Phoronix

With the AMDGPU kernel driver adding Trusted Memory Zone support for the Linux 5.8 kernel, Mesa 20.2-devel has now landed support for the RadeonSI driver to make use of this TMZ functionality...

Just this weekend we were writing about the eleventh spin of the Linux FSGSBASE patches for this capability that can help out performance going back to Ivy Bridge era processors. Kicking off Monday, version twelve is already out and an explanation why a Microsoft developer has been stewarding these patches across the finish line...

The BUS1 API did see some activity back in March but with that in-kernel IPC mechanism not yet on approach for landing in the mainline Linux kernel, the Dbus-Broker project for a high-performance D-Bus implementation remains the best solution for the time being...

Following new Intel Ice Lake CPU microcode being published on Friday without any change-log and not updating prior Intel CPU family microcodes, I've begun looking at the performance as this first Intel CPU microcode update for Linux users since November. From my initial weekend testing there does seem to be some small but measurable and consistent performance impairments for Ice Lake from this microcode upgrade.

Linus Torvalds did his usual Sunday release dance and shipped Linux 5.7-rc5 as the latest kernel test release...

While our benchmarks of Clang 10.0 have generally been favorable or at least no big regressions compared to LLVM/Clang 9.0, it seems the same can't be said for Rust when shifting their compiler base to LLVM 10.0...

EndeavourOS 2020.05.08 has been released as the latest monthly install media for this Arch-based Linux distribution born out of the ashes of the former Antergos Linux...

The FSGSBASE patches for the Linux kernel have been sent out for their 11th time over the past few years to make use of this CPU instruction supported going back to Ivy Bridge hardware...

Intel on Friday quietly released new Intel CPU microcode files for Linux...

Patches are pending that can sharply speed-up mount times of large EXT4 file-systems...

While Radeon graphics cards can work with various external GPU (eGPU) solutions, currently on Linux if trying to hot unplug such a setup can lead to various problems. An experimental patch series out this weekend is seeking to address that problem...

A Phoronix Premium reader recently asked about whether Pop!_OS 20.04 performance differs from Ubuntu 20.04 given some underlying changes made by System76 to their distribution, besides the plethora of higher-level desktop improvements. Well, here are some benchmarks.

You may recall towards the end of last year when the Pango layout engine library dropped support for bitmap fonts, causing frustrations among some users. There now appears to be another Linux font debacle brewing...

Last week Intel open-source developers sent out their initial kernel driver patches for Rocket Lake graphics support and now the Rocket Lake platform support has been merged for Mesa 20.2 on the OpenGL/Vulkan driver side...

Debian 10.4 is out this weekend as their fourth stable update to Debian Buster...

Ubuntu Studio, the spin of Ubuntu focused on multimedia production, announced last month that for their 20.10 release due out later this year they would be transitioning from their long-standing Xfce desktop environment over to using KDE Plasma. While still in early form, the transition is going ahead quite well...

Wine 5.8 was released on Friday with a GIF encoder, more WineD3D Vulkan progress, and other changes while out today is Wine-Staging 5.8 for this experimental blend...

It's been another busy week for KDE developers even with everything happening globally around the coronavirus there are a lot of open-source desktop innovations continuing...

The FreeType library that is used by many open-source projects for font rendering and other font operations, is out with their first release of the year...

Last month Crucial introduced their P2 NVMe SSD series as their new low-cost successor to their prior P1 series. The Crucial P2 500GB NVMe solid-state drive retails for $60~65 USD which offers good value and yields better performance than their prior low-cost P1 SSDs.

Wine 5.8 has been uncorked for the weekend as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows programs and games on Linux and other platforms...

Xrdesktop, the Valve-funded Linux desktop support for VR headsets and making the likes of GNOME and KDE window managers VR-aware, is out with a new release...

Last month we reported on LibreOffice now preferring its new rendering code be built with LLVM Clang over alternative compilers. When falling back to CPU-based software rasterization, the Clang-generated code performs much better than alternative compilers given Google's own emphasis with Skia on being Clang-focused. LibreOffice 7.0 is now beginning a hard requirement on Clang when building for Windows...

Con Kolivas known for his longtime work on improving Linux desktop responsiveness with largely working on the kernel and the likes of MuQSS has now seen his first Mesa patch merged for fixing unexpected GUI-related stalls...

Last month marked the release of FreeRDP 2.0 for implementing the Microsoft Remote Assistant Protocol v2. FreeRDP 2.0 also brought RDP proxy support, font smoothing by default, Flatpak packaging support, better scaling for Wayland, and other improvements. Today now marks the release of FreeRDP 2.1...

