Phoronix

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE today sent in all of the sound driver updates for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Herbert Xu sent in all of the crypto subsystem changes on Tuesday for the in-development Linux 5.6 kernel. Interesting us the most out of this crypto work is the AMD Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) driver...

Intel last night made public two more data leakage disclosures, which tie back to Zombieload and November's TAA issue...

The EFI kernel code has seen a variety of clean-ups and low-level improvements to it for the Linux 5.6 cycle...

Another alternative to slow initramfs generation could be distributing pre-built initramfs images to users. An additional benefit of that is possibly better security with measured boot capabilities, a matter currently being discussed by Fedora stakeholders...

AppStream was started in 2011 as a means of drawing up cross-distribution (XML-based) standards for describing software components/packages metadata and for repositories to describe software collections. Now nearly a decade later, AppStream 1.0 should be coming in the next few months...

Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki is punctual as always in sending in his feature pull requests for the new merge window...

Unfortunately it wasn't a trouble-free experience at launch but with time Raven Ridge APUs have been getting cleaned up on Linux for a pleasant experience, thanks in part to the Google Chromebook play that has also seen these newer AMD APUs seeing HDCP content protection support and PSP / TEE trusted execution functionality...

SELinux maintainer Paul Moore sent in the Security Enhanced Linux updates for the 5.6 merge window, which amounts to "one of the bigger SELinux pull requests in recent years."..

The FreeBSD project has issued their last quarterly status update for 2019...

Last month were benchmarks of RAID benchmarks on four hard drives in not visiting the Linux HDD RAID performance in a while. Stemming from that article were requests of fresh tests of the SSD RAID performance on Linux 5.5 Git, so here are those results for single drive performance and RAID0 / RAID1 / RAID5 / RAID6 / RAID10.

Btrfs in the now-stable Linux 5.5 kernel is exciting for its new RAID1C3/RAID1C4 capability allowing three/four copies of data rather than just two while looking ahead to Linux 5.6 is further feature work on this Linux file-system...

In ruffling feathers of open-source Qt fans, The Qt Company announced a series of changes today to help foster their commercial business...

Chris Lattner, the founder of the LLVM compiler stack and sub-projects like the Clang C/C++ compiler front-end, has joined RISC-V firm SiFive...

Fresh off the Linux 5.5 release, the Free Software Foundation Latin America crew has debuted their GNU Linux-libre 5.5 downstream that continues to be focused on deblobbing the kernel of drivers requiring proprietary firmware and stripping out other code/functionality that is contingent upon non-free software bits and removing the ability to load closed-source kernel modules...

Following last month's release of the big Qt 5.14 tool-kit, Qt 5.14.1 is out this morning as the first point release...

With Wine 5.0 having released and the Git tree back open for feature work, we're quite looking forward to see what new material will land following this feature freeze that was in effect the past two months...

SUSE's Borislav Petkov sent in the (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) updates for the Linux 5.6 kernel on this first day of the new merge window...

Habana Labs, the AI start-up being bought out by Intel, is still striving towards upstreaming their Gaudi processor support code for AI training...

Following the Linux 5.5 kernel release one of the first pull requests sent in is for the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates. Dominating the HWMON interest this cycle is a long overdue SATA temperature monitoring driver and vastly improving the k10temp driver for AMD Zen desktop and server CPUs...

More than a decade after Apple acquired the CUPS source-code and its lead developer, that developer, Michael Sweet, recently parted ways with Apple...

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.5 as stable...

Linux 5.5 is likely to be released later today and with that are many new features. But as soon as 5.5 is released it marks the opening of the Linux 5.6 merge window and this next kernel has us particularly exciting... It's certainly shaping up to be one of the most exciting kernel cycles in recent times with many blockbuster features and improvements...

MPV 0.32 is out today as the newest update to this open-source video player based on MPlayer...

Formally announced earlier this month was Kubuntu Focus as the most polished KDE laptop we've ever tested. Besides offering a great KDE desktop experience, the Kubuntu Focus offers high-end specs while now there is a slightly cheaper base model introduced...

Dracut that is used for generating the initramfs image on Linux distributions like Fedora / RHEL, Debian, openSUSE, and many other distributions could be much faster...

Fedora IoT already uses swap-on-ZRAM by default given IoT devices are often running with limited amounts of RAM, but for Fedora Workstation 33 the developers are looking at enabling SWAP-on-ZRAM by default for all new installations...

