Phoronix

We've seen a lot of odd products pick up the Free Software Foundation's "Respect Your Freedom" endorsement like a USB microphone, various re-branded motherboards, and even last year certified a USB to parallel printer cable. The latest product they are endorsing -- and their first endorsement of 2020 -- is a USD 802.11 a/b/g/n PCIe half-mini card starting out at $59 USD but going up to $79 for this outdated wireless adapter...

Mesa 20.0 feature development is over with the code now being branched from Git master and the first of several release candidates issued...

Among many other Valve ACO back-end improvements for Mesa 20.0, one of the notable additions is this AMDGPU LLVM alternative now working for Radeon "Southern Islands" / GCN 1.0 graphics cards. With this, these original AMD GCN graphics cards may have some extra life out of Linux gaming boxes thanks to slightly higher performance some eight years after these graphics cards first launched in the Radeon HD 7000 series.

While WireGuard was merged into Linux 5.6, the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release is currently tracking Linux 5.4 and for the April release is likely to be shipping with Linux 5.5 as the 5.6 release will be cutting it too close. But Ubuntu 20.04's kernel has now back-ported WireGuard...

Google today announced OpenSK as an open-source Rust-based security key implementation supporting FIDO U2F and FIDO2 standards...

File-system / storage activity is as busy as always during the Linux kernel merge windows...

Succeeding last week's DXVK 1.5.2 is now a version 1.5.3 release with various fixes...

In addition to the new openat2() system call in Linux 5.6, pidfd_getfd() has landed with growing interest from many different parties for what will be an increasingly used syscall moving forward...

Systemd-homed has been merged as the latest (optional) fundamental change to Linux distributions in how home directories are handled...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver updates were sent in today for Linux 5.6 with plenty of fun features in tow...

Earlier this month AMD finally published their Sensor Fusion Hub driver for Linux to improve the Ryzen laptop support. That new "SFH" driver hasn't been queued as part of any Linux 5.6 pull request but a second version of the driver did make it out this week...

With Linux 5.6 the staging area has seen new functionality but thanks to removing old code it ends up removing a fair number of lines of code from the kernel...

The folks at iXsystems have released FreeNAS 11.3, their latest big update to this FreeBSD-based operating system designed around the OpenZFS file-system for offering advanced network-attached storage capabilities...

On top of the last minute Radeon Vulkan "RADV" improvements landing on Wednesday for Mesa 20.0, another big ticket item landed... Well, re-enabled...

Ahead of USB4 devices expected to begin appearing later this year, the Linux 5.6 kernel is wired up with initial USB4 support...

On top of all the spectacular work coming with Linux 5.6, here is another big improvement that went under my radar until today: Linux 5.6 is slated to be the first mainline kernel ready for 32-bit systems to run past the Year 2038!..

With LLVM Clang 10 having added a Zen 2 scheduler model tuned for the latest AMD CPUs over the existing "znver2" tuning that had just copied the Zen 1 scheduler, here are some benchmarks looking at the LLVM Clang 9 vs. 10 compiler performance on AMD EPYC when making use of "-march=znver2" optimizations...

Since the stable release of Linux 5.5 this weekend I have been carrying out benchmarks for looking at how the performance of this newly-minted kernel compares to older releases. Here are benchmark results of Linux 5.3 vs. 5.4 vs. 5.5 with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X but the results are similar to other HEDT and lower-end systems we've tested thus far...

A new system call added to the very feature rich Linux 5.6 kernel is openat2() for more extensible behavior compared to the existing openat() functionality...

The Wine project's VKD3D initiative for translating Direct3D 12 support to Vulkan took another step forward today with patches for handling DXIL (Shader Model 6.0+) shaders with VKD3D, but the work in the current form may need to be re-worked...

With Mesa 20.0 scheduled for branching today (though that could be delayed a few days potentially depending upon last minute requests), there's been a flurry of Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver activity to squeeze into this first Mesa release series of 2020...

Red Hat's Matthias Clasen has provided an update on one of the latest areas the GTK developers are working on finishing up with the forthcoming GTK 4.0 tool-kit... Improving the data transfer interfaces around handling for copy/paste and drag-and-drop...

LibreOffice 6.4 is out today as the latest feature update to this cross-platform, open-source office suite...

While developers are hard at work on Godot 4.0 with Vulkan support, that release won't be ready until mid-2020 so as a result Godot 3.2 is out today as their latest stable release and serving as a "long-term support" release until transitioning to Godot 4...

