Phoronix

As last minute material for Mesa 20.0 is making Valve's "ACO" AMD compiler back-end for the RADV Vulkan driver in better shape for GFX6/GCN1.0 graphics hardware...

Driven by curiosity sake, here is a look at how the total number of AMD and Intel developers contributed to the upstream Linux kernel during the 2010s as well as the total number of commits each year from the respective hardware vendors...

LibreOffice 6.4 is set to be released in the coming days while succeeding that will now be LibreOffice 7.0...

Flatpak 1.6 was an exciting update for this Linux application sandboxing/distribution tech in that it started laying the foundation to support a paid app store but elsewhere in the code-base a security issue came about...

Last year Linux kernel developers began removing support for Intel's Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) and that looks like it will be finished up in the forthcoming Linux 5.6 cycle...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 entered public beta this week as the latest installment to RHEL8...

As we have been eagerly talking about for the past week, the Linux kernel's k10temp driver was updated for better AMD CPU CCD temperatures and voltage/current reporting. Those improvements have been quickly evolving thanks to the work of the open-source community with AMD still sadly holding the datasheets concerning the power/temperature registers close to their vest. A new version of k10temp was sent out on Wednesday...

While Apple still isn't officially supporting the Vulkan graphics/compute API in remaining focused on their Metal drivers, MoltenVK at least has been updated for Vulkan 1.2 in allowing developers to target this Vulkan-to-Metal abstraction layer for macOS and iOS...

Mesa developers are planning to end feature work on Mesa 20.0 next week as this first quarter update to the Mesa 3D graphics stack...

Android 9.0 "Pie" is approaching two years of age and already succeeded by Android 10, but on the Android-x86 front the 9.0 release is finally getting closer...

Ahead of the forthcoming dav1d 0.6 release, this open-source AV1 video decoder has begun implementing AVX-512 optimizations targeting Intel Ice Lake processors...

Sway 1.4 is out today as the newest version of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor that has a growing following...

GhostBSD 20.01 is out today as the first release of 2020 for this desktop-focused BSD operating system built off FreeBSD...

As part of our many Linux benchmarks in ending out the 2010s we ran tests looking at CentOS 6 through CentOS 8, seven years of Ubuntu Linux performance, and various other Linux distribution benchmarks and testing other important pieces of open-source software over time. One of the additional comparisons now wrapped up is looking at the performance of Debian GNU/Linux going back from the old 7 series through the current 10 stable series and also Debian Testing. Tests where relevant were done out-of-the-box with the default security mitigations and again with mitigations disabled.

Out this morning is AMDVLK 2020.Q1.1 as AMD's first official open-source Vulkan driver code drop of the new year...

GameMode, the open-source daemon led by the game porters at Feral Interactive for dynamically optimizing Linux system performance when running games, is out today with version 1.5 as its newest feature update...

The Khronos SYCL standard as a single-source C++-based programming model for OpenCL is one of the exciting elements for Intel's GPU compute plans with the forthcoming Xe graphics cards and fits into their oneAPI umbrella. They just released their SYCL Compiler and Runtimes 2019-12 release with numerous updates...

A "pin_on_cpu" system call has been proposed for the Linux kernel as a new means of letting user-space threads pin themselves to specific CPU cores...

Given yesterday's release of Wine 5.0 I was curious to run some development stats on Wine Git as of the 5.0 release tag for seeing how development is trending on this wildly popular program among Linux users especially for running Windows games and applications...

Following last week's release of Vulkan 1.2, Vulkan 1.2.132 was released on Tuesday as the first maintenance/point release to this major Vulkan API revision...

At last week's Linux.Conf.Au conference was an interesting presentation by longtime X developer Keith Packard on the early days of the pre-X.Org X Window System, the collapse of Unix, and how his views formed on copyleft licenses for building thriving communities...

Wine 5.0 has been released as stable as the annual timed release of this software for running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

In meeting the plans for releasing Wayland 1.18 in February, the alpha release of this Wayland update is now available...

As announced back at CES, the Radeon RX 5600 XT is being launched as the newest Navi graphics card to fill the void between the original RX 5700 series and the budget RX 5500 XT. The Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics cards are beginning to ship today at $279+ USD price point and offers great Linux support but with one last minute -- and hopefully very temporary -- caveat.

Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt continues working on a variety of interesting performance optimizations for upstream GNOME as well as other usability enhancements for this desktop environment. One of the latest items being tackled is improving the quality of background images on GNOME...

Canonical this morning has announced Anbox Cloud for containerized workloads using Google's Android as the guest operating system...

Fedora 32 could be two spins lighter with two little known variants of Fedora Linux set to be removed unless maintainers step up...

The Genode operating system framework that's been going strong for over a decade and continuing to employ a micro-kernel architecture continues to plan for an interesting future...

The modern F18/Flang Fortran front-end to LLVM had been set to land in the LLVM mono repository last Monday that could have made it included as part of the LLVM 10.0 branch set for that day. The LLVM 10.0 branching happened as planned but the landing of this Fortran support did not...

