Phoronix

AMD has expanded its highly successful Zen 2 family with some new low-end parts...

More than a few Phoronix readers have written in over the past few days expressing outrage that Debian GNU/Linux is dropping a number of old hardware drivers...

The latest Linux kernel security work being pursued by Thomas Gleixner is tightening up access around the kernel's per-CPU TLB state access for the translation lookaside buffer...

NixOS 20.03 has been released as the newest version of this Linux distribution built atop the Nix package manager...

Added back in Linux 5.4 was the VirtIO-FS file-system driver as a a FUSE-framework-based file-system implementation designed for guest to/from host file-system sharing for VirtIO para-virtualized devices. Now with QEMU 5.0 VirtIO-FS is supported on its side...

Slim Bootloader is the open-source initiative Intel announced in Q3'2018 for providing a very bare bones BSD-licensed open-source firmware implementation. We're now seeing new Linux patches for improving the integration with the Slim Bootloader...

Landing today in Mesa 20.1-devel were some of the OpenGL/Vulkan-side driver changes needed as part of Intel's road to bringing up discrete Xe GPU support under Linux...

Last week saw a slew of new Git releases due to a security issue over the newline character creating a possible credential leak. This week is another round of emergency Git releases due to a similar security bug...

Last week brought FreeBSD support merged into OpenZFS and it turns out there is another recently-merged exciting advancement for this cross-platform open-source ZFS file-system code in terms of a big speed boost...

With WireGuard added to the Linux 5.6 kernel and it being back-ported to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and its tools getting packaged up by more Linux distributions, it's finally the year of WireGuard. With its usage set to skyrocket as supported kernels and the WireGuard utilities become available out-of-the-box on more distributions, there is now a WireGuard benchmark for stressing the kernel and its support...

German Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers has launched the "TUXEDO Control Center" to provide a GUI-driven control panel for managing thermal and power settings on their systems...

Earlier this month I looked at the X.Org vs. Wayland browser performance with Firefox and Chrome. Mozilla Firefox in particular was showing better performance on Wayland, so here are fresh tests of Firefox with using Fedora 32 and testing various X.Org/Wayland desktops.

With the release of LibreOffice 7.0 in a few months, the open-source office suite will now prefer building at least portions of its code-base with the LLVM Clang compiler over GCC or Microsoft MSVC even if the default compiler is not Clang...

Intel's open-source SVT-AV1 encoder/decoder for AV1 content continues becoming quite featureful while being extremely performant. Out today is SVT-AV1 0.8.2 with more significant work not only on the encoder side but also decoder...

For those with more time on their hands due to social distancing, DXVK 1.6.1 is out to kick off a new week of Linux gaming. The DXVK 1.6.1 while a point release does come with a fair number of improvements to this Direct3D-over-Vulkan translation layer...

There is finally a new update to Pixman, the pixel manipulation library relied upon by Cairo and the X.Org Server most notably but also other Linux desktop software. Pixman 0.40 brings with it many changes given the year in development since the project's last point release...

One week past the end of Linux 5.7 feature development that is marked by the first release candidate, out today like clockwork is the Linux 5.7-rc2 kernel update for testing...

System76 has released the 20.04 beta of their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution. This release comes with various improvements and in this article are some initial benchmarks of Pop!_OS 20.04 beta compared to their prior 19.10 release when testing on the System76 Thelio Major with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X.

The results of the 2020 Debian Project Leader election are in...

Currently being tested ahead of the Linux 5.8 kernel cycle is a change so the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver will begin defaulting to its passive mode for systems without hardware-managed P-States...

Just weeks after the first Ardour 6.0 pre-release, the release candidate is now available for this big digital audio workstation software update...

The Rust language focused Redox OS open-source operating system is now able to boot the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-core/128-thread processor and run with full multi-threading capabilities...

NVIDIA today issued new beta builds of their Vulkan drivers for Linux and Windows...

For those using AMD Radeon "Navi" GPUs, the in-development Linux 5.7 kernel is delivering some minor performance improvements compared to prior kernels.

While waiting to see NVIDIA's new open-source play and ultimately how the re-clocking situation will get addressed for Nouveau so modern GeForce GPUs can work at their intended frequencies on this open-source Linux graphics driver stack, at least the display support has been getting into a more reliable state with CRC support on the horizon as a result of NVIDIA's already published documentation...

FreeBSD may be running great on servers at the likes of Netflix, but when it comes to running the BSD operating system on laptops it still is largely a giant mess...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development recap one day early in highlighting the most recent improvements and new capabilities to this open-source desktop environment...