KDE developers were busy as always this week working to polish up the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.18 and other areas of their open-source desktop stack...

The widely-used SQLite embedded database library saw its first major release of 2020 this week...

Earlier this month I wrote about Intel SST Core-Power patches as part of Intel's Speed Select's functionality for more control over per-core power/frequency behavior based upon the software running on each core. The "core-power" profile support appears ready now for Linux 5.6...

As shown yesterday the new video BIOS of the Radeon RX 5600 XT paired with the corrected SMC firmware on Linux yields impressive performance improvements that -- similar to Windows -- allows the card to compete better with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2060. For Linux users, activating the Valve-funded ACO compiler back-end for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver helps turn up the competition even more...

It's already been over nine months since the release of Solus 4 while now this popular Linux desktop distribution has been succeeded by Solus 4.1..

Patches written two months ago for Intel's ANV open-source Vulkan driver have now been merged ahead of the imminent Mesa 20.0 feature freeze and branching...

Some exciting news this week for Firefox users running on Wayland.....

In addition to the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's on-disk shader cache and in-memory shader cache there is now a "live shader cache" to help with deduplication of compiled shader objects...

The release candidate of OPNsense 20.1 is available this weekend, the FreeBSD/HardenedBSD-based networking/firewall OS that forked from pfSense now a half-decade ago...

One of the features that didn't materialize in time for Wine 5.0 as the annual stable Wine release was the work-in-progress Vulkan back-end to WineD3D. Rather than going from Direct3D to OpenGL as WineD3D currently does, there has been efforts to introduce a Vulkan back-end similar to the likes of DXVK...

Coming a few weeks past DXVK 1.5.1 is now version 1.5.2 and it brings with it quite a number of improvements...

Weston 8.0 was released today as the newest version of this reference Wayland compositor...

Yesterday I put together some statistics on the AMD vs. Intel contributions to the upstream Linux kernel during the 2010s, but a request coming in off that was how do NVIDIA's contributions compare. Here is a look at the NVIDIA contributions to the Linux kernel over the past decade...

Earlier this week AMD launched the Radeon RX 5600 XT and as shown in our Linux launch-day review it offers nice performance up against the GTX 1660 and RTX 2060 graphics cards on Linux with various OpenGL and Vulkan games. Complicating the launch was the last-minute change to the video BIOS to offer better performance, but unfortunately that led to an issue with the Linux driver as well as confusing the public due to the change at launch and some board vendors already shipping the new vBIOS release while others are not yet. Fortunately, a Linux solution is forthcoming and in our tests it is working out and offering better performance.

Everything is aligning that the Linux 5.5 kernel is likely to be released this coming Sunday rather than being pushed off for another week of testing...

As more last minute work for the upcoming Mesa 20.0 is initial OpenGL tessellation support for Intel's OpenSWR driver...

NVIDIA on Thursday introduced Nsight Graphics 2020.1 that to its profiling support can now handle OpenGL + Vulkan interoperability for games/applications making use of both APIs. While not many game engines / apps are yet using the likes of OpenGL 4.6 ARB_gl_spirv, Nsight is ready...

While the Linux 5.5 kernel isn't even released yet, it's ideally coming out on Sunday should there not be a one week delay. But in any event Arm's Will Deacon has already sent in the pull request of the ARM architecture changes for Linux 5.6...

The MIPS-based SGI Octane IRIX workstations were first introduced in the late 90's while recently there has been a resurgence in the work on getting these vintage PCs running off a mainline Linux kernel...

After missing their original target of transitioning to Intel Gallium3D by default for Mesa 19.3 as the preferred OpenGL Linux driver on Intel graphics hardware, this milestone has now been reached for Mesa 20.0!..

ZFS On Linux 0.8.3 is out today as the first official update to ZoL since last September...

While the Linux 5.5 kernel is expected to be released as soon as this Sunday, a last minute change to the AMDGPU DRM driver makes the Renoir graphics no longer treated as experimental. With that, there is open-source support out-of-the-box rather than being hidden behind a kernel module flag...

In addition to WireGuard being part of "net-next" as the networking subsystem material targeting the upcoming Linux 5.6 cycle, there is another big last minute addition to the networking space: the Flow Queue PIE packet scheduler has been merged...