linux still regressing percentage wise but not as bad as originally reported...
Wine-Staging 6.0-RC5 Is Testing A Patch That May Hurt The Performance Of Some Games
Building off yesterday's Wine 6.0-RC5 test release is an updated Wine-Staging build that adds nearly 800 patches atop the upstream code-base for experimental/testing features...
Fedora Is Looking For Help Testing Linux 5.10 Ahead Of Shipping That LTS Kernel Update
Fedora is preparing to ship the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel as a stable release update to those on Fedora 32 and newer...
DTPM "Avoid Burning Yourself" Framework Diverted From Linux 5.11
Yesterday I wrote about the DTPM framework being sent in for Linux 5.11 but ultimately Linus Torvalds has decided not to accept it out of the merge window...
Wine 6.0-RC5 Released With 21 Bug Fixes
Wine 6.0 stable should be out this month but for now is another weekly release candidate of this open-source project that allows running Windows games/applications on Linux, macOS, and BSD platforms...
Linux No-Copy Bvec Patches Revved For The New Year As Another I/O Optimization
The Linux kernel has been seeing incredible innovations and optimizations in the I/O area in recent times from IO_uring to numerous performance enhancements. One of the recent performance enhancements seeing activity and promising results is the no-copy bvec behavior...
Mesa's Clover OpenCL Adds Support For Loading SPIR-V IL Programs
The latest OpenCL "Clover" work to land in Mesa 21.0 is support for the cl_khr_il_program extension...
11 Features That Didn't Make It In 2020 For Linux 5.11
For as great as Linux 5.11 is with its new features, there is also some prominent material that has yet to be upstreamed into the mainline kernel -- some of which is likely to hit in 2021 while other changes have less likely ambitions for mainline...
ReactOS Has Been Steadily Improving As An Open-Source Windows Implementation
ReactOS as the long work-in-progress open-source operating system implementation of Windows enjoyed much progress over the course of 2020...
Even With The New Year's Holidays, KDE Still Saw Some Improvements This Week
While development on KDE (and other open-source projects too) was lighter this week as a result of the Christmas and New Year's holidays, the KDE desktop still saw some refinements this week...
Valve's Steam Data For December Points To A Huge Dip For Linux Gaming Marketshare
Valve just published their Steam Survey numbers for December 2020 and it's a huge letdown for Linux gamers if the numbers are indeed accurate...
Linux 5.11 Gets New Framework To Help Avoid Burning Your Skin On Hot Devices
While the Linux 5.11 merge window has been over for one week where new features are normally added, a power management pull request sent in today for mainline is adding some tardy features including the Dynamic Thermal Power Management (DTPM) framework that in part is designed to help ensure users don't burn themselves with hot devices...
OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 RC Released With Linux 5.10, Completed AArch64 Port
OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 was released last February while now we are closing in on the release of OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 for that Mandriva/Mandrake-derived Linux distribution...
The Linux Kernel Made Terrific Strides In 2020
The Linux kernel in 2020 saw lots of new features added and other functionality improved while continuing to generally keep pace with punctual new hardware support...
KDE In 2021 Should See Production-Ready Plasma Wayland, Other Improvements
KDE developer Nate Graham who has made a lot of contributions to KDE in recent years and is well known for his weekly KDE development summaries has published a 2021 roadmap for the year...
Some Linux/Open-Source Letdowns Last For Years
New Year's Eve two years ago I wrote about the open-source / Linux letdowns of 2018. It was well received at the time and sparked some interesting discussions so as we celebrate the start of 2021 I figured it would be interesting to look back and see which of those letdowns were since resolved and what ones are remaining...
Mesa Enjoyed A Record-Setting Year With Intel G3D Default, RADV ACO, Faster Performance
2020 was easily the best year yet for Mesa with this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers seeing timely new hardware support, Intel's OpenGL support defaulting to Iris Gallium3D, the Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver adding and defaulting to the ACO compiler back-end, many performance optimizations throughout, timely new GPU hardware support, and a lot more!..
Panfrost Gallium3D Seeing Some Work Towards Clover OpenCL Support
The Panfrost open-source Gallium3D driver matured into good shape over the course of 2020 with providing OpenGL support for Arm Mali graphics hardware. As we enter 2021 it will be interesting to see this year if any "Panfrost Vulkan" driver materializes for open-source Vulkan support on the newer Mali graphics hardware. But at least one area making interesting process is in regards to OpenCL compute support...
Happy New Year! A Look Back At The Most Popular Phoronix Content Of 2020
After 219 Linux hardware reviews / benchmark featured articles and 3,206 original news articles on Phoronix for 2020, it's finally time to put a wrap on this year... Happy New Year and 2021 couldn't have come soon enough!..
Linux 5.12 Should See ACPI Platform Profile Support To Alter System Thermal/Power Levels
Thanks to the ongoing upstream improvements being pursued by Lenovo as part of their effort to enhance their product support, the Linux power management tree has picked up the initial ACPI Platform Profile implementation for benefiting newer devices like Lenovo laptops...
