Phoronix

This week marks 16 years since starting Phoronix.com and 12 years since the Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 release, so what better way to celebrate than a new development release of the Phoronix Test Suite...

As part of the many areas of the kernel managed by Ingo Molnar, on Tuesday he submitted the pull request with all of the scheduler code updates for Linux 5.8...

Complementing the new AMD Energy Driver in the hwmon subsystem for Linux 5.8 to provide per-socket/core reporting, the Linux perf subsystem in this new kernel version has run-time average power limiting (RAPL) framework integration for AMD Zen/Zen2 CPUs...

Radeon Open Compute 3.5 (ROCm 3.5) is now available with a number of improvements but surprisingly still no GFX10/Navi support...

Blender 2.83 is out today as the project's first long-term support release (LTS) while still introducing many new features and improvements for existing functionality...

TPAUSE is the new Intel instruction for supporting lightweight power/performance optimized and improved power/performance states for sleeping until the timestamp counter (TSC) has reached a desired value. This new instruction with Intel's Tremont architecture will now be used by Linux 5.8+ on supported CPUs for an optimized power state while waiting on a delay event...

Valve and CodeWeavers have been preparing a new release of the Proton 5.0 series for powering Steam Play with running modern Windows games on Linux...

Besides disabling CPU security mitigations (not recommended if security is of importance), for those wanting to squeeze extra performance out of Intel CPUs like Comet Lake with the Core i9 10900K, loading Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux is one such way. Here is a look at the current performance that can be gained out of using the latest rolling-release Clear Linux on the i9-10900K in comparison to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

The improved DAX code led by Intel has landed in the Linux 5.8 kernel with EXT4 and XFS being the initial file-systems to make use of this improved direct access mode...

The usual assortment of cryptography updates have landed within Linux 5.8...

Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver is now enabling the "zero vRAM" option for all VKD3D games -- Direct3D 12 titles running on Steam Play / Wine with this D3D12 to Vulkan layer -- in order to workaround various rendering bugs...

The 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture changes have already landed into the progressing Linux 5.8 codebase...

As part of their work on ZFS support improvements for the in-development Ubuntu 20.10, Zsys 0.5 has been tagged and landing in the "Groovy Gorilla" repository for this ZFS daemon spearheaded by Canonical developers...

Two years after the release of Devuan 2.0 and just a few months since the Beowulf beta, Devuan 3.0 "Beowulf" is now officially available as this Linux distribution providing a Debian package set not dependent upon systemd...

Security Enhanced Linux is seeing some nice optimizations with the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel...

While iXsystems has been known as one of the leading FreeBSD-focused vendors with their various BSD-powered storage devices and servers as well as contributing significantly to upstream FreeBSD in addition to their former work on TrueOS/PC-BSD, they are now developing a new platform called TrueNAS SCALE that is based on Linux...

Back in April was the announcement that Lenovo would begin shipping some devices with Fedora Linux while now the story gets much juicier today...

Linux power management / ACPI maintainer Rafael Wysocki of Intel has sent in the usual big batch of PM/ACPI changes for the next version of the kernel, Linux 5.8...

With the PHP 8.0 schedule putting the first alpha release for the middle of June, I've been trying out its latest Git state in recent days for looking at its performance as well as when enabling its brand new JIT (Just In Time) compiler support that is new to PHP8. The results are quite compelling and here are metrics going back to the days of PHP 5.4 for comparison.

Mozilla's more rapid release schedule continues and that means today is Firefox 77.0 day...

A number of x86 (x86_64) pull requests have been sent in for the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates have been sent in as the open-source graphics/display driver updates for Linux 5.8 amounting to around 42k lines of new code and some 21k lines of code being removed...

Shipping one week from today is KDE Plasma 5.19 and among many other improvements is also significantly enhancing its Wayland support...

During the month of May on Phoronix were 252 original news articles and 20 featured Linux hardware reviews / benchmark specials written by your's truly. This included some surprising announcements from Microsoft, Linux 5.7 getting wrapped up and Linux 5.8 features being firmed up ahead of the now-open merge window, AMD Renoir mobile being a big success, and other milestones for open-source software...

SUSE's David Sterba was quite punctual in getting all of the Btrfs file-system updates submitted quickly for the newly-opened Linux 5.8 kernel merge window...

Valve's May 2020 numbers show another uptick for Steam Linux gaming usage, pointing towards the Linux marketshare continuing to increase with the overall Steam user-base in this coronavirus period leading to record usage with the extra time spent by gamers at home...

