Phoronix

KDE had a very eventful year even with the pandemic where it saw its Wayland support come together quite well that it's usable on a day-to-day basis, KWin has been seeing some renewed attention, and there was much application work as well as fixes and polishing throughout the massive KDE ecosystem...

Valve this year continued contributing significantly to not only improving the Linux gaming experience but also the Linux desktop at large with their continued open-source graphics driver enhancements and other infrastructure work...

The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver in Linux 5.11 didn't see any exciting features but there is now a patch pending for this DRM driver so it will at least handle mini DisplayPort connections properly...

Intel engineers continued with their decade plus tradition of providing timely hardware support (sans the discrete graphics bring-up taking a bit longer), Intel continued showing what's possible with Linux performance by means of Clear Linux, and yes more security updates were among their popular interactions in 2020...

Much of the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) steam was lost when AMD began focusing on its Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) software stack. While AMD was just one of several founding members, there doesn't seem to be much going on for the HSA effort as we roll into 2021 and in fact their website has been down for an extended period of time...

Mesa 21.0 has flipped on support for allowing OpenGL 3.2 contexts with the Freedreno Gallium3D driver that provides open-source GL support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware...

AMD this year not only delivered the very powerful Ryzen 5000 "Zen 3" desktop processors and initial Radeon RX 6000 "Big Navi" graphics cards but for exciting Linux users was the timely open-source support for the new GPUs well in advance (and also already preparing for some 2021 graphics products) as well as more timely support around Zen 3 thermal support and other additions. AMD's open-source timing is still improving although not yet optimal but all in it was a hell of a year for AMD Linux users...

Following the recent AMD Zen 3 tests on Intel's Clear Linux a user expressed curiosity over the Intel-backed Linux distribution on Tiger Lake hardware given I hadn't done a multi-distribution comparison there yet. Using the Dell XPS 9310 as my lone Tiger Lake notebook I ran some benchmarks of Clear Linux, Ubuntu, Manjaro, and Fedora. For a change, Clear Linux wasn't the distant front-runner.

Patches posted on Monday by independent open-source contributor Mario Kleiner would enable FP16 pixel format support for older generations of AMD Radeon GPUs...

Ubuntu had a rather successful 2020 with the well received Ubuntu 20.04 LTS debut to continuing to make upstream improvements to GNOME, their adoption in the cloud and Windows Subsystem for Linux remaining strong, and all around Ubuntu being on steady footing across all areas of focus...

Longtime Intel open-source graphics driver developer Chris Wilson sent out a set of 56 patches today working to improve their kernel graphics driver's scheduling performance...

It turns out the Intel/AMD AES-NI implementation of XTS regressed hard from the Retpolines functionality merged nearly three years ago for mitigating Spectre... But now the crypto performance with the AES-NI XTS implementation is set to recover from that regression with a huge improvement thanks to a new set of patches...

The systemd service and system manager had another busy year with the merging of "homed" for modernizing and reinventing home directory capabilities to "oomd" being merged for improving the Linux memory pressure / out-of-memory handling, among other new features coming to light...

Libmicrohttpd as the GNU project's embedded HTTP web server library is out with a final release of 2020...

Each of the past several years it has been interesting to monitor Microsoft's engagement in the open-source and Linux communities. Over 2020 there were interesting strides from Samsung upstreaming their improved exFAT file-system driver after having Microsoft's blessing to Microsoft contributing more and more to Mesa in leveraging the OpenGL/OpenCL code in various Windows components to new WSL2 capabilities...

Git 2.30 is out today as the latest stable release update of this wildly-popular, distributed revision control system...

It didn't land for Linux 5.11 but it looks like Linux 5.12 could end up supporting Intel's "HDR Backlight Interface" for helping newer Intel laptops with their backlight controls where they don't comply with VESA specifications but rather catering to Intel's proprietary interface...

While Linux 5.11-rc1 was just released yesterday, we have already been closely monitoring the new features of Linux 5.11 as well as carrying out early benchmarks. One area looking quite good so far are the Intel graphics performance and features with Linux 5.11, or more specifically Gen9 and newer while the latest Xe Graphics are obviously the most interesting from a benchmarking perspective.

With the Linux 5.12 kernel next spring it looks like the Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA 2" overclocking support will be in order...

Bootlin working under contract for an unnamed NAS vendor has been working to update the Large Page Support for 32-bit ARM and ultimately coming up with an upstream-friendly way to be able to support more than 16TB of storage on 32-bit ARM devices...

Of all the new Linux 5.11 features and all the enablement work Intel has already completed for Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" hardware, one big feature not yet mainlined is the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) support...

Linus Torvalds as expected released Linux 5.11-rc1 this evening, which marks the end of the two week merge window that went through Christmas...

The Linux 5.11 merge window has been open the past two weeks following the debut of Linux 5.10 but is set to close today. A lot of new features and exciting improvements were merged for Linux 5.11 although it is somewhat of a bumpy ride at the moment but should be buttoned up and ready for its stable release come February.