OpenBenchmarking.org Enjoyed A Major Overhaul In 2020, Significant Growth
This month marks ten years since OpenBenchmarking.org initially went online as part of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 development (though didn't officially launch until February 2011). In 2020 alongside Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 came a major OpenBenchmarking.org upgrade as the biggest in its history. As 2020 wraps up, here is a look at the OpenBenchmarking.org growth by the numbers...
GNOME In 2020 Saw Many Optimizations, GTK 4.0 Released, GNOME 40 In Development
The GNOME desktop environment saw many enhancements in 2020 including a number of significant performance optimizations. While GNOME on Wayland has been solid for some time, there has been further enhancements there too. This year also brought the much anticipated GTK 4.0 toolkit release that will be interesting to see how its adoption goes next year. GNOME 40 is also in development for debut in the spring as the successor to this autumn's successful GNOME 3.38 release...
Rust 1.49 Released With 64-bit ARM Linux Support Rated Tier-1
Rust 1.49 was released today for ending out 2020 with this popular programming language. Most notable with Rust 1.49 is the 64-bit ARM Linux support state being promoted...
Intel Media VA-API Driver Update Adds EU Fused Dispatch For 8K Video Processing
Yesterday Intel released an updated open-source Media SDK for leveraging media acceleration on their graphics hardware. Along with that out today is the Intel Media Driver 20.4.5 release as their dedicated Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver for Linux systems...
Linux To Report MIPS Vulnerabilities But They Often Go Unreported Or Dead Vendors
The Linux kernel with the likes of ARM and x86 hardware leverage kernel infrastructure for reporting their relevant CPU security mitigations while only now the MIPS kernel code is seeing work to report such vulnerabilities. However, on the MIPS front it's more difficult with some vendors not publicly acknowledging vulnerabilities and other cases of MIPS hardware vendors no longer producing the hardware in question or even in business...
Linux 5.10-ck1 Released With Updated MuQSS Scheduler
Con Kolivas took some time out of his New Year's Eve to release Linux 5.10-ck1 as his independent patch-set applied to the recently minted Linux 5.10 kernel and with that the latest MuQSS scheduler...
Fedora Had A Super Year From Lenovo Preloads To Btrfs To Many Other New Features
The Fedora project had a pretty terrific and exciting year especially with everything happening in the world this year. Fedora began appearing on more Lenovo device pre-loads, many features landed like Btrfs by default in Fedora Workstation, they continue to be leading the Wayland charge, and a lot of great engineering work by the folks from Red Hat...
Fedora 34 Plans To Provide Xfce 4.16 Desktop Packages
While it shouldn't come as much of a surprise given Fedora's tendency to always ship with the freshest open-source packages, but Fedora 34 should be including the latest Xfce 4.16 desktop packages for those seeking that GTK based desktop...
GNU Had A Busy 2020 With The GCC Toolchain Still Rocking, Finally Converted To Git
The GNU Project had a very active year with the GNU toolchain in particular continuing to make major strides in punctually supporting new C/C++ features, continuing to enhance device offloading / accelerator support, support new CPU features, and more. GCC also saw its conversion this year finally over to Git among other accomplishments by the large number of GNU software projects...
Mesa 21.0 Has Finally Killed The Classic "SWRAST" Software Rasterizer
For years LLVMpipe has been around as a superior software-based OpenGL implementation for those without a working GPU / hardware driver support or needing to test a bit of GL code along a vendor-neutral path. LLVMpipe thanks to leveraging LLVM is more performant than the traditional Mesa software rasterizer or similar avenues like Softpipe. Finally as we hit 2021, SWRAST has been removed from the Mesa code-base...
The Most Popular NVIDIA Linux News + Milestones Of 2020
NVIDIA's RTX 30 "Ampere" launch was quite a success for 2020 along with new Jetson products and more. Meanwhile on the Linux front this year NVIDIA's proprietary driver continued providing same-day support, features roughly at parity to Windows, and little bread crumbs of open-source support so far. But there still are indications of more possible open-source actions to come as well as potentially better Wayland support to look forward to in 2021...
Fedora Workstation 34 Looking To Employ Btrfs Zstd Transparent Compression By Default
Fedora Workstation 33 successfully switched over from EXT4 to using Btrfs as its default file-system. Now with Fedora 34 due out in the spring we are seeing Fedora beginning to make use of more features offered by Btrfs...
Intel Media SDK 20.5.1 Released
At the start of Q4, Intel released Media SDK 20.3 with AV1 accelerated decode, Rocket Lake, DG1/SG1 discrete GPU support, and other improvements. Now to end out the quarter is a new release coming in at version 20.5.1...
