Phoronix

With the newly released DragonFlyBSD 5.6 there are improvements to its original HAMMER2 file-system to the extent that it's now selected by its installer as the default file-system choice for new installations. Curious how the performance now compares between HAMMER and HAMMER2, here are some initial benchmarks on an NVMe solid-state drive using DragonFlyBSD 5.6.0...

While PCI Express 4.0 up to this point has only been found in a few systems like Talos' POWER9 platforms and coming soon with the new AMD graphics cards and chipsets, the PCI SIG today announced PCI Express 6.0...

Panfrost only made its initial debut as part of the recent Mesa 19.1 release for providing open-source Arm Mali Bifrost/Midgard graphics driver support on Linux independent of Arm and their official binary driver. While the resources are limited, so far Panfrost is making stellar progress...

KDE developer Tomaz Canabrava is working on a set of improvements around their Konsole terminal emulator when running on Wayland...

Ubuntu and their downstream flavors all stopped shipping x86 32-bit images and now for the 19.10 cycle they have decided to stop their i386 support entirely. Beginning with Ubuntu 19.10, the archive/packages will not be built for x86 32-bit...

VKHR is an open-source, real-time hybrid hair renderer written in Vulkan and developed under the support of AMD/RTG...

While the AMDGPU kernel driver has shipped with the long-awaited FreeSync support since the Linux 5.0 release earlier this year and was quickly wired up for the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver in Mesa 19.0 while the recent Mesa 19.1 update brought FreeSync for the RADV Vulkan driver, AMDVLK as AMD's official open-source Vulkan driver isn't yet supporting this variable rate refresh technology...

As Netflix's first security bulletin for 2019, they warned of TCP-based remote denial of service vulnerabilities affecting both Linux and FreeBSD. These vulnerabilities are rated "critical" but already being corrected within the latest Git code...

In addition to Clang-Scan-Deps being merged a few days ago, another new feature for LLVM's Clang is called the Clang Interface Stubs and brings a concept from Windows/macOS over to Linux/ELF systems...

Quietly released last week was Radeon Software for Linux 19.20, the latest quarterly update to AMD's packaged Linux driver that consists of their AMDGPU-PRO binary driver option as well as the AMDGPU-Open packaged components using a snapshot of Mesa...

DragonFlyBSD 5.6 is now available as the latest major update to this popular BSD operating system...

As we've been expecting, AMD's open-source developers today posted their set of patches enabling Navi (10) support within their AMDGPU DRM kernel driver. Bringing up the Navi support in kernel-space are 459 patches amounting to more than four-hundred thousand lines of code, not counting the work done to LLVM as part of their shader compiler back-end or the yet-to-be-published OpenGL/Vulkan driver patches...

For those eager to see CentOS 8.0 as the community open-source rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0, progress is being made but it looks like the release is still some weeks out...

Debian's Apt packaging system was tagged today as 1.9.0 experimental and is already in the process of being added to Ubuntu 19.10. Apt 1.9 is working towards the eventual Apt 2.0 release...

NVIDIA announced this morning for ISC 2019 that they are bringing CUDA to Arm beyond their work already for supporting GPU computing with lower-power Tegra SoCs...

With Debian 10 "Buster" due to be releasing in early July, I've begun testing the near-final Buster images on various systems. Here is a look at a common Intel Core i7 system comparing the current performance of Debian 10.0 to the current stable 9.9 release...

The FSGSBASE instruction set has been present on Intel processors going back to Ivy Bridge processors and while there have been Linux kernel patches for this feature going on for years, it looks like with the Linux 5.3 kernel cycle is this support for merging. Making us eager for this support is the prospect of better performance, especially for context switching workloads that already have been suffering as a result of recent CPU mitigations...

Debian's RISC-V support has been coming together but how's the state of affairs for the imminent Debian 10.0 "Buster" release?..

Currently NVIDIA's packaged drivers on Ubuntu can get a bit stale on Ubuntu stable releases since they aren't updated in-step with the latest driver releases. But a new stable release update (SRU) policy/exception similar to the Firefox approach is being made for Ubuntu so that new releases will end up working their way into currently supported Ubuntu series...

Arm's Wilco Dijkstra landed some more optimizations this past week in the Glibc development code for the upcoming GNU C Library 2.30 release...

NetworkManager 1.19.4 is the newest snapshot of this widely used Linux networking library on its road to version 1.20...

With Linux 5.2-rc5 providing no upsets and the release candidate smaller than the one last week, things are looking good for seeing the stable Linux 5.2 kernel release happen in early July...

Details are light up to this point but in fifteen days EndeavourOS will be announced as a new Arch-based Linux distribution aiming to continue where Antergos Linux left off...

