Phoronix

Upstream LLVM/Clang now supports making use of the vector math library found within the GNU C Library...

The Linux 5.10 merge window is closing this weekend but there still is new code landing for this last complete kernel series of 2020...

Ubuntu for many years has allowed EXT4 file-system encryption when making use of LVM management but for Ubuntu 21.04 it's looking to offer the file-system encryption without having to go through LVM...

Fedora 33 will manage to ship on-time per its back-up target date of next week Tuesday...

For months now Intel's open-source Linux driver stack has been preparing for VRR support with Gen11/Gen12 graphics. We've seen user-space patches by Intel around VRR while now they are finally sending out their key Linux kernel driver patches with the i915 DRM code...

This ~$50 USD graphics card is open-source friendly, can drive four display outputs simultaneously, passively cooled, and can fit in a PCI Express x1 slot. It's a unique card offering good value especially for those Linux users wanting open-source friendly hardware.

The crew at iXsystems this week not only released TrueNAS 12.0 as their convergence of TrueNAS and FreeNAS, but they have also put out an alpha build of TrueNAS SCALE as their new Linux-based offering...

Last week was the main set of ARM 64-bit architecture updates for Linux 5.10 while today a second batch of changes were sent in for this kernel. That first round had the Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) and Pointer Authentication support among other improvements while this secondary pull has two notable performance optimizations...

Ubuntu 20.10, the "Groovy Gorilla", is now officially available...

In an effort to better cater towards newer and common x86_64 instruction set extensions, open-source toolchain developers are moving ahead with the work on x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels for being able to target a handful of different "levels" beyond the base x86_64 instruction set...

The NFS client code with Linux 5.10 has another performance optimization...

The FreeBSD project has published their Q3-2020 report on the state of this leading BSD operating system...

The PCI changes were submitted on Wednesday for the Linux 5.10 kernel...

Following last week's big Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 and the new OpenBenchmarking.org, a small update is out this week to address some initial hiccups...

While all eyes are on the AMD Radeon RX 6000 "Big Navi" graphics cards set to be announced next week, it also looks like AMD is preparing for a Navi 1x "Blockchain" graphics card offering given the latest work in their open-source Linux driver...

While the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) on Windows allows for undervolting laptop processors, currently on Linux there isn't any Intel-endorsed way for undervolting your CPU should you be interested in better thermal/power efficiency and other factors. But a hypothetical Linux kernel driver could be coming for filling such void...

Stemming from our initial Intel Core i7 1165G7 "Tiger Lake" benchmarks on the Dell XPS 13 9310 last week and then also discovering better single-threaded performance on Ubuntu 20.10, one of the pressing questions was whether this is expected performance on Linux or if it's coming up short of Microsoft Windows for this first tier-one notebook to market with Intel Tiger Lake. So following those earlier tests I proceeded to do a Windows 10 Pro with all available updates comparison on Ubuntu 20.10 with the i7-1165G7. For added context, the same software stack and tests were repeated on an AMD Ryzen "Renoir" notebook.

Intel has begun adding support for Alderlake-S to their open-source Linux kernel graphics driver...

Facebook's BOLT is a multi-year project focused on speeding up the performance of binaries. This open-source project initially focused on being able to better optimize Linux x86_64/ARM64 ELF binaries as a post-link optimizer. BOLT has been seeing much success with even Google using it now for better performance and now there is work to upstream it as part of the LLVM project...

OpenBSD 6.8, NetBSD 9.1, and now TrueNAS 12.0 is out... It seems to be BSD release week!..

The interesting work continues pouring in for Mesa 20.3 as the Q4'2020 feature release to this open-source graphics stack... The latest excitement is on the "Clover" front for Gallium3D OpenCL...

It was just on Monday that Intel's talented open-source developers merged a hefty Tiger Lake graphics optimization into the Mesa 20.3 code that for some games/software can be around ~11% faster thanks to greater caching. Just a day later another optimization has arrived for helping these latest-generation Intel graphics...

This week's Vulkan 1.2.158 spec release brought the fragment shading rate extension to control the rate at which fragments are shaded on a per-draw, per-primitive, or per-region basis. This can be useful similar to OpenGL and Direct3D support for helping to allow different, less important areas of the screen be shaded less than areas requiring greater detail/focus...