A new set of kernel patches out this morning are for implementing software boost support within the ACPI CPPC CPUFreq driver...

Oracle's Anthony Yznaga has sent out a proposal for "PKRAM" as a new means of being able to preserve memory pages of the currently running kernel so that they can be restored after launching a new kernel via kexec...

The Lima kernel driver providing reverse-engineered, open-source driver support for aging Arm Mali 4xx graphics processors is finally seeing run-time power management capabilities come Linux 5.8...

IBM engineers have been working on improvements to the Linux kernel's power savings while running latency-sensitive tasks but still delivering comparable performance. Their own numbers for a patched kernel are showing significant power saving benefits as much as ~20%...

PipeWire, the Red Hat backed solution for providing modern management of audio and video streams that supports a Wayland-minded environment and also sandboxed applications with Flatpak while fulfilling use-cases set by JACK and PulseAudio, has a new session manager option...

At the end of April AMD announced the Ryzen 3 3100 + Ryzen 3 3300X and these Zen 2 budget processors are now shipping. Here are our initial benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X processors running on Ubuntu Linux compared to an assortment of old and new Intel/AMD CPUs with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

The GNU Compiler Collection 10 has seen its first stable release this morning in the form of GCC 10.1...

Google this week announced accepted projects for Summer of Code 2020 as their virtual engagement for getting students involved in open-source development. As usual, there are a lot of interesting GSoC projects...

Years ago long before GNOME had great Wayland support and was used by default on the likes of Fedora Workstation and long before other Wayland compositors had mature support along with other areas of the stack, there was a Linux distribution offering up an experimental Linux "Live DVD/USB" OS for showcasing Wayland. That distribution is now out with a new release...

DragonFlyBSD 5.8 debuted in March while now shipping is v5.8.1 as the latest update for this BSD operating system...

On Wednesday marked the second weekly release candidate for the forthcoming Mesa 20.1...

Following the recent release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, Oracle has now released Oracle Linux 8 Update 2 as their RHEL8-based distribution with various extra features on top and even an alternative kernel option...

Recently we noted the latest revision to AMD's Programmer Reference Manual points to PCID and MPK/PKEY support coming on future CPUs. New Linux patches now confirm that the MPK support is on the way with next-gen EPYC processors...

Android 11 Developer Previews have been available since February in bringing new 5G APIs, updated Neural Network APIs, privacy and security improvements, HDMI low-latency mode support, and many other additions. Google is now preparing the transition to Android 11 betas and ultimately to have this next mobile operating system release ready to roar by Q3...

It's been a while since hearing much out of the Google-backed Dart programming language for designing UI-focused cross-platform applications and its ability to compile to JavaScript or native code. But out today is Dart 2.8 as the latest step forward for this language...

Given the recent releases of Fedora 32, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Manjaro 20.0, and others, here is a fresh eight-way Linux distribution benchmark comparison.

Qt 5.15 is aiming to ship in approximately two weeks time while the first release candidate was issued today as one of the last opportunities for testing this forthcoming release...

David Airlie's "multi-sample support extravaganza" for the LLVMpipe software driver has been merged into Mesa 20.2-devel...

Last month the GNU MediaGoblin project announced they were still alive and have now managed to deliver a new release in the form of version 0.10...

While Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was released less than two weeks ago, attention by Canonical and the Ubuntu development community has already turned to Ubuntu 20.10 as the Groovy Gorilla. With it being the first release past an LTS debut, they tend to be a more liberal in the changes in allowing plenty of time to stabilize before the next Long Term Support cycle. On the ZFS front it looks like we could be in for some more exciting changes...

The Linux DM-Writecache target that allows for writeback caching to cache newly written data to an SSD or persistent memory will with Linux 5.8 see better performance out of Intel Optane like storage on newer platforms...

Firefox 76.0 is out today as the newest feature release to Mozilla's web browser...

David Howells of Red Hat has been working to "massively overhaul" the code surrounding the kernel's local caching for network filesystems...

NVIDIA Carmel CPU cores that succeeded Denver 2 and found for a while already within Tegra Xavier hardware now has mainline LLVM/Clang compiler support...

Intel developers are working on a new Linux feature and technology called "Intel Platform Monitoring Technology" as amounting to a hardware telemetry framework that can also be used by other hardware vendors. This appears to be a new feature Intel will be supporting on the hardware side starting with Tiger Lake...