Phoronix

With last week's release of LLVM/Clang 10.0, here are our first benchmarks looking at the stable release of the Clang 10.0 C/C++ compiler compared to its previous (v9.0.1) release on various Intel and AMD processors under Ubuntu Linux.

Intel's Rafael Wysocki who oversees the kernel's power management area has sent in his relevant pull requests for the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window...

Sway's Wayland compositor recently added Variable Refresh Rate / Adaptive-Sync support to help avoid tearing and stuttering while now GNOME's Mutter is working on similar VRR support on the desktop...

Following the release of Linux 5.6 and WireGuard 1.0 declared, Google has now enabled WireGuard within their Android open-source Linux kernel build...

Last year Intel outlined the Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) as a feature on future Intel CPUs for high-performance data movement and transformation operations for networking and storage / persistent memory. We are now seeing more of the Intel DSA work beginning to take shape for the Linux kernel...

To date Fedora has defaulted to Java 1.8 / OpenJDK 8 as the default system JDK version but for Fedora 33 later this year they plan to transition to OpenJDK 11...

Ingo Molnar on Monday began sending in his feature pull requests for the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window. Of the pull requests worth noting are the EFI changes...

With the newly-minted Linux 5.6 kernel is initial support for USB4 based on Intel's Thunderbolt code while for Linux 5.7 is a wide variety of other USB changes...

Red Hat's David Howells has sent in pull requests introducing the new fsinfo() system call and mount/superblock notifications and as part of that a general notification mechanism for the kernel...

In the past using the Wayland-based GNOME Shell session and other Wayland compositors has generally resulted in a performance hit in going through (X)Wayland but that is much less so these days. Here are some initial benchmarks of Ubuntu 20.04 running various Steam Linux gaming benchmarks both under the default X.Org-based session and then again when using the Wayland session and its (X)Wayland support.

The previously reported work on split lock detection due to its big performance hit is now queued up for Linux 5.7...

Nearly one year after announcing OpenTelemetry as the merger of the OpenCensus and OpenTracing projects, Google has announced today OpenTelemetry has advanced to its beta phase...

Greg Kroah-Hartman began sending in his pull requests this morning for the areas of the Linux kernel he oversees. With the staging area changes for Linux 5.7 there is some nice spring cleaning...

For those that are normally spinning their own kernels and punctually upgrading to new releases, you will want to hold off on the new Linux 5.6 kernel for the moment if you use the Intel "IWLWIFI" WiFi driver...

In-step with the Linux 5.6 release that mainlined the WireGuard kernel module for this secure VPN tunnel, WireGuard 1.0.0 has now been declared...

Following last night's release of Linux 5.6, the GNU FSFLA folks have put out the Linux-libre 5.6-gnu kernel as their fully-free-software kernel that disallows loading binary kernel modules, disables functionality requiring closed-source firmware/microcode, and other aspects to ensure only free software code is running on the system...

Back in December was a developer discussion over dropping or forking non-Gallium3D drivers. Since then the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver has successfully become the default OpenGL driver for Broadwell/Gen8 and newer while the non-Gallium3D drivers continue to just face bit rot. The discussion over dropping/forking non-Gallium3D Mesa drivers has been reignited...

X.Org Server 1.20.8 was released as the newest point release for this current stable branch. X.Org Server 1.20.8 brings a number of fixes with there still being no sign of X.Org Server 1.21 gearing up for release...

Within minutes of Linux 5.6 being released on Sunday evening, Jens Axboe was already with sending in the start of the various storage areas to the kernel that he oversees with their feature updates for Linux 5.7...

Lutris 0.5.5 is out today as the newest version of this Linux game manager to assist in installing both native and emulated games on Linux. Lutris continues to expand the scope of its "runners" for improving the Linux gaming experience...

Linus Torvalds just announced the release of the Linux 5.6 stable kernel a few minutes ago. This also means the Linux 5.7 merge window is now open for business...

There is less than one month to go until the official release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" but we've already begun experimenting with it for weeks across a variety of platforms. For the most part we have found Ubuntu 20.04 slated to offer some nice performance improvements, especially if upgrading from the existing LTS series, Ubuntu 18.04. In this article are our initial benchmarks looking at the Intel Xeon Scalable from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to the current 20.04 near-final state.

Earlier this month there was the proposal by a Linux kernel engineer for Amazon to flush the L1 data cache on context switches as another safeguard against the ever increasing CPU vulnerabilities...

Lead Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver developer Jason Ekstrand has ported an optimization from the Valve-backed AMD "ACO" compiler over to the NIR code-base for delivering some sizable performance improvements...

This week in KDE land there weren't too many new features introduced but a lot of low-level work to foster future features...

