Phoronix

There may be some brief, intermittent downtime this weekend as all of the Phoronix Media web server infrastructure is being upgraded. This also marks the first time in Phoronix's 16+ year history that the servers are AMD powered, thanks to the incredible success of the EPYC 7002 "Rome" series...

XDC 20 was set to take place this September in Poland but is now moving to an online event as a result of the ongoing coronavirus / COVID-19 pandemic...

Given the reignited discussions this week over Btrfs file-system performance stemming from a proposal to switch Fedora on the desktop to using Btrfs, here are some fresh benchmarks of not only Btrfs but alongside XFS, EXT4, F2FS, and for kicks NILFS2 was also tossed into the mix for these mainline file-system tests off the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel.

Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support for their graphics hardware has now rolled out support for the DG1 Xe discrete graphics card...

You may recall that earlier this year X.Org/FreeDesktop.org may have to cut CI services for developers over the cloud expenses associated with that continuous integration service for the likes of Mesa, the X.Org Server, and other components. CI usage was leading to a lot of bandwidth consumption so much so that the X.Org Foundation is facing potential ~70k USD cloud costs this year largely from their continuous integration setup...

The "V3DV" Vulkan driver being developed by Igalia under contract with the Raspberry Pi Foundation has offered a status update on this official driver for the Raspberry Pi 4...

Approaching the two year anniversary next month of the L1TF / Foreshadow vulnerability, a Google engineer has proposed allowing the default mitigation state to be controlled via a Kconfig build-time option...

Following the discussions last month over restricting access to dmesg / kernel logs on Ubuntu in matching the behavior of other Linux distributions for better security practices, Ubuntu 20.10 indeed is moving forward with these plans where dmesg access would require root privileges...

Intel's open-source oneDNN library, which was formerly known as MKL-DNN and DNNL for this deep neural network library now living under the oneAPI umbrella, continues working on some big performance advancements for its 2.0 release...

Intel has sent in their initial batch of graphics driver updates to DRM-Next that in turn are slated to land with the Linux 5.9 cycle once its merge window opens next month...

If you have say a 144Hz gaming monitor as well as a conventional 60Hz secondary display or any other multi-monitor configuration with different refresh rates, there is now another reason to get excited for GNOME 3.38...

The GNOME Shell and Mutter have seen a lot of work come together nicely over the past two months...

Following Intel publishing the initial Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) documentation at the end of June, the open-source/Linux bring-up has continued for these new CPU instruction set extensions set to premiere with Sapphire Rapids next year...

OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 is out today as the Linux distribution built from the same sources as SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 sources...

The LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver that provides a software/CPU-based OpenGL implementation for running on systems as a fallback path when no GPU / hardware OpenGL driver is available, a vendor-neutral path for debug purposes, and similar use-cases, now has OpenGL 4.0 support...

IGC 1.0.4241 is out this morning as the latest version of Intel's open-source graphics compiler that is used by their compute stack for oneAPI and OpenCL...

With the start of a new month comes the latest numbers out of Valve for the rough Linux gaming market percentage from the Steam Survey...

NVIDIA has quietly released Video Codec SDK 10 as the newest version of their proprietary video encode/decode implementation designed for their GPUs...

With Weston 8.0 having shipped in January, Wayland developers are beginning to prepare for the next feature release of this reference Wayland compositor...

As what was formerly FreeNAS, the first beta of TrueNAS CORE 12.0 is available for testing of this BSD-based operating system for NAS devices and other storage setups...

Back in March I benchmarked the Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG) as a means of achieving additional security safeguards for a ~5% performance hit. With LKRG 0.8 having been released a few days ago, here is a fresh look at the LKRG performance compared to the stock kernel on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

There is finally a new release out of The Dark Mod, the original total conversion mod for Doom 3 that transformed into its own standalone game powered by the open-source id Tech 4 engine. This remains the lone flagship example of the open-source id Tech 4 game engine in action by the community (besides the DHEWM3 / RBDOOM-3-BFG engine work) with ioDoom3 having never taken off like ioquake3...

Last month you may recall that the free software purists maintaining the GNU Linux-Libre kernel dropped the Intel "iGPU Leak" security fix for Ivybridge / Haswell as they considered the compiled shaders/kernels responsible for clearing those residual contexts to be binary blobs. A resolution is now pending for upstream...

With it already having been a few months since systemd 245 debuted with systemd-homed, the systemd developers have begun their release dance for what will be systemd 246...

While RDNA/Navi brought Wave32 support, the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for Linux has decided to switch to make greater use now of Wave64 for more shaders...

Following recent talk of Fedora potentially switching to Btrfs and Red Hat's Storage Instatiation Daemon among other Linux storage areas pursued by Red Hat, it turns out "Project Springfield" is some effort being pursued by the enterprise Linux giant for improving in this area...

Aside from the H1'2020 open-source/Linux highlights, here is our look at the top stories for June 2020 on Phoronix with many interesting software and hardware topics...