Intel engineers have outed a new version of oneDNN, the library formerly known as DNNL and before that MKL-DNN for providing a deep neural network library geared for high performance deep learning applications. In aiming to live up to its name, oneDNN 1.4 has more performance optimizations...

Queued up as one of the early changes in the cryptographic subsystem ahead of the Linux 5.8 kernel cycle this summer is an Arm CryptoCell driver...

While there exists DXVK offering great Direct3D 9/10/11 support atop Vulkan that is used by Steam Play / Proton and others, Wine developers continue working on their Vulkan back-end to WineD3D as a similar Direct3D-over-Vulkan approach for pre-D3D12...

FreeBSD developers have been working on transitioning to using OpenZFS as their ZFS file-system upstream code rather than the dormant Illumos base. That initial FreeBSD support has been mainlined this week into the OpenZFS repository, now providing a common code-base between for the open-source ZFS file-system code between Illumos, FreeBSD, Linux, and work-in-progress macOS...

AMD has finally released their first "Radeon Software for Linux" packaged driver release to succeed their Radeon Software for Linux 19.50 driver series that saw its last update in December. Radeon Software for Linux 20.10 is available today as their first packaged Linux driver update of 2020 for AMD Radeon Linux owners as the packaged solution intended for easy installation of their All-Open and "PRO" driver components...

Following the release of Chrome 81 earlier this month, Chrome 83 is now in beta with Google having skipped Chrome 82 due to delays / internal issues...

With Linux 5.7 the kernel is preparing to use the Schedutil governor more often on Intel systems. That change affects the CPUfreq default as well as the Intel P-State driver when in passive mode. While Schedutil holds a lot of hope, at least on Linux 5.7 with the testing I've done thus far the results show the raw performance slipping while testing on more platforms is forthcoming.

Less than one week since the release of Linux 5.7-rc1, Intel's large open-source graphics team has already submitted their first pull request to DRM-Next of changes for Linux 5.8...

Besides the long-running FSGSBASE patch series that has the ability to help the performance for CPUs going back years, another engineer on Intel's open-source team has been working on a separate but enticing patch in the name of performance...

Canonical is transitioning Ubuntu's support in the Amazon AWS environment to have a rolling-release model for its kernel albeit other packages will remain under their traditional stable release update handling. At least though it's good they will be more punctually offering new kernel versions in the cloud..

Facebook and Intel have been working on being able to enable Xeon Scalable Open Compute Project systems with an open-source FSP...

Hopefully it won't be like many Fedora releases in the past that were dragged out for weeks at a time due to blocker bugs (thankfully, recent Fedora releases have been tremendously better in that regard), but Fedora 32 will not be debuting next week as planned due to bugs...

It looks like better support for Windows programs running under Wine interacting directly with USB devices could finally be on the horizon...

It turns out our recent OpenJDK 8 through OpenJDK 14 benchmarks caught some on Oracle's Java team by surprise. But they were able to replicate the outcome and as a result OpenJDK 15 will be seeing better out-of-the-box performance...

Earlier this week I published new benchmarks looking at the desktop CPU security mitigation impact with Ubuntu 20.04. Here are similar tests done in looking at the server mitigation impact with the near-final Ubuntu 20.04 LTS while testing server workloads on Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server platforms. Like the desktop tests, the mitigation impact with the out-of-the-box protections against Spectre, Meltdown, and friends is being compared to booting the same Ubuntu 20.04 release with "mitigations=off" for run-time disabling of the relevant mitigations on each platform.

Mir 1.8 is available today as the newest feature update to this display stack developed by Canonical that currently is focused on providing a pleasant Wayland compositor experience especially for kiosk-type environments and others wanting to transition from X11 to Wayland...

AMD released today their first update of the quarter for their open-source AMDVLK Vulkan Linux driver...

A big change was just merged today for the in-development GNOME 3.38 that will benefit Wayland gamers and others...

If you tried out Linux 5.7-rc1 at the start of the week you may have found your system unbootable if using EFI... Fortunately, those EFI fixes have now been merged several days later...

There are many new and exciting features of Linux 5.7 but also some material that didn't make the cut this window that we are now hoping will see mainline status for Linux 5.8 or another kernel this year...

The GCC compiler's libstdc++ library has continued receiving more last minute C++20 work...

With Linux 5.6 the flash-focused F2FS file-system added LZO and LZ4 compression support for enhancing performance and ideally extending flash storage life by reducing the amount of writes. Added meanwhile for the current Linux 5.7 cycle was F2FS Zstd compression support. Now looking ahead to Linux 5.8, it looks like LZO-RLE support is being baked...

Various patches are pending for improving the Linux support for onboard audio with motherboard sporting the AMD TRX40 chipset for 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadripper systems...