Phoronix

This should come as little surprise to regular Phoronix readers and those that follow the Mesa release cadence, but Mesa 20.1 as the next quarterly feature release now has a release calendar putting its debut towards the end of May...

The os108 project is one of the few (or only?) distributions based on NetBSD currently providing a MATE-based desktop experience atop this BSD. The os108 9.0 release is now available that re-bases against the recent NetBSD 9.0 release while continuing to provide its out-of-the-box desktop goodness...

Debian has the debian.social domain where they are looking to deploy a set of services to share content and collaborate among Debian contributors as their own federated social platform...

Going back to Ivy Bridge processors, Intel has supported "PPIN" as the Protected Processor Identification Number as a globally unique identification number set in the factory. It turns out recent AMD CPUs are also supporting PPIN and that reading their value is about to be supported on Linux...

For those that may be working from home more frequently now and looking for a very capable laptop to serve as a mobile workstation, HP's ZBook 17 G6 is the most powerful contender we have tested to date that offers great performance potential paired with very reliable build quality and also offering easy upgrade potential.

While not Linux specific news, for those interested in graphics APIs or cross-platform aspects of gaming, Microsoft today announced DirectX 12 Ultimate...

LLVM 10.0 along with the likes of Clang 10.0 were supposed to be out nearly one month ago but instead a fifth release candidate arrived today...

Linux 5.7 will support the MHI protocol developed by Qualcomm as part of the new kernel bus being introduced...

In light of data sampling vulnerabilities like MDS, engineers from Amazon, Google, and other organizations are discussing a proof-of-concept implementation that would optionally flush the L1 data cache on context switches...

Back in February came patches for AMD SEV-ES "Encrypted State" support as building off the Linux kernel's existing support for Secure Encrypted Virtualization in conjunction with AMD EPYC processors. The SEV-ES enablement work has now been revised...

For the past year Mesa has offered a "soft" implementation of FP64 capabilities for GPUs lacking FP64 hardware capabilities in order to support ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 as required by OpenGL 4.0. Optimizations were merged today to significantly enhance the "soft FP64" capabilities of Mesa...

Since being released by Google engineers last year and subsequently integrated into the LLVM ecosystem, the MLIR intermediate representation has quickly been gaining interest both among LLVM projects and other external users...

With the upcoming Firefox 75 there is VA-API GPU-based video acceleration working on Wayland. While this built off FFmpeg, the initial code was limited to supporting H.264 while for Firefox 76 that is being extended...

Mesa 20.0.2 is out this evening as the latest stable bug-fix update for the Mesa Q1'2020 driver series...

Systems making use of NVMe solid-state storage may see slightly faster boot times with the Linux 5.7 kernel this summer...

With the in-development LibreOffice 7.0 one of the headlining changes is making use of Google's Skia library and with that is Vulkan rendering support. That initial implementation was using Skia to draw the UI while now it's also picking up text rendering responsibilities...

Linux 5.7 continues the trend of the community taking up new drivers being created to support different peripherals under Linux that amount to dealing with quirky/buggy behavior of the hardware...

Particularly for those on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or derivative distributions based on the current long-term support base, moving to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS due out next month will yield some nice improvements particularly for those on newer platforms like the AMD Ryzen 3000 series. Here are some benchmarks at how the Ryzen 9 3900X performance is looking between Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 19.10, and the current Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development snapshot.

It looks like in the next one or two kernel releases we could see Intel transitioning their CPU frequency scaling governor default from the long-standing powersave to the modern schedutil governor. It's now believed schedutil should be at least as good as powersave...

A user experimenting with Clear Linux had an opinion to share on their mailing list and referred to it as a "toy" distribution and some of our readers have expressed similar opinions on it. Here is the response by one of the Intel developers central to Clear Linux's development...

Devuan 3.0 "Beowulf" has finally reached beta as a spin of Debian 10 "Buster" created without a dependence on systemd...

Since its introduction in Linux 5.1, IO_uring has been coming together quite nicely and getting better with each new kernel release. IO_uring is the effort for delivering faster and more efficient I/O by avoiding excess copies and other efficiency improvements over the existing Linux AIO code. Here are some comparison benchmarks off Linux 5.6 Git...

With new feature work beyond the scope now of Fedora 32, we're beginning to get a better idea for some of the feature plans for Fedora 33 due out this autumn...

