Phoronix

Not only is Btrfs seeing notable improvements with the in-development Linux 5.10 kernel but the XFS file-system also has some prominent changes of its own...

As it's been a while since running a fresh Linux distribution comparison with Intel's Clear Linux platform and given all the autumn distribution updates inbound, here is a fresh look at the rolling-release Clear Linux up against a snapshot of Ubuntu 20.10, Fedora Workstation 33 Beta, openSUSE Tumbleweed 20200929, Arch-based Endeavour OS, and Debian Testing from the start of October.

If 2020 couldn't get more peculiar, today the SDL2 project mainlined support for the OS/2 operating system...

Mesa 20.2 officially released at the end of September as the Q3'2020 open-source driver stack update providing open-source OpenGL/OpenCL/Vulkan support for much of the graphics hardware on the market. For those that prefer waiting for the first point release before upgrading, that milestone was reached today...

The Linux kernel's fundamental printk() function for printing messages at various log levels for then accessing via the likes of dmesg is beginning to see a significant overhaul...

Intel today is revealing a few details concerning upcoming Intel 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" processors...

While the LibreOffice fork is much more popular than OpenOffice these days, the Apache Software Foundation does continue maintaining the OpenOffice codebase born out of Sun Microsystems' StarOffice...

The UBports community that continues advancing the Ubuntu Touch mobile platform has been working on improvements to its installer...

Following this month's Intel programming reference manual update disclosing a number of new instruction set extensions, Intel's compiler engineers have gone public with patches for implementing some of these forthcoming CPU features...

The kernel power management changes have been sent in for Linux 5.10 with a few items worth pointing out from faster hibernation to fixing power management handling for AMD laptops with both integrated and discrete graphics...

The media subsystem of the Linux kernel is seeing a number of changes with the in-development Linux 5.10...

While the mainline Linux kernel for quite a while now has supported AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization for EPYC processors as a means of better securing guest virtual machines (VMs) and public clouds with hardware memory encryption and using one key per VM to not only protect between guests but also the hypervisor, with Linux 5.10 comes AMD SEV-ES as another step forward for secure virtualization on AMD EPYC...

Good news for Raspberry Pi 4 users... The V3DV Vulkan driver developed over the past year for newer Broadcom VideoCore hardware with an emphasis on the Raspberry Pi 4 support is now mainlined in Mesa 20.3!..

WireGuard has long been available as an app on the Google Play store for those wishing to use this cross-platform, open-source secure VPN tunnel solution on Google's mobile operating system. But for Android 12 it appears there will be a form of official support...

CodeWeavers as the main contributor to the Wine code-base and employing many of the key developers thanks to the development of their Linux and macOS CrossOver software is working on a rebrand and promotion of their consulting services...

Phoronix Test Suite 10.0-Finnsnes is now officially available as the latest major feature release for our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software that now has more than six hundred tests/benchmarks available for fully-automated testing. With Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 also comes a significant overhaul to OpenBenchmarking.org and its biggest since its debut back in 2011 alongside Phoronix Test Suite 3.0.

It's been a while since having any major news to report on the once promising mobile Linux software platform Sailfish OS from Finnish vendor Jolla, but today they issued a big update in the form of "Pallas-Yllästunturi" or more easily known as Sailfish OS 3.4...

KDE's Plasma 5.20 is now available as a seriously great update to this open-source desktop environment...

Krita 4.4 is out today as the latest release for this flagship open-source digital painting program...

At the end of 2019 the lead developer of CUPS left Apple after he joined Apple and the company purchased the source code a decade prior for this long-standing open-source printing system used by not only macOS but also Linux and other Unix-like platforms. This unfortunately has not bode well for CUPS in 2020...

The hardware monitoring "hwmon" subsystem maintainer Guenter Roeck sent in the feature updates on Monday to Linux 5.10...

New Intel and AMD hardware support headline the performance events work for Linux 5.10 as part of the "perf" subsystem...

The Linux kernel's prandom_u32() interface for providing pseudo-random number generation is used heavily by the kernel's networking code but that PRNG output can be figured out rather predictably. Thus lining up for Linux 5.10 is a new prandom_u32 implementation...

The Btrfs file-system is seeing some promising additions with Linux 5.10...

After last week exploring the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Linux GPU compute performance for this Ampere graphics card along with the Blender 2.90 performance, today is a look at the Linux gaming performance for the RTX 3080 both for native games as well as those Windows games running on Linux via Steam Play (Proton).

OpenCV as the widely-used, real-time computer vision library is out this week with version 4.5 as a big feature release...

