Phoronix

Richard Hughes has released GNOME Firmware 3.34, his new project formerly known as the GNOME Firmware Update as an alternative interface outside of GNOME Software for managing firmware updates on Linux. Additionally, Fwupd 1.3.1 is out with the newest firmware updating bits...

After going through 40+ rounds of revisions and review, the Linux kernel "LOCKDOWN" feature might finally make it into the Linux 5.4 mainline kernel...

With Hyper Threading continuing to look increasingly unsafe in data centers / shared computing environments in light of all the speculative execution vulnerabilities exposed thus far particularly with L1TF and MDS having no SMT-secure mitigation, DigitalOcean continues working on their Linux kernel "core scheduling" patches so they can still make use of HT/SMT in a sane and safe manner...

A Phoronix reader pointed out recent patches by a SUSE engineer working on support for mounting root file-systems over SMB (Samba)...

Linux 5.3 isn't being released until this weekend after being delayed by one week, but already there have been a few early pull requests submitted for the to-be-opened Linux 5.4 merge window...

While not quite as exciting as the big performance boost found with SVT-VP9 for AVX2 CPUs a few days ago, Intel's Scalable Video Technology team has released SVT-HEVC 1.4.1 as their newest feature release to this open-source H.265/HEVC video encoder...

This shouldn't come as much surprise, but the upcoming Fedora 32 will offer the latest "L.A.M.P." stack components...

Going on for months had been work by Intel Linux developers on supporting the FSGSBASE instruction for helping Intel CPU performance going back to Ivybridge where this instruction set extension was first introduced. The FSGSBASE support was queued for the Linux 5.3 kernel but was reverted due to "serious bugs" in the implementation. Intel has now published a revised version of this support...

Red Hat developer Matthias Clasen has just announced the release of GNOME 3.34 as this widely anticipated update to the GNOME 3 desktop environment...

AMD developers are looking at finally re-enabling the LRU bulk moves functionality in their AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver that has the ability to help with performance...

With the upcoming LLVM Clang 9.0 compiler release there is an amazing achievement more than a decade in the making... The mainline Clang compiler can finally build the mainline Linux x86_64 kernel. The AArch64 state has been in better shape in recent years with multiple Arm vendors using Clang as their default compiler including to build the Linux kernel, but finally in 2019 the mainline Clang can build mainline Linux x86_64. There are a few caveats, but in this article is my experience in doing so with LLVM Clang and the Linux 5.3 kernel as well as running some preliminary benchmarks on AMD and Intel hardware.

While days too late for squeezing into GNOME 3.34.0, the GNOME Shell has landed a one year old merge request providing various fixes and performance improvements to its extension system...

The third release candidate of the belated Mesa 19.2 is now available while a fourth and likely final RC is expected next week while the stable release of this quarterly Mesa3D update should be out at month's end...

Intel engineer Craig Topper who frequently contributes the new Intel CPU support to LLVM/Clang has made an AVX-512 behavioral change for next spring's LLVM Clang 10 release...

One of the best and most practical use-cases for sandboxed Linux apps via Flatpak or Snaps is certainly web browsers. There has been unofficial Firefox Flatpaks offered to this point but it's looking like better support for a Flatpak'ed Firefox could be coming down the pipe soon...

Manjaro 18.1 "Juhraya" is now available as the newest six-month feature release to this Arch Linux based operating system...

While the NVIDIA 435 series is now stable, for those sticking to the previous NVIDIA 430 driver series that is their current "long-lived" driver branch, a new version is available...

Two years ago NVIDIA announced the NVDLA as an open-source hardware project with this "NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator" to be a free and open architecture for inference accelerators. NVIDIA has now expanded the open-source software ecosystem around NVDLA...

Now that BIOS updates over the past month have resolved the early boot issue with Ryzen 3000 processors and thus the new AMD CPUs playing nicely with modern Linux distributions, here is the long-awaited benchmark comparison of the Ryzen 9 3900X + X570 system benchmarked across an array of different Linux distributions... In fact, 11 Linux OS releases in total were tested on this high-end 12-core / 24-thread desktop processor.

Google has rolled out Chrome 77 into their stable channel as the newest version of their lightning fast web browser for Linux...

AMD Trusted Memory Zone support is a new feature being worked on for their open-source graphics driver that works in conjunction with the graphics hardware for being able to encrypt portions of the video memory...

Arm has now joined Intel, HP Enterprise, Google, Microsoft, Dell EMC, and others in backing the new Compute Express Link (CXL) effort as the interconnect for future accelerators...

Following a lengthy evaluation period, Acer is the latest hardware manufacturer offering firmware updates for their products via the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for easily applying these updates from the Linux desktop with Fwupd...

With the big GNOME 3.34 release coming out this week, the GNOME 3.36 release schedule has now been published...

