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Updated 2025-07-05 22:30
Linux Returns To Parallel CPU Microcode Updates To Reduce Cloud Disruption
Following the Spectre mitigations coming to light last year, the late microcode update process for CPUs was serialized. However, this has led to complaints from cloud vendors and other customers with large core count servers where downtime/disruptions need to be minimal. So now the CPU microcode update process is being parallelized again...
Systemd Starts Tapping ChromeOS For USB Devices That Support Auto-Suspend Well
Systemd has begun harvesting the automatic suspend rules from ChromeOS for determining which USB devices support automatic suspend well out-of-the-box on Linux...
Systemd Starts Tapping ChromeOS For USB Devices That Support Auto-Suspend Well
Systemd has begun harvesting the automatic suspend rules from ChromeOS for determining which USB devices support automatic suspend well out-of-the-box on Linux...
The Matrix Of Software Projects Mapping Khronos APIs From DXVK To Zink & CLVK
Neil Trevett, the president of the Khronos Group, presented at the X.Org Developers' Conference for the first time. During his presentation on Wednesday he covered their usual initiatives, how Khronos engages in open-source and open standards, and related bits -- plus a few interesting ones...
Fedora 32 Planning To Ship With GNU Binutils 2.33
Not particularly surprising considering Fedora tends to always ship with a bleeding-edge toolchain, but for their Fedora 32 release to kick off 2020 they are planning for GNU Binutils 2.33...
Intel Has Been Quietly Developing A New Backend Compiler For Their OpenGL/Vulkan Drivers
One of the interesting reveals so far from this week's X.Org Developers' Conference in Montreal is that Intel has been developing a new back-end compiler for their OpenGL/Vulkan Linux drivers based upon their experiences so far with their NIR support and the lessons learned over the past number of years...
Intel MKL-DNN 1.1 Released, Now Branded As The Deep Neural Network Library
Intel's open-source crew has had a busy week with their first public OpenVKL release, OSPray 2 hitting alpha, and now the release of MKL-DNN where they are also re-branding it as the Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL)...
Windows 10 vs. Eight Linux Distributions In Various "Creator" Workloads On An Intel Core i9
For those wondering about the current performance of desktop Linux distributions against Microsoft Windows 10 with the latest updates as we embark upon fall update season, here is a look at the performance of eight different Linux distributions compared to Windows 10. While a larger set of cross-platform tests are currently being worked on, for this article we are focusing on different "creator" workloads from video/audio encoding, render workloads, and related software prior to the larger comparison in the next week or two.
Blender 2.81 In Next Phase Of Development With NVIDIA RTX Optix, Intel Open Image Denoise
The Blender 2.81 release cycle has entered its "bcon2" development phase of development with the focus shifting to bug fixing and stabilizing new features with now being past the initial window of merging in the big ticket items...
PostgreSQL 12 Released As Newest Update To "World's Most Advanced Open-Source DB"
As was anticipated, PostgreSQL 12.0 is now officially available...
RADV Vulkan Driver Picks Up Several GFX10/Navi Fixes, Including To Address Random Hangs
If you are a user of AMD Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" graphics and don't mind riding Mesa Git, the latest 19.3-devel code as of yesterday has several more GFX10 fixes/improvements...
Flatpak 1.5 Released With Version Pinning, Self-Updates In Portals
Flatpak 1.5 is the newest pre-release for this Linux app sandboxing and distribution tech...
ASTC Texture Compression License Turns Out To Be Restrictive Outside Of Khronos APIs
The lossy ASTC texture compression algorithm has been widely adopted in recent years with it being official extensions to both OpenGL and OpenGL ES. While it may not be as messy as the S3TC patent situation of the past, it turns out Arm's license on Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression actually is quite restrictive outside of the context of Khronos' APIs...
AMDGPU Submits LRU Bulk Moves Support As A Linux 5.4 "Fix" For Better Performance
While initially queued as a work-in-progress feature for Linux 5.5, AMD has now submitted a batch of "fixes" to the current Linux 5.4 cycle that include enabling of the LRU bulk moves performance-boosting functionality...
Igalia Is Working On "mediump" Support For Mesa To Help With OpenGL ES Performance
Igalia is working on supporting OpenGL ES' GLSL marking of variables as "mediump" when the precision involving those variables can be lowered to half-float 16-bit registers. That in turn can help with performance when honoring that precision marking, which to date Mesa has ignored...
Google Is Uncovering Hundreds Of Race Conditions Within The Linux Kernel
One of the contributions Google is working on for the upstream Linux kernel is a new "sanitizer". Over the years Google has worked on AddressSanitizer for finding memory corruption bugs, UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer for undefined behavior within code, and other sanitizers. The Linux kernel has been exposed to this as well as other open-source projects while their newest sanitizer is KCSAN and focused as a Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer...
AMD Dominated Q3 In Wooing Over Linux / Open-Source Fans
Here is our recap of the most popular content on Phoronix for Q3. This is also the first time any one vendor has nearly dominated the charts thanks to multiple successful product launches and growing embrace for Linux/open-source...
