Phoronix

Back in September was an initial "request for comments" by Google on some kernel work they are doing with Kernel Runtime Security Instrumentation (KRSI) for providing eBPF-powered security helpers, ultimately for creating dynamic MAC and audit policies. Just before Christmas the first official version of this new eBPF-based instrumentation was sent out and is being prepared for deployment within Google...

One of the interesting milestones this year in the compiler world was the ability with LLVM Clang 9.0 to compile Linux 5.3+ for x86_64 without needing any extra patches to either the kernel or the LLVM/Clang compiler. That initial support in Linux 5.3 was not without a few issues, but on Linux 5.5 the experience is in great shape with the stable Clang compiler.

Well, this is a hell of a way to surprisingly end the 2010s... Reiser5. Reiser5 brings a new format to the Reiser file-system and brings some new innovations to this file-system while keeping to its controversial name...

With bisecting one of the big regressions in Linux 5.5 and finding the culprit to be an AppArmor change while using Hackbench as one of the most affected tests, I was curious to see what other workloads are impacted big by AppArmor on the current Linux 5.5 Git code. Here are 72 tests with the Threadripper 3970X on Linux 5.5 Git when toggling AppArmor...

Jolla has been working on Sailfish OS for nearly a decade now and for 2020 they are planning more improvements to their Linux-based smartphone OS as well as working to push Sailfish into new markets...

Nearly two years after the release of Trisquel 8, the release of Trisquel 9 "Etiona" for this Free Software Foundation approved Linux distribution is quickly approaching. An alpha/development release of Trisquel 9 is available for testing...

Some Intel server platforms could see better performance with the Linux 5.6 kernel cycle...

Going along with our other end of year and decade recaps, here is a look back at the Linux kernel highlights for the 2010s...

By default the Linux kernel selects the aging Radeon DRM driver for GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" and GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" hardware (as well as all older ATI/AMD GPUs) while it's GCN 1.2 and newer that defaults to the modern AMDGPU kernel driver. But for years there has been experimental GCN 1.0/1.1 support available via kernel module options, but now for the original GCN GPUs that code is at risk of being dropped...

Landing as a great Christmas present for LLVM developers interested in heterogeneous hardware compilation, TensorFlow and other machine learning use-cases was MLIR within the LLVM source tree...

Fwupd 1.3.6 was released today for ending out a very successful year for this firmware updating utility that works in-step with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for allowing hardware firmware/BIOS updating on Linux systems...

As part of our year-end articles we already provided benchmarks looking at the Radeon OpenGL / Vulkan driver performance for 2019. That testing was done using Polaris and Vega given their GPU support prior to 2019, but for those wondering about the Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" performance for these GPUs that launched this summer, here are some end-of-year tests.

Just a friendly reminder that if you wish to show your support in 2019 and take part in our Christmas / New Year's deal, time is quickly running out...

For those still having fond memories for the KDE 3 desktop days as we roll into 2020, the Trinity Desktop Environment as a fork of K Desktop Environment 3.5 is still pushing along with maintaining these aging open-source software packages...

Similar to the trend with other Mesa drivers, the Radeon R600g driver for supporting Radeon HD 2000 through Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards has been seeing experimental work to introduce a NIR back-end for this modern intermediate representation. That R600 NIR support now has a merge request open meaning it could possibly land still for Mesa 20.0...

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) plans for transitioning from SVN to Git over New Year's Day looks like for sure now that goal will not be realized. There still is no firm consensus over which SVN to Git conversion approach to utilize...

Last night I shared the results from what's causing one of the performance regressions in Linux 5.5 but sadly more regressions remain that are currently being tracked down...

Mesa 20.0 continues getting more interesting with the infrastructure around the Gallium3D LLVM "Gallivm" and TGSI IR now supporting tessellation...

Introduced with Linux 5.4 was a long-awaited Microsoft exFAT file-system driver albeit within the kernel's staging area and based upon some dated Samsung file-system driver code. That exFAT staging driver was improved upon more with Linux 5.5 but ultimately there is a concurrent effort for replacing it with a driver derived from newer Samsung open-source code and to be merged outside of staging...

Going back to the start of December with the Linux 5.5 merge window we have encountered several significant performance regressions. Over the weeks since we've reproduced the behavior on both Intel and AMD systems along with large and small CPUs. Following some holiday weekend bisecting fun, here is the cause at least partially for the Linux 5.5 slowdowns.

Linus Torvalds just released the fourth weekly release candidate of Linux 5.5 following a fairly light week due to the Christmas holidays...

With the recently launched Threadripper 3960X / 3970X processors there was a workaround needed to boot them on Linux until an AMD MCE driver issue was resolved. That patch was upstreamed last week into the Linux 5.5 development kernel while now is getting ready to make its debut into supported Linux stable release branches...

Last week were some benchmarks showing LLVM Clang hitting ~96% the performance of GCC using Intel Ice Lake while now for the recently released Zen2-based AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X we are seeing results where overall LLVM Clang is now at performance parity to GCC.

While open-source software development activity was light this week due to the Christmas holiday, some new features still landed this week for KDE...

The 2010s saw the release of Wayland 1.0, Ubuntu's Mir initially being a "competitor" to now embracing Wayland, desktop environments like GNOME and KDE now having good support for it as an alternative to X11, and other functionality continues to be added to Wayland compositors and its standard protocols...

Last week I posted benchmarks looking at seven years of Ubuntu Linux performance in re-testing the releases of Ubuntu 13.04 through Ubuntu 19.10 stable and even the latest Ubuntu 20.04 LTS daily development image. A question that came up was how much better that performance would have been without any CPU vulnerability mitigations in place for Ubuntu 20.04... Well, here's that answer...