Intel engineer Feng Tang spoke at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference in Lisbon, Portugal on how the Clear Linux team managed to boot their kernel faster. They started out with around a three second kernel boot time but cut it down to just 300 ms...

The EXT4 case-insensitive lookup optimization added to the file-system with the current Linux 5.3 cycle has been ported to the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) for the upcoming Linux 5.4...

A new release of MoltenVK is now available that is updated against Vulkan 1.1.121 for allowing much of this graphics/compute API to function under Apple's macOS and iOS platforms by remapping the Vulkan calls to Metal...

Just a few weeks after Intel's i965 OpenGL driver in Mesa added GL 4.6 support, the "Iris" Gallium3D driver is now exposing OpenGL 4.6 support too...

While Fedora 31 isn't even out yet, looking ahead to the Fedora 32 release next spring is a plan to switch firewalld as Fedora's default network firewall from its existing iptables back-end to the more modern nftables back-end...

Intel's open-source crew has released version 0.2 of its primarily Rust-developed Cloud Hypervisor and associated firmware also in Rust...

Sadly too late for the upcoming Linux 5.4 merge window, but for Linux 5.5 it looks like there will be a FreeSync improvement around low-frame-rate compensation...

As a follow-up from this weekend's article about Intel's SVT-VP9 video encoder running much faster on AVX2 CPUs from both Intel and AMD, here are the results now before/after for ten different systems with this open-source CPU-based VP9 video encoder...

The LLVM 9.0 release is running a few weeks behind schedule but should be out in the days ahead along with other LLVM sub-project releases like Clang 9.0. Here's a look at what's on tap for this half-year update to the LLVM compiler infrastructure...

Ubuntu's kernel team has decided to switch to LZ4 kernel image compression beginning with Ubuntu 19.10 in order to speed-up the boot times...

Yesterday we reported on two Navi 14 device IDs being added for "workstation SKUs" while today a third has appeared...

In our recent Mesa 19.2 benchmarks of Intel's old and new (Gallium3D) OpenGL Linux drivers one of the rare areas where the new "Iris" driver performed behind the classic driver was with "j2dbench" that stresses the Java OpenGL pipeline. At the time it was unknown why the new driver was performing subpar for this Java graphics test, but now at least there's one optimization so far in addressing that shortcoming...

During this week's KDE Akademy 2019 conference there was some planning discussions around improving the Kate text editor...

Back in April we wrote about MLIR as Google's new IR designed for machine learning. This intermediate representation was designed for use by any machine learning framework and now this common format is being contributed to LLVM...

The past month and a half we have been putting CompuLab's Airtop 3 computer through some demanding benchmarks and a variety of endurance workloads. With the Airtop 3 under test loaded with an 8-core / 16-thread Xeon processor, NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics, and 64GB of RAM with NVMe SSD storage there were some concerns over thermal throttling and if this fan-less industrial PC design could really deal with the generated heat. But after all of this testing, the Airtop 3 continues running strong and another shining example of CompuLab's engineering strength.

Microsoft Teams, the communication platform for chat / video messaging / collaborative file storage and other features, is in the process of being brought to Linux...

In addition to AMD's open-source Linux driver developers being busy in recent weeks bringing up the Renoir APU support, today we've seen the first baby steps towards bringing up "Dali" as another upcoming AMD APU...

Linux/open-source fans don't at least have to hear "Imagination Technologies" or PowerVR as often as in the past, but today's Vulkan 1.1.122 specification update does publicly document Imagination's VK_IMG_format_pvrtc extension that remains "Imagination Technologies Proprietary" licensed...

The next-generation AMD "Renoir" APU is turning into being an interesting successor over the existing Picasso APUs. While at first it was a letdown finding out that the APU is based on Vega and not their newer Navi architecture, follow-on open-source Linux patches have continued to show that it's more than a facsimile and in some areas like display and multimedia has blocks in common with Navi...

Longtime Intel open-source graphics driver developer Chris Wilson today sent out a set of patches attempting to enable IOMMU coverage for graphics by default...

When it comes to Navi graphics processors in workstation cards, there's now confirmation of at least one coming with the "Navi 14" GPU...

Outreachy's summer round recently wrapped up while their winter round for participants in the southern hemisphere is now open...

Up to now the LLVM compiler stack has been used when wanting to target the Linux's eBPF in-kernel virtual machine while now the port for the GNU Compiler Collection has been deemed in good enough shape and merged...

For fans of the Mumble open-source VoIP communication program that is popular with gamers, Mumble 1.3 was released as their first major release in years...

Intel's open-source team continues showing the power of optimizations... Or rather in this case, a three fold performance improvement due to previously limiting an AVX-512 routine that also works on AVX-2 CPUs. SVT-VP9 is now a lot faster on AVX2 CPUs from both Intel and AMD...

As expected, Linus Torvalds today released the Linux 5.3-rc8 kernel rather than opting for the stable Linux 5.3...