Phoronix

For fiscal year 2019 the Apache Software Foundation valued their codebase at around $20 billion USD. The open-source organization has now published their annual report for fiscal year 2020...

Building off the work sent out by Google engineers in recent months and merged for Linux 5.8 around RAPL support for AMD Zen / Zen 2 CPUs with supporting the "runtime average power limiting" counters on Linux similar to Intel's longstanding support, that work has continued now with Zen RAPL support in the PowerCap driver...

For those using the Intel ICE Linux network driver that is used for the likes of the E800 series, it's now going to be easier updating the device firmware from Linux...

Worked out in recent months by an Amazon engineer was optional L1 data cache flushing on context switches to allow for greater computer security in an era of data sampling vulnerabilities and other data leakage issues via side channels. It was sent in for Linux 5.8 but Linus Torvalds characterized it as "beyond stupid" and not being convinced by it. Well, now it's been revised but isn't yet clear if it will appease Torvalds for mainline inclusion...

One of the new network drivers now queued up for Linux 5.9 is the SFC EF100 driver for the EF100 NIC architecture...

While LLVM 11.0 was branched almost two weeks ago with many new/improved features for this open-source compiler stack, it has taken until today to get into shape for issuing the first release candidate...

"Navy Flounder" as the codename for another Navi 2 GPU following the "Sienna Cichlid" Linux driver work has made it into Mesa 20.2 for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

A Microsoft engineer is proposing the Trampoline File Descriptor "TRAMPFD" as a new kernel API for securely dealing with trampoline code on systems. There are concerns already over the potential performance implications but there does seem to be some interest in this approach...

Valve appears to have hired yet another open-source graphics driver developer and will initially be working on the Mesa Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver...

Red Hat has announced the public beta of the forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 release...

Along with OpenMandriva working on a rolling-release version of its distribution long ago derived from Mandrake/Mandriva, OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 is coming along as the next stable release...

The Khronos Group announced this morning that Microsoft and Oculus are the first two companies shipping conformant OpenXR 1.0 implementations...

GNOME OS as the Linux build with bleeding edge GNOME software for testing continues taking shape and a call for testing has been issued...

The latest GNOME performance work being explored is effectively how to make the Intel graphics clock speed ramp up quicker when necessary. Canonical developer Daniel van Vugt is working on a set of patches for enabling triple buffering with Mutter when the GPU starts falling behind and that additional rendering work in turn should ramp up Intel GPUs to their optimal frequency in order to smooth out the performance...

For helping to debug more issues within the Rust-written Redox operating system, the GNU Debugger (GDB) is beginning to work well on the platform...

Intel has been preparing "Power Limit4" support for their Linux PowerCap driver that is being rolled out for the forthcoming Tiger Lake SoCs...

The AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" graphics processors continue seeing open-source driver improvements on Linux in 2020...

Following last week's public disclosure that Intel is running six to twelve months behind on their 7nm production, Intel this evening announced a set of leadership changes to move the company forward...

Purism has revealed more details about their improved "Dogwood" batch that will be soon shipping for their Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone. The battery life is longer but still short of what is provided by modern day flagship smartphones...

A progress report was shared today on the work towards making the Btrfs file-system the default choice for the desktop spins of the upcoming Fedora 33...

Git 2.28 is now officially out this Monday and features continued work on moving off the "master" default branch naming as well as the ongoing work around ultimately transitioning from SHA1 to SHA256 for hashing to prevent possible collisions...

Firefox 79.0 isn't scheduled to be formally announced until Tuesday but the release binaries have now hit Mozilla's FTP servers...

With the Intel Core i9 10900K "Comet Lake" processor here are some fresh GCC compiler benchmarks when looking at the performance of GCC 8.4 versus 9.3 versus a 10.2 snapshot while testing with optimization flags of -O2, -O3 -march=native, and -O3 -march=native -flto.

As outlined a few months ago, Intel's future Sapphire Rapids and Alder Lake processors are set to add a SERIALIZE instruction. That SERIALIZE instruction ensures all flags/register/memory modifications are complete as well as draining all buffered writes to memory before the next instruction is executed. Linux is moving forward with preparing to make use of this new CPU instruction in its function for stopping speculative execution and prefetching of modified code...

DragonFlyBSD developer François Tigeot continues his trek of near single-handedly porting the Intel and Radeon DRM graphics driver code from the Linux kernel to this BSD...

MikroBUS is the open add-on board standard aiming for "maximum expandability with the smallest number of pins". MikroBUS already has fairly robust industry support particularly in the embedded space while finally a mikroBUS mainline kernel driver may be near for Linux to improve the status quo of driver support...

Debuting this weekend was LuxCoreRender 2.4, the newest version of this impressive open-source physically based renderer...

