Phoronix

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver's ACO shader compiler back-end has merged its FP16 related bits and in turn putting the ACO back-end very close to being enabled by default for this open-source AMD Vulkan driver...

One of the main blockers from AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" GPUs achieving feature parity when using the newer AMDGPU DRM kernel driver rather than the older "Radeon" DRM kernel driver has been in regards to UVD video decoding. But in 2020 it looks like that might finally change...

Intel's oneDNN 1.5 deep neural network library has been released that is part of their oneAPI initiative and formerly known as MKL-DNN and DNNL...

Along with Intel and NVIDIA offering new Windows drivers with WSL2 support, AMD has released an updated Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition driver with support for Windows Subsystem for Linux...

Amazon's AWS has today introduced the smallest member of the "Snow" family for migrating data into/out-of the cloud...

For those curious about the performance of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with the recently released Windows 10 May 2020 Update, here are benchmarks of Ubuntu 20.04 on both WSL and WSL2 compared to the bare metal Ubuntu 20.04 LTS performance on the same system.

Intel and NVIDIA have both published new Windows 10 graphics drivers that support the new experimental capabilities coming to Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) for running Linux GUI applications atop Windows and ultimately for exposing GPU compute capabilities as well inside the WSL2 environment...

The iNet wireless daemon (IWD) software developed by Intel's open-source team have released IWD 1.8...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver has landed support for the recent VK_EXT_pipeline_creation_cache_control extension...

Ubuntu 20.10 will likely join other Linux distributions in restricting access to dmesg by unprivileged users...

For those not on the current FreeBSD 12 stable series but currently relying on FreeBSD 11, the FreeBSD 11.4 stable release is now available...

QML Online is a Qt/QML adaptation for the web powered by EmScripten / WebAssembly...

While Intel updated the CPU microcode for Skylake and other affected generations last week as part of the SRBDS / CrossTalk vulnerability that was made public last week Tuesday, today Intel quietly released another microcode revision but this time just for Skylake...

FFmpeg 4.3 is out as the latest version of this key open-source multimedia library. FFmpeg 4.3 is quite a big release...

After weeks of rumors, AMD today officially confirmed the existence of the Ryzen 3000XT series...

Linux 5.8 is shaping up to be one of the biggest kernel releases ever and while there are many new Linux 5.8 features, here is a look at some prominent and recently discussed material that didn't make the cut this cycle...

Following the recent Linux kernel and Mesa patches for AMD "Sienna Cichlid" enablement for this "Navi 2" graphics processor, the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end support has been merged into LLVM 11...

The Zink Mesa driver for implementing OpenGL over the Vulkan API is now quite close to hitting OpenGL 3.0...

As a change past the Linux 5.8 merge window now that the flurry of code activity has settled down was changing the use of zero-length arrays in structs with flexible array members. Linus Torvalds did pull the change into Linux 5.8 but then decided shortly afterwards to drop the change at least for the time being...

A change proposal for Fedora 33 would introduce the concept of "fedora-retired-packages" for removing retired packages when upgrading Fedora...

A merge request opened at the end of last week would now have the Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver default to using the Valve-backed ACO shader compiler in place of the default LLVM AMDGPU back-end...

The CentOS crew maintaining this community enterprise Linux operating system rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux have announced their RHEL 8.2-based release...

Since yesterday's big release of Linux 5.8-rc1 I have begun benchmarking this new kernel on various systems. Here are some tests on the first system that was being vetted, the Intel Core i9 10900K Comet Lake with Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics...

Intel is confirming today that Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (Intel CET) will premiere with upcoming mobile Tiger Lake processors...

Being about six months out from the planned release of Qt 6.0, The Qt Company has issued its first snapshot of this forthcoming tool-kit update...

Canonical's Daniel van Vugt who is known for his prolific contributions to GNOME the past several years particularly in regards to performance has a new merge request open for helping with the "smoothness" of the NVIDIA driver on GNOME Shell...

This weekend we reported on how injecting ACPI tables could lead to bypassing Linux's lockdown / UEFI Secure Boot protections and let attackers load unsigned kernel modules. That earlier issue was found on a patched version of the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS kernel while now a similar attack vector has been discovered on the mainline Linux kernel...

