Phoronix

While Linux 5.6-ck1 was much delayed due to Dr. Con Kolivas being busy designing COVID-19 equipment, that work has settled down and the retired anaesthetist is out with his newest Linux patches for improving system responsiveness...

Following a survey of FreeBSD developers gauging interest in a new Code of Conduct and then a follow-up survey of keeping their current CoC versus adopting one similar to the LLVM or Go projects, FreeBSD has now settled on a new document...

Following today's disclosure by Intel of the CrossTalk/SRBDS vulnerability that is MDS-based and vulnerable across physical cores with affected instructions, Intel released new CPU microcode to mitigate the most prone/significant instructions. I've been benchmarking the impact of this new microcode on multiple systems and will have a full report tonight or tomorrow morning... But here is a look specifically at the look at the impact on the RdRand performance...

Haiku, the nearly two decade old open-source operating system still preserving compatibility with BeOS, is out with its second beta release...

This morning I noted CrossTalk / SRBDS as the newest side-channel vulnerability following Intel's monthly security advisories being sent out. It turns out Intel broke their own embargo on the disclosure and I happened to spot it quickly before they retracted it. In the hours since, the university researchers behind this CrossTalk vulnerability reached out and have provided an embargoed copy of the whitepaper. As of now, the formal disclosure time has passed so information on this new side-channel Intel CPU vulnerability is public and it shows for the first time that speculative execution can enable attackers to leak sensitive information across physical cores on Intel CPUs.

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for serving up firmware/BIOS files to Linux users has now served over 16 million downloads thanks to cooperation from over 80 vendors that have uploaded more than 4,000 firmware files...

Details are still coming in but INTEL-SA-00320, a.k.a. "CrossTalk", is the newest Intel side-channel CPU vulnerability...

The open-source Nouveau kernel driver has supported Volta GPUs for some time and since Linux 5.6 also supported open-source initialization of Turing GPUs for hardware acceleration. But missing for Volta and Turing has been the Mesa-side support for enabling 3D (OpenGL) and compute (OpenCL) functionality on these newer GPUs. That is finally changing with pending Mesa patches...

Consulting firm Igalia that has been working under contract with the Raspberry Pi Foundation on developing a Raspberry Pi Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 and future SBCs has provided a status update on their development efforts...

The KDE community has released Plasma 5.19 on schedule this morning...

There are some urgent fixes pending for the x86/x86_64 speculative execution handling for the Linux kernel following a Google security engineer discovering these issues, including one of the fixes address a situation that unfairly impacted AMD CPUs...

Merged back in Linux 5.7 was the new exFAT file-system driver backed by Samsung and replacing the prior "staging" exFAT driver that had been around for the prior few kernel releases. Samsung has now sent their queued up exFAT improvements for the Linux 5.8 kernel...

The char/misc pull request for Linux 5.8 is big at nearly one hundred thousand lines of new code...

Canonical's Andrea Righi who is on the Ubuntu Kernel Team sent out a set of patches last week working on opportunistic memory reclaim support as a means of achieving much speedier system hibernation and resume performance...

With the staging/IIO subsystem changes for Linux 5.8 arguably most notable is what didn't make the cut this round...

Last week AMD's open-source Linux engineers published the initial Linux kernel driver patches for the "Sienna Cichlid" GPU that appears to be almost definitely the big Navi 2. Now that those AMDGPU patches are public, the folks working on the user-space drivers have had the go-ahead to begin volleying their related patches for Sienna Cichlid. Out today is the RadeonSI OpenGL driver support for this next-generation Navi GPU...

Given the recent releases of Chrome 83 and Firefox 77 while Firefox 78 was promoted to beta, here are some current web browser benchmarks from the Linux desktop for these different browser releases.

On Sunday Greg Kroah-Hartman began sending in his pull requests to the different areas of the kernel he oversees for the ongoing Linux 5.8 merge window...

Longtime open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developer Chris Wilson on Sunday sent out a big patch series that introduces a new fair low-latency scheduler for the Intel kernel graphics driver...

Last week saw the main Direct Rendering Manager driver updates for Linux 5.8 with a lot on the open-source graphics front while a secondary pull request was submitted today with the Freedreno "MSM" DRM driver changes for this open-source Qualcomm Adreno driver implementation...

While more laptops are shipping these days finally with Icelake "Gen 11" graphics and Tiger Lake with "Gen 12" graphics are expected soon, there still is an incredible amount of hardware out there making use of Intel Gen 9 graphics that have been in use since Skylake. It's looking like for the Ubuntu 20.10 cycle, there is going to be an emphasis on offering better performance for this very common generation of Intel UHD Graphics...