Testing The Intel "Workload Hints" Capability Of Linux 5.11
There are many new features with the Linux 5.11 kernel that is presently under development but one of the ones I've been more curious about for how well it works is the Intel "workload hints" that can be passed via its thermal framework. This is about providing the system with hints of workloads being run to optimize the thermal/power properties.
A Look At The Big Impact To AES-XTS Encryption Performance From Spectre Retpolines
With it recently being noticed that the Linux AES-NI XTS performance regressed big time from the return trampolines "Retpolines" enacted nearly three years ago as a defense against Spectre, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance cost involved to this day using Retpolines and the impact on the XTS encryption/decryption performance measured by cryptsetup that is used for setting up encrypted disks under Linux...
KDE Saw Its Wayland Support Stabilize Nicely In 2020, Much Polishing Throughout
KDE had a very eventful year even with the pandemic where it saw its Wayland support come together quite well that it's usable on a day-to-day basis, KWin has been seeing some renewed attention, and there was much application work as well as fixes and polishing throughout the massive KDE ecosystem...
Valve Continued Doing A Lot For Linux Gaming & Open-Source Radeon Drivers In 2020
Valve this year continued contributing significantly to not only improving the Linux gaming experience but also the Linux desktop at large with their continued open-source graphics driver enhancements and other infrastructure work...
Nouveau Sees Fix To Properly Handle Mini DP Connectors - Avoids GNOME Mutter Crashing
The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver in Linux 5.11 didn't see any exciting features but there is now a patch pending for this DRM driver so it will at least handle mini DisplayPort connections properly...
New Intel Linux Features, Timely Hardware Support & More From Intel In 2020
Intel engineers continued with their decade plus tradition of providing timely hardware support (sans the discrete graphics bring-up taking a bit longer), Intel continued showing what's possible with Linux performance by means of Clear Linux, and yes more security updates were among their popular interactions in 2020...
The HSA Foundation Has Been Eerily Quiet As We Roll Into 2021
Much of the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) steam was lost when AMD began focusing on its Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) software stack. While AMD was just one of several founding members, there doesn't seem to be much going on for the HSA effort as we roll into 2021 and in fact their website has been down for an extended period of time...
Mesa's Freedreno Gallium3D Now Exposes OpenGL 3.2 Support
Mesa 21.0 has flipped on support for allowing OpenGL 3.2 contexts with the Freedreno Gallium3D driver that provides open-source GL support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware...
AMD Wowed Linux Users In 2020 With Their Fantastic Zen 3 CPUs, Timely New Open-Source GPU Support
AMD this year not only delivered the very powerful Ryzen 5000 "Zen 3" desktop processors and initial Radeon RX 6000 "Big Navi" graphics cards but for exciting Linux users was the timely open-source support for the new GPUs well in advance (and also already preparing for some 2021 graphics products) as well as more timely support around Zen 3 thermal support and other additions. AMD's open-source timing is still improving although not yet optimal but all in it was a hell of a year for AMD Linux users...
Fedora Workstation 33 Performing Very Well - Runs Past Clear Linux On Intel Tiger Lake Notebook
Following the recent AMD Zen 3 tests on Intel's Clear Linux a user expressed curiosity over the Intel-backed Linux distribution on Tiger Lake hardware given I hadn't done a multi-distribution comparison there yet. Using the Dell XPS 9310 as my lone Tiger Lake notebook I ran some benchmarks of Clear Linux, Ubuntu, Manjaro, and Fedora. For a change, Clear Linux wasn't the distant front-runner.
Proposed Patches Would Enable FP16 Pixel Format Support For Older AMD GPUs
Patches posted on Monday by independent open-source contributor Mario Kleiner would enable FP16 pixel format support for older generations of AMD Radeon GPUs...
Ubuntu Had A Stellar 2020 From Ubuntu 20.04 LTS To Continued WSL, Cloud Popularity
Ubuntu had a rather successful 2020 with the well received Ubuntu 20.04 LTS debut to continuing to make upstream improvements to GNOME, their adoption in the cloud and Windows Subsystem for Linux remaining strong, and all around Ubuntu being on steady footing across all areas of focus...
56 Patches Volleyed For Improving Intel Linux Graphics Driver Scheduling
Longtime Intel open-source graphics driver developer Chris Wilson sent out a set of 56 patches today working to improve their kernel graphics driver's scheduling performance...
AES-NI XTS To See 2~3x Performance Recovery After Regressing Hard From Retpolines
It turns out the Intel/AMD AES-NI implementation of XTS regressed hard from the Retpolines functionality merged nearly three years ago for mitigating Spectre... But now the crypto performance with the AES-NI XTS implementation is set to recover from that regression with a huge improvement thanks to a new set of patches...
Systemd Had A Pretty Big 2020 With Homed, OOMD Components Merged
The systemd service and system manager had another busy year with the merging of "homed" for modernizing and reinventing home directory capabilities to "oomd" being merged for improving the Linux memory pressure / out-of-memory handling, among other new features coming to light...
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