Phoronix

This week's bombshell that future Qt releases might be restricted to paying customers for a period of twelve months has many open-source users and developers rightfully upset. Qt so far only provided a brief, generic statement but several individuals and projects are already expressing interest in a Qt fork should it come to it...

With the Git 2.26 release at the end of March one of the performance wins comes in the way of Git's grep functionality now being multi-threaded...

At the end of February Intel launched the Xeon Scalable "Cascade Lake Refresh" processors with a number of more aggressively priced SKUs with different core counts and clock speeds compared to the original Cascade Lake CPUs launched last year. Intel recently sent over the Xeon Gold 5220R and Xeon Gold 6226R processors and we've begun our Linux benchmarks of them. In this article is our initial look at their performance using a near-final build of Ubuntu 20.04 and seeing how the performance stacks up in raw performance and performance-per-dollar against the AMD EPYC competition.

Unigine Corp has announced a new "Community" edition of their visually stunning, cross-platform game/simulation engine that will be available to non-commercial projects and academic entities...

Wine 5.6 is out as the latest bi-weekly snapshot of this program for running Windows applications and games under Linux...

Beyond the new systemd-homed functionality, another improvement to look forward to in the systemd space this calendar year is systemd-oomd materializing as its new out-of-memory daemon...

Given the release of Firefox 75 with Wayland improvements and also Firefox 76 now being in beta with even more work on the Wayland front, here are some web browser benchmarks under Wayland and the X.Org Server session with GNOME Shell 3.36 on Ubuntu 20.04. Additionally, Google Chrome benchmarks on Wayland and X.Org were also carried out.

The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) and now in turn the Intel Compute Runtime have updated their compiler stack against the newly released LLVM Clang 10.0...

The FreeDesktop.org UDisks project that provides a daemon and interface for querying and manipulating storage devices on Linux is approaching its long overdue version 2.9 update...

Last week the XFS file-system saw its first round of updates for the Linux 5.7 kernel cycle that included preparations for supporting online repair in the future as well as many underlying code improvements. A second round of code improvements were sent in on Thursday for this mature file-system...

Intel's open-source teams have been issuing a slew of new packages in recent days...

Three years after the FreeRDP 2.0 release candidates began, version 2.0 of this Free Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation is finally available. FreeRDP remains one of the leading RDP remote desktop solutions for Linux users and is finally ready to lead with its shiny new release...

Following a number of setbacks over recent months, the modern Fortran "f18" compiler front-end to LLVM has been upstreamed under the FLANG branding...

A number of recent id Tech games (though seemingly not DOOM Eternal) have seen another performance optimization with Mesa 20.1's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver...

After they were teasing the new Lemur Pro at the end of March, the Lemur Pro is now ready and formally announced by Linux PC vendor System76...

SUSE and the openSUSE community are working to move SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE Leap closer together...

ReactOS 0.4.13 is out today as the newest feature update to this open-source operating system project continuing to strive for binary software compatibility with Microsoft Windows...

With the new exFAT file-system merged for Linux 5.7, Samsung engineers responsible for this open-source native Linux kernel driver for Microsoft's exFAT file-system support have now issued their first official release of exfat-utils...

Yesterday a KDE developer who serves on the board of the KDE Free Qt Foundation commented that The Qt Company is evaluating restricting new releases to paying customers for 12 months. That was said to be under consideration due to COVID19 / coronavirus impacting their finances and needing to boost short-term revenues. The Qt Company has now come out with an incredibly brief statement on the matter...

The RISC-V architecture changes have been submitted for the Linux 5.7 kernel and includes early work on bringing up a new RISC-V dual-core SoC...

The Ceph open-source distributed storage platform is seeing some nice performance-related work to its kernel component in the Linux 5.7 kernel...

Intel's open-source multimedia crew has released their Media Driver Q1'2020 build for Linux users. This Intel Media driver is what provides Video Acceleration API (VA-API) capabilities for Intel GPU-based video encode/decode for Broadwell through next-gen Tiger Lake...

Last week the X-Plane 11.50 beta was released with its long awaited Vulkan renderer to complement its mature OpenGL rendering code. Since then we've been busy benchmarking with 23 different graphics cards of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce line-ups while running Ubuntu Linux and comparing the OpenGL vs. Vulkan rendering performance for this realistic flight simulator.

LOOPFS is the latest Linux kernel file-system proposal...

Patches have been revised for allowing Linux to support kernel stack base address offset randomization for each system call...