As part of the initial set of changes merged today for Linux 5.8 was the x86/mm material that included the controversial feature of opt-in flushing of the L1 data cache on context switching. Linus Torvalds ended up deciding to revert this functionality as for now at least he views it as crazy...

One of the use-cases for this new "initrdmem" option in Linux 5.8 can be for storing an initial ramdisk (initrd) on a motherboard flash chip in the space available after stripping out Intel's Management Engine (ME) code...

Hitting the mailing list just minutes ago were a set of more than 200 patches bringing up support for the previously unheard of Sienna Cichlid GPU...

Git 2.27 is out as the newest version of this widely-used distributed revision control system...

A few weeks back I began delivering Ryzen 7 4700U Linux laptop benchmarks for this 8-core Zen 2 mobile CPU with Vega graphics. The results have been very good and the support is in good shape with the latest Linux kernel, but many have been wondering about the Ryzen 5 4500U. The Ryzen 5 4500U is beginning to appear in several $500~600 USD laptops and offers six cores. Here are benchmarks and initial impressions with the Lenovo Flex 5 that features a 14-inch 1080p display, 16GB dual channel memory, 256GB SSD, and the Ryzen 5 4500U all for just $599!

For those very concerned about CPU data sampling vulnerabilities, the Linux 5.8 kernel comes with the ability to flush the L1 data cache on each context switch. That's good for security, but will hurt the system performance with all the excess L1 cache flushing...

Linux Mint 20 is in the works as the re-base off this popular desktop Linux distribution that in turn is derived from the Ubuntu package set. With Linux Mint 20 they are re-basing to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS packages but with better measures to ensure Snap packages don't end up on user systems...

There still is two months to go until the stable release of LibreOffice 7.0 but today marks the availability of the first beta...

Adding to the multiple new AMD drivers coming with Linux 5.8 is their new SPI controller driver...

The MMC changes for new kernel cycles don't tend to be particularly noteworthy but it's a different story with the new Linux 5.8 kernel cycle...

Linux's pstore "persistent storage" code is seeing a number of improvements for the Linux 5.8 kernel...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were sent in today for the newly-opened Linux 5.8 merge window...

As expected, Linus Torvalds just released the stable Linux 5.7 kernel...

The Linux kernel has officially deprecated its coding style that the length of lines of code comply with 80 columns as the "strong preferred limit"...

Newer Windows games/applications are making use of system call instructions from the application code without resorting to the WinAPI and that is breaking Wine emulation support. A Linux kernel patch is now being worked on for addressing this issue in the form of system call isolation based on memory areas while having a smaller performance hit than alternatives...

Google's Chrome/Chromium web browser is finally reaching the stage where having both the X11 support and Ozone abstraction layer for Wayland can be enabled concurrently in the same build...

NetworkManager 1.25.2-dev is the latest development version of this important Linux networking component in the road towards NetworkManager 1.26...

While the Linux 5.7 kernel is likely being released as stable today, the Reiser4 port to the Linux 5.6 kernel is out this weekend...

At least for the workloads tested this round, when booting the new Intel Core i9 10900K "Comet Lake" processor with the software-controlled CPU security mitigations disabled, the overall performance was elevated by about 6% depending upon the workload. Here is a look at the out-of-the-box security mitigations for this new Intel desktop CPU against foregoing the default CPU security mitigations and running an unprotected configuration to see what the pre-Spectre performance looks like.

Next week on 5 June already marks sixteen years since I started Phoronix.com as well as twelve years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0!..

One of the interesting new happenings in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver space is a Generic USB Display stack including a USB gadget driver that together allow for some interesting generic USB display setups. This work was motivated by being able to turn a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero into a USB to HDMI display adapter...

KDE Plasma 5.19 is due for release very soon (9 June) but that hasn't kept KDE developers from already working on Plasma 5.20 and other components for this open-source desktop...

Valve developers have been working on Vulkan shader pre-caching with their latest Steam client betas to help in allowing Vulkan/SPIR-V shaders to compile ahead of time, letting them be pre-cached on disk to allow for quicker game load times and any stuttering for games that otherwise would be compiling the shaders on-demand during gameplay, especially under Steam Play...

One of the latest performance optimizations being pursued by Intel on the open-source Linux side is providing an AVX-512-optimized container for Golang usage...