Phoronix

While the Linux 5.10 merge window passed a week and a half ago, similar to the Navi Blockchain SKU being added as a "fix", the Green Sardine enablement is also being submitted as a fix for this current kernel version...

In addition to Mesa 20.3 seeing RadeonSI support for EGL protected surfaces backed by the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver with Trusted Memory Zone support, AMD's graphics driver developers have now added support for secure/protected video acceleration playback to their Mesa driver code...

If the recent releases of KDE Plasma 5.20 and GNOME 3.38 didn't fulfill your wishes for a dream Linux desktop and are looking for something lightweight, LXQt 0.16 is out today...

With C++20 one of the major features added is that of modules as a modern alternative to that of conventional C++ header files for packages. The C++20 modules code for the GNU Compiler Collection that has been in the works for several years is now under review and could potentially still land for the GCC 11 release next year...

Beginning in Dell's 2021 laptop models they are providing hardware-based "privacy buttons" to disable microphone and camera support. In preparations for more Dell laptops coming to market with these buttons, a Dell privacy driver is being prepared for the Linux kernel...

One of the areas of the Qt 6.0 toolkit with the greatest number of improvements is on the Qt Quick 3D front...

There's still more than one month to go until the Linux 5.11 merge window kicks off but Intel open-source developers have already submitted their initial batch of kernel graphics driver updates to DRM-Next...

With Intel Gen12 Xe-LP / Tiger Lake supporting AV1 accelerated decoding, Intel has provided this support via their open-source media stack on Linux that is then exposed via the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). Intel has now landed their patches for supporting VA-API AV1 decode with FFmpeg...

In addition to OpenIndiana Hipster 2020.10 having just been released, OmniOS v11 r151036 as another operating system long ago derived from OpenSolaris is also out with a big new release...

The trek to OpenZFS 2.0 continues with the fifth release candidate now being outed...

With Mesa 20.3 that should be released as stable in December there is working Arm Bifrost graphics support for the open-source Panfrost Gallium3D while looking past that this Arm Mali driver is going to be focusing on better performance and desktop OpenGL 3.1 support...

Cincoze is a brand we previously haven't tested at Phoronix but is a Chinese manufacturer of embedded computers. The company's recently introduced GM-1000 is advertised as a "Machine Vision Embedded Computer" geared for a variety of industrial applications in being constructed within a well engineered aluminum enclosure that is fan-less thanks to an array of heatpipes and chassis serving as a heatsink while offering MXM-based GPU expansion and a total system power budget of up to 360 Watts.

Given Intel's very fresh Tiger Lake platform, our latest benchmarking with the Core i7-1165G7 within the Dell XPS 9310 is seeing if running the in-development Linux 5.10 kernel means any performance or power changes for this latest-generation Intel mobile CPU with Xe/Gen12 graphics...

While Qt 6.0 is aiming to ship in December there are many open bugs against the Qt code-base. Given the increasing number of P1 priority bug reports that are the highest besides the "P0" build breakage bug reports, developers are discussing what to do with these bugs and the merits of their current priority classifications...

We haven't heard much of traditional Linux gaming on any ARM-powered Qualcomm notebooks as it would rely on the likes of Hangover for running Windows x86_64 games on ARM, but the Turnip Vulkan driver within Mesa has a necessary feature for now being able to run DXVK with the Direct3D 10_1 (v10.1) feature level...

The Linux x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels have taken shape this year for different feature/performance levels based on a CPU's capabilities. Both LLVM Clang 12 and GCC 11 are ready to go in offering the new x86-64-v2, x86-64-v3, and x86-64-v4 targets...

AMD mentioned Fine-Grain Clock Gating as one of the new features for the Radeon RX 6000 series with "Big Navi" but it will also be present with the next-gen Van Gogh APU too. The Linux driver patches for bringing up FGCG are under review...

Monado as the open-source OpenXR implementation has been working on support for Google's Android platform...

Valve has published their latest Steam Survey results. For October 2020 the Linux gaming marketshare pulled back or at least not keeping up with the pace of Steam's growing user-base...

The Zink Gallium3D driver that implements OpenGL on top of Vulkan has been on quite a roll recently... Beyond reaching OpenGL 4.6 support in yet-to-be-merged patches and passing ~97% of the Piglit OpenGL tests and increasingly good performance compared to Intel's OpenGL driver, the latest interesting milestone is seeing initial work on bringing Zink to macOS...

Following the successful shipping of Fedora 33, Red Hat developers have begun proposing more changes for future Fedora releases...

For any of you that happen to still be relying on the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system or interested in the technical design of Reiser5, these file-system drivers have been updated for Linux 5.9 compatibility...

Following this summer's big round of layoffs at Mozilla, the organization's deep learning open-source speech-to-text engine has been among the projects considered at risk. Fortunately, at least for now, DeepSpeech is still moving forward and is up to version 0.9...

Landing in Mesa 20.3 during this final week of feature development is support in RadeonSI Gallium3D for EGL_EXT_protected_surface. This long-standing EGL extension allows surfaces/windows to beset as protected and in which case the contents are only accessible to secure accesses. Outside/insecure accesses to the window (surface) contents are blocked...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is today announcing a new and unexpected single board computer: the Raspberry Pi 400. It's more of a single-keyboard computer that offers slightly higher performance than the Raspberry Pi 4.

