Phoronix

A set of kernel patches to Intel's graphics driver helps improve the GPU power consumption to the extent of on Chrome OS seeing about 45 minutes extra battery life and several percent under the likes of Ubuntu Linux...

Oracle continues releasing new updates to Solaris 11.4 but there still aren't any public signs of life past v11.4. Out now is Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU19 with one interesting addition...

For the Fedora 33 release later this year, Red Hat is looking at further enhancing and strengthening the cryptography settings/configuration of the OS...

The GNU Debugger (GDB) is seeing the start of improvements to enhance its Microsoft Windows debugging experience...

Some new HID device called Moonball by Google will be supported with Linux 5.7...

Going back to at least late 2017 have been proposals for Zstd-compressing the Linux kernel images for the Facebook-developed Zstandard compression algorithm. In 2020 perhaps we will finally see the support mainlined...

Back in January we reported on the lead developer of the CUPS printing system quitting Apple and following that he began development of LPrint as a new label printer software solution for Linux and macOS. It turns out he has another software projects in the works too...

Here is an up-to-date look at how the very latest Mesa 20.1 Git performance is for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver both out-of-the-box and when enabling the Valve-backed ACO compiler back-end alternative to AMDGPU LLVM. Plus there are benchmarks of the latest AMDVLK open-source AMD Vulkan driver and also when using AMDGPU-PRO's Vulkan packages that still rely upon AMD's proprietary shader compiler.

While the Debian 11 "Bullseye" code freeze isn't for another year, the second alpha release of the Debian Installer to ultimately provide the installation process is now available...

As a move ultimately for Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well, Red Hat developers working on Fedora are planning to transition the RPM database (RPMDB) away from the long-standing Berkeley DB to using SQLite...

The upcoming Linux 5.7 kernel is preparing to bid farewell to KVM virtualization support on 32-bit ARM architectures...

AMD today announced the Ryzen 9 4900H as their new top-end Zen 2 mobile processor for notebooks...

While many would argue it's past due for the Linux kernel's floppy disk code to be gutted from the mainline code-base, instead it's seeing improvements in 2020 ahead of the Linux 5.7 kernel... The same kernel where Intel stabilized Tiger Lake graphics, AMD preparing Zen 3 support, a new exFAT driver, and a multitude of other modern improvements is also now seeing floppy work...

Intel has begun piping the Linux support for Keem Bay...

Kernel patches pending that might see mainlining for the upcoming Linux 5.7 window provide ASpeed XDMA engine support for the plethora of AST2500 BMCs found on server platforms and the forthcoming AST2600-based platforms...

Linux 5.7's Netfilter framework is set to see better performance on modern Intel and AMD systems thanks to AVX2 optimizations...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.6-rc6 and the code metrics are looking good for this stage of the kernel cycle...

While a lot of feature work has been building up for Linux 5.7 in various subsystem development repositories ahead of the merge window in a few weeks, one of the big driver additions many users have been clamoring for isn't yet queued. The AMD Sensor Fusion Hub open-source driver for Linux appears stalled pending more reviews from upstream developers...

Flying under our radar until now was that KDE Frameworks 5.68 was released last week as the monthly update to this collection of KDE-minded libraries complementing the Qt tool-kit...

Complementing the Firefox 73 vs. 74 vs. 75 Beta benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux from AMD Ryzen this week, here are those numbers side-by-side with the Google Chrome 80 web-browser for putting the performance into more perspective...

Marcel Holtmann of Intel's open-source Linux team released BlueZ 5.54 this morning as the latest version of this widely-used user-space Linux Bluetooth stack...

Coming just past the GNOME 3.36.0 release is the merging of a year-old patch-set to tie in middle mouse button click emulation with libinput for Mutter...

The Coronavirus doesn't appear to be impacting KDE development speed at all as it's been another week seeing a ton of feature activity for this open-source desktop...

After being in development for two years, GNOME Shortwave has seen its first stable release shortly after this week's GNOME 3.36 desktop debut...

Back in January "iGPU Leak" was disclosed as CVE-2019-14615 as an information leakage vulnerability affecting Intel's graphics architecture leading to both register and local memory leaks. While Intel "Gen9" graphics were patched right away on the disclosure date and Gen8 Broadwell graphics were already mitigated, Gen7/Gen7.5 graphics took longer... In fact, not until the Linux 5.7 release this spring is there the mitigation for iGPU Leak...

It's been a while since having news on Redox OS as the Rustlang-written open-source operating system. But it turns out that's been due to Jeremy Soller being busy working on Pkgar as a new package management format for the operating system...

Over the past year we have seen a steady flow of Intel Tiger Lake "Gen12" graphics enablement for the Linux kernel, their first generation also adopting the Xe Graphics branding as part of their discrete GPU initiative. With the Linux 5.7 kernel this spring will be the first release where the Gen12 graphics support is there by default as a sign of stability...