Entangle 3.0 has been released as the newest feature update to this software for controlling your DSLR camera under Linux with tethered shooting capabilities...

The Corsair Commander Pro is a controller that offers six 4-pin fan ports with PWM control, two RGB LED channels for RGB LED light strips and fans, and four thermistor inputs. This thermal/cooling/lighting controller is seeing Linux support via a third-party driver...

A new feature release is now available for this leading open-source BLAS linear algebra library...

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 5.8-rc1 test build as what he describes as one of the biggest releases of all time...

Hours ahead of the expected Linux 5.8-rc1 release that also marks the merge window closure of new features for this next kernel version, a secondary EXT4 file-system set of changes were just mailed in...

Linus Torvalds is expected to release Linux 5.8-rc1 following the two week long Linux 5.8 kernel merge window. Here is our overview of all the big changes coming with this next version of the Linux kernel.

As part of our ongoing testing of the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U "Renoir" mobile processors, here is some Wayland vs. X.Org data with the GNOME desktop on Fedora Workstation 32...

With Ubuntu 18.04 when running on its Linux 4.15 kernel and not one of the newer hardware enablement kernels, in the mess of patches back-ported to the release it ends up being vulnerable to bypassing the kernel lockdown security and compromising UEFI Secure Boot that is persistent across reboots...

The beta of Linux Mint 20 "Ulyana" is available this weekend as the popular desktop distribution now based on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS package set...

LibVNCServer is the cross-platform library allowing the accelerated development of VNC server / Remote Framebuffer Protocol functionality into applications. LibVNCServer 0.9.13 is out as the first update to this library in more than one year and now comes with better cross-platform support...

The DirectFB library once popular with embedded systems and other environments needing formerly a full X11 stack (or now, Wayland) remains in an abandoned state with no real upstream development any longer and the project site long dead, but with a newly proposed Vulkan extension could allow this modern graphics API to run on top of it...

Merged this weekend ahead of Linux 5.8-rc1 is the long-standing work on introducing a general notification queue for the kernel. The general notification queue was pushed back last year from merging but now the initial code is in shape for Linux 5.8...

There is a new packaged AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver release now available...

Linux kernel developer Thomas Gleixner sent in the RAS/core changes on Friday night for the Linux 5.8 kernel merge window that is wrapping up this weekend...

Cloud-Hypervisor as the Intel-backed Rust-based VMM built on top of Linux's KVM now has experimental 64-bit ARM (AArch64) support...

Given this week's successful launch of Plasma 5.19, KDE developers have begun focusing more work on Plasma 5.20 as the desktop's next feature release...

Recently there has been an uptick in Linux upstream support activity around Loongson CPUs, the Chinese-made MIPS64 CPUs. With Linux 5.8, the newest Loongson 3 CPU models can even begin supporting KVM-based virtualization...

Given the increasing number of security issues requiring compiler-based security mitigations with the likes of the Intel LVI attack to Arm Straight Line Speculation just being the two latest examples, Apple's LLVM team has been spearheading a new security group for the upstream LLVM developer community to better manage security-related matters...

The Linux kernel's 9P protocol support with the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel will see the potential for faster performance with its Xen transport code...

Last year Valve in cooperation with consulting firm Collabora published their work on extending the futex system call for more optimal thread pool synchronization with a means of waiting on any of several futexes. This kernel-level work paired with patched user-space for Wine/Proton allows better matching behavior on Windows. It's been months since hearing anything on Valve's futex effort while today a futex2 system call was published for discussion...

Following our Intel Core i5 10600K and Core i9 10900K Linux benchmarks, here is a look at the lowest-end Core "Comet Lake" processor in the form of the Core i3 10100. Thanks to the increased pressure from AMD Ryzen, Intel now has a 4 core / 8 thread Core i3 processor at less than $150 USD. Here is a head-to-head matchup of the AMD Ryzen 3 3300X and Intel Core i3 10100 processors in more than 350 benchmarks while also looking at the power and thermal efficiency in this largest comparison to date for these low-end desktop CPUs.

Merged overnight into the Linux 5.8 code-base is KCSAN, the Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer that is a dynamic race detector for spotting flaws in the kernel code...

The latest Linux kernel patch work we are seeing out of AMD in preparations for Zen 3 processors coming later this year is INVPCID instruction support for KVM virtualization guests...