While there is the MuQSS CPU scheduler that lives out of tree as a promising CPU scheduler for the Linux kernel, it is not alone. Another option has been the PDS scheduler while now its author, Alfred Chen, has announced another new CPU kernel scheduler option he has dubbed the BitMap Queue...
Fedora 30 is aiming to ship with the Wayland native version of Firefox by default rather than relying upon XWayland. This Wayland-native Firefox has long been offered in the Fedora repository but not used as the default browser. While it's not all squared away yet, more time has been granted to get it ready for this spring update to Fedora...
We are over half-way through the Linux 5.1 kernel merge window. While we've had many articles detailing the individual changes thus far of the new kernel, if you are unfortunately behind on your Phoronix reading, here's a quick look at some of what has been queued this far for this next major kernel update...
The work done by Red Hat's Karol Herbst over the past year for plumbing in NIR intermediate representation support within the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Gallium3D driver will finally be landing...
The recently open-sourced Intel video encoders for VP9, AV1, and HEVC under the "Streaming Video Technology" (SVT) umbrella continue looking very positive especially for the newer VP9/AV1 video formats...
One week has passed since the official debut of Linux 5.0 and now long-time kernel hacker Con Kolivas is out with his 5.0-ck1 kernel patch as well as an updated MuQSS scheduler...
Up for discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list is adding support for the Secure Launch boot protocol to Linux. This is part of the recent efforts to supporting Linux in "secure" boot environments around Intel Trusted Execution Technology and AMD SKINIT platform security...
While nearly all Linux distributions have been mitigated against the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities for over one year, the performance ahead associated with these speculative execution vulnerabilities can vary. This is especially more so with the enterprise Linux distributions that are generally shipping on older kernel branches prior to where the initial kernel support was mainlined. With recent kernel releases we've also seen varying optimizations and other changes around the Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF mitigations. So for those wondering about the varying impact, here are some side-by-side benchmarks.
Sway 1.0 is now available for this independent Wayland compositor that is inspired by the i3 X11 window manager and has matured with quite an in-depth feature set as well as evolved along with its own "WLROOTS" Wayland library...
While earlier this month it looked like Intel was going to be the likely suitor to Mellanox Technologies, NVIDIA has managed to edge out Intel and the others bidding for the networking chip provider...
LLVM 8.0 had been expected for release prior to the end of February, but now as we approach the middle of March, this major compiler update along with associated sub-projects like Clang 8.0 have yet to see the light of day...
The latest work within Mesa 19.1 is for the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver and that is dumping more shader information within the VK_EXT_debug_report extension. The output of that is then used by the Mesa developers' VKpipeline-DB utility for offline analysis...
While we are expecting to see more Intel Optane NVDIMMs this year that offer up persistent memory using 3DXPoint memory on the DDR4 bus for persistent storage, the Linux 5.1 kernel might pick-up support for treating this persistent memory back as traditional RAM if so desired...
Meson 0.50 is now available as the latest feature update to this increasingly used cross-platform build system that is powering the likes of many GNOME projects, many X.Org/FreeDesktop.org low-level software components, and other software that when paired with Ninja is known for its lightning fast build times and better cross-OS support compared to traditional alternatives...
The Panfrost Gallium3D driver has been quick to take form since it was merged to the Mesa 19.1 development code a month ago providing open-source 3D support for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost graphics hardware. The latest achievement for this Gallium3D driver in Mesa Git is being able to run with the yet-to-be-merged DRM kernel driver...
SIMPLE_LMK is a simple low-memory killer being worked on for potential upstreaming in the mainline Linux kernel in the future but for now is simply seeking comments on its design approach...
Back when kernel mode-setting (KMS) was originally talked about a decade ago one of the talked about possibilities of implementing a Linux "Blue Screen of Death" / better error handling when a dramatic system problem occurs. Such an implementation never really materialized but now in 2019 there is a developer pursuing new work in this area with a DRM-based kernel oops viewer...
It's been just one week since the debut of the big Linux 5.0 kernel release and today that's been succeeded by Linux 5.0.1 as the first fix-things-up release...
