Phoronix

For those wondering what the buzz was about earlier this month when there was word of a high quality GPU compression codec going open-source, details on that have now been revealed...

Well known open-source AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák has been focusing recently on improvements to glthread for OpenGL threading that is generally able to offer better performance...

Debian is the latest Linux distribution flipping on WireGuard within their kernel builds...

Even Apple is on the bandwagon of transitioning select C code-bases of theirs over to Rust as well as expanding the code they are writing in Rust...

Disclosed last week was the Load Value Injection attack affecting Intel CPUs and requiring new mitigations. While the GNU Assembler mitigation options were quickly added, on the LLVM toolchain side the developers there continue evaluating the proposed LVI mitigation along with another option that looks to mitigate more than just LVI. The "SESES" proposal looks more broadly at mitigating CPU side-channel vulnerabilities but with shattering performance hits...

As another update to their Wine-based Proton 5.0 series for powering Steam Play, Valve has been readying their next update for enhancing the experience of running Windows games on Linux under Steam...

TrueNAS 12.0 CORE, which up until the new TrueNAS / FreeNAS branding unification would have been called FreeNAS, will in its next release support ZFS async copy-on-write functionality...

Intel's open-source team responsible for their Rust-based cloud hypervisor today issued a big feature update...

DXVK 1.6 is out in time for weekend gamers wishing to enjoy recent Windows games on Linux...

Given this week's general availability release of OpenJDK 14, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at all the major releases from OpenJDK 8 through 14 while looking at the JVM performance across multiple workloads.

The Linux Mint crew has released LMDE 4 "Debbie" as their hedge against anything dramatic happening to Ubuntu that would limit their ability to offer Linux Mint and for those preferring the upstream Debian base...

Intel's IWD wireless daemon for Linux systems has added full MAC randomization support as well as manual MAC override capabilities, similar to the MAC spoofing capabilities generally offered by other Linux networking components...

With the forthcoming Linux 5.7 kernel Intel Tiger Lake "Gen12" Xe graphics are considered stable as in enabled by default but that doesn't mean they are done working on features for the highly-anticipated next-gen Intel graphics...

Passing the point that new feature code is generally permitted into DRM-Next for in turn hitting the next mainline kernel merge window, AMD's open-source graphics driver developers have been turning their attention to bug fixes for all the new feature code set for Linux 5.7...

This should come as little surprise to regular Phoronix readers and those that follow the Mesa release cadence, but Mesa 20.1 as the next quarterly feature release now has a release calendar putting its debut towards the end of May...

The os108 project is one of the few (or only?) distributions based on NetBSD currently providing a MATE-based desktop experience atop this BSD. The os108 9.0 release is now available that re-bases against the recent NetBSD 9.0 release while continuing to provide its out-of-the-box desktop goodness...

Debian has the debian.social domain where they are looking to deploy a set of services to share content and collaborate among Debian contributors as their own federated social platform...

Going back to Ivy Bridge processors, Intel has supported "PPIN" as the Protected Processor Identification Number as a globally unique identification number set in the factory. It turns out recent AMD CPUs are also supporting PPIN and that reading their value is about to be supported on Linux...

For those that may be working from home more frequently now and looking for a very capable laptop to serve as a mobile workstation, HP's ZBook 17 G6 is the most powerful contender we have tested to date that offers great performance potential paired with very reliable build quality and also offering easy upgrade potential.

While not Linux specific news, for those interested in graphics APIs or cross-platform aspects of gaming, Microsoft today announced DirectX 12 Ultimate...

LLVM 10.0 along with the likes of Clang 10.0 were supposed to be out nearly one month ago but instead a fifth release candidate arrived today...

Linux 5.7 will support the MHI protocol developed by Qualcomm as part of the new kernel bus being introduced...

In light of data sampling vulnerabilities like MDS, engineers from Amazon, Google, and other organizations are discussing a proof-of-concept implementation that would optionally flush the L1 data cache on context switches...

Back in February came patches for AMD SEV-ES "Encrypted State" support as building off the Linux kernel's existing support for Secure Encrypted Virtualization in conjunction with AMD EPYC processors. The SEV-ES enablement work has now been revised...

