Phoronix

Yet another release candidate of OpenZFS 2.1 is now available for testing and this time around there are some interesting changes to note...

While yesterday was the Threadripper 3990X Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks, with recently picking up the $450 Lenovo IdeaPad 3 15 with Ryzen 5 5500U, prior to wiping the Windows 10 preload I ran some benchmarks to see how that default Microsoft Windows 10 Home installation compared to a fresh install of Ubuntu 21.04 for maximizing the performance potential of this budget six core / twelve thread laptop.

Chrome 91 released this week with WebAssembly SIMD by default, new JavaScript APIs, and other improvements. Plus there are also some performance improvements too, here are some benchmarks...

Last year we wrote about Dell working on a hardware privacy driver for Linux as with 2021 laptops they are beginning to add hardware-based privacy buttons for disabling microphone and camera support. That Dell Hardware Privacy platform support is now set to be introduced to the mainline kernel with Linux 5.14...

The Linux 5.14 kernel this summer is going to bring a reworked user-space API for Intel's DG1 graphics card and their future discrete graphics offerings. This change to the Intel kernel graphics driver's user-space API, which is currently flagged as "broken" until it has been proven sufficiently capable for user-space needs and stable, is principally needed for handling of device local memory (dedicated vRAM)...

Added to the Arch Linux install media back in April was Archinstall as a quick/easy installer for the Linux distribution. Released today is now Archinstall 2.2 as the latest advancement for this convenient Arch Linux installer...

Frontier as the first US exascale supercomputer being commissioned by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Department of Energy. while being powered by AMD CPUs/GPUs is in the process of seeing more Linux kernel changes for bringing up the new platform...

Earlier this month were benchmarks looking at Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 21.04 on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X desktop to which Ubuntu came out roughly 8% faster than the Microsoft OS on average. But what about the difference for HEDT systems? Given the more radical performance difference we have seen in the past with Windows vs. Linux for Threadripper systems, here are some recently conducted benchmarks on that front with the 64-core Threadripper 3990X.

Over the past year developers from Igalia, Collabora, and others have been involved in bringing up support for the OpenGL EXT_external_objects extension within the Intel open-source drivers. That work is now squared away as one of the pieces for offering better interoperability between OpenGL and Vulkan...

While other mobile operating systems have for years been on a 64-bit software stack and in the process of phasing out 32-bit app support, Jolla is celebrating Sailfish 4.1 as finally marking their first fully 64-bit Sailfish OS software stack -- for use currently just with the Sony Xperia 10 II smartphone...

Last month with the Radeon Software for Linux 21.10 driver there was finally Vulkan ray-tracing support added to that proprietary Vulkan driver component, the first time that Vulkan ray-tracing has been available on Linux for any AMD Radeon 6000 series graphics card across the multiple driver options. Last month I posted some initial Vulkan ray-tracing AMD vs. NVIDIA Linux benchmarks while questions were raised how well the driver performs with NVIDIA's Quake II RTX port. Here are some initial benchmarks for those wondering...

Qt Multimedia should return for Qt 6.2's release later this year and is perhaps the module changing the most in its transition from Qt5 to Qt6...

Following last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4, various downstreams are beginning to release their respective updates based against the RHEL 8.4 changes...

Merged today to Linux 5.13 Git and marked for back-porting to stable series is a new "confused deputy" weakness and affects kernels going back to Linux 2.6.12 from 2005...

Epic Games today pushed Unreal Engine 5 out to early access. Like with UE4, Unreal Engine 5 continues offering native Linux support and allowing use of the Vulkan API...

The AMD Ryzen 5 5500U with six cores / twelve threads within a Lenovo laptop at $449 USD is quite a steal. This is also my first time benchmarking the AMD Ryzen 5 5500U after waiting months on Ryzen 5000 series laptop availability. Here are some initial benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 5500U under Ubuntu 21.04 Linux against various other Intel/AMD laptops.

Just one week after AMDVLK 2021.Q2.3 is now another update to this open-source AMD Vulkan driver for Linux systems...

Apple's shiny new in-house M1 Arm chip is the latest processor challenged by a security vulnerability. The "M1RACLES" vulnerability was made public today as a covert channel vulnerability by where a mysterious register could leak EL0 state...

Fedora Workstation has been defaulting to the Btrfs file-system since F33 while other editions of Fedora Linux have continued using their defaults. With Fedora Cloud 35, this cloud spin of Fedora is now also looking to migrate to Btrfs...

The BLAKE3 high performance crypto hashing function that is much speedier than MD5, SHA-1/SHA-2/SHA-3, and the former BLAKE2, is nearing its v1.0 release for its official Rust and C implementations...

Google has released Chrome 91 as a rather exciting feature update to their open-source, cross-platform web browser...

Linux 5.14 to debut later in the summer will allow for hot unplugging of AMD Radeon graphics cards such as when using an external GPU enclosure or passing back a GPU from a virtual machine to the host. Up until now the AMDGPU kernel driver hasn't cooperated nicely with the Radeon GPU for hot unplug events...

