Phoronix

Several months ago we learned of the Xfce 4.16 plans to drop GTK2 support and explore client-side decoration goals among other changes for this lightweight desktop environment release expected in late 2020...

Sent out shortly before the holidays was an Intel Uncore Frequency driver for Linux servers. That driver has now been revised with the latest fixes and is looking like it could soon land in mainline for helping latency-sensitive servers...

Back in December was the proposal to finally enable FSTRIM by default for Fedora 32 in benefiting solid-state storage. Today the formal approval was given by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee to go ahead with this long overdue change...

Git 2.25 is out today with over 500 commits making up this latest feature release...

Last week marked the two year anniversary since the formal public disclosure of the Spectre and Meltdown disclosures. To commemorate that anniversary, I was running some fresh benchmarks of various Intel desktop and server processors with the in-development Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to look at the performance impact today with the default CPU vulnerability mitigations and then again with the mitigations disabled at run-time.

The first development release of Phoronix Test Suite 9.4-Vestby is now available for evaluation...

Following the long-awaited GCC transition from SVN to Git that took place this weekend, the GNU Compiler Collection is kicking off this week by transitioning to "stage four" development on the GCC 10 compiler...

The NGG (Next-Gen Geometry) support with Navi continues to be refined by the open-source AMD Linux graphics drivers with the RADV Vulkan driver seeing a fresh batch of fixes/clean-ups, inspired in part by the NGG code from the RadeonSI and AMDVLK drivers...

One of the set of patches for Intel's Linux kernel graphics driver that have been floating around for more than one year is about exposing per-client (process) statistics in how each application is making use of the GPU's render/blitter/video hardware and various insightful statistics related to that. The patches aren't queued for mainline yet but at least a new revision of the work was published...

Linus Torvalds has just issued Linux 5.5-rc6 as the latest test release ahead of the stable Linux 5.5 kernel due out in a few weeks...

At the end of 2019 I ran some GCC 5 through GCC 10 compiler benchmarks while here are the similar tests conducted on the LLVM side for seeing how the Clang C/C++ compiler performance has evolved over the past few years...

Wine 5.0 is still going through weekly release candidates but the stable release of Wine 5 is expected to land in the back-half of January. With that imminent release, here is a look at the big changes to find with this annual Wine update...

Here is another long overdue kernel change... For more than a decade there have been patches trying to get SATA/SCSI drive temperature monitoring working nicely within the Linux kernel but none of that work ever made it through for mainlining. That has left various user-space tools to provide the functionality, but in doing so that has required root access and not to mention the need to first install said utilities. Well, with Linux 5.6 in 2020, there is finally a proper drive temperature driver for disks and solid-state drives with temperature sensors...

Making rounds in Q4 of last year was the little known Project Trident open-source operating system switching from its TrueOS/FreeBSD base to in turn moving to Void Linux as a base for their platform. Towards the end of the year they offered some initial images of their reborn OS while now Project Trident based on Void Linux has reached beta...

Marvell has been preparing the Octeon TX2 processor support for the GCC compiler, their next-generation version of the (originally Cavium) infrastructure/network processors now based on their ThunderX2 line...

I refrained from writing about Valve's Steam Survey numbers at the start of January when they were posted for December as the numbers didn't seem up to scratch. But half-way through the month now, the same numbers are up with no edits by Valve, as we've seen in some months when they refine their measurements...

I reported a few days ago GCC was hoping to transition to Git this weekend from their large SVN repository. Going into this weekend I wasn't going to be the least bit surprised if this transition got delayed again given all of the months of delays already, but actually, they went ahead and migrated to Git!..

KDE developers fixed a number of Wayland and KWin bugs this week along with a number of other annoying bugs as well as making several other noteworthy refinements to the growing KDE ecosystem...

Wine-Staging 5.0-RC5 is out today as usual, arriving just one day after the upstream Wine 5.0-rc5 release...

While the Flang/f18 compiler is expected to land in the LLVM 10.0 source tree on Monday, another Fortran LLVM front-end continues in development...

For those wanting to run Debian from the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) as the root file-system, that support is emerging...

Back in October 2018 was a patch series out of Linaro for "thermal pressure" support in the Linux kernel for providing better task placement when CPUs are running hot/overheating to the extent their CPU frequencies are being downclocked/limited. Out this weekend is a revised version of that Linux thermal pressure support...

One of the missing features for those with AMD Ryzen laptops has been the lack of a Sensor Fusion Hub driver that is needed for supporting the accelerometer and gyroscopic sensors for the display and related laptop sensor functionality. This week AMD finally posted patches for a Sensor Fusion Hub Linux driver...