For the past year Mesa has offered a "soft" implementation of FP64 capabilities for GPUs lacking FP64 hardware capabilities in order to support ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 as required by OpenGL 4.0. Optimizations were merged today to significantly enhance the "soft FP64" capabilities of Mesa...

Since being released by Google engineers last year and subsequently integrated into the LLVM ecosystem, the MLIR intermediate representation has quickly been gaining interest both among LLVM projects and other external users...

With the upcoming Firefox 75 there is VA-API GPU-based video acceleration working on Wayland. While this built off FFmpeg, the initial code was limited to supporting H.264 while for Firefox 76 that is being extended...

Mesa 20.0.2 is out this evening as the latest stable bug-fix update for the Mesa Q1'2020 driver series...

Systems making use of NVMe solid-state storage may see slightly faster boot times with the Linux 5.7 kernel this summer...

With the in-development LibreOffice 7.0 one of the headlining changes is making use of Google's Skia library and with that is Vulkan rendering support. That initial implementation was using Skia to draw the UI while now it's also picking up text rendering responsibilities...

Linux 5.7 continues the trend of the community taking up new drivers being created to support different peripherals under Linux that amount to dealing with quirky/buggy behavior of the hardware...

Particularly for those on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or derivative distributions based on the current long-term support base, moving to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS due out next month will yield some nice improvements particularly for those on newer platforms like the AMD Ryzen 3000 series. Here are some benchmarks at how the Ryzen 9 3900X performance is looking between Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 19.10, and the current Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development snapshot.

It looks like in the next one or two kernel releases we could see Intel transitioning their CPU frequency scaling governor default from the long-standing powersave to the modern schedutil governor. It's now believed schedutil should be at least as good as powersave...

A user experimenting with Clear Linux had an opinion to share on their mailing list and referred to it as a "toy" distribution and some of our readers have expressed similar opinions on it. Here is the response by one of the Intel developers central to Clear Linux's development...

Devuan 3.0 "Beowulf" has finally reached beta as a spin of Debian 10 "Buster" created without a dependence on systemd...

Since its introduction in Linux 5.1, IO_uring has been coming together quite nicely and getting better with each new kernel release. IO_uring is the effort for delivering faster and more efficient I/O by avoiding excess copies and other efficiency improvements over the existing Linux AIO code. Here are some comparison benchmarks off Linux 5.6 Git...

With new feature work beyond the scope now of Fedora 32, we're beginning to get a better idea for some of the feature plans for Fedora 33 due out this autumn...

The GrSecurity patches to the Linux kernel have long focused on security enhancements but this year they are said to be taking on a larger focus of performance optimizations...

Java 14 has reached general availability today with numerous updates to the JDK...

Unity Tech has released the Unity 2020.1 game engine beta as their first quarterly update of the year...

While the most prominent addition to today's Vulkan 1.2.135 update is the provisional ray-tracing support, there are also other new extensions with this update...

The beta of the highly anticipated Fedora 32 Linux distribution update is now available...

While Vulkan has had NVIDIA's ray-tracing extension (VK_NV_ray_tracing) extension, coming out today is Vulkan's first formal ray-tracing extension for cross-vendor/driver adoption.

A set of kernel patches to Intel's graphics driver helps improve the GPU power consumption to the extent of on Chrome OS seeing about 45 minutes extra battery life and several percent under the likes of Ubuntu Linux...

Oracle continues releasing new updates to Solaris 11.4 but there still aren't any public signs of life past v11.4. Out now is Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU19 with one interesting addition...

For the Fedora 33 release later this year, Red Hat is looking at further enhancing and strengthening the cryptography settings/configuration of the OS...

The GNU Debugger (GDB) is seeing the start of improvements to enhance its Microsoft Windows debugging experience...

Some new HID device called Moonball by Google will be supported with Linux 5.7...

Going back to at least late 2017 have been proposals for Zstd-compressing the Linux kernel images for the Facebook-developed Zstandard compression algorithm. In 2020 perhaps we will finally see the support mainlined...

Back in January we reported on the lead developer of the CUPS printing system quitting Apple and following that he began development of LPrint as a new label printer software solution for Linux and macOS. It turns out he has another software projects in the works too...