The AMDGPU open-source Linux kernel graphics driver continues seeing work on next-generation GPU support around the forthcoming "Big Navi" GPUs...

With Ubuntu 20.10 due for release this week I have begun testing near-final Ubuntu 20.10 builds on many more systems in the lab. Larger than our normal distribution/OS comparisons, here is the culmination of running hundreds of benchmarks (366 tests to be exact) under both Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with all available updates and then again on the Ubuntu 20.10 development state while testing on Intel Comet Lake.

Mesa 20.3 has merged a long work-in-progress patch series providing support for going from the modern NIR intermediate representation to TGSI as the conventional Gallium3D IR...

Not only is there a new OpenBSD release this week but the NetBSD crew also issued a big update in the form of NetBSD 9.1...

The ODF 1.3 Open Document Format specification was approved by the OASIS Committee at the start of the year and now as we approach the end of the year The Document Foundation is hoping to see ODF 1.3 support completed soon for this leading open-source office suite...

The System76 Thelio Major with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3900 series is already a beast, but now this Linux PC vendor has managed to outdo themselves once again with the Thelio Mega...

Firefox 82.0 is now available as the latest release of Mozilla's web browser that continues on their expedited release cycles...

The Xen virtualization work for the Linux 5.10 kernel revolves around security...

AMD has issued their first open-source Vulkan driver code drop of the quarter with AMDVLK 2020.Q4.1...

Last week saw the XFS file-system with Linux 5.10 support timestamps until the year 2486 rather than year 2038 and other improvements too. This week a second round of XFS work has landed for Linux 5.10...

It was just two weeks ago that the Qt 6.0 Alpha released, but in aiming to get the release back on schedule, the beta is already shipping today...

The FreeType text rendering library is out with version 2.10.4 today as an important security update...

The RISC-V architecture code with Linux 5.10 adds the ability for booting via (U)EFI...

From my Tiger Lake testing so far with the Core i7 1165G7, the "Gen12" Xe Graphics have been quite compelling with a very nice upgrade over Gen11 and especially obvious win over the very common still Gen9 graphics. With Mesa 20.3, another measurable performance is on the way for the Intel Vulkan driver with Tiger Lake...

The fourth release candidate of OpenZFS 2.0 is now available for testing of this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently for Linux and FreeBSD platforms...

Trisquel 9.0 has been released as one of the few Linux distributions approved by the Free Software Foundation...

The FUSE implementation for supporting file-systems in user-space is seeing important kernel work merged for Linux 5.10...

Git 2.29 is now available with experimental support for using SHA-256 to increase security of code repositories over the possibility of intentional SHA-1 collisions with the current indices...

An independent party has slowly begun merging patches into mainline Mesa for allowing the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" to build on Microsoft Windows...

Last week I published initial benchmarks of the Intel Core i7 1165G7 "Tiger Lake" performance on Linux with the Dell XPS 13 9310 Developer Edition laptop. Of most surprise from those preliminary Linux figures were finding that for some single-threaded workloads the performance was actually worse than the previous generation Ice Lake. Since then I've been running more tests around the clock with some interesting discoveries to note today. It is possible to enhance the single-threaded performance so it's performing better than Ice Lake as would be expected, but comes with lowering the multi-threaded performance compared to the results shared last week.

Vulkan 1.2.158 was released this morning with two notable extensions introduced...

Independent Linux kernel developer Con Kolivas (and retired anaesthetist) is back on track with a new update to his "CK" patch-set and the MuQSS scheduler...

Should you want to use the Ada programming language for GPU programming, the GCC compiler has been working on CUDA support within its front-end for this safety and security minded language...

The "char/misc" area within the Linux kernel continues to have a bit of everything as the "catch all" pull request of the kernel not fitting into other existing subsystems...

Building off Linux 5.9 that featured initial support for Gen12 graphics on next year's Rocket Lake desktop platform along with other early enablement for Rocket Lake like RAPL support and other PCI ID additions, that work has continued for the Linux 5.10 cycle...

One of AMD's compiler experts this week sent out a patch wiring up Zen 3 support in the important GNU Binutils collection for Linux systems...

It was in October 1995 that Theo de Raadt began the OpenBSD project as a fork of NetBSD 1.0 following his resignation from the NetBSD core development team. Now twenty-five years later OpenBSD 6.8 has been released for marking the 25th anniversary of this popular BSD distribution...