Phoronix

Samsung engineers responsible for the modern exFAT file-system driver for Linux have updated the adjoining "exfatprogs" user-space programs around this file-system. Notable to exfatprogs-1.0.4 is much faster "fsck" file-system checking support...

If all goes well the Linux 5.8 kernel will be released as stable this weekend. Linus Torvalds last weekend expressed some uncertainty whether an extra release candidate would be required, but so far this week the kernel Git activity is light, thus for the moment at least is looking like 5.8 will be christened on Sunday...

The Speakup screen reader that is built into the kernel and allows for speaking all text printed to the text console from boot-up to shutdown for assisting blind individuals is now being promoted out of staging with Linux 5.9...

The X.Org/X11 Server has been hit by many security vulnerabilities over the past decade as security researchers eye more open-source software. Some of these vulnerabilities date back to even the 80's and 90's given how X11 has built up over time. The X.Org Server security was previously characterized as being even worse than it looks while today the latest vulnerabilities have been made public...

The developers working long on the GTK4 toolkit are finally close to declaring version 4.0...

Red Hat's input expert Peter Hutterer has started writing another library to help the Linux input ecosystem: LIBEI. This new library is focused on offering emulated input device support for Wayland in order to support use-cases like xdotool for automating input events...

This month the Raspberry Pi Foundation funded "V3DV" open-source Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 began being able to run vkQuake. In ending out July, the developers at consulting firm Igalia who are working on this driver for the Raspberry Pi Foundation shared some of their latest driver activity...

Weston 9.0 release preparations are getting underway. At least compared to the original Weston 9.0 release plans, this Wayland compositor is running about a month behind those plans but in any case the release is now making its way to reality...

Back in May I wrote about Intel working on Platform Monitoring Technology or hardware telemetry capabilities that are coming with Tiger Lake. The Linux support continues to be worked on for this "PMT" functionality although it looks like the work won't be ready in time for the imminent Linux 5.9 kernel merge window...

While there is already the Cage kiosk full-screen shell as well as the likes of Ubuntu's Mir Kiosk Shell, Wayland's Weston reference compositor now has its own implementation...

Systemd 246 is out today as the newest version of this dominant Linux init system and system/service manager. Systemd 246 has a lot of new functionality in time for making it into at least some of the autumn 2020 Linux distributions...

The popular "ACO" shader compiler back-end that recently was promoted to the default shader compiler for Mesa's open-source Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) has long been testing with shaders and traces while now a proper unit testing framework is being introduced for verifying optimizations are correctly handled, ensuring no regressions, etc...

Following in the steps of their hand-crafted Thelio desktops manufactured in-house in Colorado, Linux PC vendor System76 is also working to not only manufacture their own laptops but also other components like their own keyboard...

OPNsense 20.7 "Legendary Lion" released today as "a major operating system jump forward on a sustainable firewall experience" powered by HardenedBSD...

While we have looked a lot at how the Core i9 10900K performs at the top-end of Intel's Comet Lake line-up as well as with the likes of the i5-10600K and i3-10100, here is our first look at the very bottom of the stack with the new Celeron and Pentium processors. Benchmarked today are the Celeron G5900 as a ~$40 processor and the Pentium Gold G6400 that retails for around $60 and compared against other low-end Intel and AMD processors as well as older Intel Core i3 CPUs.

Intel's open-source ISPC (the Intel SPMD Program Compiler) now has preliminary support for code generation targeting their GPUs...

The AMD ROCm developer tool engineers have released a new build of AOMP, their LLVM Clang compiler downstream that adds OpenMP support for Radeon GPU offloading until that support ultimately makes it back upstream into LLVM/Clang...

Building off the recently mainlined Intel work on split lock detection, Intel engineers have now been extending that with bus lock detection support...

The open-source MSM DRM driver developed by Google, Qualcomm's Code Aurora, and other parties as what started out as part of the "Freedreno" driver initiative is continuing to see better support for the newer Adreno 640 and 650 series...

Merged today to mainline for Linux 5.8 Git and also marked for back-porting is a change to make it more difficult to guess the network random number generator's internal state. It looks like it could be for a yet-to-be-published vulnerability...

While GCC with GNU Make and other build systems can scale nicely in compiling many files concurrently, there has been an ongoing GCC effort to be able to parallelize more of the GNU Compiler Collection work when compiling large source files...

A major vulnerability in the GRUB2 boot-loader has been made public today that compromises its UEFI SecureBoot capabilities...

The Samsung 870 QVO solid-state drives announced at the end of June have begun appearing at Internet retailers. The Samsung 870 QVO is the company's latest QLC NAND solid-state drive offering 1TB of storage for a little more than $120 USD all the way up to 4TB for $500 and an 8TB variant for $900. For those curious about the EXT4 file-system Linux performance out of the Samsung 870 QVO, here are some benchmarks.