Normally the NTB patches for new kernel cycles aren't particularly noteworthy but this time around for Linux 5.8 is Icelake support...

Consulting firm KDAB has released Kuesa 3D 1.2 as the newest version of their 3D integration workflow open-source software...

It was just over a week ago that Reiser4 was updated for Linux 5.6 support while now it's been updated for the newly-minted Linux 5.7 stable kernel along with updating the experimental Reiser5 file-system for this latest kernel series...

GNOME 3.37.2 is out as the latest development snapshot in the quest towards the stable GNOME 3.38 desktop environment this September...

NVIDIA has yet to formally announce the 450 Linux driver series in beta or stable form, but the first pre-release builds in the 450 branch did manage to creep out this past week alongside the CUDA 11.0 release candidate...

Adding to the Linux 5.8 changes is the landing of modernization work for the proc special-purpose file-system...

One week after the release of the big Linux 5.7 kernel release with its many new features, the first point release is now available and overall it's quite light for being the first point release in a new series...

The RISC-V architecture code in the Linux kernel continues seeing more improvements for running on real hardware and seeing other capabilities introduced...

The German-based 9elements Cyber Security has ported Coreboot to another newer Intel server motherboard...

As part of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS exclusively using its newer "Subiquity" server installer is a new means of supporting automated installations of the operating system in a server environment...

Following last week's 64-bit ARM architecture updates for Linux 5.8, the Arm SoC/platform changes have now been submitted...

It was just back in late April that the Panfrost Gallium3D driver began rendering with Arm Mali "Bifrost" graphics processors while now it has most of OpenGL ES 2.0 working, some of the desktop OpenGL 2.1 functionality, and is capable of running software like GNOME on Wayland...

Linux 5.8 has merged all of the PCI/PCIe subsystem updates and there are a number of notable changes...

Some Fedora spins have already made use of swap on zRAM for serving as a compressed RAM drive while with Fedora Workstation 33 they are looking to make use of zRAM by default...

The SMB3/CIFS updates for the Linux 5.8 kernel from the Samba camp can offer better performance...

It's another busy week in the KDE land from their Wayland session finally supporting middle-click paste to Konsole now able to display image thumbnail previews when hovering over filenames with this KDE terminal emulator...

Following the recent release candidate, the Valve and CodeWeavers developers have officially promoted this latest Wine-based downstream for empowering Steam Play to their latest stable release...

Wine Staging 5.10 is out today as the latest version of this experimental blend of Wine that is re-based off yesterday's Wine 5.10 codebase...

LunarG in cooperation with The Khronos Group has released Vulkan SDK 1.2.141...

POWER10 is the forthcoming IBM + OpenPOWER processor expected to be shipping in 2021 and manufactured on a 7nm process and offer big improvements over the existing POWER9 microarchitecture...

Wine 5.10 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source project for allowing Windows games and applications to run generally gracefully on Linux (and other) platforms...

Today marks sixteen years since I started Phoronix.com for Linux hardware reviews as well as twelve years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0...

Given the recent release of the Windows 10 May 2020 Update, here are some fresh benchmarks showing how the latest Windows 10 software update paired with the latest AMD drivers performs against the latest 2020 Linux distribution releases. This testing was done on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X box given the interesting performance differences we have seen in the past to Linux's advantage with these HEDT processors. The Linux distributions tested against Windows 10 May 2020 Update were Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Arch-based Manjaro 20.0.2, Clear Linux 33250, and Fedora Workstation 32.

Ted Ts'o sent in the EXT4 file-system changes on Thursday for Linux 5.8 as the summer 2020 kernel release...

Following VMware making the VMWGFX kernel changes for supporting OpenGL 4.x, the SVGA Gallium3D driver is now exposing OpenGL 4.1 in compatibility profile contexts for this open-source graphics driver used as part of the VMware virtualization stack...

With today's Intel Compute Runtime 20.22.16952 release there is now OpenCL 3.0 support exposed for Tiger Lake...

There is new hardware support as part of the sound subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel...

Today AMD and Amazon announced the general availability of 2nd Gen AMD EPYC "Rome" processors available via the Elastic Compute Cloud. AMD EPYC "Rome" on EC2 with the new "C5a" instance types offer very competitive performance against the latest Intel Xeon instance types, Amazon's own Graviton2 Arm-based instances, and a big upgrade compared to the first-generation EPYC processors in the cloud.

A feature proposal raised by Red Hat's Jeff Law would allow Fedora packages to be built under the LLVM Clang compiler rather than defaulting that all packages to be built under GCC. Clang-built packages would happen where the upstream software recommends using Clang by default or for software without an upstream to let the packager(s) make their own decision...