Libre RISC-V, the project aiming to create an open-source accelerator that would run a Vulkan software renderer in being an "open-source GPU" aiming for just 25 FPS @ 720p or 5~6 GFLOPS, has managed to secure 300k EUR in grants for their work...

With the Wraith Prism heatsink fan included with many modern AMD Ryzen processors there is configurable RGB lighting, which unfortunately AMD hadn't publicly documented or offered a Linux utility for manipulating the RGBs under Linux. Fortunately, there is now a straight-forward solution for dealing with those Wraith Prism RGB LEDs thanks to the open-source and independent CM-RGB project...

With our various ending-2019 and end-of-2010s articles, the standout on the Linux performance front has certainly been Intel's Clear Linux in consistently delivering the leading Linux x86_64 performance throughout all of our testing on many different tests and hardware platforms. Here's a look back at some of the Clear Linux highlights...

Back in November was the first of several KDE Frameworks 6 developer sprints as plans begin to formulate for this evolutionary frameworks upgrade due out not until well after the Qt 6.0 tool-kit release. While Qt6 itself is still in flux, KDE Frameworks 6 efforts continue moving along by focusing on porting code away from deprecated KF5 functionality...

Here's a look back at the most popular news over the past decade on X.Org out of our one thousand plus articles on the topic during the 2010s. Even with Wayland taking off in recent years and effectively reaching parity to the X.Org Server for common use-cases, the X.Org Server has continued seeing new development especially in the areas of GLAMOR and XWayland. Sadly though we're ending the 2010s without a major stable release of the xorg-server since May 2018...

Going back a number of years has been various out-of-tree front-ends for GCC toying with the ability to compile Rust code with GCC while a new discussion has started up about the prospects of theoretically mainlining one of those efforts or otherwise developing a new GCC Rust front-end...

For server administrators with extra downtime around the holidays, phpMyAdmin 5.0.0 is now available for this widely-used web interface for administering MySQL/MariaDB databases...

Recently a Phoronix reader inquired about seeing some fresh hard drive RAID benchmarks on the current kernel release and using Btrfs / EXT4 / XFS. While we don't often look at HDD RAID performance these days compared to speedier SSD testing, since the reader was a generous Phoronix Premium member I was happy to oblige to his test request. Here is a look at the Linux 5.4 HDD RAID performance per his request with Btrfs, EXT4, and XFS while using consumer HDDs and an AMD Ryzen APU setup that could work out for a NAS type low-power system for anyone else that may be interested.

For the Linux 5.5 kernel that's about half-way through its development phase we have been pointing out some rather significant performance regressions affecting both AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon servers but there are also regressions to be found with desktop class systems too...

Last month I wrote about AMD working on TEE driver support to load "trusted applications" onto the AMD Secure Processor under Linux. That work is now queued for introduction with Linux 5.6 and wired through for Raven Ridge APUs...

Based on Wine 5.0-RC3 released yesterday is now Wine-Staging 5.0-RC3 with its 800+ patches on top and it comes with two new additions this week...

MPV, the open-source cross-platform media player derived from MPlayer/mplayer2 long ago, is out with a new feature release before closing out 2019...

With all but the very first Google Chromebook devices running Coreboot in place of traditional proprietary BIOS, this has been a big win for Coreboot during the 2010s but there has also been notable offshoots like LinuxBoot and Libreboot...

Latte Dock, the dock designed for KDE Plasma desktops, is working on a v0.10 feature update due out next summer while out this weekend is the first development release...

The Debian developer voting over init system diversity options has wrapped up and a decision has been made...

Even with the Christmas holiday slowing down the rate of changes for some of the developers, this week's Wine 5.0 release candidate managed to arrive with 46 bug fixes...

Last week I posted benchmarks looking at the performance of Intel's Clear Linux over the course of 2019 with roughly 7% better performance across dozens of benchmarks on the same system. But how does that compare to other Linux distributions with the same hardware? Here is a look in showing the performance for both Fedora and Ubuntu at the end of 2018 to the end of 2019.

Since this summer Intel open-source engineers have been working on adding ACPI Error Disconnect Recover (EDR) support to the Linux kernel and this week marks the eleventh revision to the kernel support for this new ACPI feature...

Early on in the Linux 5.5 cycle during the merge window we saw some wild swings in performance including some positive gains but also performance regressions. Given last weekend's Linux 5.5-rc3 release having merged some scheduler fixes and other fallout from early on in Linux 5.5, I was curious to see if those regressions have been addressed... Sadly, they are not...

Mesa's LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver has long been about running OpenGL on GPUs as a software fallback / debug path but as of this morning in Mesa 20.0-devel there is now the experimental ability of having OpenCL support making use of OpenCL "Clover" with NIR for CPU-based execution...

Following Richard Stallman being ousted from the Free Software Foundation, the FSF was said to be re-evaluating its relationship with the GNU while R.M.S. said no radical changes are expected. Now a group of GNU maintainers have laid out some of their desires for improving the interactions between the GNU and FSF...

The Linux 4.8 series is over three years old while now the DragonFlyBSD crew has pulled in the Linux 4.8.17 sources of the Intel "i915" DRM driver into their kernel for providing updated graphics driver coverage...

One of the few still maintained Linux distributions derived from Gentoo is Calculate Linux, which saw a new release today in preparing for the new year...

As we enter 2020, Debian remains one of the oldest Linux distributions out there and over the 2010s continued advancing quite well for being volunteer-led and competing with the corporate heavyweights like Ubuntu, Red Hat, and SUSE. Debian in the 2010s found itself being used as the basis for Valve's SteamOS, continuing to be integral to the success of Ubuntu, it ultimately decided to make use of systemd, there were various desktop changes, and multiple successful releases of Debian GNU/Linux to celebrate...