Landing this week in the LLVM Clang 9.0 development code-base is the new clang-scan-deps tool for much faster scanning of files for dependencies compared to the traditional pre-processor based approach...

New to the GCC 10 compiler code-base this week is a port for the Texas Instruments Programmable Real-Time Unit (PRU) processor found on various boards, including the likes of the BeagleBone Arm SBCs...

The long-awaited OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 distribution update has set sail this weekend...

Making KDE's Baloo file indexing/searching framework really efficient appears to be a never-ending task. Baloo is already much less bloated recently than it's been hungry for resources in the past and with KDE Frameworks 5.60 will be slightly more fit...

For those wondering how Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux is comparing to the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution, here are a number of benchmarks on the same Intel Core i7 8700K in seeing how these rolling-release distros are competing for summer 2019...

In time for those planning to spend some time this weekend gaming, DXVK lead developer Philip Rebohle announced the release of DXVK 1.2.2 that will hopefully soon be integrated as part of a Proton update for Steam Play but right now can be built from source...

In hoping to catch more bugs quickly, systemd now has continuous fuzzing integration via the new "Fuzzit" platform that provides continuous fuzzing as a service...

The Intel open-source/Linux compute stack has added Comet Lake support along with more Icelake PCI IDs in its latest round-up...

It was nearly a decade ago the high-end, commercial video software editing solution Lightworks announced they would be going open-source but to this day that milestone has yet to be materialized. Lightworks though does continue advancing with their v14.6 release on the horizon and at least their added Linux support continues to be expanded upon...

The past few years there's been the me_cleaner software for disabling and stripping parts of Intel's Management Engine for soft-disabling the notorious bit on modern Intel boards. ME_Cleaner has been making much progress and now there is work pending for being able to disable the newer Management Engine 12 found on more recent Intel motherboards...

FreeBSD 11.3 is lining up for release in July while this weekend the first release candidate is available for testing...

Released at the end of May was the huge ZFS On Linux 0.8 release with many new features like native encryption, TRIM/discard support for SSDs, device removal, Python 3 compatibility with its tooling, pool check-points, and much more. Out today is now the first maintenance release following that big release...

Since the release of WSL2 as a Windows 10 Insider Preview update this week, we've been putting the new Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 under some benchmarks compared to WSL1 and bare metal Linux. While WSL2 has improved the I/O performance thanks to the new Hyper-V-based virtualization approach employed by WSL2, the performance has regressed in other areas for running Linux binaries on Windows 10. Here are our preliminary benchmark results.

At the start of May there were the initial patches out of AMD for implementing a better runtime linker in its graphics stack. That code has now been merged into Mesa 19.2 and is being used by the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Wacom's second-generation Intuos Pro Small digital drawing tablet will be supported by the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel...

To be exposed via /proc/[pid]/arch_status is a new interface for exposing architectural-specific information for a given Linux process...

To date the open-source AMD "Navi" graphics code inside their LLVM compiler back-end has been focused on the "GFX1010" target but now it's been branched out to also GFX1011 and GFX1012...

The team maintaining MoltenVK for allowing a majority of the Vulkan API to function atop Apple's Metal drivers for macOS/iOS have issued their first big update in two months...

Following last week's release of Chrome 75, Google today issued the first public beta for the Chrome 76 web-browser...

Intel announced at the start of the year their newest Itanium 9700 "Kittson" processors from 2017 would be discontinued with no planned successor for the IA-64 line-up. Given the IA-64 compiler support is already in rough shape for GCC, the GNU developers are planning to deprecate the support for the current GCC 10 cycle and to remove it entirely for GCC 11...

With Intel's Icelake/Gen11 graphics support considered production-ready when on the latest Linux graphics driver components and ahead of the real enablement around their highly anticipated Xe Graphics discrete hardware, it's making for a summer of clean-ups and restructuring within their kernel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver...

The first alpha release of PHP 7.4 is now available ahead of its feature freeze next month and after a period of betas and release candidates will culminate with the official PHP 7.4.0 release around the end of November...

The Linux 5.3 mainline kernel will be picking up support for enabling Linux guests on the ACRN hypervisor...

If you are a user of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Linux graphics driver on laptops and have found no audio support, that is likely to be fixed by an upcoming kernel patch that should make its way to the Linux 5.3 kernel...

As a win for the Ubuntu Server team, the founder of Inkscape and longtime X.Org/graphics developer Bryce Harrington has returned to Canonical...

While Vega M has been on the market for several months as the Radeon graphics processor found on Intel Kabylake-G chips, interestingly in the past few days have been a number of improvements for using the open-source Linux graphics stack on this hardware...

After announcing Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 just over one month ago, Microsoft has begun pushing out WSL2 to its Windows Insider Preview channel...