Phoronix

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...

Since 2012 there has been a quirk in the Linux kernel to disable/override using ACPI _PSD data on all AMD processors as a workaround in turn for Windows-specific behavior that clashes with the semantics of the Linux ACPI CPUFreq driver for CPU frequency scaling. With AMD Zen 3 this quirk is no longer needed to behave correctly and thus Linux 5.10 is going to drop this eight year old quirk on Zen 3 and newer...

Building off the Friday release of Wine 5.20, a new Wine-Staging release is now available that is carrying more than 750 patches atop the upstream code-base that are currently undergoing testing...

Complementing the ARM(64) architecture changes for Linux 5.10 are now the SoC and board updates that are quite interesting this round...

Version 0.23 of the Eclipse OpenJ9 Java Virtual Machine was released this week in continuing to focus on being a high performance, open-source JVM...

The EXT4 file-system updates have landed in Linux 5.10 with some notable additions for this mature file-system...

Wine 5.20 was just released as the newest bi-weekly development milestone for this solution to run Windows games and other software on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

Since picking up the Dell XPS 13 9310 for delivering Tiger Lake Linux benchmarks, most of the focus so far has been about the overall processor performance while in this article is our first deep dive into the Gen12 Xe Graphics performance on Linux with Intel's fully open-source graphics and compute stack. Here is a look at how the Tiger Lake Xe Graphics performance is with the Core i7-1165G7 ranging from OpenGL and Vulkan graphics tests to OpenCL, oneAPI Level Zero, and Vulkan compute tests.

It was sadly too late for squeezing into the current Linux 5.10 merge window but it looks like for Linux 5.11 in early 2021 the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub "SFH" driver will make its long awaited debut...

Going back more than a year there have been Intel "i915" kernel graphics driver patches implementing integer mode scaling support while finally for Linux 5.11 in early 2021 the support will have landed...

Upstream LLVM/Clang now supports making use of the vector math library found within the GNU C Library...

The Linux 5.10 merge window is closing this weekend but there still is new code landing for this last complete kernel series of 2020...

Ubuntu for many years has allowed EXT4 file-system encryption when making use of LVM management but for Ubuntu 21.04 it's looking to offer the file-system encryption without having to go through LVM...

Fedora 33 will manage to ship on-time per its back-up target date of next week Tuesday...

For months now Intel's open-source Linux driver stack has been preparing for VRR support with Gen11/Gen12 graphics. We've seen user-space patches by Intel around VRR while now they are finally sending out their key Linux kernel driver patches with the i915 DRM code...

This ~$50 USD graphics card is open-source friendly, can drive four display outputs simultaneously, passively cooled, and can fit in a PCI Express x1 slot. It's a unique card offering good value especially for those Linux users wanting open-source friendly hardware.

The crew at iXsystems this week not only released TrueNAS 12.0 as their convergence of TrueNAS and FreeNAS, but they have also put out an alpha build of TrueNAS SCALE as their new Linux-based offering...