The third alpha release of Kodi 19 "Matrix" was released on Sunday for this popular multi-platform HTPC software...

The second weekly release candidate to Linux 5.10 is now available for testing...

For those still fond of the once venerable KDE 3.5 desktop, the Trinity Desktop Environment is still maintaining its KDE 3.5 fork after more than one decade. Trinity Desktop R14.0.9 debuted today with some additional applications now included and other updates...

While Linux 5.10-rc2 is coming later today and a week past the merge window, a notable late pull request sent in this morning by Greg Kroah-Hartman is removing the Intel MIC (Many Integrated Core) architecture drivers, a.k.a. Xeon Phi...

At the Linux Foundation's KVM Forum 2020 this week, Stefano Garzarella of Red Hat presented on the possibility of speeding up virtual machine I/O performance by sharing the host's IO_uring queues with guests. In doing so the virtual machines have near bare-metal performance with the proposed patches...

Earlier this year the Linux kernel landed split lock detection for being able to detect and optionally kill processes leading to a split lock since it can cause measurable performance issues and even possible unprivileged denial of service...

September marked a decade since the OpenIndiana project was announced for continuing on with the OpenSolaris code-base (and ultimately based on Illumos) in being born out of the justified and proven accurate concerns when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. OpenIndiana Hipster 2020.10 was released this weekend as the newest version of this open-source operating system...

Another month in the books, another month closer to the end of the dreadful 2020. It was at least an eventful October with 268 original news articles and another 21 multi-page featured articles and Linux hardware reviews. The content ranged from the continuous Linux kernel advancements to exciting hardware announcements...

The Wine program for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms can run on a number of different architectures, but Wine doesn't handle the emulation of running Windows x86/x64 binaries on other architectures like 64-bit ARM or PowerPC. But that's what the Wine-based Hangover is about with currently allowing those conventional Windows binaries to run on AArch64 (ARM64) and 64-bit POWER too...

With this month's Ubuntu/Debian-based Linux Mint development news there are two items worth calling attention to...

Laptop vendors recently disclosed "Xe MAX" graphics as discrete Intel graphics set to appear within laptops in the coming weeks. That announcement was a bit unexpected and Intel did not brief the media in advance while today -- in an unusual announcement for a Saturday (Intel says it's timed for system availability, seemingly first in China) -- the company is formally announcing Iris Xe MAX.

This week brought the release of AMD's ROCm 3.9 as their open-source compute stack for Radeon GPUs. With ROCm 3.9 the AOMP work for LLVM/Clang-based compiler with OpenMP offload capabilities to Radeon GPUs was integrated. AOMP though is still advancing independently of the ROCm releases with Friday night marking the release of AOMP 11.11...

The LLVM Clang compiler stack has merged its support for AVX-VNNI, the Vector Neural Network Instructions for AVX to complement the AVX-512 version...

The bug fixing in KDE land continues and ends the month with a "bug massacre", for how KDE developer Nate Graham describes it in his weekly recaps...

It's looking like Paragon Software's "NTFS3" read-write Linux driver for Microsoft's NTFS file-system is on a trajectory where we could see it land possibly with the Linux 5.11 kernel kicking off at year's end. Friday marked the eleventh iteration of these patches that Paragon previously offered to commercial customers but is now in the process of being upstreamed...

The Linux 5.11 kernel will bring support for the ASUS "N-Key" keyboard that is used by nearly all of the current ASUS gaming laptops...

Beginning with Mesa 20.2 is OpenGL 4.5 support for LLVMpipe, the LLVM-based software rasterizer built as a Gallium3D driver. This succeeded LLVMpipe for years being limited to OpenGL 3.3. While the OpenGL 4.5 support has been enabled for weeks, The Khronos Group has now officially confirmed its implementation...

The Linux kernel's frame-buffer console (FBCON) is set to drop accelerated scrolling support since it isn't widely used and now found to be "full of bugs" plaguing the code-base...

Canonical has announced ETrace as a new application tracing tool designed for debugging and performance profiling of Snap packages but can also be used with any Linux binary applications...

Intel Compute-Runtime 20.43.18277 is out this morning as the latest version of the company's open-source graphics compute stack for HD/UHD/Iris/Xe Graphics on Linux with OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support...

On top of the AMD Zen L3 cache optimizations hitting Mesa 20.3 today, Marek Olšák has also landed his RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code for optimizing OpenGL uber shaders...

You may recall going back to 2018 that well known open-source AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olsak was working on Mesa optimizations around the AMD Zen architecture. In particular, better handling of Mesa for Zen's L3 cache design. A rewritten implementation of that has now landed along with some other improvements...

More than a decade ago Linux users tended to be envious of Sun Microsystems' Solaris for ZFS and DTrace as the two most interesting technical selling points of the platform. In that time OpenZFS is now extremely vibrant for offering ZFS on BSD and Linux systems while DTrace is barely brought up these days. This tracing framework originally developed for Solaris was fantastic back in the day but over the years Linux has stepped up its game with various efforts. Now as we hit the end of 2020, Oracle engineers continue working on bringing better DTrace support to Linux...

Intel has a shiny new feature release out of their open-source Cloud-Hypervisor that runs atop KVM and leveraging the Rust programming language...

At the start of October we mentioned a kernel optimization that can help IO_uring performance. Now as we approach the end of the month, Linux 5.11 is poised to land the optimization that especially helps out with threaded workloads...