Following Buggy AMD RdRand, The Linux Kernel Will Begin Sanity Checking Randomness At Boot Time
The Linux kernel will begin doing a basic sanity check of x86_64 CPUs with the RdRand instruction to see if it's at least returning "random looking" data otherwise warn the user at boot time. This stems from a recent issue where AMD's RdRand behavior with some hardware (particularly, buggy motherboards) could have borked RdRand issues...
Samba 4.12 Bringing Much Faster Encryption Performance With GnuTLS
Samba 4.11 was just released a few weeks back with big scalability improvements, but looking ahead to Samba 4.12 will be some big performance improvements for those leveraging encryption...
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Intel Core i9 9900K Performance In 400+ Benchmarks
Given the recent AMD "ABBA" Ryzen 3000 boost fix, the upcoming release of Ubuntu 19.10 powered by Linux 5.3, here is a fresh round of AMD Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Intel Core i9 9900K benchmarks in a side-by-side matchup . It's just not any comparison but our largest i9-9900K vs. 3900X comparison ever: 112 gaming benchmarks and 321 system/CPU benchmarks carried out for our most extensive look yet at how these ~$500 CPUs are competing in this fierce race.
PostgreSQL 12 Due Out Tomorrow With Better Performance
Tomorrow is when PostgreSQL 12.0 should meet the world for this popular open-source SQL database server...
Intel Core i9 10900 Series Coming With Competitive Pricing For Taking On Threadripper
Details have emerged on Intel's forthcoming Core i9 10900 X-Series processors...
GCC Is Potentially Months From Seeing Radeon OpenMP 4.5 / OpenACC 2.6 GPU Offloading
At last month's GNU Tools Cauldron was an update on the Radeon GCN back-end state for the GCC compiler, which is likely to see more code land around year's end...
PHP 7.3 Is In Ubuntu 19.10, PHP 7.4 Hopefully Will Make It Into Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
One of the benefits of upgrading to Ubuntu Server 19.10 this month is for a newer version of PHP7 providing new features and better performance. While that took close to one year to land PHP 7.3 in Ubuntu 19.10, it looks like next spring's Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will be pulling in PHP 7.4 that is shipping later this year...
Panfrost Gallium3D Driver Focusing On Bettering The Arm Midgard Support
While there hasn't been too much to write on it in recent weeks, the Panfrost Gallium3D driver within Mesa for Arm Midgard/Bifrost graphics continues chugging along. The latest work on it is switching over to a new scheduler for Midgard...
Steam Linux Marketshare Ticks Up Higher For September
The Steam Linux marketshare measurement for September ticked up slightly and to the highest point we have seen in a a number of months...
GeForce RTX SUPER Linux Compute Performance - 18 GPU NVIDIA OpenCL Comparison
Last week we began our belated NVIDIA GeForce RTX SUPER benchmarking by looking at the RTX 2060 / 2070 / 2080 SUPER Linux gaming performance in a 26-way graphics card comparison. For those more interested in the RTX SUPER graphics cards for their OpenCL compute performance potential, these benchmarks today are for you.
Intel's Inaugural Release Of OpenVKL Ties Into Their Promising oneAPI Rendering Toolkit
While announced some months ago, today in-step with the OSPray 2.0 Alpha ray-tracing release is the inaugural development release of the Open Volume Kernel Library (OpenVKL)...
Intel Sends Out Initial USB 4.0 Support For The Linux Kernel
Intel open-source engineers have sent out their initial patches wiring up USB 4.0 support for the Linux kernel...
Significant Performance & Perf-Per-Watt Gains Coming For Intel CPUs On Linux Schedutil
Sadly not making it for the just-closed Linux 5.4 merge window but hopefully something we could see in Linux 5.5 is recent patches on "frequency invariance" in optimizing the Schedutil frequency scaling governor that will really benefit Intel CPUs and improve their performance by double digits...
Phoronix Test Suite 9.0.1 Available Along With Several New/Updated Test Profiles
As a minor update following last month's Phoronix Test Suite 9.0 release, version 9.0.1 is now available and also for all PTS users are a number of new/updated test profiles via OpenBenchmarking.org...
Steam, Open-Source Intel & Ryzen 3000 / EPYC's Continued Domination Rocked September
It was another busy September on Phoronix with 298 original Linux/open-source news articles and 22 featured articles / hardware reviews written by your's truly. There was an interesting combination of both hardware and software happenings over the past month, so here is your convenient recap...
Unofficial Radeon ROCm Packages Re-Enable APU Support
Over a year ago the AMD APU support in the Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) stack was quietly removed and has yet to be re-enabled in the upstream ROCm packages. But should you be wanting to use ROCm for their compute APIs or OpenCL on APUs, unofficial Ubuntu packages are now available to provide this capability...
Intel's OSPray 2.0 Enters Alpha With Many Changes For This Ray-Tracing Engine
Ahead of the oneAPI beta expected this quarter, Intel's OSPray ray-tracing engine that is set to be part of the oneAPI rendering tool-kit is embarking on its next major release...
