Phoronix

Recently there has been an uptick in Linux upstream support activity around Loongson CPUs, the Chinese-made MIPS64 CPUs. With Linux 5.8, the newest Loongson 3 CPU models can even begin supporting KVM-based virtualization...

Given the increasing number of security issues requiring compiler-based security mitigations with the likes of the Intel LVI attack to Arm Straight Line Speculation just being the two latest examples, Apple's LLVM team has been spearheading a new security group for the upstream LLVM developer community to better manage security-related matters...

The Linux kernel's 9P protocol support with the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel will see the potential for faster performance with its Xen transport code...

Last year Valve in cooperation with consulting firm Collabora published their work on extending the futex system call for more optimal thread pool synchronization with a means of waiting on any of several futexes. This kernel-level work paired with patched user-space for Wine/Proton allows better matching behavior on Windows. It's been months since hearing anything on Valve's futex effort while today a futex2 system call was published for discussion...

Following our Intel Core i5 10600K and Core i9 10900K Linux benchmarks, here is a look at the lowest-end Core "Comet Lake" processor in the form of the Core i3 10100. Thanks to the increased pressure from AMD Ryzen, Intel now has a 4 core / 8 thread Core i3 processor at less than $150 USD. Here is a head-to-head matchup of the AMD Ryzen 3 3300X and Intel Core i3 10100 processors in more than 350 benchmarks while also looking at the power and thermal efficiency in this largest comparison to date for these low-end desktop CPUs.

Merged overnight into the Linux 5.8 code-base is KCSAN, the Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer that is a dynamic race detector for spotting flaws in the kernel code...

The latest Linux kernel patch work we are seeing out of AMD in preparations for Zen 3 processors coming later this year is INVPCID instruction support for KVM virtualization guests...

The first round of "x86/urgent" fixes have been sent in to Linux 5.8 just ahead of this weekend's 5.8-rc1 milestone while many of these fixes are marked for back-porting to the stable series...

With Mesa 20.1.1 having shipped, Mesa 20.0.8 was released today as the final point release of last quarter's Mesa 20.0 series...

AMD has shared with us that they have published a video to explain in basic terms for the audience at large "What is ROCm?", a.k.a. the Radeon Open Compute stack...

Legendary processor engineer Jim Keller has resigned from Intel just over two years since he joined the company to much fanfare...

For those making use of GNU's "adns" asynchronous DNS client library, important security updates are out today...

Following last week's big Proton 5.0-8 release, Valve and CodeWeavers have just released Proton 5.0-9 as a quick bug fix release...

Linux enthusiasts have long been after System76 to offer an AMD Ryzen powered laptop and today they announced such in the form of the new Serval WS...

Last week I provided some fresh benchmarks of Windows 10 May 2020 vs. Linux on AMD. As has been common across multiple systems particularly with Threadripper, using Linux leads to a ~20% uptick in performance at large over Windows. While at times we have seen similar advantages for Intel CPUs on Linux, with the new Intel Core i9 10900K Comet Lake processor it is a very competitive race between Windows 10 May 2020 Update and Ubuntu Linux.

While not the long-awaited GIMP 3.0, GIMP 2.10.20 is out today as the newest stable release for this open-source image editor alternative to the likes of the proprietary Photoshop software...

Disclosed back in March was the LVI attack (Load Value Injection) affecting Intel CPUs. Mitigating LVI requires compiler toolchain changes and LLVM 11 merged its LVI mitigation last month that adds a load fence after each instruction that may be vulnerable to this attack, similar to the GNU Assembler changes. Now though LLVM is adding an unoptimized version of their LVI pass...

Martin Peres who is known for his decade plus in the X.Org community for his longstanding work on the open-source Nouveau driver and in recent years working on Intel's open-source graphics driver team has been brewing a new hobby project around generic open-source Linux drivers for FPGAs...

While Intel's CrossTalk/SRBDS vulnerability dominated the conversation on Tuesday, Arm quietly revealed a new speculative execution vulnerability of its own called Straight Line Speculation...

With Intel supporting Adaptive-Sync/VRR with Gen11+ graphics and these days with effectively only supporting xf86-video-modesetting for X.Org-driven Linux desktops rather than their basically dead xf86-video-intel driver, the Intel open-source Linux developers continue working on plumbing variable refresh rate support into this generic modesetting DDX...

Sent in last week to the Linux 5.8 mainline kernel were all the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates...

The LLVMpipe software OpenGL implementation that recently has seen work on MSAA, tessellation shader support, and other improvements, now has a working on-disk shader cache implementation...

The Linux MTD subsystem that abstracts raw flash devices will allow emulating MLC NANDs as SLC in an attempt to boost reliability...

Mesa 20.1 was released at the end of May while now Mesa 20.1.1 is out as the first point release to this Q2'2020 driver series...

The ACPI-defined Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) CPUFreq driver will support "boosting" to the optimal performance level with the Linux 5.8 kernel...

Intel has provided more public details today on their hybrid processor efforts, initially with their "Lakefield" CPUs for small form factor devices...