The GrSecurity patches to the Linux kernel have long focused on security enhancements but this year they are said to be taking on a larger focus of performance optimizations...

Java 14 has reached general availability today with numerous updates to the JDK...

Unity Tech has released the Unity 2020.1 game engine beta as their first quarterly update of the year...

While the most prominent addition to today's Vulkan 1.2.135 update is the provisional ray-tracing support, there are also other new extensions with this update...

The beta of the highly anticipated Fedora 32 Linux distribution update is now available...

While Vulkan has had NVIDIA's ray-tracing extension (VK_NV_ray_tracing) extension, coming out today is Vulkan's first formal ray-tracing extension for cross-vendor/driver adoption.

A set of kernel patches to Intel's graphics driver helps improve the GPU power consumption to the extent of on Chrome OS seeing about 45 minutes extra battery life and several percent under the likes of Ubuntu Linux...

Oracle continues releasing new updates to Solaris 11.4 but there still aren't any public signs of life past v11.4. Out now is Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU19 with one interesting addition...

For the Fedora 33 release later this year, Red Hat is looking at further enhancing and strengthening the cryptography settings/configuration of the OS...

The GNU Debugger (GDB) is seeing the start of improvements to enhance its Microsoft Windows debugging experience...

Some new HID device called Moonball by Google will be supported with Linux 5.7...

Going back to at least late 2017 have been proposals for Zstd-compressing the Linux kernel images for the Facebook-developed Zstandard compression algorithm. In 2020 perhaps we will finally see the support mainlined...

Back in January we reported on the lead developer of the CUPS printing system quitting Apple and following that he began development of LPrint as a new label printer software solution for Linux and macOS. It turns out he has another software projects in the works too...

Here is an up-to-date look at how the very latest Mesa 20.1 Git performance is for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver both out-of-the-box and when enabling the Valve-backed ACO compiler back-end alternative to AMDGPU LLVM. Plus there are benchmarks of the latest AMDVLK open-source AMD Vulkan driver and also when using AMDGPU-PRO's Vulkan packages that still rely upon AMD's proprietary shader compiler.

While the Debian 11 "Bullseye" code freeze isn't for another year, the second alpha release of the Debian Installer to ultimately provide the installation process is now available...

As a move ultimately for Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well, Red Hat developers working on Fedora are planning to transition the RPM database (RPMDB) away from the long-standing Berkeley DB to using SQLite...

The upcoming Linux 5.7 kernel is preparing to bid farewell to KVM virtualization support on 32-bit ARM architectures...

AMD today announced the Ryzen 9 4900H as their new top-end Zen 2 mobile processor for notebooks...

While many would argue it's past due for the Linux kernel's floppy disk code to be gutted from the mainline code-base, instead it's seeing improvements in 2020 ahead of the Linux 5.7 kernel... The same kernel where Intel stabilized Tiger Lake graphics, AMD preparing Zen 3 support, a new exFAT driver, and a multitude of other modern improvements is also now seeing floppy work...

Intel has begun piping the Linux support for Keem Bay...

Kernel patches pending that might see mainlining for the upcoming Linux 5.7 window provide ASpeed XDMA engine support for the plethora of AST2500 BMCs found on server platforms and the forthcoming AST2600-based platforms...

Linux 5.7's Netfilter framework is set to see better performance on modern Intel and AMD systems thanks to AVX2 optimizations...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.6-rc6 and the code metrics are looking good for this stage of the kernel cycle...

While a lot of feature work has been building up for Linux 5.7 in various subsystem development repositories ahead of the merge window in a few weeks, one of the big driver additions many users have been clamoring for isn't yet queued. The AMD Sensor Fusion Hub open-source driver for Linux appears stalled pending more reviews from upstream developers...

Flying under our radar until now was that KDE Frameworks 5.68 was released last week as the monthly update to this collection of KDE-minded libraries complementing the Qt tool-kit...

Complementing the Firefox 73 vs. 74 vs. 75 Beta benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux from AMD Ryzen this week, here are those numbers side-by-side with the Google Chrome 80 web-browser for putting the performance into more perspective...

Marcel Holtmann of Intel's open-source Linux team released BlueZ 5.54 this morning as the latest version of this widely-used user-space Linux Bluetooth stack...