Phoronix

The first alpha release of LibreOffice 7.0 is out this week for testing ahead of the planned official release of this big open-source office suite update in August...

Earlier this week I provided the first Linux benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 7 4700U Zen 2 mobile processor on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and running within a Lenovo IdeaPad 5 (14). That initial article was focused on the CPU performance while for your viewing pleasure today are some preliminary benchmark numbers for the Vega 7 graphics up against Intel Gen11/Icelake.

AMD this week marked the relaunch of GPUOpen as their resource for creators and game developers with their collection of open-source/open-standards minded offerings on the graphics front. In honor of their relaunch, they said they would be issuing new software releases every day this week. It was a bit odd yesterday with Radeon Rays 4.0 dropping their open-source code-base and today they are introducing another new utility that is also binary-only...

The KDE community has released the first beta of the forthcoming Plasma 5.19 desktop release...

Originally slated for the NVIDIA GTC event but then delayed due to the coronavirus, the Jetson Xavier NX Developer Kit is launching today for "cloud native computing" on edge/AI devices.

While yesterday GFX10/Navi soft recovery support was sent in to DRM-Next for Linux 5.8, today that material was sent in as a "fix" for Linux 5.7 along with a number of other AMDGPU driver alterations...

AMDVLK 2020.Q2.3 was released today as the newest version of this official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems...

Announced back in March were the Marvell ThunderX3 Arm server processors with up to 96 cores per SoC and support for 4-way SMT to yield up to 384 threads per socket. These 7nm Arm server processors also support eight channels of DDR4-3200 memory, 64 lanes of PCIe 4.0, and other competitive features for a 2020 server CPU. While we await to see how the ThunderX3 processors perform, the compiler support and other Linux software features are getting all buttoned up...

While already various changes are building up for Mesa 20.2, the Mesa 20.1 release process is still progressing with hopes of shipping this quarter's stable release later in the month...

A year after the transition started to import Unity 8 into Ubuntu Touch, the work is now ready for users with the newly released Ubuntu Touch OTA-12 by the UBports crew...

Mesa 20.2-devel has a new cache in place for TTN...

FSGSBASE patches for the Linux kernel have been available for years albeit not mainlined to date. However, thankfully, a Microsoft Linux developer has taken up the cause to get them upstreamed given the performance benefits they are even seeing. Here are some benchmarks of the Linux kernel patches for FSGSBASE on both Intel and AMD CPUs.

Epic Games today offered the first glimpse at Unreal Engine 5, their next-generation game engine they hope to have out in preview form in early 2021 and for its official release before the end of next year...

Continuing with AMD's relaunch of GPUOpen and introducing new software releases all week, out this morning is Radeon Rays 4.0. It takes another step forward while taking a step back in terms of no longer being open-source...

AMD announced today the Radeon Pro VII workstation graphics card for $1899 USD and will begin shipping in June...

The upstream Linux kernel developers have come out against a proposal to begin using the "-O3" optimization level when compiling the open-source code-base with the GCC 10 compiler or newer...

The LLVM compiler stack is about to merge its support for the BFloat16 floating-point format, including the BF16 C language support...

A lot is building up for Linux 5.8 and there already being a few rounds of AMDGPU feature improvements. Another batch of feature material for the AMD Radeon graphics driver was sent in this week to DRM-Next destined for Linux 5.8...

While many hoped that with the adoption of Vulkan it would lead to avoiding driver-specific checks/workarounds, that's still not been the case to workaround various driver bugs and other issues. The RADV ACO compiler back-end has resorted to altering its version string in order to obtain 2~5% higher performance in Feral's latest Linux game release...

For those on the hunt for another lightweight Wayland compositor option, TAIWINS is the newest option...

Since AMD Renoir laptops began shipping some weeks ago, I've been on the hunt for an interesting laptop to pick up for Linux testing and to potentially even use as my next main production laptop. Given the successes of AMD Zen 2 on the desktop and server front, I've been very eager to try out a Renoir laptop and last week picked up a Lenovo IdeaPad with Ryzen 7 4700U and the experience so far has been very good and with captivating Linux performance.

OpenZFS / ZFS On Linux 0.8.4 is out as the latest update to this leading open-source ZFS file-system base for Linux and FreeBSD and coming together as well for macOS...

Coreboot 4.12 is out today as the latest version of this open-source BIOS / system firmware implementation that saw more than 2,600 commits since the previous release...

With the recently released Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the Ubuntu Server installer exclusively uses the "Subiquity" installer that Canonical has been working on in recent years in moving away from the classic Debian Installer. Unfortunately a security issue crept into Subiquity that has now been resolved...

Intel's Load Value Injection mitigation has finally been merged into mainline LLVM...

Qt 5.15 is aiming to release next week while today marks the availability of the toolkit's second release candidate...

With the WireGuard secure VPN tunnel having been upstreamed in the Linux 5.6 kernel, developer attention recently turned to OpenBSD and porting the very promising VPN technology to its kernel...

Version 6.2 of the Proxmox VE open-source virtualization environment has been released for this web-based, easy-to-use solution...

FlightGear 2020.1 is out as the newest release to this long-running project providing an open-source flight simulator...

Wraith Master 1.0 has been released as the "feature complete" version of this Linux GUI application for providing RGB lighting controls for the AMD Wraith Prism heatsink under Linux...

The Google-backed SESES pass for LLVM to help fend off speculative execution vulnerabilities has been merged for LLVM 11, but in opting to enable this patch you lose much of your system's performance...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) today approved the plans for Fedora 33 to enable systemd-resolved by default...

Longtime AMD open-source driver developer Christian König is proposing the removal of AGP graphics card support from their Radeon kernel driver as well as the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" kernel driver and in turn removing the AGP related code from the TTM memory management code...

AMD announced this morning the relaunch of GPUOpen, the company's effort on providing open-source development resources primarily for game developers in making use of various Radeon GPU technologies and other open standards across Windows and Linux...

Thunderspy is a class of seven vulnerabilities found within Intel's Thunderbolt 3 hardware and the researchers having found nine realistic scenarios for exploiting these Thunderbolt issues across platforms...

Over the past year IBM engineers have been plumbing "future" processor support into the GCC compiler and related GNU toolchain components. The patches often referred to the work either as "future" or "powerxx" while today is christened as what was pretty much obvious all along: it's POWER10...

Given last week's release of Firefox 76 and promoting 77 to beta, here are some fresh benchmarks of the recent Mozilla Firefox releases on Ubuntu Linux...

The Zink Gallium3D driver project that is layering OpenGL over Vulkan is one step closer to exposing OpenGL 3.0 capabilities...

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.