Linus Torvalds has performed his usual Sunday dance and released the Linux 5.8-rc7 kernel as one of the final test releases before Linux 5.8 is declared stable in August...

Even without the Samsung OSG support these days, the Enlightenment project continues making nice progress...

While the current Vulkan API is exhaustive enough to implement full-featured Wayland compositors and X11 window managers, to date there hasn't been too much adoption considering OpenGL is still more pervasive among hardware/drivers and it's obviously a significant effort writing a new compositor from scratch. One of the leading (among few) examples of a Vulkan-powered window manager / compositor is ChamferWM, which does continue to be developed. SWVKC meanwhile is one that has been seeing development this year as an alpha-stage Wayland Vulkan compositor...

Set to be formally introduced next quarter alongside Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 is the long-overdue overhaul of OpenBenchmarking.org -- the biggest upgrade to our public "cloud" platform for benchmark aggregation and result analytics since its debut nearly one decade ago. Before then, a public beta of OpenBenchmarking.org should get underway in the next few weeks while here is an early look at some of the changes...

Last month on Phoronix were 350+ benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 3 3300X vs. Intel Core i3 10100, including a number of Linux gaming performance tests. Following that I also ran some tests with the Core i5 10600K tossed in for those that may be weighing between the Ryzen 3 / Core i3 vs. Core i5 for gaming. Here are those additional data points...

Making waves just over a year ago in the GNU Compiler Collection community was the "Ranger" project for on-demand range generator that's been worked on for several years at Red Hat. While their goals for GCC 10 didn't pan out, it's looking like in the next few months more of the Ranger infrastructure will land and thus putting it in the window for GCC 11...

One of many interesting Google Summer of Code 2020 projects is working on automated benchmarking for NetBSD in order to allow for performance/regression testing of this BSD operating system known for its portability across CPU architectures...

The work on Zstd'ing the Linux kernel for using this Facebook-developed Zstandard compression algorithm to in turn speed up decompression times when booting Linux kernel images might be mainlined as soon as Linux 5.9...

Started back in 2018 during the Google Summer of Code was work for reporting system power information within the GNOME-Usage utility. While some user-interface elements were fleshed out and other engineering completed, the code isn't yet merged or ready for users as the approach for accomplishing the per-program power reporting is still being devised...

While Intel's open-source engineers have been working on Tiger Lake enablement for Linux going back roughly a year with many kernel patches spanning the different areas over numerous kernel releases, which aligns with Intel's ongoing cadence of ensuring good Linux hardware support at launch even for consumer hardware, there have been a few stragglers in the Linux bring-up for Tiger Lake...

On the mailing lists and browsing various Git "-next" repositories it's felt like "damn, there are a lot of patches about replacing HTTP links with HTTPS all of a sudden" inside the kernel sources and documentation. Indeed, for Linux 5.9 where applicable HTTP links are being replaced for HTTPS...

David Howells of Red Hat continues striving for great improvements to Linux storage...

KDE Plasma 5.20 is bringing an important feature in further closing the gap between Wayland and X11 feature parity... Finally there will be working screen recording and screencasting on Wayland for compatible applications...

A patch queued up into the driver core tree ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.9 kernel will allow further restricting access to DebugFS...

Announced earlier this year was the SD Express specification offering around 4x the speed of existing SD cards thanks to leveraging PCI Express 4.0 (or otherwise PCI Express 3.0 fallback) and the NVMe 1.4 protocol. The Linux kernel has begun preparing for SD Express compatibility...

With basically at the cut-off for new feature material wanting to get into DRM-Next for Linux 5.9, Nouveau DRM maintainer Ben Skeggs of Red Hat today sent in the primary feature pull...

As some additional Core i5 10600K Linux benchmarks for historical perspective, here is a look at how the Core i5 10600K looks in comparison to the Core i5 7600K Skylake, Core i5 4670 Haswell, and Core i5 2500K Sandy Bridge processors on Ubuntu Linux. There were 250 benchmarks ran on each of the CPUs under test.

While Intel on the hardware manufacturing side continues facing stiff challenges, on the open-source software side the company continues making legendary progress. Out in today's Intel Graphics Compiler and in turn Intel Compute Runtime releases as part of their GPGPU toolchain is the recent open-sourcing and integration of their Vector Compute back-end...

Approaching two years already since the release of Mir 1.0 following its shift to Wayland support, Mir 2.0 is now available...

With System76 working towards offering more AMD Linux laptop options as well as continuing to expand their line-up of AMD desktop offerings, it appears their next hurdle is on bringing Coreboot to these current-generation AMD platforms...

Systemd 246 should be shipping in the days ahead...

DigiKam 7.0 is out for this KDE/Qt-aligned open-source photography manager solution...

The initial batch of WiFi/wireless driver improvements slated for Linux 5.9 landed in net-next this week with a few noteworthy additions...