The popular GNU Nano terminal text editor has reached version 5.0...

For fiscal year 2019 the Apache Software Foundation valued their codebase at around $20 billion USD. The open-source organization has now published their annual report for fiscal year 2020...

Building off the work sent out by Google engineers in recent months and merged for Linux 5.8 around RAPL support for AMD Zen / Zen 2 CPUs with supporting the "runtime average power limiting" counters on Linux similar to Intel's longstanding support, that work has continued now with Zen RAPL support in the PowerCap driver...

For those using the Intel ICE Linux network driver that is used for the likes of the E800 series, it's now going to be easier updating the device firmware from Linux...

Worked out in recent months by an Amazon engineer was optional L1 data cache flushing on context switches to allow for greater computer security in an era of data sampling vulnerabilities and other data leakage issues via side channels. It was sent in for Linux 5.8 but Linus Torvalds characterized it as "beyond stupid" and not being convinced by it. Well, now it's been revised but isn't yet clear if it will appease Torvalds for mainline inclusion...

One of the new network drivers now queued up for Linux 5.9 is the SFC EF100 driver for the EF100 NIC architecture...

While LLVM 11.0 was branched almost two weeks ago with many new/improved features for this open-source compiler stack, it has taken until today to get into shape for issuing the first release candidate...

"Navy Flounder" as the codename for another Navi 2 GPU following the "Sienna Cichlid" Linux driver work has made it into Mesa 20.2 for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

A Microsoft engineer is proposing the Trampoline File Descriptor "TRAMPFD" as a new kernel API for securely dealing with trampoline code on systems. There are concerns already over the potential performance implications but there does seem to be some interest in this approach...

Valve appears to have hired yet another open-source graphics driver developer and will initially be working on the Mesa Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver...

Red Hat has announced the public beta of the forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 release...

Along with OpenMandriva working on a rolling-release version of its distribution long ago derived from Mandrake/Mandriva, OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 is coming along as the next stable release...

The Khronos Group announced this morning that Microsoft and Oculus are the first two companies shipping conformant OpenXR 1.0 implementations...

GNOME OS as the Linux build with bleeding edge GNOME software for testing continues taking shape and a call for testing has been issued...

The latest GNOME performance work being explored is effectively how to make the Intel graphics clock speed ramp up quicker when necessary. Canonical developer Daniel van Vugt is working on a set of patches for enabling triple buffering with Mutter when the GPU starts falling behind and that additional rendering work in turn should ramp up Intel GPUs to their optimal frequency in order to smooth out the performance...

For helping to debug more issues within the Rust-written Redox operating system, the GNU Debugger (GDB) is beginning to work well on the platform...

Intel has been preparing "Power Limit4" support for their Linux PowerCap driver that is being rolled out for the forthcoming Tiger Lake SoCs...

The AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" graphics processors continue seeing open-source driver improvements on Linux in 2020...

Following last week's public disclosure that Intel is running six to twelve months behind on their 7nm production, Intel this evening announced a set of leadership changes to move the company forward...

Purism has revealed more details about their improved "Dogwood" batch that will be soon shipping for their Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone. The battery life is longer but still short of what is provided by modern day flagship smartphones...

A progress report was shared today on the work towards making the Btrfs file-system the default choice for the desktop spins of the upcoming Fedora 33...

Git 2.28 is now officially out this Monday and features continued work on moving off the "master" default branch naming as well as the ongoing work around ultimately transitioning from SHA1 to SHA256 for hashing to prevent possible collisions...

Firefox 79.0 isn't scheduled to be formally announced until Tuesday but the release binaries have now hit Mozilla's FTP servers...

With the Intel Core i9 10900K "Comet Lake" processor here are some fresh GCC compiler benchmarks when looking at the performance of GCC 8.4 versus 9.3 versus a 10.2 snapshot while testing with optimization flags of -O2, -O3 -march=native, and -O3 -march=native -flto.

As outlined a few months ago, Intel's future Sapphire Rapids and Alder Lake processors are set to add a SERIALIZE instruction. That SERIALIZE instruction ensures all flags/register/memory modifications are complete as well as draining all buffered writes to memory before the next instruction is executed. Linux is moving forward with preparing to make use of this new CPU instruction in its function for stopping speculative execution and prefetching of modified code...

DragonFlyBSD developer François Tigeot continues his trek of near single-handedly porting the Intel and Radeon DRM graphics driver code from the Linux kernel to this BSD...

MikroBUS is the open add-on board standard aiming for "maximum expandability with the smallest number of pins". MikroBUS already has fairly robust industry support particularly in the embedded space while finally a mikroBUS mainline kernel driver may be near for Linux to improve the status quo of driver support...