Phoronix

While the past few weeks have seen relatively smaller than usual weekly release candidates, Linux 5.7-rc6 is out this evening and it's bigger than normal...

Carsten Haitzler has released Enlightenment 0.24 as the latest significant update to this X11 window manager and Wayland compositor...

Since the release of Rav1e v0.3.1 back in February the "weekly pre-releases" dropped off until this week with there finally being a new tagged milestone...

The folks at Laminar Research published a new blog post this week detailing their latest development work on their Vulkan (and Apple Metal) renderers for the realistic X-Plane flight simulator...

Various open-source patches have gone back to at least 2017 for enabling Intel's Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) for the Linux kernel and related components. This is the Intel feature for helping prevent ROP and COP/JOP style attacks via indirect branch tracking and a shadow stack. Recently there has been a fair amount of CET improvements to the various open-source components...

While there aren't yet any Arm SoCs we are aware of at least offering Thunderbolt connectivity, that will eventually change with at least USB4 being based on Thunderbolt. But in any case Thunderbolt software support can work on Arm today if using a Thunderbolt add-in PCIe card...

The ZFS file-system has long offered transparent file-system compression via the likes of LZ4 and Gzip and while now Zstd compression is under review for OpenZFS and seeking testing from the community...

Since last year's GCC 9 release the C++17 support has been considered stable and with the changeover to it as the default C++ dialect having not happened for the recent GCC 10 release, developers are now looking at increasing the default C++ version to 17 for next year's GCC 11 release...

Several days back was the proposal to "remove AGP support" from Radeon/Nouveau/TTM. This did formulate into a set of patches that would disable the AGP mode in the Radeon driver and deprecate the AGP code in TTM memory management. However, as was pointed out in the ensuing discussion, AGP graphics cards will still be operable on Linux with this level of deprecation by using the PCI GART mode...

This week I began benchmarking the AMD Ryzen 7 4700U on Linux using the new Lenovo IdeaPad featuring this new Zen 2 "Renoir" APU. The initial CPU benchmarks were quite positive as were the Vega graphics comparison tests. Amid other follow-up articles for AMD Renoir Linux support/performance, for your weekend viewing pleasure are a large set of data points between the Ryzen 7 4700U up against the Intel Core i7 1065G7 "Ice Lake" processor...

DXVK 1.7 is out this weekend as the important library translating Direct3D 9/10/11 usage into Vulkan API and is leveraged by the likes of Steam Play for running modern Windows games on Linux...

For now at least the in-person X.Org Developers' Conference is still on with plans for X.Org/Wayland/Mesa developers to meet in Gdańsk, Poland for their annual conference...

Intel's open-source graphics driver team on Friday sent in a final set of kernel graphics driver updates targeting the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle...

The recently released GCC 10 compiler landed initial coroutines support for this major C++20 feature but wasn't enabled unless explicitly enabling that option...

The Plasma 5.19 beta was released this week but that's not the finish line yet and KDE developers have remained very busy polishing it up for ensuring this open-source desktop has a stellar release coming up...

One of the long sought after features for AMD Zen (and Zen 2) processors on Linux has been the ability to monitor the CPU package power consumption on Linux, similar to what's long been available for Intel CPUs on Linux and similarly for older AMD Bulldozer era CPUs with a power monitoring driver. Now on Friday evening a patch series was posted by a Google engineer to provide this long sought after functionality...

Two days ago as part of the GPUOpen relaunch AMD released Radeon Rays 4.0 as their ray intersection library. Unlike the previous Radeon Rays release, however, this new Vulkan-enabled version was not open-source. But now AMD has decided that at least in large part it will be going back to open-source...

On launch-day Valve had Half-Life: Alyx running on Linux via Steam Play while with the VR game's latest update is now a Linux-native build and Vulkan rendering support...

Intel's oneAPI crew just released version 2020-03 (though one would have thought it should be 2020-05) of their Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) compiler and with this release are several new features including the NVIDIA CUDA back-end...

This week Amazon announced the general availability of their EC2 "M6g" instances powered by their second-generation Graviton processors. Amazon is offering a variety of M6g instances with the Graviton2 CPU, including a bare metal instance. In this article are many benchmarks looking at the various Amazon EC2 M6g instances compared to other EC2 Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC instances as well as looking at the M6g Graviton2 metal performance up against various Intel/AMD CPUs in our lab.

Weeks ahead of the Linux 5.8 kernel cycle kicking off it's still not clear if the Intel SGX foundation patches will be ready for merging, but they were sent out today as version 30 of this long-running effort for supporting the Intel enclaves functionality on the mainline kernel...

For a number of months now various Google engineers have been working on inline encryption support for FSCRYPT in order to offer better encryption performance on modern SoCs. That FSCRYPT side work is coming together and now also queued up for Linux 5.8 is plumbing inline encryption into blk-mq...

Announced over one year ago was the Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Accelerator as designed for offering superior AI inference performance in the cloud. Since then not much has been heard of this accelerator but their engineers did publish a Linux driver on Thursday...

Git 2.27-rc0 was released on Thursday as the first test release towards the next update on this leading version control system...

While Microsoft executives in past years have called open-source/Linux a "cancer" and other FUD, current President of Microsoft, Brad Smith, acknowledges they were wrong in those past remarks...

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...