Phoronix

After 219 Linux hardware reviews / benchmark featured articles and 3,206 original news articles on Phoronix for 2020, it's finally time to put a wrap on this year... Happy New Year and 2021 couldn't have come soon enough!..

Thanks to the ongoing upstream improvements being pursued by Lenovo as part of their effort to enhance their product support, the Linux power management tree has picked up the initial ACPI Platform Profile implementation for benefiting newer devices like Lenovo laptops...

This month marks ten years since OpenBenchmarking.org initially went online as part of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 development (though didn't officially launch until February 2011). In 2020 alongside Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 came a major OpenBenchmarking.org upgrade as the biggest in its history. As 2020 wraps up, here is a look at the OpenBenchmarking.org growth by the numbers...

The GNOME desktop environment saw many enhancements in 2020 including a number of significant performance optimizations. While GNOME on Wayland has been solid for some time, there has been further enhancements there too. This year also brought the much anticipated GTK 4.0 toolkit release that will be interesting to see how its adoption goes next year. GNOME 40 is also in development for debut in the spring as the successor to this autumn's successful GNOME 3.38 release...

Rust 1.49 was released today for ending out 2020 with this popular programming language. Most notable with Rust 1.49 is the 64-bit ARM Linux support state being promoted...

Yesterday Intel released an updated open-source Media SDK for leveraging media acceleration on their graphics hardware. Along with that out today is the Intel Media Driver 20.4.5 release as their dedicated Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver for Linux systems...

The Linux kernel with the likes of ARM and x86 hardware leverage kernel infrastructure for reporting their relevant CPU security mitigations while only now the MIPS kernel code is seeing work to report such vulnerabilities. However, on the MIPS front it's more difficult with some vendors not publicly acknowledging vulnerabilities and other cases of MIPS hardware vendors no longer producing the hardware in question or even in business...

Con Kolivas took some time out of his New Year's Eve to release Linux 5.10-ck1 as his independent patch-set applied to the recently minted Linux 5.10 kernel and with that the latest MuQSS scheduler...

The Fedora project had a pretty terrific and exciting year especially with everything happening in the world this year. Fedora began appearing on more Lenovo device pre-loads, many features landed like Btrfs by default in Fedora Workstation, they continue to be leading the Wayland charge, and a lot of great engineering work by the folks from Red Hat...

While it shouldn't come as much of a surprise given Fedora's tendency to always ship with the freshest open-source packages, but Fedora 34 should be including the latest Xfce 4.16 desktop packages for those seeking that GTK based desktop...

The GNU Project had a very active year with the GNU toolchain in particular continuing to make major strides in punctually supporting new C/C++ features, continuing to enhance device offloading / accelerator support, support new CPU features, and more. GCC also saw its conversion this year finally over to Git among other accomplishments by the large number of GNU software projects...

For years LLVMpipe has been around as a superior software-based OpenGL implementation for those without a working GPU / hardware driver support or needing to test a bit of GL code along a vendor-neutral path. LLVMpipe thanks to leveraging LLVM is more performant than the traditional Mesa software rasterizer or similar avenues like Softpipe. Finally as we hit 2021, SWRAST has been removed from the Mesa code-base...

NVIDIA's RTX 30 "Ampere" launch was quite a success for 2020 along with new Jetson products and more. Meanwhile on the Linux front this year NVIDIA's proprietary driver continued providing same-day support, features roughly at parity to Windows, and little bread crumbs of open-source support so far. But there still are indications of more possible open-source actions to come as well as potentially better Wayland support to look forward to in 2021...

Fedora Workstation 33 successfully switched over from EXT4 to using Btrfs as its default file-system. Now with Fedora 34 due out in the spring we are seeing Fedora beginning to make use of more features offered by Btrfs...

At the start of Q4, Intel released Media SDK 20.3 with AV1 accelerated decode, Rocket Lake, DG1/SG1 discrete GPU support, and other improvements. Now to end out the quarter is a new release coming in at version 20.5.1...

There are many new features with the Linux 5.11 kernel that is presently under development but one of the ones I've been more curious about for how well it works is the Intel "workload hints" that can be passed via its thermal framework. This is about providing the system with hints of workloads being run to optimize the thermal/power properties.

With it recently being noticed that the Linux AES-NI XTS performance regressed big time from the return trampolines "Retpolines" enacted nearly three years ago as a defense against Spectre, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance cost involved to this day using Retpolines and the impact on the XTS encryption/decryption performance measured by cryptsetup that is used for setting up encrypted disks under Linux...

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...