Phoronix

For those looking to experiment with some BSD desktop operating systems this weekend, FreeBSD-based MidnightBSD 2.0 is out along with NetBSD-based os108 9.1...

The open-source, cross-platform LuxCoreRender physically based renderer is closing in on its version 2.5 release and most noticeable is supporting NVIDIA's OptiX library for faster acceleration on NVIDIA RTX GPUs...

Stemming from a GRUB bootloader inquiry and discussion that started over one year ago, a new specification is being proposed for possible adoption by the Linux kernel in being able to pass bootloader or system firmware logs to the operating system kernel for in turn exposing them to user-space...

Fedora Media Writer is the project's cross-platform utility for deploying Fedora install images to USB drives in an easy-to-user manner and for selecting from the various Fedora spins. One of Red Hat's engineers has recently been working on some modernization improvements to this Fedora image writer...

The 2020 Linux App Summit just concluded as a conference focused on the Linux user-space/applications. Given the pandemic, it was a virtual conference and the video recordings are now available...

Four years ago I chronicled building a massive L-shaped desk for a better workflow, more monitors and space. For those that may be wanting to procure a new computer desk if you are working from home or eyeing L-shaped desk options, here is a new build I recently finished up as an improvement over my original design

Back during the summer LLVM developers began devising plans for a new default branch name in Git for fostering the development of the open-source compiler stack. Like a growing number of open-source software projects, they have been working to move away from Git's current default of "master" as the main development branch. Beginning next month, that should now be a reality...

It's been another busy week of bug fixing in the KDE space along with other feature work, including on the Plasma Wayland front...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers have begun preparing support for a new feature previously not talked about publicly: Intel PXP or the "Protected Xe Path"...

For the Supercomputing SC20 week there is the release of the OpenMP 5.1 specification with some exciting additions...

The newly-opened Mesa 21.0 development window has merged support for EGL_EXT_platform_xcb...

In time for the weekend Linux gamers is an updated Proton release from Valve and CodeWeavers for powering Steam Play to enjoy the latest Windows games on Linux...

"The road to get Mageia 8 is winding, slow but steady," begins the project's latest status update...

Back in September Firefox Nightly enabled the JavaScript "Warp" code for SpiderMonkey and now for next week's Firefox 83.0 release it is remaining on by default for this web browser update...

Over the past week we have published our Linux performance reviews of the Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 7 5800X, and Ryzen 9 5900X + 5950X "Zen 3" processors. For as much data that has been available in those reviews, here is even more data accumulating thanks to the open-source Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. Thousands of data points are building up for these very exciting AMD Zen 3 desktop processors...

Oracle has released Oracle Linux 8 Update 3 as the newest version of their RHEL8-based operating system...

Red Hat engineers are working on a "big block mode" for the VirtIO-MEM code and could land for the Linux 5.11 cycle...

The long-standing patches by Bas Nieuwenhuizen on implementing DMA-BUF modifier support for the RadeonSI code within Mesa has now been merged for next quarter's Mesa 21.0 feature release...

A new Linux I/O scheduler has been proposed that is optimized for batching such as for MMC and TCP-based/remote storage...

A late notable change for the Linux 5.10 kernel that was merged today as a "fix" is DPTF support for Intel Alder Lake hardware...

Just one week after OpenZFS 2.0-RC5, a sixth release candidate is now available for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently geared for Linux and FreeBSD systems...

After announcing Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 back in March as their modified kernel based currently on the Linux 5.4 source tree while adding and back-porting extra features, UEK R6U1 was released today as their first major update to this kernel that can be found on the likes of Oracle Linux and powering the Oracle Cloud...

Over the past week we have looked at the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X Linux performance as well as that of the lower-end -- but still very powerful -- Ryzen 5 5600X. Today we are striking in the middle in looking at the last Zen 3 CPU model for the moment: the Ryzen 7 5800X. The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X is a $449 USD processor that is packing eight cores / sixteen threads, a 3.8GHz base clock. 4.7GHz boost clock, 32MB L3 cache, and has a 105 Watt TDP.

For those wondering the outcome of last month's Debian 11 "Bullseye" artwork voting, a new default theme for this 2021 GNU/Linux distribution release has been decided...

The Translation Table Maps (TTM) video memory management code used within the Linux kernel by DRM drivers such as Nouveau and Radeon/AMDGPU is seeing some improvements with the forthcoming Linux 5.11 kernel cycle...

