Phoronix

Oracle has put out another VirtualBox 6.1 point release though making it notable this time around is support for the upstream Linux 5.8 kernel...

PipeWire as the Red Hat led project for better audio/video stream management server on the Linux desktop is getting into increasingly great shape. This forward-looking solution that handles PulseAudio/JACK use-cases as well as pleasant integration with the likes of Wayland and Flatpak is ready to take on more user testing...

AMD's open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver developers have sent in their first round of updates to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.10 kernel merge window kicking off in October...

Dbus-Broker as the high performance, D-Bus compatible implementation with BUS1 not panning out yet for high-performance, in-kernel IPC has seen a new release...

Weston 9.0 is out as the latest feature update to this Wayland reference compositor...

The virtual DebConf20 concluded last week as the annual main conference for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Recently elected Debian Project Leader Jonathan Carter gave his talk at the event as an overview of where the project is at today as well as some of the problems they are facing today...

Google engineers have posted a new revision of their work from earlier this summer for allowing the Linux kernel to be LTO-optimized using Clang...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) announced on Thursday that they are funding improvements to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) around GPU compute offloading...

While Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 is the latest and greatest series for Oracle's kernel spin derived from upstream Linux 5.4 as an alternative on Oracle Linux to their "Red Hat Compatible Kernel", for those still making use of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5, a new update was issued today...

Building off the recent release of Chrome 85, Google has now released the beta of Chrome 86 with a number of goodies introduced and promotions for some existing functionality...

The fourth and likely last release candidate of Mesa 20.2 is now available for testing while the formal release should happen next week...

Just over one month ago was the GTK 3.99 release and now that has been succeeded by GTK 3.99.1 in getting quite close to the long-awaited GTK 4.0 tool-kit release...

Following the debut of the big Blender 2.90 release and subsequently updating it for the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org, here is a deep dive into the Blender 2.90 performance... A number of areas are being looked at with the initial Blender 2.90 benchmarks from how the performance is on various CPUs and GPUs to the performance of the Blender 2.82 vs. 2.90 to looking at the Windows vs. Linux performance for Blender 2.90 with various means of acceleration.

Longtime NVIDIA engineer Thierry Reding who has been involved with the open-source Nouveau driver efforts largely from an embedded/mobile Tegra angle last week sent out the newest patch series...

Earlier this summer building off the latest Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 advancements by Microsoft, NVIDIA released early support for CUDA / GPU compute on WSL2. This week NVIDIA offered up a new version of their CUDA WSL support...

Going back a number of months have been patches for bringing up the Broadcom BCM2711 display pipeline as found with the Raspberry Pi 4 SBC. That work still hasn't been mainlined but a fifth round of patches has now been sent out for review...

Open-source consulting firm KDAB has released Hotspot 1.3 as their GUI utility for visualizing Linux perf reports...

One of the most interesting projects out of Google Summer of Code 2020 has been the ongoing work for allowing individual code files to be compiled in parallel, building off work last year in addressing GCC parallelization bottlenecks. The final report for GSoC 2020 on this work has been issued...

In addition to Intel talking a lot today in virtual briefings about the new 11th Gen "Tiger Lake" mobile processors, they were also talking at a higher level extensively on their second-generation "Project Athena" laptop innovation program and their new Intel Evo branding for premium laptops...

After a small dip in July, how did the Steam on Linux gaming marketshare end out for August prior to many gamers returning to school and others still being isolated at home? A small uptick but still under the 1% threshold...

While Mesa 20.2 will hopefully be out next week, Mesa 20.1.7 is out today as the newest stable release for this collection of open-source Linux graphics drivers...

NVIDIA software engineer Zi Yan who specializes in the Linux kernel memory management subsystem today sent out a set of patches proposing the addition of 1GB THP support for the Linux kernel...

Intel Tiger Lake will soon begin appearing in laptops with an upgraded CPU architecture, the all new Iris Xe (Gen12) graphics, new AI capabilities, Thunderbolt 4, PCI Express 4.0, WiFi 6, and other new functionality. The Gen12 graphics have me most excited but there should be healthy improvements as well on the CPU side and not to mention improved connectivity.

Upstream developers are looking at phasing out Intel MMX that was popular in the late 90's but has since long been succeeded by SSE and AVX instruction set extensions...

SHADERed has been available for a while now as a cross-platform, open-source shader editor and for debugging and writing of graphics shaders. SHADERed not only runs on Linux and Windows now but through any modern web browser as of the new v1.4 release...

