Phoronix

While NVIDIA is usually quite timely in supporting new versions of the Linux kernel and aim to have out a driver by the end of the release candidates for new series, in the case of the recently minted Linux 5.9 kernel it's taking a lot longer...

This week marked the release of Plasma 5.20 while KDE developers continue working towards not only Plasma 5.21 as the next desktop feature release but also providing fixes for next month's Plasma 5.20.1 release and the growing collection of KDE applications...

For weeks there have been patches getting the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation to OpenGL 4.6 while mainline Mesa has been at OpenGL 3.0 support. Thankfully the out-of-tree patch delta is being reduced and this week in Mesa 20.3-devel the code has been upstreamed getting the support level to OpenGL 3.3...

The POWER architecture changes have been submitted for the Linux 5.10 kernel. As expected, the PowerPC 601 support is retired as that original 32-bit PowerPC processor from the early 90's...

The perf tool updates have been sent in for the ongoing Linux 5.10 merge window...

NGG (Next-Gen Geometry) ended up being fairly buggy/problematic for Navi but it looks like for the upcoming Radeon RX 6000 (RDNA 2 / Navi 2) launch that it's in better shape...

OverlayFS as the Linux union mount file-system that allows combining multiple underlying mount points into one is seeing a new feature with Linux 5.10...

The GNU Compiler Collection 11 (GCC 11) will be ending stage one development in mid-November to get the release process underway...

Here are our initial benchmarks of Intel Tiger Lake on Ubuntu Linux via the premium Core i7 1165G7 processor. This also appears to be the first public benchmarks of the new Dell XPS 13 9310 laptop that just-launched as the refreshed XPS notebook for Tiger Lake and with Intel EVO certification.

Intel issued a notable open-source Compute Runtime stack update today that provides OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support for the company's graphics processors from Xe/Gen12 graphics back through Gen8 Broadwell hardware...

It seems AMD's Linux graphics driver team is firing with precision on all cylinders these days. Not only have they been working on timely support for the Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA 2" / "Big Navi" Linux driver support ahead of the official launch and have the initial code already upstreamed in Linux 5.9, but they've even been going back with a number of fixes for older graphics processors...

The big networking pull request has landed in Linux 5.10 Git...

The Zink Gallium3D code for Mesa that is mapping OpenGL on top of the Vulkan API continues making great progress particularly with the near-daily work by developer Mike Blumenkrantz...

JACK2 1.9.15 released on Thursday as the newest version of this professional-minded sound server focused on real-time, low-latency connections...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) that is of growing prominence on Android-powered mobile phones and other flash-storage-only Linux systems has some promising improvements with Linux 5.10...

The Wine-based Proton development has been disappointingly quiet in recent weeks but fortunately it's alive and ticking with today's Proton 5.13-1 release for powering Valve's Steam Play to run many modern Windows games gracefully on Linux...

Following last week's release of Chrome 86, Google has promoted its Chrome 87 web browser to beta...

Given that Intel never shipped a production "Cannon Lake" CPU with its Gen10 graphics enabled, Intel's open-source driver developers have finally removed all Gen10-specific code from their Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers in Mesa...

Following this week's KDE Plasma 5.20 release, KWinFT 5.20 has been released as the fork of KWin and other select components in aiming to offer a better experience...

The sound subsystem updates were submitted today for the Linux 5.10 kernel with some interesting changes and new hardware support...

Merged just minutes ago into systemd Git is the new systemd-oomd component pushed along by Facebook...

In addition to Linux 5.10 supporting SEV-ES as the "encrypted state" for AMD EPYC's Secure Encrypted Virtualization, this kernel is also adding Secure Nested Paging (SNP) support to the AMD IOMMU driver as part of their next-generation SEV-SNP security...

The direct rendering manager (DRM) driver updates were sent in overnight for the ongoing Linux 5.10 merge window with a range of improvements for these graphics/display drivers and as usual the Intel and AMD Radeon driver churn is particularly heavy...

Not only is Btrfs seeing notable improvements with the in-development Linux 5.10 kernel but the XFS file-system also has some prominent changes of its own...

As it's been a while since running a fresh Linux distribution comparison with Intel's Clear Linux platform and given all the autumn distribution updates inbound, here is a fresh look at the rolling-release Clear Linux up against a snapshot of Ubuntu 20.10, Fedora Workstation 33 Beta, openSUSE Tumbleweed 20200929, Arch-based Endeavour OS, and Debian Testing from the start of October.