While we were hoping to see the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub driver introduced in Linux 5.7 for improving the AMD Ryzen Linux laptop experience, that now looks quite unlikely...

For the very common Intel "Gen9" graphics found on pretty much all current pre-Icelake hardware that is available through retail channels, high dynamic range (HDR) display support could soon be enabled under Linux for a subset of devices...

Following Friday's release of Wine 5.5, Wine-Staging 5.5 is now available as the experimental blend of Wine with some 850+ patches atop the upstream code-base with various features in testing...

The Linux 5.6 stable kernel could be released as soon as tomorrow if Linus Torvalds is comfortable with its current state to avoid having an eighth weekly release candidate. Whether Linux 5.6 ends up being released tomorrow or next weekend, this kernel is bringing many exciting changes...

In hopefully meaning less regressions moving forward for DXVK with the latest open-source Vulkan drivers, the Mesa continuous integration (CI) infrastructure saw support added for playing DirectX (DXGI) traces with DXVK/Wine...

Open-source video editors over the years have generally fallen well short of the stability and feature set offered by proprietary video editing solutions but in recent years at least there has been some measurable progress to the likes of Kdenlive and OpenShot. Out this weekend for testing is the Kdenlive 20.04 beta...

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has been experimenting with compute-based culling for GFX10/Navi hardware...

It's been on life support for a while but to much sadness, TrueOS indeed is no longer being maintained as the once very promising downstream of FreeBSD that for a while offered arguably the best out-of-the-box BSD desktop experience...

POCL 1.5 is on the way for release in April as the first feature update to this Portable OpenCL implementation since the previous release last September...

Debian developers are wanting to do their part to take on the global coronavirus pandemic by hosting a COVID-19 Biohackathon...

Wine 5.5 is out as the latest bi-weekly Wine development snapshot for running your favorite Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 will likely see support for older x86_64 CPUs eliminated to focus on more modern x86_64 Intel/AMD families. With that, Red Hat developers working on Fedora have been working on an "Enterprise Linux Next" proposal to not only vet such x86_64 build changes but also to provide a feedback workflow for other changes...

When it comes to the AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors we have looked at the various higher-end SKUs since their launch last August up to and including the EPYC 7742 with its 64 cores / 128 threads per socket. But for those wondering about the EPYC 7002 series performance at the bottom end of the spectrum, here are some fun benchmarks of the EPYC 7232P and EPYC 7262 on the near-final Ubuntu 20.04 LTS state compared to various vintages of Intel Xeon CPUs -- most notably, a curiosity driven look at the 8 core / 16 thread Intel Haswell Xeon performance.

With the Linux 5.7 cycle kicking off in April with its merge window opening upon the release of Linux 5.6, here is a look at some of the changes and new features that have been on our radar for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Intel Software has increased their developer funding provided to Blender, the leading open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software...

Following two and a half years of development, the first pre-release of the forthcoming Ardour 6.0 digital audio workstation is now available for testing...

AMDVLK 2020.Q1.4 is out today as the fourth and last open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver code drop of the quarter...

Plasma Bigscreen is a new KDE project aiming to provide a user interface for television screens..

It remains to be seen if it will make it for the upcoming Linux 5.7 kernel merge window, but the FSCRYPT inline encryption functionality has now made it up to its ninth revision for offering better file-system encryption performance on modern mobile SoCs...

One of many new features in the GCC 10 code compiler releasing in about one month's time is finally having a built-in static analyzer. This static analyzer can be enabled with the -fanalyzer switch and has been maturing nicely for its initial capabilities in the GNU Compiler Collection 10...

It shouldn't come as a big surprise but PHP 7.4 has now landed in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to replace the existing PHP 7.3 support within the "Focal Fossa" package archive...

Following the virtual Linaro Tech Days this week, Nuvia's VP of Software, Jon Masters, has begun talking up the Arm server start-up's Linux/open-source support plans...

For those managing to get their hands on a recently released Loongson 3A4000/3B4000 or even older Loongson 3 MIPS64 processors, improving the support is on the way with the upcoming Linux 5.7 kernel...

In addition to the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub driver that we are hopeful could land in Linux 5.7 albeit not yet queued in the iio-next branch, another AMD driver that has been around for a few months in patch form but yet to be mainlined is the AMD PassThru DMA Engine driver...

Given the release earlier this month of DragonFlyBSD 5.8 along with the recent debut of the FreeBSD-based desktop-focused GhostBSD 20.02, here are benchmarks looking at their performance up against FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE as well as the current state of Ubuntu 20.04. Tests were done both with the LLVM Clang and GCC compilers.