AOMP 11.6-2 is out this evening as the final Radeon Open Compute update for H1'2020. This is AMD's LLVM Clang downstream focused on providing OpenMP offloading to Radeon GPUs...

Intel has introduced a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver for Linux...

As one of the last minute change proposals for Fedora 33 is to introduce the Red Hat backed Storage Instantiation Daemon "SID" though at least for this first release would be off by default. The Storage Instantiation Daemon is one of the latest storage efforts being worked on by Red Hat engineers...

The Crust CRM suite that aims to compete with Salesforce has been open-source under an Apache 2.0 license but now its paywall has been dropped to make it more compelling as a free software CRM suite...

Fedora stakeholders are debating the merits of potentially ending legacy BIOS support for the Linux distribution and to only support UEFI-based installations...

One of the security improvements being worked on in recent months by Intel's open-source team has been FGKASLR. But how is the performance overhead compared to just traditional KASLR? Here are benchmarks looking at the performance impact of FGKASLR on top, just KASLR, and then no address space layout randomization.

The Khronos Group has announced the provisional specification of SYCL 2020 as the newest version of this higher-level programming model originally designed for OpenCL that is based on pure single-source C++...

Firefox 78.0 is available this morning as the newest version of Mozilla's web browser. Firefox 78.0 is also significant in being the newest Extended Support Release (ESR) series...

The AMD Radeon Vulkan driver developers are ending out June by shipping their sixth open-source snapshot of the quarter...

KDE has completed its transition to its own self-hosted GitLab instance for Git hosting and other developer services for handling of bug reports and merge requests...

It's been quite an unfortunately wild year thus far with everything going on in the world, but at least within the open-source / Linux scope it's been an exciting time as ever. Here is a look at the top stories on Phoronix during the first half of this year...

Fedora for the past few releases doesn't show the GRUB boot-loader menu by default when only Fedora is installed on the system as there is little purpose for most users and it just interrupts the boot flow. But for those wanting to access the GRUB bootloader menu on reboot, they offer integration in GNOME to easily reboot into this menu. The other exception is the menu will be shown if the previous boot failed. This functionality has relied on downstream patches but now they are working towards a better upstream solution...

Zink is the generic OpenGL over Vulkan driver that has been in development as part of Mesa's Gallium3D code. It was just earlier this month that Zink achieved OpenGL 3.0 support and now it looks like OpenGL 3.1 will soon be flipped on...

Lua 5.4 shipped today as the newest version of the interpreter for this scripting programming language that is particularly popular for embedding within games and other applications...

Recently AMD posted UVD video decode support for GCN 1.0 with the AMDGPU driver, one of the long holdouts for letting the AMDGPU DRM driver approach feature parity with the longstanding Radeon DRM driver that is the default for GCN 1.0/1.1 era GPUs. That AMDGPU UVD GCN 1.0 decode support is going into the Linux 5.9 kernel later this summer after years ago Radeon driver developers largely dismissed the efforts of porting the UVD decode capability for these original GCN graphics cards over to AMDGPU...

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for hosting firmware files to be consumed by Fwupd for firmware updating from Linux is on quite a streak...

Slated for Linux 5.9 is finally mainlining the FSGSBASE patches that have been floating around the kernel mailing list for years. Testing last week showed the tentative x86/fsgsbase patches helping Intel Xeon Linux performance but with AMD also supporting this instruction set extension going back to Bulldozer, how is it looking on the likes of AMD? Here are some benchmarks.

Over the weekend I began running some benchmarks of the Linux 5.8 development kernel on the Lenovo Flex 5 laptop with Ryzen 5 4500U. One of the standouts so far for from this Linux 5.8 testing compared to the stable 5.6/5.7 kernel series is better Radeon graphics performance with the Renoir laptop...

Following the announcement last week that future Apple computers will use in-house ARM-powered chips, some open-source projects have already begun prepping for the future ARM64-supported macOS 11...

Linux 5.6 brought initial USB4 support that primarily was starting things off by basing things off the existing Thunderbolt 3 support in the kernel for which this latest USB standard is based. For the Linux 5.9 kernel later this summer it's looking like there will be further work on getting Linux's USB4 support into good shape ahead of hardware appearing in the months ahead...

On top of an optimization to lower render times and reduce power usage and fixing window culling as another performance optimization, Canonical's Daniel van Vugt also came across another serious optimization for GNOME Shell's icon grid performance...

Linus Torvalds just pushed out Linux 5.8-rc3 as the newest weekly test candidate for the upcoming Linux 5.8 that should debut as stable around early August...

While Ubuntu continues in their path of OpenZFS integration, Fedora is revisiting the possibility of using Btrfs on the desktop, Red Hat is continuing to invest in Stratis, and Reiser5 is being developed, Bcachefs as the file-system born out of the Linux block cache code is continuing to evolve...