Intel's open-source oneAPI Data Parallel C++ compiler saw a Christmas Day update with the 2020-12 monthly update...

Linux 5.11-rc1 is due for release later today and at least one regression has seen a quick resolution...

Back in 2010 was a change to disable run-time power management of PCI devices by default and leaving it up to user-space to in turn override it if desired. Now as we gear up for 2021, some upstream kernel developers are wondering about that original decision and possibly changing the default behavior to yield better out-of-the-box power savings with modern systems...

The HAMMER2 file-system that has been used by default on DragonFlyBSD for some time has lacked multi-volumes support compared to its former HAMMER1 file-system. But as of this weekend in the latest Git development code, HAMMER2 now has initial support for multiple volumes...

While being released one day late due to Christmas, Wine 6.0-RC4 is out. This is the latest weekly test candidate of the forthcoming Wine 6.0 as the annual stable release due out in January for this leading software to run Windows programs/games on Linux, macOS, and the BSDs...

Linux 5.10.3 is out today as a post-Christmas stable release update...

Even with Christmas week there has been a lot of improvements still happening in the KDE world...

One of the pleasant kernel surprises in 2020 was Paragon Software looking to upstream their previously commercial NTFS driver. This driver offers read-write support and more advanced capabilities than the current read-focused NTFS driver presently in the mainline kernel and better off than the other FUSE-based driver. This driver hasn't been mainlined yet but Paragon published new patches on Christmas...

LibreOffice has various "AVMedia" back-ends for supporting the playback of audio and video within the open-source office suite with GStreamer and other platform-specific options. LibreOffice also supported a VLC back-end for audio/video playback but after years of that code being experimental and not maintained, it's now been eliminated...

Adding to the open-source Christmas excitement this year was the release of GIMP 2.99.4 that puts this image editor one step closer to the long-awaited GIMP 3.0...

After a half-decade working toward it, Ruby 3.0 was released on Christmas Day with much greater performance and other features for this high-level general purpose programming language...

It's not the Grinch in 2020 that stole Christmas, but the Schedutil CPU frequency scaling governor on the in-development Linux 5.11 kernel that is thrashing performance for AMD Zen 2 and newer. Distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Manjaro are beginning to use CPUFreq Schedutil by default on newer kernels and thus leading to a very bad initial/out-of-the-box experience with the current behavior on the early Linux 5.11 code.

It's been a turbulent year and 2020 is certainly ending interesting in the Linux/open-source space... If it wasn't odd enough seeing Sony providing a new official Linux driver for their PlayStation 5 DualSense controller for ending out the year, there is also a new Linux port to the Nintendo 64 game console... Yes, a brand new port to the game console that launched more than two decades ago...

Linux 5.10 as a Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel has been off to a rocky start after an immediate point release due to a RAID issue, some reporting AMDGPU problems, and also a staggering Btrfs performance regression hitting some users...

Redox OS, the micro-kernel based Rust-written operating system, is out with a new Christmas release...

For those looking to get involved with the Fedora project in manner besides the likes of coding and documentation, a Fedora Zine is being established and are looking for creative submissions...

It's looking like Wasmer 1.0 will be released early in the new year as the open-source WebAssembly run-time for desktops or to run WASM code anywhere as a "universal runtime" in contexts outside of the web browser...

Well here is a pleasant Christmas surprise... Sony has published a new "hid-playstation" Linux kernel driver for bringing up the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller and will also be used for supporting other PlayStation hardware on Linux...

To those celebrating any year-end holidays, Happy Holidays / Merry Christmas. It's been a hell of a year and 2021 will hopefully be better. In any event even if not celebrating any end of year holidays or other events, there still is daily Phoronix content to come...

A few days ago I noted nice AMD EPYC performance improvements with PostgreSQL when running on Linux 5.11 compared to prior kernels. I've confirmed that for even more AMD EPYC servers now that the PostgreSQL uplift is there, but other workloads are unfortunately regressing for both Ryzen and EPYC. Here's the start of an exciting Christmas benchmarking adventure looking at this change with Linux 5.11.....

The past several days FreeBSD has been working to complete its migration from their development being done with Subversion to instead using the Git distributed revision control system as used by most other open-source projects...

A few days ago there was a glibc commit mentioning Intel "LAM" and now the updated Intel documentation sheds more light on this forthcoming processor feature...

As a Christmas gift to font enthusiasts, the FreeType font rasterization engine today merged its SDF renderer...

Darktable 3.4 is out in time for dealing with any of your RAW holiday photos...

The out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system has now been ported to the week-old Linux 5.10 kernel code-base. This also comes days ahead of the one year anniversary since the "Version 5" announcement...

For those with extra time around the holidays, the first release candidate of LibreOffice 7.1 is now available for testing...

Linux 5.11's Kconfig build configuration updates are bringing some long overdue improvements to its "Qconf" Qt toolkit user interface option for configuring Linux kernel builds...