Phoronix

As we approach the end of Q3'2020 there have been 783 original news articles on Phoronix this quarter and another 40 featured reviews / multi-page articles. Here is a look back at what's been keeping readers informed during this turbulent year...

Intel's compiler experts in Moscow have been working on OpenCL C 3.0 support for the LLVM Clang compiler front-end...

The open-source Panfrost graphics driver, which is now backed/supported by Arm after starting as a reverse-engineering effort, has picked up support for the Mali G72 GPU...

In addition to Fedora Workstation 33 switching to Btrfs, there are a number of key components updated in Fedora 33 as well as finally enabling link-time optimizations (LTO) for package builds that make this next Fedora Linux installment quite interesting from a performance perspective. Here are some initial benchmarks of Fedora Workstation 32 against the Fedora Workstation 33 Beta on an Intel Core i9 10900K system.

The beta of Fedora 33 is available this morning ahead of the official release expected at the end of October for this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution...

While yesterday brought the release of Intel's oneAPI 1.0 specification, the interesting news today is that oneAPI support is coming to AMD Radeon graphics cards...

Following the news yesterday of NetBSD changing its default X11 window manager after two decades with TWM to now using CTWM by default, some wondered why they don't jump on the Wayland bandwagon...

MoltenVK 1.1 is out as a big update for this graphics translation layer for getting the Vulkan API running on macOS and iOS devices by translating calls to Apple's Metal API...

Mesa 20.2 has managed to release just before the end of the the quarter. This Mesa Q3'2020 graphics driver update is coming out about one month behind schedule but the wait is worthwhile given many open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver updates...

Mir 2.1 has been released as Canonical's project around offering a set of libraries for constructing Wayland shells particularly with Snap confinement support and other Ubuntu-focused features...

Hobbyist developers are trying once again to get a Motorola 68000 back-end merged into the upstream LLVM compiler. Yes, the M68k processors that are some 30+ years old...

A new version of Stratis is ready to go as Red Hat's open-source storage solution built atop LVM and XFS for offering easy and modern local storage management on Linux systems that aim to rival the likes of Btrfs and ZFS but without having to rely on a new file-system...

WayVNC 0.3 released today as the Wayland VNC server built atop the WLROOTS library...

Micron's Mpool is at the heart of their HSE Open-Source Storage Engine in providing an object storage media pool built atop block storage devices. Micron engineers are now looking at possibly having Mpool upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel...

After announcing oneAPI at the end of 2018 and then going into beta last year, oneAPI 1.0 is now official for this open-source, standards-based unified programming model designed to support Intel's range of hardware from CPUs to GPUs to other accelerators like FPGAs. Intel's oneAPI initiative has been one of several exciting software efforts led by the company in recent years while continuing to serve as one of the world's largest contributors to open-source software.

Building off Friday's release of Wine 5.18 is now an updated Wine-Staging that adds just over 600 patches atop the upstream code-base for delivering experimental/testing features...

AMD driver developers today released AMDVLK 2020.Q3.6 as their latest open-source snapshot of their official Vulkan graphics driver...

It was just earlier this summer that the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) crossed 17 million firmware downloads while today the Linux hardware community is celebrating that already surpassing 20 million downloads!..

It's 2020 and NetBSD has changed its default X11 window manager after more than two decades with TWM...

Version 8.4 of OpenSSH has been released and among its wide assortment of changes is a lot of continued work on FIDO/2FA key handling...

Vulkan 1.2.155 is out this morning as a small weekly update over last week's spec revision that brought the Vulkan Portability Extension 1.0 for easing software-based Vulkan implementations running atop other graphics APIs...

Broadcom engineers have prepared their Linux network driver infrastructure for supporting 200G link speeds...

Rob Clark who founded the Freedreno/MSM driver project and current Googler sent in the MSM direct rendering manager driver updates targeting the upcoming Linux 5.10 merge window. This time around the Adreno kernel graphics/display driver has some notable additions...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.9-rc7 as the newest weekly test candidate for Linux 5.9. Due to the regressions encountered this cycle and prominent issues being resolved late, he's looking at releasing Linux 5.9 in two weeks time rather than next week...