A new kernel feature sent in today for the Linux 5.10 merge window is static calls, which can be helpful in cases where Retpolines (return trampolines) are currently used as part of protections against speculative execution vulnerabilities like Spectre...

Ingo Molnar as usual is quite quick in submitting his changes for the new kernel merge window in the areas he oversees. With the scheduler changes for Linux 5.10 there are some changes worth mentioning...

On this first official day of breaking open Linux 5.10 for development with its merge window, quite a number of noteworthy Intel and AMD x86 processor changes have already been sent in for landing...

Within hours of Linus Torvalds releasing the Linux 5.9 kernel, the GNU folks maintaining the GNU Linux-libre downstream released their version of the kernel that prevents the loading of binary-only modules as well as the loading of binary-only firmware/microcode blobs...

After being one and a half months late, LLVM 11.0 is now tagged and ready to ship...

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.9 as stable...

Given the impending release of Linux 5.9, I was having some fun with cloc today looking at the current lines of code count for this near-final Linux 5.9 kernel state...

Pitivi 2020.09 is now available (well, actually, was tagged ten days ago but only announced today) as the first release for this GNOME video editor solution since Pitivi 0.999 back in August 2018...

The Linux 5.9 kernel is expected for release this evening which will in turn kick off the Linux 5.10 merge window for the next two weeks. As we've already been closely monitoring the various "-next" development trees in recent weeks of material building up for this next cycle, here is a look at a portion of what's to come for this late 2020 kernel...

While the Linux 5.9 kernel isn't even being released until later today, the ARM64 architectural changes have already been mailed in ahead of the opening of the Linux 5.10 merge window...

Intel engineers continue working on "Protection Keys for Supervisor" support for the Linux kernel as a feature coming to a future generation of processors (presumably Sapphire Rapids). The initial users of this PKS support will be helping to protect persistent memory as well as adding safeguards to Trusted Keys within the Linux kernel...

Seeing new AMDGPU targets added to mainline LLVM for aging Radeon GFX7/GFX8 graphics hardware wasn't what I expected to see this weekend...

Just over one week ago Intel released the Media Driver 2020.3 with Gen12/Xe AV1 decode and other improvements for their quarterly feature release of this open-source video acceleration driver. They have also now released their adjoining Media SDK 20.3 open-source update...

KDE developers have been busy not only putting the finishing touches on the soon to be released Plasma 5.20 but also early feature work continues on what will be Plasma 5.21...

It was in January that AMD finally published an open-source Linux driver for their Sensor Fusion Hub used by AMD Ryzen laptops for various sensor functionality. As we approach the end of the year this driver still hasn't been mainlined yet but a new revision was sent out on Friday...

Adding to the growing list of Mesa 20.3 features is now RADV ACO supporting NGG GS. Or rather, the Radeon Vulkan driver with the ACO back-end now supports geometry shaders with Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) as found on newer AMD GPUs...

Following yesterday's release of Wine 5.19, the developers responsible for the Wine-Staging have issued their corresponding update for this codebase that adds 600+ patches currently undergoing testing...

Intel's next Compute Runtime release is going to be exciting as OpenCL 3.0 will be enabled for all graphics hardware found going back to Broadwell CPUs...

Just a friendly reminder and last call that if you wanted to partake in this week's 2020 "Oktoberfest" Phoronix Premium special, it is ending this weekend...

Wine 5.19 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this software for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms...

After being in development for more than one year, it looks like with Linux 5.10 there will be EXT4 fast commit support...

Of the many new features in Linux 5.9 with its debut set for this weekend, one of the performance-related changes is Intel FSGSBASE support finally being mainlined. A half-decade after the Linux patches first appeared for this feature present in Intel CPUs going back to Ivy Bridge, the mainline kernel is now patched for this feature that can help out I/O and other context switching heavy workloads. Given many of the same workloads were negatively impacted by the CPU security mitigations of recent years, here is a look at the current mitigated vs. unmitigated performance difference on the Linux 5.9 kernel with an Intel Core i9 9900K CPU for reference on how the mitigation impact is on recent versions of the Linux kernel.

Back in August was the big surprise of file-system driver vendor Paragon Software wanting to mainline their NTFS driver into the Linux kernel that is much more advanced than the existing NTFS Linux driver. While not merged yet, on Friday the latest version was sent out for review...

Not only is the Plasma 5.20 desktop shining and more Wayland improvements and other enhancements queuing for Plasma 5.21, but the Plasma Mobile effort is also beginning to shine...