A big change merged to the GNU Debugger (GDB) code-base on Friday is support for multi-target debugging support...

Python scripts may be running noticeably faster come the release of Fedora 32 in April...

One of the many devices being pursued by the PINE64 crew is the PineTab open-source ARM 64-bit tablet. Thanks to being another Allwinner A64 product and not using any too bleeding edge tech, the PineTab has patches available to get it running off a mainline Linux kernel...

We are likely to see the stable Wine 5.0 release within the next week or two but for now Wine 5.0-RC5 is available for the latest testing...

In addition to their AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature updates sent out on Thursday, AMD also sent in a special pull request to DRM-Next on its own of a new feature: DP MST DSC...

The GRUB boot-loader has finally merged support for dealing with LUKS2 encrypted disks...

In time for some weekend testing is the beta release of OpenMandriva Lx 4.1...

Amazon engineers announced their work today on "DAMON", a Linux kernel module for monitoring of data accesses for specific user-space processes...

We've already been looking forward to Linux 5.6 with already there being a lot of good stuff coming and now it's even more exciting: at least the prerequisites have been merged overnight for Multipath TCP (MPTCP) support!..

Time is quickly running out to get new code into DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.6 merge window. AMD on Thursday did send out another feature pull request with some interesting additions worth mentioning...

GNOME 3.35.3 is out today as the latest development release on the road to GNOME 3.36...

The long awaited release of OpenWrt 19.07 took place this week for this Linux distribution popular for embedded, primarily networking devices...

It's been four years since last testing out the XanMod kernel as a spin of the Linux kernel with various patches and extra tuning designed to offer better desktop/workstation performance, similar to the Liquorix kernel. But given the recent Liquorix kernel testing and discussions over kernel schedulers and more, here are some fresh benchmarks of the latest XanMod kernel. Long story short, I am quite impressed by these latest XanMod results.

AMD "Pollock" is a new chip similar to Dali and looking like it may be used for some Ryzen embedded purposes. AMD Pollock was plumbed into the Linux driver yesterday and was the first time we've heard this codename...

Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds doesn't recommend using ZFS On Linux at least until Oracle were to re-license the code to make it friendly for mainline inclusion. But even then he doesn't seem turned on by the ZFS features or general performance...

DXVK 1.5.1 is out today as the latest feature update for this project implementing Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan for faster Wine/Proton Linux gaming performance. This is the first update since the big DXVK 1.5 release that integrated D9VK for D3D9 support...

There hasn't been a new Mesa stable release in a number of weeks due to the Christmas and New Year's holidays but that changed today with Mesa 19.3.2 as the first significant point release of Mesa 19.3...

GNOME has continued its recent trend of offering more point releases to existing stable series for filling the void between the six-month feature releases. Out today is GNOME 3.34.3 with all of the latest fixes, many of which were back-ported from the currently under development GNOME 3.36...

The long in development process of converting GCC's SVN repository to Git for using this modern distributed revision control system for developing the GNU Compiler Collection in the 2020s may finally be complete in the days ahead...

A few days ago I wrote about a big improvement to write performance for EXT4's Direct I/O code path but that is not the only DIO optimization coming for Linux 5.6. Thanks to IBM, another big EXT4 DIO boost can be found for database workloads...

Oracle has released a developer preview of their forthcoming Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 to Oracle Linux users, the company's spin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With Oracle UEK 6, Linux 5.4 serves as the new base...

While the Allwinner VPU "Cedrus" video decode driver is a wonderful success of open-source third-party work expanding Linux's multimedia hardware acceleration capabilities, consulting firm Bootlin who spearheaded this driver is for now at least is ending feature development on this driver...

Separate from the whole Python 2 removal effort with the Python 2.7 that is EOL'ed since the start of the year, Fedora 33 due out later this year is looking to be their first release dropping the even older Python 2.6 series...

While on the back-half of the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle, sent in on Wednesday were an interesting batch of AMDGPU driver fixes that are quite notable...

While no major performance improvements were noted as part of the release notes, given this week's Firefox 72 release here are some fresh benchmarks of Firefox 70/71/72 on Ubuntu Linux benchmarked with and without WebRender being enabled. As well, these numbers show how Firefox on Linux is currently stacking up against Google Chrome 79 as its latest stable release.

While Intel has offered good Ice Lake support since before the CPUs were shipping (sans taking a bit longer for the Thunderbolt support as a key lone exception, since resolved), a feature that's been publicly known since 2017 is the Fast Short REP MOV behavior and finally with Linux 5.6 that is being made use of for faster memory movements...

In addition to Intel IGC network driver performance-boosting TSO support, also queued within Intel's next-queue tree of networking changes is a new software bus called Virtual Bus...