The Rowhammer security exploit affecting DRAM memory modules has a new chapter with Google now detailing "half-double" as a new technique for exploit of system memory...

Earlier this month in our initial benchmarking of DragonFlyBSD 6.0 we found DragonFlyBSD 6.0 performing much better than DragonFlyBSD 5.8, but how does that put its performance up against FreeBSD 13.0 and Ubuntu Linux for reference? Here are such benchmarks in our latest benchmarking of DragonFlyBSD 6.0, FreeBSD 13.0 (with both GCC and Clang), and Ubuntu Linux.

With the Linux 5.14 cycle this summer the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) should land its new "RO" feature read-only mode...

Arm today announced the Cortex-X2 as their new flagship Armv9 processor design...

Intel's open-source driver engineers remain very active on bringing up their discrete graphics card support under Linux with restructuring of the kernel driver to handle local/dedicated memory among a variety of other changes needed. Plus there are new features with the latest generation of Intel graphics such as the Protected Xe Path (PXP) for hardware-protected sessions for multi-user / multi-process scenarios. The Intel PXP code for their Linux driver has been in the works since last year and the latest revision now submitted...

It's been a while since last having any major/exciting optimizations to the GNOME desktop to report on by Canonical's Daniel van Vugt that is known for his performance work over the past few years, but some optimizations are forthcoming...

The first alpha release of LibreOffice 7.2 is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable release of this open-source office suite update in August...

After Intel originally proposed zero-copy capability for the Linux kernel's AF_XDP high performance packet processing code years ago and implemented for their higher performance network hardware/drivers, with Linux 5.14 the common Intel "IGC" Gigabit Ethernet driver is set to introduce AF_XDP zero-copy support...

Following the earlier release candidate, Inkscape 1.1 is now officially available as the latest feature update to this leading open-source vector graphics application...

Following February's release of OpenMandriva Lx 4.2, the release candidate to Lx 4.3 is now available for testing...

Intel's Linux preparations for Alder Lake -- and more broadly the concept of hybrid x86_64 CPUs with a mix of large Core and small Atom cores -- continues with the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver seeing new work to prepare for Intel's hybrid era...

Red Hat engineers have scored an impressive performance optimization to the DeviceMapper (DM) code that is now queued up for merging with the Linux 5.14 cycle...

Intel engineers have been publishing open-source/Linux enablement patches around Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) for nearly one year now. While Intel Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" with AMX support is expected around the end of this year, one of the key pieces yet to land is the Linux kernel support...

A bit late to the game on the Rocket Lake side but ahead as usual when it comes to Alder Lake S, Intel's engineers maintaining the open-source Compute Runtime for Linux systems have now flipped on the Level Zero support...

Raspberry Pi's Power over Ethernet HAT is beginning to face production challenges caused by the supply chain crisis so now the Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced the PoE+ HAT that is not only easier to produce but also can provide more power in conjunction with supported switches...

Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 5.13-rc3 kernel as expected as the newest weekly test release of the forthcoming Linux 5.13...

As usual when getting my hands on a new processor family, I was curious about the performance difference if booting the Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" processors with the Spectre security mitigations disabled at run-time. Ultimately there was very little difference when using the standard "mitigations=off" option for these new Intel server processors...

With recently showing desktops and servers enjoying better performance on Ubuntu 21.04 through high end hardware like Xeon Ice Lake, you might be wondering what this means for mobile Linux performance... Here are some quick weekend benchmarks of the Dell XPS laptop with Core i7 1165G7 "Tiger Lake" on Ubuntu 20.10 versus 21.04...

The Forge rendering framework that picked up Vulkan and Linux support a few years back is out this week with a new release...

Libreboot as the Coreboot downstream focused on providing a fully open-source BIOS/firmware replacement without any black boxes / binary blobs is out with a new release. The prior tagged release of Libreboot was all the way back in 2016 while has now been succeeded by a new release albeit in testing form...

With CentOS Stream to be the upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux moving forward, a CentOS special interest group is being formed that is driven by Red Hat stakeholders in helping to ensure technically interesting CentOS Stream changes made by community members are evaluated and primed for inclusion into future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases...

It's sounding like a vendor is readying to publish a "big" new open-source driver, likely a GPU driver, for the Linux kernel...

GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines "HIG" are in the process of being updated around the GTK4 tool-kit and new components like libadwaita and libhandy...

There continues a lot of work going into Virgl for 3D guest acceleration with the open-source Linux virtualization stack as well as most recently Vulkan driver activity. However, much of that work driven by Google these days is focused on Chrome OS with "Crosvm" rather than the venerable QEMU...

A security module continues to be worked on for being able to detect and mitigate against fork/execute brute force attacks to Linux systems...

Following the introduction of KHamburgerMenu, the latest KDE user-interface element being introduced is KCommandBar for expert-focused, HUD-style pop-ups...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 has reached general availability (GA) status as the latest iteration of RHEL8...

Wine 6.9 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows applications and games on Linux and other Unix-like platforms...