Intel's Clear Linux Upgrades Its Performance-Optimized Desktop To GNOME 3.34
For those that had been interested in GNOME 3.34 for Intel's Clear Linux when running their developer-focused, performance-optimized desktop those packages have now landed...
Linux 5.4-rc1 Kernel Steps Forward With Next-Gen GPU Bits, Arm Laptop Support & exFAT
It's coming one day late due to the last minute entropy/RNG patches to improve the random behavior during boot time (among other late patches), but Linus Torvalds has just tagged Linux 5.4-rc1 as what will be the last major stable kernel release of 2019...
Raspbian 2019-09-26 Has Raspberry Pi SPI EEPROM Updater, NTFS-3G Added
Raspbian 2019-09-26 is out as the latest version of this Debian-based Linux distribution that leads the default OS experience for Raspberry Pi devices...
Xfce's xfce4-panel Says Farewell To GTK2 Support
Following last month's release of Xfce 4.14 that transitioned from GTK2 to GTK3 as its tool-kit, old remnants of GTK2 support are now being nuked...
LuxCoreRender 2.2 Released With Intel Open Image Denoise Yields Faster Render Times
LuxCoreRender, the open-source physically based renderer for execution on CPUs as well as OpenCL accelerators / GPUs, is out with version 2.2 and now integrates Intel's open-source Open Image Denoise...
The Xeon vs. EPYC Performance With Intel's oneAPI Embree & OSPray Render Projects
With Intel seemingly ramping up work on their open-source OSPray portable ray-tracing engine now that they have pulled it under their oneAPI umbrella as part of a forthcoming rendering tool-kit, I figured it would be the latest interesting candidate for benchmarking of AMD EPYC 7742 vs. Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 performance. In addition, the Embree ray-tracing kernels are also being benchmarked as part of this performance comparison.
Intel Releasing FSP For Xeon Scalable Skylake-SP For Coreboot Support
Intel in cooperation with Facebook have announced they are releasing a Firmware Support Package (FSP) to allow Xeon Scalable "Skylake-SP" to boot with Coreboot...
Linux 5.4 Will Try When Needed To Actively Generate RNG Entropy To Avoid Boot Problems
Linux 5.4-rc1 didn't end up being released on Sunday night as is tradition but instead there were some last-minute critical patches that landed around the kernel's handling of the random number generator / entropy at boot-time...
GCC Developers Look At Transitioning Their Codebase To C++11
Seven years after the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers began transitioning their codebase from C to C++, they are now discussing the prospects of adopting C++11 as their allowed C++ standard revision for developing this open-source compiler...
OpenMandriva Can Now Clang Its Linux Kernel Build For This LLVM Focused Distribution
OpenMandriva is one of the few Linux distributions (and arguably the only prominent one) that uses LLVM Clang as its default compiler toolchain over GCC for building its packages and the preferred C/C++ compiler exposed to its users. One of the last hold outs for this Clang'ed Linux distribution has been the kernel build but that is now no longer a blocker...
QEMU's Assortment Of Virtual VGA/GPU Options & What To Pick For Desktop Virtualization
The virtual GPU/display landscape particularly for having accelerated guest graphics was once non-existent and then suffering for the open-source Linux virtualization stack around QEMU, but that is no longer the case. There are options these days to rival the GPU/display offerings of VirtualBox and VMware albeit to newcomers may not be so clear...
Linux 5.4 Should Improve NUMA Hugepage Allocation Performance
It turns out Linux 5.3 shipped with potentially subpar performance for the allocation of hugepages but that should be rectified in the now open Linux 5.4 cycle for trying to provide a sane default allocation strategy on NUMA boxes...
Wine-Nine-Standalone 0.5 Released To Improve Wine Integration With Gallium Nine
Wine-Nine-Standalone is the project making it easier to make use of Gallium3D's Direct3D 9 state tracker within Wine. Wine-Nine-Standalone 0.5 is out as the first new release since March for this project making it easier to use the Direct3D 9 Gallium state tracker within Wine...
D9VK 0.22 Released To Workaround Direct3D 9 Game Bugs
Joining DXVK 1.4.1 with a new release this weekend is D9VK 0.22 as the similar project achieving faster Direct3D 9 performance over Wine/Proton via translating the API calls to Vulkan...
Linux 5.4 Features Are Huge From exFAT To New GPUs To Enabling Lots Of New Hardware
The Linux 5.4 merge window is set to end today with the release of Linux 5.4-rc1. With the major pull requests in, here is a look at the prominent changes and new features coming with Linux 5.4. As is standard practice, there will be about eight weekly release candidates of Linux 5.4 prior to officially releasing this kernel as stable in late November or potentially early December depending upon how the cycle plays out.
KVM Changes For Linux 5.4 Fix Performance Regression, Add UMWAIT Support
A second batch of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes for the Linux 5.4 kernel have landed...
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