Following yesterday's disclosure of CrossTalk / SRBDS after a nearly two year embargo period for this Special Register Buffer Data Sampling vulnerability, I have been running benchmarks on multiple systems for the past nearly 24 hours. Here are some preliminary data points for both synthetic and real-world workloads on various Intel CPUs before/after mitigating SRBDS with the updated Intel microcode.

The previously reported on Sienna Cichlid support for AMD's RadeonSI OpenGL driver has finished its quick review process and now merged for Mesa 20.2...

On the desktop side for Ubuntu 20.10 one of the changes we have been eager to see is ZFS encryption support on new installations in an easy-to-use manner and extending their existing OpenZFS file-system support. That ZFS encryption support has begun to land...

Jaegeuk Kim has sent in the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) improvements for the Linux 5.8 kernel...

While Linux 5.6-ck1 was much delayed due to Dr. Con Kolivas being busy designing COVID-19 equipment, that work has settled down and the retired anaesthetist is out with his newest Linux patches for improving system responsiveness...

Following a survey of FreeBSD developers gauging interest in a new Code of Conduct and then a follow-up survey of keeping their current CoC versus adopting one similar to the LLVM or Go projects, FreeBSD has now settled on a new document...

Following today's disclosure by Intel of the CrossTalk/SRBDS vulnerability that is MDS-based and vulnerable across physical cores with affected instructions, Intel released new CPU microcode to mitigate the most prone/significant instructions. I've been benchmarking the impact of this new microcode on multiple systems and will have a full report tonight or tomorrow morning... But here is a look specifically at the look at the impact on the RdRand performance...

Haiku, the nearly two decade old open-source operating system still preserving compatibility with BeOS, is out with its second beta release...

This morning I noted CrossTalk / SRBDS as the newest side-channel vulnerability following Intel's monthly security advisories being sent out. It turns out Intel broke their own embargo on the disclosure and I happened to spot it quickly before they retracted it. In the hours since, the university researchers behind this CrossTalk vulnerability reached out and have provided an embargoed copy of the whitepaper. As of now, the formal disclosure time has passed so information on this new side-channel Intel CPU vulnerability is public and it shows for the first time that speculative execution can enable attackers to leak sensitive information across physical cores on Intel CPUs.

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for serving up firmware/BIOS files to Linux users has now served over 16 million downloads thanks to cooperation from over 80 vendors that have uploaded more than 4,000 firmware files...

Details are still coming in but INTEL-SA-00320, a.k.a. "CrossTalk", is the newest Intel side-channel CPU vulnerability...

The open-source Nouveau kernel driver has supported Volta GPUs for some time and since Linux 5.6 also supported open-source initialization of Turing GPUs for hardware acceleration. But missing for Volta and Turing has been the Mesa-side support for enabling 3D (OpenGL) and compute (OpenCL) functionality on these newer GPUs. That is finally changing with pending Mesa patches...

Consulting firm Igalia that has been working under contract with the Raspberry Pi Foundation on developing a Raspberry Pi Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 and future SBCs has provided a status update on their development efforts...

The KDE community has released Plasma 5.19 on schedule this morning...

There are some urgent fixes pending for the x86/x86_64 speculative execution handling for the Linux kernel following a Google security engineer discovering these issues, including one of the fixes address a situation that unfairly impacted AMD CPUs...

Merged back in Linux 5.7 was the new exFAT file-system driver backed by Samsung and replacing the prior "staging" exFAT driver that had been around for the prior few kernel releases. Samsung has now sent their queued up exFAT improvements for the Linux 5.8 kernel...

The char/misc pull request for Linux 5.8 is big at nearly one hundred thousand lines of new code...

Canonical's Andrea Righi who is on the Ubuntu Kernel Team sent out a set of patches last week working on opportunistic memory reclaim support as a means of achieving much speedier system hibernation and resume performance...

With the staging/IIO subsystem changes for Linux 5.8 arguably most notable is what didn't make the cut this round...

Last week AMD's open-source Linux engineers published the initial Linux kernel driver patches for the "Sienna Cichlid" GPU that appears to be almost definitely the big Navi 2. Now that those AMDGPU patches are public, the folks working on the user-space drivers have had the go-ahead to begin volleying their related patches for Sienna Cichlid. Out today is the RadeonSI OpenGL driver support for this next-generation Navi GPU...

Given the recent releases of Chrome 83 and Firefox 77 while Firefox 78 was promoted to beta, here are some current web browser benchmarks from the Linux desktop for these different browser releases.

On Sunday Greg Kroah-Hartman began sending in his pull requests to the different areas of the kernel he oversees for the ongoing Linux 5.8 merge window...

Longtime open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developer Chris Wilson on Sunday sent out a big patch series that introduces a new fair low-latency scheduler for the Intel kernel graphics driver...

Last week saw the main Direct Rendering Manager driver updates for Linux 5.8 with a lot on the open-source graphics front while a secondary pull request was submitted today with the Freedreno "MSM" DRM driver changes for this open-source Qualcomm Adreno driver implementation...