For months we have seen various Intel open-source Linux graphics driver patches that begin preparing for multi-GPU support where in moving forward with their Xe graphics cards there could be the iGPU + dGPU setup or even multiple Xe graphics cards in a single system. So far those Intel Linux multi-GPU preparations have been focused on their kernel-space driver while now it's reaching into user-space with their Vulkan driver seeing early infrastructure changes...

Following last month's Debian init system diversity vote where the Debian developers decided on a general resolution of focusing on systemd but support exploring alternatives, the official Debian Policy has been updated to reflect that...

One of the changes planned for Fedora 32 has been to enable EarlyOOM by default to better handle low memory situations either due to the system running with minimal RAM or under memory pressure. But the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has yet to reach a decision over this default...

Earlier this month many Phoronix readers were interested in our fresh tests of the XanMod-patched Linux kernel for boosting the desktop and workstation performance compared to Ubuntu's default Linux kernel. Among many patches, XanMod does pull in some kernel patches from Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux, so we figured it would be interesting to see how the XanMod'ed Ubuntu compares to Clear Linux performance.

One of several projects implementing the OpenGL graphics API over Vulkan has been Think Silicon's GLOVE library. GLOVE currently is focuses on OpenGL ES 2.0 + EGL 1.4 support and is a standalone project unlike Mesa's Zink Gallium3D driver working on OpenGL / GLES over Vulkan too. GLOVE 0.4 is out today as a big feature update...

Last week I eagerly reported on Ryzen CPUs on Linux finally seeing CCD temperatures and current/voltage reporting thanks to new patches to the k10temp driver by Google's Guenter Roeck who oversees the kernel's hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem. The patches seem to be working well and are tentatively queued in hwmon-next, but more testing is still needed...

While there has been the initial Microsoft exFAT file-system driver since Linux 5.4, that code is based on a vintage snapshot of prior Samsung code. Samsung engineers meanwhile have been working to upstream a much newer and better off exFAT implementation to replace that existing driver and it looks like it could be ready for Linux 5.6...

Not to be confused with Ubuntu's Mir display stack or Rustlang's MIR, the new MIR effort by Red Hat developer Vladimir Makarov is a new project focused on providing a lightweight JIT compiler...

With the upcoming Linux 5.6 kernel cycle will be the first of many patches to come surrounding AMD Zen 3 "Family 19h" support...

The seventh weekly release candidate to Linux 5.5 is now available for testing...

While a Red Hat developer is working on "Goals" to try to improve upon Make, the GNU Make project is not slowing down and is out this Sunday with a big update...

Following the recent AppArmor performance regression in Linux 5.5 (since resolved), some Phoronix readers had requested tests out of curiosity in looking at the performance impact of Fedora's decision to utilize SELinux by default. Here is how the Fedora Workstation 31 performance compares out-of-the-box with SELinux to disabling it.

In addition to NetworkManager having good WireGuard support in advance of this secure VPN tunnel tech landing with the Linux 5.6 kernel, Intel's ConnMan software is also ready with supporting WireGuard...

An area where Intel continues striking with rhythm and near perfection is on the open-source software front with their countless speedy and useful open-source innovations that often go unmatched as well as timely hardware support. Out this weekend is their OSPray 2.0 release for this damn impressive ray-tracing engine...

This past week KDE Plasma 5.18 reached beta for this next long-term support release of the modern KDE desktop. While it's approaching the finish line next month, developers have not let up on more improvements in making this one of their best and most polished releases ever...

A few days ago I reported on AMD's "k10temp" Linux kernel driver finally seeing the ability to report CCD temperatures and CPU current/voltage readings as a big improvement to this hardware monitoring driver. The work hasn't yet been queued for inclusion into the mainline kernel, but initial testing is working well and a second revision to the patches has been sent out...

Hopefully you didn't yet book your tickets to XDC2020 as the annual X.Org conference as the venue -- and host country for that matter -- may change...

GNU Binutils 2.34 has been branched off in preparing for the upcoming release of this important set of "binary utilities" to the GNU compiler toolchain. Most interesting with Binutils 2.34 is in fact an optional HTTP server support for enhancing the developer/debugging experience...

As for CVE-2019-14615 the Intel graphics vulnerability disclosed this week affecting Gen7 through Gen9 graphics architectures, it's been dubbed "iGPU Leak" by the researchers involved. Thanks to the researcher who originally discovered this vulnerability having reached out to us, we now have some more information on this issue they describe as a "dangerous vulnerability."..

As of this morning experimental support for C++20 coroutines has been merged into the GCC 10 compiler!..

We haven't heard of the Simple Firmware Interface in a number of years, but that changed this week in Linux now formally marking SFI as "obsolete" and confirmation Intel does not plan to ship any future platforms with this standard that dates back to their early days of working on Atom-powered mobile devices...