Intel's Andy Shevchenko sent in the x86 platform driver updates on Monday for the newly opened Linux 5.6 merge window. There is the never-ending work on dealing with quirky Windows-focused laptops to adding new Intel hardware support and other additions...

With LLVM Clang 9.0 and Linux 5.3 together it became possible to build the mainline Linux kernel with this non-GCC compiler. The x86_64 Linux kernel Clang-based kernel builds has continued to improve through newer kernel releases. This follows the mainline AArch64 (64-bit ARM) Linux kernel mainline build by Clang too, which has been of much interest by different hardware/software vendors. There hasn't been much Clang'ing kernel efforts for other architectures, but it turns out with Clang 10 and Linux 5.6 will be another working combination, this time for IBM s390...

The Time Namespace, which was originally proposed back in 2018 for allowing per-namespace offsets to the system clocks, has finally entered the mainline kernel in early 2020 with the in-development Linux 5.6 kernel...

The very exciting networking subsystem updates have made it into the Linux 5.6 kernel...

Mozilla's Thunderbird mail client has been rather neglected the past several years with all the focus on the Firefox web browser, but as the next step forward for this mail/RSS client is now placing it under the newly-formed MZLA Technologies Corporation...

It turns out Sony is now maintaining the mainline Linux kernel's hid-sony input driver in an "official capacity now across various devices." This hid-sony driver is what traditionally has supported the various PlayStation controllers and other input devices for their hardware. But their newfound "official" support for this open-source input driver could lead to interesting predicaments...

One of the work items we have been keen to monitor during the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development cycle is tracking the happenings around Zsys, the Ubuntu/Canonical led utility for helping to administer ZFS On Linux systems. In ending out January, Zsys now has more functionality in tow...

We remain quite excited to see Godot 4.0 this year that most notably is working on Vulkan API support...

While Mesa 20.0 will be entering its feature freeze this week and branching ahead of the stable release expected in about one month, for now the Mesa 19.3 series is the newest available for stable users...

As part of the Linux 5.6 development dance, Ingo Molnar began sending in all of the pull requests this morning for the different areas of the Linux kernel he oversees...

XCP-ng, the Xen-based enterprise-focused hypervisor offering a Xen Server Linux distribution, has released a beta of its next feature release while formally becoming part of the Linux Foundation hosted Xen Project...

Flashing the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP) onto devices is now a lot easier thanks to the Android Flash Tool...

After last week looking at the AMD/Intel/NVIDIA contributions to the mainline Linux kernel over the past number of years, there were reader requests for seeing how some of the top distributions compare namely Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical...

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE today sent in all of the sound driver updates for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Herbert Xu sent in all of the crypto subsystem changes on Tuesday for the in-development Linux 5.6 kernel. Interesting us the most out of this crypto work is the AMD Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) driver...

Intel last night made public two more data leakage disclosures, which tie back to Zombieload and November's TAA issue...

The EFI kernel code has seen a variety of clean-ups and low-level improvements to it for the Linux 5.6 cycle...

Another alternative to slow initramfs generation could be distributing pre-built initramfs images to users. An additional benefit of that is possibly better security with measured boot capabilities, a matter currently being discussed by Fedora stakeholders...

AppStream was started in 2011 as a means of drawing up cross-distribution (XML-based) standards for describing software components/packages metadata and for repositories to describe software collections. Now nearly a decade later, AppStream 1.0 should be coming in the next few months...

Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki is punctual as always in sending in his feature pull requests for the new merge window...

Unfortunately it wasn't a trouble-free experience at launch but with time Raven Ridge APUs have been getting cleaned up on Linux for a pleasant experience, thanks in part to the Google Chromebook play that has also seen these newer AMD APUs seeing HDCP content protection support and PSP / TEE trusted execution functionality...

SELinux maintainer Paul Moore sent in the Security Enhanced Linux updates for the 5.6 merge window, which amounts to "one of the bigger SELinux pull requests in recent years."..

The FreeBSD project has issued their last quarterly status update for 2019...

Last month were benchmarks of RAID benchmarks on four hard drives in not visiting the Linux HDD RAID performance in a while. Stemming from that article were requests of fresh tests of the SSD RAID performance on Linux 5.5 Git, so here are those results for single drive performance and RAID0 / RAID1 / RAID5 / RAID6 / RAID10.

Btrfs in the now-stable Linux 5.5 kernel is exciting for its new RAID1C3/RAID1C4 capability allowing three/four copies of data rather than just two while looking ahead to Linux 5.6 is further feature work on this Linux file-system...

In ruffling feathers of open-source Qt fans, The Qt Company announced a series of changes today to help foster their commercial business...