Hot off yesterday's release of Wine 5.4 with Unicode 13 and text drawing for D3DX9, Wine-Staging 5.4 is now available with more than 850 patches on top of it...

Any regular Phoronix reader should already be quite familiar with SVT-AV1 and the other open-source Scalable Video Technology encoders considering how much we have been benchmarking them -- months before even before they were officially announced. Netflix, which has been working on SVT-AV1 in conjunction with Intel, has an interesting write-up for some weekend reading on the state of this open-source AV1 encoder/decoder...

Microsoft announced in their forthcoming Windows 10 Version 2004 update that Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) will be entering general availability status...

Fedora 32 Beta was deemed unready for release on Thursday during the initial Go/No-Go meeting but after reconvening twenty-four hours later the remaining blocker bugs were addressed...

Moving forward it will hopefully become easier updating NVMe solid-state drive device firmware under Linux...

Wine 5.4 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release and it comes with a number of improvements...

Announced at the end of last year was Radeon Open Compute 3.0 with the new "AOMP" compiler. Today a new version of AOMP has been released for OpenMP offloading support to AMD Radeon GPUs...

LLVM 10.0-RC3 was released last week as what was supposed to be the last release candidate of the cycle after being challenged by delays already. However, last minute issues with RC3 has led to LLVM 10.0-RC4 coming out today...

A rather simple improvement to the Linux CFS scheduler's load balancing code appears to have measurable benefits with helping to more quickly spread the task utilization across the system...

A four year old Intel Linux display driver bug around corruption issues when trying to drive tiled displays (namely 5K+ setups with dual DisplayPort connections) on Intel "Gen9" graphics hardware for Skylake up until Icelake could soon be marked as resolved...

Intel Compute Runtime 20.10.16087 was released today as their latest weekly-ish tagged update to this open-source compute runtime for empowering their graphics hardware on Linux with OpenCL and oneAPI support...

Currently the Linux kernel SECCOMP secure computing mode force-enables Spectre protections, which comes with obvious performance implications. When force-enabled, however, processes can't opt-out of the protection if they are not at risk to the likes of Spectre V4 "Speculative Store Bypass" issues. But a simple change being proposed would let such processes opt out if desired...

2020 could be the year we see the Vulkan API seeing more adoption on the desktop outside of games. We are already looking forward to LibreOffice 7.0 with Vulkan rendering support coming out later this summer while the next FFmpeg release also has Vulkan support lined up...

There have not been many AMDVLK open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver releases this quarter, but out today in any case is AMDVLK 2020.Q1.3 as their newest update to this official open-source Vulkan driver derived in part from shared sources with the AMD Vulkan Windows driver...

One of the most frequent critiques of Intel's Clear Linux distribution has been its lackluster support in dealing with proprietary/third-party packages like the Google Chrome web browser and Valve's Steam gaming client. Since last summer, Clear Linux has been working on their third-party packaging support with their unique "bundles" system, but not much has been heard on the matter since...

Feature work of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics driver work for Linux 5.7 is winding down now that Linux 5.6 is almost to its sixth release candidate this weekend, but sent in this week by AMD were a few more AMDGPU items though mostly amounting to fixes for their graphics driver...

In addition to WebAssembly's growing presence outside of the web browser thanks to various desktop run-times and interesting use-cases, WebAssembly is also popping up in other areas. Google has been working on WebAssembly support for extensions within network proxies typically reserved for C/C++ or the likes of Lua scripts...

On Tuesday the Load Value Injection (LVI) attack was disclosed by Intel and security researchers as a new class of transient-execution attacks and could lead to injecting data into a victim program and in turn stealing data, including from within SGX enclaves. While Intel has publicly stated they don't believe the LVI attack to be practical, one of their open-source compiler wizards did go ahead and add mitigation options to the GNU Assembler as part of the GCC toolchain. Here are benchmarks showing the performance impact of enabling those new LVI mitigation options and the significant impact they can cause on run-time performance in real-world workloads.

The Debian release team has published their tentative freeze dates for the next major version of their Linux operating system, Debian 11 Bullseye...

We continue to see bits here and there of AMD Family 19h / Zen 3 support coming together for the mainline Linux kernel...

Following last week's release of GCC 8.4, the GCC 9.3 compiler is out in offering the latest fixes to the newer (and current) GCC 9 compiler series...

The Turnip Mesa Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics processors can now handle transform feedback...

While Windows and Linux have seen good 802.11ac "WiFi 5" support and these days are focused on 802.11ax "WiFi 6" with the latest wireless chipsets, FreeBSD is still tackling 802.11ac. But the FreeBSD Foundation is prepared to soon begin sponsoring development work on ironing out their 802.11ac support...