Given the interest from the RealSR-NCNN Vulkan benchmarks on various NVIDIA and AMD Radeon graphics cards looking at this neural network inference framework with the task of upscaling an image by 4x the resolution using RealSR, here are some more benchmarks of the NCNN framework accelerated by Vulkan on different GPUs under Ubuntu Linux...

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 660 is approaching four years old and the Snapdragon 630 a bit younger than that, but these mobile phone SoCs may soon find renewed life on the upstream Linux kernel thanks to the work of community developers...

Patches sent out on Friday provide an initial DP-HDMI2.1 PCON implementation for the Intel Linux kernel graphics driver...

Virt-Manager 3.0 quietly got released a little more than one week ago...

For those following the development of Zink as a software OpenGL driver built atop the Vulkan API, there are some new performance numbers to discuss this weekend...

KWinFT as a fork of KDE's KWin focused on better Wayland support and other modernization efforts is approaching its first stable release next month around the same time as KDE Plasma 5.20...

Warzone 2100 as the real-time strategy/tactics game that first premiered in 1999 before becoming open-source in 2004 and then fully open-source with game data in 2008 is now evolving in 2020 with Vulkan graphics support...

While Debian 11 "Bullseye" is on the way for release next year, Debian 10.6 "Buster" is out this weekend as the latest stable installment for this GNU/Linux distribution...

Microsoft's work on Mesa continues with a Microsoft engineer reviving earlier work carried out by David Airlie for allowing SPIR-V binaries produced by LLVM's libclc library to work with Mesa OpenCL...

Following the recent Plasma 5.20 beta release, KDE developers have been landing many fixes for the Plasma 5.20 desktop ahead of its official release in October...

On Friday night patches began to appear for "RISC-V Bullet" in the LLVM compiler code-base...

Earlier this year Apple engineers announced Swift System as their new library for low-level system interfaces. They have now open-sourced Swift System while also introducing Linux support...

As a nice Friday afternoon patch series there is the 275k lines of code for wiring up the next-generation AMD Van Gogh APU support under Linux...

Wine 5.18 is out as the newest bi-weekly feature development release...

With having added Tencent's NCNN tests to the Phoronix Test Suite with Vulkan acceleration, here is a look at the real-world impact by using RealSR-NCNN for scaling up with RealSR. Various NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards were tested for this initial NCNN / RealSR-NCNN Vulkan comparison.

Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine team have been working on a big update to their just-in-time compiler code. This big update called "Warp" is now enabled in the latest Firefox Nightly builds for offering big speed-ups...

Queued today into the block subsystem's "-next" area ahead of the Linux 5.10 cycle kicking off next month are some MD RAID enhancements...

Ahead of next month's Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 release and the new OpenBenchmarking.org, the milestone was met this week of having 600 different test profiles (benchmarks) available for automated execution via our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software...

For a while now Oracle engineers and others have been working on Trenchboot as a means of secure launch/boot support when paired with the likes of Intel TXT and AMD SKINIT for trusted execution and configuring each piece of the software boot chain for trusted/secure handling. The latest kernel patches have been sent out for review for secure launching of the kernel...

Oracle's GraalVM has seen language support well outside of Java/OpenJDK from Ruby to WebAssembly to R and Python. The newest language seeing an experimental implementation built atop GraalVM is PHP...

Following word last week that the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan layer was seeing 50~100% performance gains, more details are now available...

After missing the preferred target date of 15 September and the secondary beta target date of this week, Fedora 33 Beta is now on track to ship next week...

Intel continues bringing up the DG1 discrete graphics card under Linux with continued refinements set to hit for Linux 5.10...

It turns out AMD is at least exploring the possibilities around using the Rust programming language in their graphics driver tooling...

One of the most frequent questions received at Phoronix in recent times is whether the "schedutil" governor is ready for widespread use and if it can compare in performance to, well, the "performance" governor on AMD Linux systems. Here are some benchmarks of an AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT using the latest Linux 5.9 development kernel in looking at the performance differences between the CPUFreq governor options of Ondemand, Powersave, Performance, and Schedutil.

The kernel support for Nitro Enclaves landed this week in char-misc-next ahead of the Linux 5.10 cycle kicking off next month...