Phoronix

As we hit the end of October AMD has issued their second open-source Vulkan driver code drop of the quarter with the AMDVLK 2020.Q4.2 availability...

Earlier this year was the surprising move of Intel's oneDNN neural network library adding AArch64 support and that was then complemented by adding IBM POWER support to this neural network library that is part of their oneAPI collection. Now with the latest oneDNN 2.0 beta they have furthered the support and performance for non-Intel hardware...

A new version of the AMD Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) has been released on the same day as the company announcing the Radeon RX 6800/6900 series. Meet ROCm 3.9...

The GNU compiler toolchain has begun landing Arm's contributions around ARMv8.7-A architecture support...

Intel's open-source developers have begun publishing their patches enabling their "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver to support Vulkan ray-tracing! This is in preparation for next year's Xe HPG graphics card that will feature hardware-accelerated ray-tracing...

There was talk earlier this year of mainlining the real-time Linux kernel patches after similar discussions last year didn't result in it happening. Merging the RT code didn't happen for the recent Linux 5.10 merge window but at least the out-of-tree patches were quickly re-based for Linux 5.9 stable and 5.10-rc1...

Version 2.0 of Pyston is now available, the Python implementation originally started by Dropbox that builds on LLVM JIT for offering faster Python performance...

Lisa Su is about to begin the presentation unveiling the much anticipated Radeon RX 6000 "Big Navi" (RDNA 2) graphics cards. This article will be updated live as the event progresses but first up let's recap the current Linux open-source driver state for these forthcoming graphics cards.

Adam Jackson who on Red Hat's Graphics Team served as the X.Org Server release manager for many years and being heavily involved in the xorg-server development and related components as shared his views on whether the X.Org Server is "abandonware."..

Following last week's Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla" release, Ubuntu 21.04 development is now getting underway as the Hirsute Hippo...

Adding to the list of changes coming with the Qt 6 toolkit, The Qt Company has now outlined their initial implementation of a package manager to provide additional Qt6 modules...

A Sony engineer confirmed at this week's Embedded Linux Conference Europe that the company has begun using the Flutter toolkit atop Wayland as their means of developing user-interfaces on embedded systems...

Last week Intel open-source engineers began publishing Linux kernel patches for the "Alder Lake S" graphics support. That work should be found in the Linux 5.11 cycle being christened as stable in early 2021. In user-space, Alder Lake graphics patches also appeared for their OpenCL / oneAPI Level Zero compute stack and now merged into Mesa 20.3 as well for OpenGL / Vulkan support...

With the WiMAX 802.16 standard not being widely used outside of the Aeronautical Mobile Airport Communication System (AeroMACS) and usage in some developing nations, the Linux kernel may end up dropping its support for WiMAX but first there is a proposal to demote it to staging while seeing if any users remain...

Windows gaming on Linux got some love this week at the Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit Europe virtual event. In particular, a recap of the work that's been done so far on extending the Linux kernel to better support Wine / Steam Play based support for Windows games running on Linux...

The Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" series are about seven years old almost to the day and the AMD Linux open-source driver crew is seemingly celebrating by finally adding the few lines of code needed to enable BACO power management...

FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE is now available as the latest feature and bug fix update to the FreeBSD 12 platform ahead of the expected FreeBSD 13.0 release around the end of Q1-2021...

Bcachefs has been developed for a half-decade now as the Linux file-system born out of the block cache "bcache" kernel code. Kent Overstreet continues spearheading the work and while it's been quiet in recent months today he sent out a new round of Bcachefs patches for review on the Linux kernel mailing list...

The Snap packaging / software deployment effort led by Canonical for Ubuntu and other distributions currently relies on XZ compression of the SquashFS-based archives while moving forward they are planning to make use of LZO compression. Snap'ing with LZO will result in faster startup-times at the cost of larger packages...

Landing yesterday within the Rust code-base is the initial version of a Cranelift code generator back-end. By leveraging the Cranelift code generator that is developed as part of the Bytecode Alliance for WebAssembly, Rustc with Cranelift can experince much faster debug builds...

At the end of last week System76 released Pop!_OS 20.10 as their customized distribution built atop Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla. For those curious here are some benchmarks of System76's Pop!_OS 20.10 versus 20.04 using the Thelio Major with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics.

Fedora 33 has just been released as the last major update to this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution for 2020...

Following the rumors earlier this month that AMD was in talks to acquire Xilinx, a deal has been announced this morning...

While Linux 5.10-rc1 was just released two days ago, the first pull request to DRM-Next of various changes was submitted today in beginning to stage material for inclusion with next year's Linux 5.11 kernel release...

