Phoronix

Adding to the amount of surprising news this week, Electronic Arts just announced they will be open-sourcing portions of Command and Conquer Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert in order to help the mod community around this franchise...

Compute Express Link is the interconnect standard backed by Intel, AMD, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Dell, and others for building off PCI Express with new CPU-to-device and CPU-to-memory capabilities. Intel's stellar open-source team has been working on plumbing the Linux kernel support for this next generation of devices...

RenderDoc 1.8 is out as the newest feature release for this cross-platform, open-source graphics debugging and profiling utility for Vulkan, Direct3D 11/12, OpenGL, and OpenGL ES APIs...

Intel announced at the end of April the 10th Gen Core "Comet Lake" S-Series CPUs with the Core i9 10900K being their new top-end processor with a 10 core / 20 thread processor that can clock up to 5.3GHz. The Comet Lake S-Series desktop CPUs are now shipping and this morning the embargo lifts in being able to publish the benchmarks. Here is how the Intel Core i5 10500K and Core i9 10900K processors are performing on Linux from Steam on Linux gaming to various interesting real-world workloads.

Microsoft is working on its own Wayland compositor derived from the Weston code-base...

FUSE for file-systems in user-space while being criticized by developers in the past and known for being slower than kernel native file-systems is seeing another write optimization come Linux 5.8...

AMD on Tuesday sent in another batch of feature updates for Linux 5.8 with the cut-off for new material upon us with this next kernel cycle expected to begin in early June...

AI startup Habana Labs, which was recently acquired by Intel, will see its Gaudi accelerator supported by the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel...

On Tuesday was the big announcement of Microsoft bringing Direct3D 12 to Linux/WSL2 in the context of allowing GUI applications and GPU compute within Windows Subsystem for Linux. This also means OpenCL/OpenGL/Vulkan support by ultimately converting it into D3D12 consumption by the host Windows system. While Microsoft was quick to post patches for their "dxgkrnl" kernel driver for this Direct3D implementation, it's already facing resistance and will be an uphill battle for it to be mainlined...

A few years ago it was GNOME developers frustrated with Microsoft over naming a project GVFS (later renamed to Virtual File System for Git) as it collided with their GVFS (GNOME Virtual File-System) while now there is a similar situation brewing between Microsoft and KDE camps...

Oracle today released GraalVM 20.1 as their latest big feature update to this virtual machine implemented in Java that also supports not only JIT compilation but ahead-of-time compilation for Java software as well as supporting an LLVM runtime and other languages...

As part of bringing GPU acceleration to WSL2 that was announced at today's virtual Build conference, Microsoft just published a blog post with more details including their port of Direct3D 12 for Linux...

Microsoft's virtual Build conference kicked off this morning and this year brings another big improvement on the Windows Subsystem for Linux front.....

OpenBSD 6.7 was released this morning as the newest version of this security-minded BSD operating system...

We delivered many benchmarks of Clang 10.0 on various CPUs following that updated LLVM compiler stack release earlier this year. With GCC 10 released earlier this month, we have begun our benchmarking of this annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection. First up is a look at the GCC 9 vs. GCC 10 vs. LLVM Clang 10 compiler performance on AMD Zen 2 and Intel Cascade Lake systems.

The SD 8.0 specification was announced today for SD Express memory cards to allow up to 4GB/s transfer rates by building off the PCIe 4.0 architecture...

The all-important Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) code for open-source virtualization had mistakenly been applying its L1TF workaround for unaffected CPUs -- namely AMD EPYC CPUs -- for the past several months until the issue was uncovered this week...

Clang 11.0 has changed its "-O" optimization flag to match the defaults of GCC...

Version 2.0 of the libaom AOMedia AV1 video encoder / video codec SDK library is now available as the first major update in nearly two years...

A new patch series has been revived from work originally published by Micron back in 2018 for dealing with the behavior on their planar 2D NAND devices where in rare cases when issuing block erase commands, the flash block might not actually be erased and this could lead to further problems down the road when touching said block...

Fedora has been improving its 64-bit ARM (AArch64) support for quite some time and with this autumn's Fedora 33 release it should be in even better shape...

One of the interesting patch series initially published back in 2019 by NVIDIA engineer Nitin Gupta was on proactive memory compaction for the Linux kernel while so far in 2020 it hasn't yet been merged but a fifth revision to the work was published today...

Launched last month were the AMD EPYC 7Fx2 CPUs as new high frequency SKUs and with larger L3 cache sizes. Following our initial EPYC 7F52 benchmarking we moved on to testing the EPYC 7F32 and today are putting it head-to-head against the Xeon Gold 6250 and other EPYC/Xeon SKUs while running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

It's arguably long overdue but OpenBSD is seeing initial work on POWERPC64 enablement landing in its source tree...

Adding to the early changes accumulating for the GCC 11 development cycle is automatic CPU detection support for newer families of Intel CPUs...

Queued up this weekend as part of the x86/fpu changes slated for the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle is low-level functionality necessary for supporting other current and future Intel CPU features...