With an apparent blame on the novel coronavirus, The Qt Company is said to be considering restricting new Qt releases to paying customers for a period of twelve months in an effort to boost their near-term finances...

Last week there were a bunch of new improvements and features for the open-source kernel graphics/display drivers merged for Linux 5.7. There were not any feature changes on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver front while this week at least are some fixes/workarounds so it's less buggy for some hardware...

The OverlayFS union mount file-system has a number of fixes and other changes with Linux 5.7...

The Qt Company has made public their 2020 road-map for Qt software releases...

The TURNIP open-source Vulkan driver continues advancing in-step with the other Mesa drivers...

At the end of last year with ROCm 3.0 AMD introduced the AOMP compiler for OpenMP support targeting Radeon GPUs. AOMP is another downstream of LLVM Clang and on Tuesday marked the latest update...

We have begun seeing the start of upstreaming on Google's Propeller Framework for offering post-link-time binary optimizations in the LLVM compiler stack to offer measurably faster (re)generated binaries...

The GNOME Foundation in cooperation with Endless has launched their first Community Engagement Challenge where they are offering up many prizes and cash...

While Intel's open-source Linux hardware support is extremely good even in time for launch day of not only for their server / data center products but also desktop and mobile platforms, occasionally there are exceptions. One of the biggest exceptions over the past decade has been the Bay Trail support sometimes taking years to see fixes or finishing up areas of the support. The latest example of this is some Intel Bay Trail and Cherry Trail tablets finally seeing working/reliable touchscreen support on Linux 5.7...

Less than one month ago came the big Vulkan 1.2.135 update with official ray-tracing capabilities and other extension promotions. Out today is Vulkan 1.2.137 with a whole lot of clarifications and fixes...

NVIDIA today released the 440.82 Linux binary display driver as their newest stable update in the current 440 driver series...

While some Linux distributions are still using MQ-Deadline or Kyber by default for NVMe SSD storage, using no I/O scheduler still tends to perform the best overall for this speedy storage medium.

Mozilla has released Firefox 75.0 as what is a big update for Linux users...

The AMD "ACO" compiler backed by Valve for offering a faster shader compiler back-end than AMDGPU LLVM for the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver has begun making use of Navi's NGG "Next-Gen Geometry" hardware...

One of several GNU projects that have been silent in recent years is MediaGoblin, the effort to provide a free and decentralized web platform for sharing of digital media...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates have been sent in for the very active Linux 5.7 kernel...

Since the "f18" open-source Fortran compiler front-end was approved last year for merging as the newest LLVM sub-project and using the Flang name, there have been a number of false starts in getting the code merged. This year alone Flang had multiple delays and cancelled merge plans as the developers worked to get the code ready for upstream. Now though it looks like it could be ready to cross that long sought after milestone for having an in-tree Fortran front-end...

One of the immediate differences Ubuntu 20.04 desktop/laptop users will notice when booting in UEFI mode is the boot splash screen improvements thanks to leveraging Red Hat's work on providing a flicker-free boot experience and pulling in the UEFI BGRT system/motherboard logo during the boot process to provide a more transitive experience. Canonical in turn is working on pushing some of their improvements back into upstream Plymouth...

On top of all the other changes in Linux 5.7 so far, a secondary set of power management updates were sent in today for this next version of the kernel and includes now using the Schedutil governor by default for Intel P-State and Arm big.LITTLE systems...

One month ago to the day I was writing about OpenGL threading improvements for Mesa 20.1 and since then more "GLTHREAD" work has materialized and successfully landed for improving the Mesa OpenGL driver performance...

We are now one week through the two week long Linux 5.7 kernel merge window where new/improved functionality is introduced. Here is a look at the changes so far for Linux 5.7...

C-SKY is a Chinese 32-bit CPU architecture intended for low-power devices from media boxes / DVRs to printers and other consumer electronics. C-SKY has also worked its way into a ~$6 development board. With its updates for the Linux 5.7 kernel are various additions to this maturing architecture support along with a speculative execution fix...

Last week Intel released an initial set of micro-benchmarks for their oneAPI Level Zero and with L0 support being plumbed into their open-source Intel Compute Runtime, this weekend I started toying around with some Level Zero benchmarks on a variety of Intel processors.

A new patch series sent out just under one month ago was providing opt-in L1 data cache flushing on context switching. That work has now been revived again and now with documentation added it's clear that this work is being done in response to a recent CVE being made public...

Ongoing work around Linux's exec() code should make it less deadlock prone in future kernel versions...