Phoronix

The Android open-source project "AOSP" with its latest code is very close to being able to boot off the mainline Linux kernel when assuming the device drivers are all upstream...

KDE's Plasma 5.20 desktop picked up a number of new features this week...

Two weeks ago file-system driver vendor Paragon Software posted patches for their previously commercial NTFS Linux driver with hopes of getting the code mainlined. That initial patch drew some criticism for how it was handled but a week later a new version was published that split up the patches nicely and had other feedback. Prior to calling it a weekend, Paragon sent out a third version of the "NTFS3" Linux kernel driver patches...

DALI is the project at NVIDIA focused on GPU-accelerated data augmentation and image loading along with other tasks while being optimized for deep learning workflows. DALI 0.25 was released on Friday as the latest step forward for this open-source NVIDIA project...

The friends at LunarG who maintain the Vulkan SDK today announced their new Vulkan Configurator tool, accessible via the vkconfig command and installed as part of the SDK...

Wine 5.16 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release leading up to next year's Wine 6.0...

When it comes to kernel address space isolation (ASI) and other yet-to-be-merged security features around fending off speculative execution attacks, there are multiple concurrent efforts by many of the public cloud providers and other hyperscalers. A Google engineer at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference has called for more collaboration in this area to ideally provide a unified solution...

At the end of June AMD quietly released a new version of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler. Noticing the new release this week, here are some benchmarks of AOCC 2.2 up against LLVM Clang 10 and GCC 10 with Ubuntu Linux while running from an AMD EPYC 7742 2P server for looking at the performance gains possible with the compiler optimizations.

After forgetting to release last week, Mesa 20.2-RC3 is out as the newest test build of this quarterly Mesa3D feature release for the collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers...

An alpha prototype of openSUSE "Jump" is now available for testing of this new build of openSUSE...

For those looking at enjoying some open-source Linux gaming this weekend, SuperTuxKart 1.2 is out as the Mario Kart inspired racing game that is cross-platform and features the Linux mascot Tux...

While a Microsoft engineer was at Linux Plumbers Conference this week talking up their LTO and PGO optimization work for the Linux kernel, Google engineers have now one upped that work by also shipping kernels with AutoFDO optimizations...

With last week's release of ROCm 3.7 for the Radeon Open Compute stack, it turns out there is a welcome change that wasn't published as part of the announcement...

While Fedora 33 hasn't even been released yet, Fedora 34 is already seeing new feature proposals...

As mentioned back in July, upstream Linux developers have been working to figure out a path for adding Rust code to the Linux kernel. That topic is now being further explored at this week's virtual Linux Plumbers Conference and it's still looking like it will happen, it's just a matter of when the initial infrastructure will be in place and how slowly the rollout will be...

With NVIDIA next week expected to launch their next-generation GeForce RTX 3000 "Ampere" graphics cards, here is a fresh look at the current GeForce RTX 2000 series performance up against the latest AMD Radeon competition when using the very latest Linux graphics drivers for both vendors. This is the very latest performance showdown right now for the AMD/NVIDIA GPU performance under various Linux and Steam Play games on Ubuntu.

When it comes to Radeon GPU offloading for compute, most of the emphasis placed by AMD has been on Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) and now as part of that as well is the AOMP compiler for OpenMP targeting the AMD GPUs. Both ROCm and AOMP along with their other graphics driver components like RadeonSI and AMDVLK target an LLVM-based compiler stack as their principal focus, but they do continue engaging with Mentor Graphics who leads the development work on a Radeon GPU back-end for GCC...

While more and more software vendors are employing link-time optimizations (LTO) and profile-guided optimizations (PGO) for leveraging the compiler to squeeze out performance, it may surprise many that Microsoft engineers are exploring LTO+PGO for the Linux kernel in their own quest of achieving greater Linux performance...

The newest Linux networking feature to get excited about that's in development is PTQ, or Per Thread Queues...

While the Linux 5.9 kernel cycle is still young and not seeing its formal release until early October or so, Intel's open-source team has already submitted to DRM-Next their first batch of feature changes desired for Linux 5.10...

Starting with LLVM Clang 12.0 next year, the Clang compiler on x86/x86_64 CPUs will finally honor -mtune= in a similar manner to GCC...

Back during the Ubuntu 20.04 cycle there was an attempt to switch the iptables back-end to Nftables by default. That plan was ultimately foiled by LXD at the time running into issues and other fallout. But now t hat those issues should be addressed and Debian Buster has switched to Nftables, the move is being re-attempted next week for Ubuntu 20.10...

Mesa Gallium3D is close to seeing a major change in their intermediate representation path for drivers consuming Gallium's TGSI rather than NIR directly. Eric Anholt has been working on a NIR-to-TGSI path so that drivers still relying on TGSI can benefit from the NIR optimization paths and improvements while ultimately hoping to eliminate the existing GLSL-to-TGSI code-path currently relied upon by these drivers...

While NVIDIA's desktop graphics drivers may not be open-source, there are other open-source projects maintained by NVIDIA that we have covered over the years particularly in the high performance computing and visual design space, among other interesting bits. Dirk Van Gelder who is NVIDIA's Direct of Software Development gave a talk this week about some of the open-source efforts engaged in by the company...

At this week's Linux Plumbers Conference there were DigitalOcean engineers providing an update on their CoreScheduling work in the era of vulnerabilities affecting Hyper Threading. Oracle meanwhile presented today at LPC2020 on their Kernel Address Space Isolation (ASI) functionality for dealing with Hyper Threading data leakage in a different manner, but the performance costs are still being evaluated...