When seeing GCC 11 in its early development state pick up a new -flarge-source-files option I was curious what that was all about......

While the past few weeks have seen relatively smaller than usual weekly release candidates, Linux 5.7-rc6 is out this evening and it's bigger than normal...

Carsten Haitzler has released Enlightenment 0.24 as the latest significant update to this X11 window manager and Wayland compositor...

Since the release of Rav1e v0.3.1 back in February the "weekly pre-releases" dropped off until this week with there finally being a new tagged milestone...

The folks at Laminar Research published a new blog post this week detailing their latest development work on their Vulkan (and Apple Metal) renderers for the realistic X-Plane flight simulator...

Various open-source patches have gone back to at least 2017 for enabling Intel's Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) for the Linux kernel and related components. This is the Intel feature for helping prevent ROP and COP/JOP style attacks via indirect branch tracking and a shadow stack. Recently there has been a fair amount of CET improvements to the various open-source components...

While there aren't yet any Arm SoCs we are aware of at least offering Thunderbolt connectivity, that will eventually change with at least USB4 being based on Thunderbolt. But in any case Thunderbolt software support can work on Arm today if using a Thunderbolt add-in PCIe card...

The ZFS file-system has long offered transparent file-system compression via the likes of LZ4 and Gzip and while now Zstd compression is under review for OpenZFS and seeking testing from the community...

Since last year's GCC 9 release the C++17 support has been considered stable and with the changeover to it as the default C++ dialect having not happened for the recent GCC 10 release, developers are now looking at increasing the default C++ version to 17 for next year's GCC 11 release...

Several days back was the proposal to "remove AGP support" from Radeon/Nouveau/TTM. This did formulate into a set of patches that would disable the AGP mode in the Radeon driver and deprecate the AGP code in TTM memory management. However, as was pointed out in the ensuing discussion, AGP graphics cards will still be operable on Linux with this level of deprecation by using the PCI GART mode...

This week I began benchmarking the AMD Ryzen 7 4700U on Linux using the new Lenovo IdeaPad featuring this new Zen 2 "Renoir" APU. The initial CPU benchmarks were quite positive as were the Vega graphics comparison tests. Amid other follow-up articles for AMD Renoir Linux support/performance, for your weekend viewing pleasure are a large set of data points between the Ryzen 7 4700U up against the Intel Core i7 1065G7 "Ice Lake" processor...

DXVK 1.7 is out this weekend as the important library translating Direct3D 9/10/11 usage into Vulkan API and is leveraged by the likes of Steam Play for running modern Windows games on Linux...

For now at least the in-person X.Org Developers' Conference is still on with plans for X.Org/Wayland/Mesa developers to meet in Gdańsk, Poland for their annual conference...

Intel's open-source graphics driver team on Friday sent in a final set of kernel graphics driver updates targeting the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle...

The recently released GCC 10 compiler landed initial coroutines support for this major C++20 feature but wasn't enabled unless explicitly enabling that option...

The Plasma 5.19 beta was released this week but that's not the finish line yet and KDE developers have remained very busy polishing it up for ensuring this open-source desktop has a stellar release coming up...

One of the long sought after features for AMD Zen (and Zen 2) processors on Linux has been the ability to monitor the CPU package power consumption on Linux, similar to what's long been available for Intel CPUs on Linux and similarly for older AMD Bulldozer era CPUs with a power monitoring driver. Now on Friday evening a patch series was posted by a Google engineer to provide this long sought after functionality...

Two days ago as part of the GPUOpen relaunch AMD released Radeon Rays 4.0 as their ray intersection library. Unlike the previous Radeon Rays release, however, this new Vulkan-enabled version was not open-source. But now AMD has decided that at least in large part it will be going back to open-source...

On launch-day Valve had Half-Life: Alyx running on Linux via Steam Play while with the VR game's latest update is now a Linux-native build and Vulkan rendering support...

Intel's oneAPI crew just released version 2020-03 (though one would have thought it should be 2020-05) of their Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) compiler and with this release are several new features including the NVIDIA CUDA back-end...

This week Amazon announced the general availability of their EC2 "M6g" instances powered by their second-generation Graviton processors. Amazon is offering a variety of M6g instances with the Graviton2 CPU, including a bare metal instance. In this article are many benchmarks looking at the various Amazon EC2 M6g instances compared to other EC2 Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC instances as well as looking at the M6g Graviton2 metal performance up against various Intel/AMD CPUs in our lab.

Weeks ahead of the Linux 5.8 kernel cycle kicking off it's still not clear if the Intel SGX foundation patches will be ready for merging, but they were sent out today as version 30 of this long-running effort for supporting the Intel enclaves functionality on the mainline kernel...

For a number of months now various Google engineers have been working on inline encryption support for FSCRYPT in order to offer better encryption performance on modern SoCs. That FSCRYPT side work is coming together and now also queued up for Linux 5.8 is plumbing inline encryption into blk-mq...

Announced over one year ago was the Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Accelerator as designed for offering superior AI inference performance in the cloud. Since then not much has been heard of this accelerator but their engineers did publish a Linux driver on Thursday...