If 2020 couldn't get more peculiar, today the SDL2 project mainlined support for the OS/2 operating system...

Mesa 20.2 officially released at the end of September as the Q3'2020 open-source driver stack update providing open-source OpenGL/OpenCL/Vulkan support for much of the graphics hardware on the market. For those that prefer waiting for the first point release before upgrading, that milestone was reached today...

The Linux kernel's fundamental printk() function for printing messages at various log levels for then accessing via the likes of dmesg is beginning to see a significant overhaul...

Intel today is revealing a few details concerning upcoming Intel 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" processors...

While the LibreOffice fork is much more popular than OpenOffice these days, the Apache Software Foundation does continue maintaining the OpenOffice codebase born out of Sun Microsystems' StarOffice...

The UBports community that continues advancing the Ubuntu Touch mobile platform has been working on improvements to its installer...

Following this month's Intel programming reference manual update disclosing a number of new instruction set extensions, Intel's compiler engineers have gone public with patches for implementing some of these forthcoming CPU features...

The kernel power management changes have been sent in for Linux 5.10 with a few items worth pointing out from faster hibernation to fixing power management handling for AMD laptops with both integrated and discrete graphics...

The media subsystem of the Linux kernel is seeing a number of changes with the in-development Linux 5.10...

While the mainline Linux kernel for quite a while now has supported AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization for EPYC processors as a means of better securing guest virtual machines (VMs) and public clouds with hardware memory encryption and using one key per VM to not only protect between guests but also the hypervisor, with Linux 5.10 comes AMD SEV-ES as another step forward for secure virtualization on AMD EPYC...

Good news for Raspberry Pi 4 users... The V3DV Vulkan driver developed over the past year for newer Broadcom VideoCore hardware with an emphasis on the Raspberry Pi 4 support is now mainlined in Mesa 20.3!..

WireGuard has long been available as an app on the Google Play store for those wishing to use this cross-platform, open-source secure VPN tunnel solution on Google's mobile operating system. But for Android 12 it appears there will be a form of official support...

CodeWeavers as the main contributor to the Wine code-base and employing many of the key developers thanks to the development of their Linux and macOS CrossOver software is working on a rebrand and promotion of their consulting services...

Phoronix Test Suite 10.0-Finnsnes is now officially available as the latest major feature release for our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software that now has more than six hundred tests/benchmarks available for fully-automated testing. With Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 also comes a significant overhaul to OpenBenchmarking.org and its biggest since its debut back in 2011 alongside Phoronix Test Suite 3.0.

It's been a while since having any major news to report on the once promising mobile Linux software platform Sailfish OS from Finnish vendor Jolla, but today they issued a big update in the form of "Pallas-Yllästunturi" or more easily known as Sailfish OS 3.4...

KDE's Plasma 5.20 is now available as a seriously great update to this open-source desktop environment...

Krita 4.4 is out today as the latest release for this flagship open-source digital painting program...

At the end of 2019 the lead developer of CUPS left Apple after he joined Apple and the company purchased the source code a decade prior for this long-standing open-source printing system used by not only macOS but also Linux and other Unix-like platforms. This unfortunately has not bode well for CUPS in 2020...

The hardware monitoring "hwmon" subsystem maintainer Guenter Roeck sent in the feature updates on Monday to Linux 5.10...

New Intel and AMD hardware support headline the performance events work for Linux 5.10 as part of the "perf" subsystem...

The Linux kernel's prandom_u32() interface for providing pseudo-random number generation is used heavily by the kernel's networking code but that PRNG output can be figured out rather predictably. Thus lining up for Linux 5.10 is a new prandom_u32 implementation...

The Btrfs file-system is seeing some promising additions with Linux 5.10...

After last week exploring the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Linux GPU compute performance for this Ampere graphics card along with the Blender 2.90 performance, today is a look at the Linux gaming performance for the RTX 3080 both for native games as well as those Windows games running on Linux via Steam Play (Proton).

OpenCV as the widely-used, real-time computer vision library is out this week with version 4.5 as a big feature release...

A new kernel feature sent in today for the Linux 5.10 merge window is static calls, which can be helpful in cases where Retpolines (return trampolines) are currently used as part of protections against speculative execution vulnerabilities like Spectre...