While Fedora is generally known to ship the very latest upstream software with each release, Fedora has continued shipping Mono 4.8 even though Mono 5.0 shipped in May 2017. With the Fedora 31 release due out later in the year, they are finally working on switching to Mono 5...
The Lemote Yeeloong netbooks came out a decade ago and based on the MIPS Loongson 2F processor clocked up to 900MHz, offered up to 1GB of RAM, some models featuring an 8GB SSD, and driving the display was a Silicon Motion controller. The Yeeloong netbooks/laptops were even used by Richard Stallman for being open-source friendly and he used the devices as his own system for several years. Finally in 2019, better mainline Linux kernel support is being worked on...
Support is coming together within the Linux kernel and QEMU for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack to handle Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) for the virtual displays to handle some practical improvements moving forward...
NVIDIA will no longer be officially supporting Kepler mobile/notebook GPUs by their mainline driver. For now at least they will continue supporting Kepler desktop GPUs by their mainline driver...
The Kbuild updates for the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel have a few worthwhile improvements including the ability to pass optional flags to dpkg-buildpackage when spinning up a Debian kernel package, some minor optimizations, and preparations around LD.LLD support in using the LLVM linker to link the Linux kernel...
Following the Gallum Nine "TTN" support landing to allow a TGSI-to-NIR code path to be used rather than requiring Gallium3D drivers support the conventional TGSI intermediate representation, Intel's new "Iris" driver now is working with Gallium D3D9 after the final bit of code was merged...
A month ago we were first to report on Intel posting Linux graphics driver patches for "device local memory" as they prepare for the bring-up of their "Xe Graphics" discrete GPU hardware due out at some point in 2020. To no surprise, there are more patches out today as the Intel open-source developers begin pushing out more code restructuring work for bringing up graphics support past Icelake "Gen 11" graphics...
As a change in acknowledging the increasing Arm SoC core counts as more vendors take stabs at higher-end server chips, the default 64-bit Arm (ARM64 / AArch64) kernel image as of Linux 5.1 will default to supporting 256 CPUs compared to the current default limit of 64 CPU cores...
Valve has released Proton 3.16-8 as their newest release to their Wine fork that adds in various improvements for helping Windows games on Linux primarily to bolster their "Steam Play" functionality...
Feral's GameMode daemon for dynamically tuning Linux systems while gaming and reverting to the default behavior when not running games continues to see new capabilities added...
One of the milestones we hope will be reached this year is having SPIR-V support in mainline LLVM, but while the Khronos working group engaging on better support around LLVM isn't there yet, the code continues improving out-of-tree...
In addition to measured boot support being worked on for Coreboot to enhance the security of this open-source BIOS/firmware replacement, support for working with Intel TXT - Trusted Execution Technology - is also happening...
The Linux kernel's RISC-V processor support is getting into good shape now since the support for this open-source processor ISA was originally introduced back for Linux 4.15. Moving forward, it's now expected the support to be maintained and only improve for the HiFive Unleashed developer board...
Besides new/improved CPU targets, C++20 additions, and a lot of other additions to the code-base for GCC 9, there is also continued work on usability improvements for developers to make their lives easier and helping out with more precise error/warning details...
The 19.04 release of Ubuntu Studio, the Ubuntu flavor focused on multimedia production / content creation, might not happen unless at least one of their developers are granted package upload rights...
Recently I carried out a number of GCC 9 compiler benchmarks on AMD EPYC looking at the performance benefits of "znver1" compiler tuning and varying optimization levels to see when this level of compiler tuning pays off. There was interest from that in seeing some fresh Intel Skylake-X / AVX-512 figures, so here are those benchmarks of GCC 9 with various tuning options and their impact on the performance of the generated binaries.
As the latest on the Spectre/Meltdown front for the Linux kernel, the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel is bringing an optimization for Retpolines "return trampolines" so GCC will generate more efficient code on x86/x86_64 in its mitigations against Spectre Variant Two...
LLVM for a while has offered a "Shadow Call Stack" pass used to protect programs against stack buffer overflows. While the 64-bit ARM (AArch64) shadow call stack has worked out well, the x86_64 implementation has been deemed insufficient and is now removed...
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