At this week's virtual Embedded Linux Conference was a talk on Monday by Igalia engineer Maksim Sisov as to the state of native Wayland support for the open-source Chromium web browser and in turn Google Chrome...

While LibreOffice 7.0 was just released back in August, LibreOffice 7.1 is now in alpha as the first step towards this next open-source office suite release...

Given the AArch64 laptops coming to market and continuing popularity around ARM64 SBCs for Linux desktop use-cases, Fedora's KDE special interest group is proposing Fedora KDE Plasma edition also be spun for the 64-bit ARM architecture...

The first release candidate of systemd 247 is now available for testing and it's a huge feature release...

LLVM has merged an experimental MLIR-based SPIR-V CPU runner that the developers are working towards being able to handle CPU-based execution of GPU kernels...

While there had been much speculation that Linux 5.9 would be the kernel's next long-term support release based on past timing, Linux 5.10 is going to be the LTS release...

Debian is looking for the community to partake in the quick voting process around selecting the default artwork for the upcoming Debian 11 "Bullseye" release...

The Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid-state drives are now available from Internet retailers. For those wondering how these SSDs compare with EXT4 under Linux against other PCIe 4.0/3.0 drives, here are a variety of benchmarks.

Version 1.5 of the Fwupd utility is available for updating various component firmware/BIOS natively on Linux and integrating with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for the easy distribution of said firmware images...

If all goes well Qt 6.0 will make its official debut in December. One of the areas much talked about for Qt 6 development has been the graphics architecture changes and better supporting more APIs besides OpenGL...

ReactOS Deutschland e.V. has hired one of their long-time contributors to work full-time on the "open-source Windows" implementation's memory management for the next quarter...

Select high-end Corsair power supplies such as their RMi / HXi / AXi series are able to expose various sensor metrics via USB interface to the system. To date this sensor functionality has only worked under Windows with their proprietary software but now an open-source driver is seeking mainline inclusion for supporting these sensors under Linux...

Building off a set of "request for comments" patches from September, a set of patches were sent out on Sunday for providing brute force attack mitigation around the fork system call...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.10-rc1 that also marks the end of the feature merge window for this EOY2020 kernel. Linux 5.10 isn't the largest kernel update in recent time but still has a lot of interesting additions and improvements...

The Linux 5.10 merge window is set to close this afternoon followed by around seven weeks worth of release candidates before the stable kernel release in December. As usual here is our look at the many new features set to premiere with this next version of the Linux kernel.

The Linux kernel's TTM memory management code that is most notably used by the Radeon / AMDGPU kernel drivers but also Nouveau, QXL, VMWGFX, and others, is seeing a new back-end allocation pool that can yield 3~5x faster page allocation performance for video memory...

This past week Intel began adding Alder Lake support to their Linux graphics driver and that also continued on the compute side with the Intel Compute-Runtime receiving initial support for Alder Lake S "ADLS" too...

While AMD has landed Znver3 support in GNU Binutils, the company hasn't yet sent out patches for either the GCC or LLVM/Clang compilers in setting up the Zen 3 target with its new instructions or optimized scheduling model / cost table. But a basic implementation has been merged to LLVM for allowing "-march=znver3" based on the limited public details thus far...

The last major release of the X.Org Server was in May 2018 but don't expect the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.21 to actually be released anytime soon...

After six years serving as the LLVM release manager and taking over the role from LLVM founder Chris Lattner followed by Bill Wendling, Google's Hans Wennborg has stepped down from his position and handed it over to Red Hat's Tom Stellard...

Not only is the Zink Gallium3D code for OpenGL accelerated by Vulkan up to around 69% the speed of Intel's OpenGL driver but it's at around a 97% passing test rate for Mesa's Piglit testing...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is seeing plenty of improvements with the Linux 5.10 kernel...

FreeBSD has long supported a "nosymfollow" mount option to prevent following of symlinks on mounted file-systems while now the mainline Linux kernel is adding a similar security defense...

For the Intel Tiger Lake Linux benchmarking thus far with the Core i7 1165G7 on the Dell XPS 13 9310 it's primarily been compared against the Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U on the AMD side since those are the only Renoir units within my possession. But a Phoronix reader recently provided me with remote access to his Lenovo ThinkPad X13 with Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U (8 cores / 16 threads) for seeing how the Tiger Lake performance compares against that higher-end SKU...

GDB 10.1 is now shipping as a big update to the GNU Debugger...

KDE developers remain very busy this autumn working on fixes for the recently released Plasma 5.20 and related software...