Phoronix

The Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid-state drives are now available from Internet retailers. For those wondering how these SSDs compare with EXT4 under Linux against other PCIe 4.0/3.0 drives, here are a variety of benchmarks.

Version 1.5 of the Fwupd utility is available for updating various component firmware/BIOS natively on Linux and integrating with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for the easy distribution of said firmware images...

If all goes well Qt 6.0 will make its official debut in December. One of the areas much talked about for Qt 6 development has been the graphics architecture changes and better supporting more APIs besides OpenGL...

ReactOS Deutschland e.V. has hired one of their long-time contributors to work full-time on the "open-source Windows" implementation's memory management for the next quarter...

Select high-end Corsair power supplies such as their RMi / HXi / AXi series are able to expose various sensor metrics via USB interface to the system. To date this sensor functionality has only worked under Windows with their proprietary software but now an open-source driver is seeking mainline inclusion for supporting these sensors under Linux...

Building off a set of "request for comments" patches from September, a set of patches were sent out on Sunday for providing brute force attack mitigation around the fork system call...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.10-rc1 that also marks the end of the feature merge window for this EOY2020 kernel. Linux 5.10 isn't the largest kernel update in recent time but still has a lot of interesting additions and improvements...

The Linux 5.10 merge window is set to close this afternoon followed by around seven weeks worth of release candidates before the stable kernel release in December. As usual here is our look at the many new features set to premiere with this next version of the Linux kernel.

The Linux kernel's TTM memory management code that is most notably used by the Radeon / AMDGPU kernel drivers but also Nouveau, QXL, VMWGFX, and others, is seeing a new back-end allocation pool that can yield 3~5x faster page allocation performance for video memory...

This past week Intel began adding Alder Lake support to their Linux graphics driver and that also continued on the compute side with the Intel Compute-Runtime receiving initial support for Alder Lake S "ADLS" too...

While AMD has landed Znver3 support in GNU Binutils, the company hasn't yet sent out patches for either the GCC or LLVM/Clang compilers in setting up the Zen 3 target with its new instructions or optimized scheduling model / cost table. But a basic implementation has been merged to LLVM for allowing "-march=znver3" based on the limited public details thus far...

The last major release of the X.Org Server was in May 2018 but don't expect the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.21 to actually be released anytime soon...

After six years serving as the LLVM release manager and taking over the role from LLVM founder Chris Lattner followed by Bill Wendling, Google's Hans Wennborg has stepped down from his position and handed it over to Red Hat's Tom Stellard...

Not only is the Zink Gallium3D code for OpenGL accelerated by Vulkan up to around 69% the speed of Intel's OpenGL driver but it's at around a 97% passing test rate for Mesa's Piglit testing...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is seeing plenty of improvements with the Linux 5.10 kernel...

FreeBSD has long supported a "nosymfollow" mount option to prevent following of symlinks on mounted file-systems while now the mainline Linux kernel is adding a similar security defense...

For the Intel Tiger Lake Linux benchmarking thus far with the Core i7 1165G7 on the Dell XPS 13 9310 it's primarily been compared against the Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U on the AMD side since those are the only Renoir units within my possession. But a Phoronix reader recently provided me with remote access to his Lenovo ThinkPad X13 with Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U (8 cores / 16 threads) for seeing how the Tiger Lake performance compares against that higher-end SKU...

GDB 10.1 is now shipping as a big update to the GNU Debugger...

KDE developers remain very busy this autumn working on fixes for the recently released Plasma 5.20 and related software...

Since 2012 there has been a quirk in the Linux kernel to disable/override using ACPI _PSD data on all AMD processors as a workaround in turn for Windows-specific behavior that clashes with the semantics of the Linux ACPI CPUFreq driver for CPU frequency scaling. With AMD Zen 3 this quirk is no longer needed to behave correctly and thus Linux 5.10 is going to drop this eight year old quirk on Zen 3 and newer...

Building off the Friday release of Wine 5.20, a new Wine-Staging release is now available that is carrying more than 750 patches atop the upstream code-base that are currently undergoing testing...

Complementing the ARM(64) architecture changes for Linux 5.10 are now the SoC and board updates that are quite interesting this round...

Version 0.23 of the Eclipse OpenJ9 Java Virtual Machine was released this week in continuing to focus on being a high performance, open-source JVM...

The EXT4 file-system updates have landed in Linux 5.10 with some notable additions for this mature file-system...

Wine 5.20 was just released as the newest bi-weekly development milestone for this solution to run Windows games and other software on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

Since picking up the Dell XPS 13 9310 for delivering Tiger Lake Linux benchmarks, most of the focus so far has been about the overall processor performance while in this article is our first deep dive into the Gen12 Xe Graphics performance on Linux with Intel's fully open-source graphics and compute stack. Here is a look at how the Tiger Lake Xe Graphics performance is with the Core i7-1165G7 ranging from OpenGL and Vulkan graphics tests to OpenCL, oneAPI Level Zero, and Vulkan compute tests.

It was sadly too late for squeezing into the current Linux 5.10 merge window but it looks like for Linux 5.11 in early 2021 the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub "SFH" driver will make its long awaited debut...

Going back more than a year there have been Intel "i915" kernel graphics driver patches implementing integer mode scaling support while finally for Linux 5.11 in early 2021 the support will have landed...

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...