Microsoft announced on Tuesday that the .NET 5.0 release is now "feature complete" for this major overhaul of .NET that breaks compatibility with prior versions. Microsoft .NET 5.0 has many changes to its libraries and runtimes, introduces WebAssembly support, support for single file applications/executables, new APIs, better performance, and much more...

Ahead of the official GNOME 3.38 launch in September, the second GNOME 3.38 beta (v3.35.91) is now available for testing,..

One of the many interesting discussions for this week's virtual Linux Plumbers Conference is on planning code obsolescence moving forward. While this is about kernel features too, it's also about the steps and when to phase out old hardware support...

The Qt Company has released version 4.13 of Qt Creator as their Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment that also supports Python and other languages via the Language Server Protocol...

In 2019 there were kernel developers talking at conferences that the remaining "PREEMPT_RT" patches for a real-time kernel should be mainlined in early 2020. That didn't happen for the long ongoing work around the "RT" patches while at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC 2020) is that the work should finally be close to merging to mainline...

Sporting AGP, fabbed on a 350nm process, making use of a 64-bit memory interface, and clocking to nearly 100MHz, the Matrox G200 desktop graphics cards are set to see mainline open-source support come Linux 5.10...

With no one stepping up to manage the X.Org Server 1.21 release, the two year old X.Org Server 1.20 series continues seeing new point releases, particularly with 1.21 being out of the scope already for having the chance to appear in the major H2'2020 Linux distribution releases. X.Org Server 1.20.9 is the newest point release out today in shipping fixes...

Following the recent layoffs at Mozilla and some projects seemingly at risk moving forward, one that we have been worried about is GFX-RS as the interesting Rust-based library implementing the Vulkan Portability Initiative using GFX-HAL...

The first release candidate of the forthcoming OpenZFS 2.0 is now available for testing on both Linux and BSD systems...

Covered back in February was work for Nouveau's NVC0 Gallium3D driver to finalle make use of the Mesa on-disk shader cache functionality for speeding up game load times by allowing previously compiled GLSL shaders to be cached to disk. That work by Red Hat has finally been mainlined in Mesa 20.3...

As we frequently cover, making use of compiler PGO (Profile Guided Optimizations) can mean some sizable performance wins, assuming the generated usage profile is accurate. With the imminent Chrome 85 availability, Google is now making use of PGO with their default LLVM Clang compiler toolchain for squeezing out around 10% better performance...

A single patch coming in at nearly three thousand lines was merged on Monday for the Linux 5.9 kernel that make the use of the "fallthrough" macro more widespread throughout the kernel...

Not even one month passed since the previous libX11 security vulnerabilities were made public while today a new security advisory was issued along with releasing version 1.6.12 of this key X11 library...

Now that the default graphics driver stack of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is a few months old, here is a look at the AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance of Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS out-of-the-box compared to upgrading against Linux 5.9 Git and Mesa 20.3-devel for seeing if the performance advantages are worthwhile in making the leap to the newer RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers paired with the very latest kernel.

Vladimir Makarov of Red Hat spoke at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference during the GNU Tools Track on lightweight JIT compilers and the effectiveness (or not) of GCC's JIT implementation as well as LLVM's JIT in the context of just-in-time support for Ruby. But following those shortcomings with GCC/LLVM JIT, he's been working on MIR as a lightweight JIT compiler...

Last month the German Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers launched the PULSE 15 with AMD Ryzen "Renoir" processors. Today they launched a new model also featuring the very popular AMD Renoir parts...

Following ongoing work for over a year on moving to OpenZFS for FreeBSD's ZFS file-system support, FreeBSD HEAD overnight has imported the OpenZFS code-base...

Queued now in the "x86/cpu" development branch ahead of the Linux 5.10 kernel later this year is the change to make use of Intel's new "SERIALIZE" instruction within the kernel's "sync_core" code that is used for stopping the speculative execution and prefetching of modified code...

Firefox 80.0 is now available. There isn't too much to get excited about with Firefox 80, but at least some changes on the developer front...

With vulnerabilities like L1TF and Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) prominently showing the insecurities of Intel Hyper Threading, DigitalOcean and other organizations continue spearheading a core scheduling implementation for Linux that could allow HT to remain enabled but with reducing the security risk...

When the Zink Gallium3D driver running OpenGL over Vulkan was first introduced in 2018 and since one of the main blockers besides the performance overhead has been the limited OpenGL 2/3 support. The GL3/GL4 support has been improving with time for Zink and when making use of the latest out-of-tree patches is even possible to get OpenGL 4.6 running over Vulkan with Zink!..

As part of the virtual SIGGRAPH20, Intel is using the opportunity to talk up their ray-tracing efforts...

Proposed last summer by Valve and Collabora developers were extending the Linux kernel's futex system call to allow for more optimal thread pool synchronization and paired with Wine/Proton work to better match the semantics of Windows. That then spun into creating a new system call, futex2. With the recently closed Linux 5.9 merge window the new futex2 system call didn't land, but the work is still being pursued...

For a number of years the GNU Compiler Collection has shipped experimental support for the DWARF 5 debugging data format while finally for next year's GCC 11 release it might be deemed stable and used by default...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has seen an initial trap handler implementation for helping to more easily catch and diagnose various issues stemming from Vulkan shaders...