Following last month's systemd 247-RC1 release that was headlined by the systemd-oomd service being merged for better low memory / out-of-memory handling and many other changes, a second release candidate is now available...

Fedora stakeholders and the folks at Red Hat have been discussing the idea of having a "lightly maintained" package repository (or some RPM metadata otherwise to indicate such light maintenance) for packages that are either very new, not receiving much packaging attention, or simply used as a build dependency for other packages...

PAPPL as the printer application framework created by the CUPS founder is approaching the v1.0 release...

Just a day after the CXL 2.0 specification was published, the initial Linux kernel support for this updated Compute Express Link revision was sent out for review...

Following the news today of Intel sharing ~60% of their GPU driver code-base between Windows and Linux and working to bring the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) to Mesa in 2021, not everyone is enthusiastic about those prospects...

Adding to the growing list of changes for the next FFmpeg release is now AV1 video decoding with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards...

Intel today is announcing their Server GPU for the data center based on their Xe-LP microarchitecture with an initial focus on high-density, low-latency Android cloud gaming and media streaming. For as exciting as the Intel Server GPU is, some exciting Intel Linux graphics driver details were also disclosed.

AMD and IBM are this morning announcing a multi-year, joint development agreement focused on "building upon open-source software, open standards, and open system architectures to drive Confidential Computing in the cloud and support a broad range of accelerators across high-performance computing (HPC), and enterprise critical capabilities such as virtualization and encryption."..

GCC 11 feature development is ending very shortly but landing in time are the patches last month for adding AVX-VNNI support...

Following the Mesa 20.3 branching on Monday and subsequent opening of Mesa 21.0 for development, the first release candidate of Mesa 20.3 is now available for testing...

Intel on Tuesday evening released their 20201110 CPU microcode package as their first collection of updated CPU microcode binaries since June and it's a big update...

Microsoft on Tuesday released .NET 5.0 as their latest work on unifying their .NET stack and continuing along with support for Linux and other non-Windows platforms...

Last week Valve added Sony PlayStation 5 controller support to SDL2 while today there is launch-day support for the Xbox Series X controller for this cross-platform abstraction layer popular with games...

As was widely expected for today's Apple event, the Cupertino company just announced their first three Macs powered by Apple Silicon...

As part of Intel's monthly security disclosures the company is today releasing forty new security advisories today...

Now that the Samsung-contributed open-source exFAT file-system kernel driver has matured quite nicely since being merged earlier this year as a replacement to the short-lived staging exFAT driver based on an older code-base, here is a look at how exFAT is performing on the Linux 5.9 kernel compared to EXT4 and F2FS as well as the existing exFAT FUSE file-system implementation.

Mesa 21.0 will allow running OpenCL and OpenGL on top of Gallium3D for any hardware on Windows 10 supporting Direct3D 12 acceleration...

Just a year after the Compute Express Link 1.0 and 1.1 interconnect specifications were published, CXL 2.0 is being announced this morning for this high-speed, data center minded specification built atop the PCI Express interface...

For those on the Qt 5.12 LTS series the Qt 5.12.10 point release is out today with 30 new bug fixes. But for those looking ahead to Qt 6 also out today is Qt 6.0 Beta 4...

After last week sharing some Intel Tiger Lake benchmarks on Linux 5.10, the tables have turned and here are some similar tests when running Linux 5.10 on an AMD Ryzen 4000 series "Renoir" notebook...

A proposal and set of patches have been sent out around the Linux kernel's Page Table Isolation (PTI/KPTI) implementation to defer switching from the user page-table to kernel page-table until later in the kernel entry sequence. There are possible performance benefits and code improvements that would stem from this change...

In addition to the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub (SFH) driver coming with Linux 5.11 for improving Ryzen laptop support, the AMD SoC PMC driver is also under review for landing in this next kernel release...

Valve's open-source developers responsible for DXVK and VKD3D-Proton are working on a new Vulkan extension to help in their porting/layering effort of Direct3D on top of the Vulkan API...

Mesa 20.3 was branched this evening in marking the end of feature development for this Q4-2020 Mesa3D release that should debut as stable in December. This also means that Mesa 21.0 is now open for development...

Making use of "-march=tigerlake" for building optimized binaries catering to Intel's latest-generation processors is well worth it on the likes of GCC 11. Out of the new instruction set extensions on Tiger Lake is more uplift than we have seen out of recent Intel generations and comparing the different "-march=" targets shows significant performance benefits if you don't mind compiling your own software from source.