It's not clear if AMD has provided the independent RADV Vulkan driver developers at the likes of Valve, Red Hat, and Google with any Navi 2 hardware yet, but they do seem to be making progress on this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver separate from their official AMDVLK open-source driver...

Even more optimizations have now been queued up for GNOME 3.38 launching this month...

While LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler was traditionally known for its faster build speeds than GCC, in recent releases of GCC the build speeds have improved and in some areas LLVM/Clang has slowed down with further optimization passes and other work added to its growing code-base. As it stands right now, GCC is faster than Clang at compiling the Linux kernel...

Just over twenty years after the Linux From Scratch project was started as a guide/book to building all of the software components manually from source, Linux From Scratch 10.0 has been released...

Earlier this year Amazon announced Bottlerocket as a Linux distribution for running containers. This week Bottlerocket crossed the general availability milestone...

Intel's open-source engineers today sent out their latest patches bringing up the Dynamic Load Balancer 2.0 for the next-gen PCIe device that offers load-balanced, prioritized scheduling of core-to-core communication...

One important bit not covered in today's GeForce RTX 3070/3080/3090 announcement but now detailed via the NVIDIA website is confirmation that the RTX 30 "Ampere" GPUs do in fact have dedicated AV1 hardware decode capabilities...

As widely expected amid a constant flow of rumors and leaks in recent weeks, NVIDIA just revealed their GeForce RTX 3000 "Ampere" series...

In addition to the new OpenBenchmarking.org now out in public "alpha", a number of new and updated test profiles were published in August for users of our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software...

With the soon to be released Mesa 20.2, the RADV Vulkan driver is using the ACO back-end by default that's been developed with funding by Valve as an alternative to AMD's official "AMDGPU" LLVM back-end. For those wondering how this shader compiler back-end compares and more intricate details of its design, some extensive documentation has finally been added to the Mesa tree...

The Qt Company has announced the feature freeze for the big Qt 6.0 toolkit milestone...

Intel developers engaging with upstream LLVM have been adding AMX support and other new features for next year's Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" while as of a few days ago in LLVM 12 Git is the actual enabling of -march=sapphirerapids support...

Creative Labs last year released the high-end SoundBlaster AE-7 sound card. Sadly the company is back in their state where they do not provide official Linux support, but coming up for Linux 5.10 is the support for this sound card thanks to Connor McAdams who has worked on supporting prior SoundBlaster hardware under Linux...

August was an interesting month in terms of Linux/open-source activity though still another tough month during the coronavirus pandemic...

Going back to earlier this year has been work on an "adaptive" mode for P-State to improve GPU bound efficiency when the CPU is forced to share a power/thermal budget with other components like onboard graphics. That work is still advancing and an update was provided on it last week...

At the beginning of August we reported on Google engineers proposing the Machine Function Splitter to LLVM as a means of making binaries up to a few percent faster thanks to this code generation optimization pass for splitting code functions into hot and cold portions. That work has now been merged into LLVM 12.0 with very promising results...

As noted this weekend, Lenovo has begun offering Fedora pre-loaded on their systems beginning with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8 laptop. Red Hat's Christian Schaller who serves as the senior manager for desktop chimed in with some additional thoughts and details on this achievement...

With last week having delivered some current NVIDIA Linux gaming performance metrics ahead of the anticipated GeForce RTX 3000 "Ampere" series launch this week, here are some fresh compute metrics for those interested.

Blender 2.90 is out as a huge feature update to this widely-used, cross-platform and open-source 3D modeling solution...

Aleksa Sarai of SUSE and Christian Brauner of Canonical presented at last week's Linux Plumbers Conference with a call for more extensible system calls moving forward in aiming to enhance the Linux user-space API...

Red Hat engineers in recent weeks began working on a new project called "starved" though recently renamed to "stalld". The stalld service is for serving as a Linux thread stall detector...

In making for easier code re-use among file-systems and allowing a unified implementation to focus on a single code-base for optimizations moving forward, a generic case-folding implementation for Linux file-systems is being prepared for mainline...

Manjaro Linux developer Tobias Schramm brought to light that only single data rate mode is currently being used for micro SD cards and eMMC storage with Raspberry Pi 4 Model B SBCs. But with a two line kernel patch, the double data rate mode can be enabled...

In addition to talking about code/hardware obsolescence from the Linux kernel, prominent upstream Linux kernel developer Arnd Bermann also presented at last week's Linux Plumbers Conference on the current SoC landscape and sharing his predictions for ten years down the road...

The Genode OS project is out with its 20.08 version bump that brings some high profile improvements for this open-source operating system framework...