Phoronix

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...

Debuting this weekend was LuxCoreRender 2.4, the newest version of this impressive open-source physically based renderer...

Linus Torvalds has performed his usual Sunday dance and released the Linux 5.8-rc7 kernel as one of the final test releases before Linux 5.8 is declared stable in August...

Even without the Samsung OSG support these days, the Enlightenment project continues making nice progress...

While the current Vulkan API is exhaustive enough to implement full-featured Wayland compositors and X11 window managers, to date there hasn't been too much adoption considering OpenGL is still more pervasive among hardware/drivers and it's obviously a significant effort writing a new compositor from scratch. One of the leading (among few) examples of a Vulkan-powered window manager / compositor is ChamferWM, which does continue to be developed. SWVKC meanwhile is one that has been seeing development this year as an alpha-stage Wayland Vulkan compositor...

Set to be formally introduced next quarter alongside Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 is the long-overdue overhaul of OpenBenchmarking.org -- the biggest upgrade to our public "cloud" platform for benchmark aggregation and result analytics since its debut nearly one decade ago. Before then, a public beta of OpenBenchmarking.org should get underway in the next few weeks while here is an early look at some of the changes...

Last month on Phoronix were 350+ benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 3 3300X vs. Intel Core i3 10100, including a number of Linux gaming performance tests. Following that I also ran some tests with the Core i5 10600K tossed in for those that may be weighing between the Ryzen 3 / Core i3 vs. Core i5 for gaming. Here are those additional data points...

Making waves just over a year ago in the GNU Compiler Collection community was the "Ranger" project for on-demand range generator that's been worked on for several years at Red Hat. While their goals for GCC 10 didn't pan out, it's looking like in the next few months more of the Ranger infrastructure will land and thus putting it in the window for GCC 11...

One of many interesting Google Summer of Code 2020 projects is working on automated benchmarking for NetBSD in order to allow for performance/regression testing of this BSD operating system known for its portability across CPU architectures...

The work on Zstd'ing the Linux kernel for using this Facebook-developed Zstandard compression algorithm to in turn speed up decompression times when booting Linux kernel images might be mainlined as soon as Linux 5.9...

Started back in 2018 during the Google Summer of Code was work for reporting system power information within the GNOME-Usage utility. While some user-interface elements were fleshed out and other engineering completed, the code isn't yet merged or ready for users as the approach for accomplishing the per-program power reporting is still being devised...

While Intel's open-source engineers have been working on Tiger Lake enablement for Linux going back roughly a year with many kernel patches spanning the different areas over numerous kernel releases, which aligns with Intel's ongoing cadence of ensuring good Linux hardware support at launch even for consumer hardware, there have been a few stragglers in the Linux bring-up for Tiger Lake...

On the mailing lists and browsing various Git "-next" repositories it's felt like "damn, there are a lot of patches about replacing HTTP links with HTTPS all of a sudden" inside the kernel sources and documentation. Indeed, for Linux 5.9 where applicable HTTP links are being replaced for HTTPS...

David Howells of Red Hat continues striving for great improvements to Linux storage...

KDE Plasma 5.20 is bringing an important feature in further closing the gap between Wayland and X11 feature parity... Finally there will be working screen recording and screencasting on Wayland for compatible applications...

A patch queued up into the driver core tree ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.9 kernel will allow further restricting access to DebugFS...

Announced earlier this year was the SD Express specification offering around 4x the speed of existing SD cards thanks to leveraging PCI Express 4.0 (or otherwise PCI Express 3.0 fallback) and the NVMe 1.4 protocol. The Linux kernel has begun preparing for SD Express compatibility...

With basically at the cut-off for new feature material wanting to get into DRM-Next for Linux 5.9, Nouveau DRM maintainer Ben Skeggs of Red Hat today sent in the primary feature pull...

As some additional Core i5 10600K Linux benchmarks for historical perspective, here is a look at how the Core i5 10600K looks in comparison to the Core i5 7600K Skylake, Core i5 4670 Haswell, and Core i5 2500K Sandy Bridge processors on Ubuntu Linux. There were 250 benchmarks ran on each of the CPUs under test.

While Intel on the hardware manufacturing side continues facing stiff challenges, on the open-source software side the company continues making legendary progress. Out in today's Intel Graphics Compiler and in turn Intel Compute Runtime releases as part of their GPGPU toolchain is the recent open-sourcing and integration of their Vector Compute back-end...

Approaching two years already since the release of Mir 1.0 following its shift to Wayland support, Mir 2.0 is now available...

With System76 working towards offering more AMD Linux laptop options as well as continuing to expand their line-up of AMD desktop offerings, it appears their next hurdle is on bringing Coreboot to these current-generation AMD platforms...

Systemd 246 should be shipping in the days ahead...

DigiKam 7.0 is out for this KDE/Qt-aligned open-source photography manager solution...

The initial batch of WiFi/wireless driver improvements slated for Linux 5.9 landed in net-next this week with a few noteworthy additions...

The Linux 5.9 kernel is set to introduce support for the new IBM POWER System Call Vectored (SCV) ABI with the new SCV and RFSCV instructions. These new instructions can help with performance...

While GNOME software may be free as in beer, at today's GUADEC 2020 annual GNOME developers conference there was a call that GNOME software should label their "embodied carbon cost" as part of collecting more data on the environmental impact of creating said software and working to reduce said impact...

Following the recent Chrome 84 stable release, Google has now promoted Chrome 85 to beta as their latest feature update to this cross-platform web browser...

Intel open-source developer Kristen Carlson Accardi continues work on Function Granular Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (FGKASLR) as a big improvement over traditional KASLR address space layout randomization...

Unity 2020.1 is out today as the latest feature release for this popular, cross-platform game engine...

It was just at the start of July that the Raspberry Pi 4 "V3DV" Vulkan driver started running more sample code while now it reached the milestone of being able to run vkQuake -- the Vulkan ports for the classic Quake games...

While it was just two days ago that AMDVLK 2020.Q3.1 debuted and normally there is a two to three week release cadence for these open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver code drops, this morning was already met by the debut of AMDVLK 2020.Q3.2...

Version 10.2 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is now available...

Way back in 2013 there was a presentation at the Linux Plumbers Conference around Google's work on user-level threads and how they were working on new kernel functionality for using regular threads in a cooperative fashion and building various features off that. Fast forward to today, that functionality has been in use internally at Google for a range of services for latency-sensitive services and greater control over user-space scheduling while now finally in 2020 they are working towards open-sourcing that work...

RenderDoc as the open-source, cross-platform, cross graphics API debugger tool for profiling and analyzing issues across Vulkan / Direct3D / OpenGL / GLES continues getting even better with its advanced tool set...

The virtual GNOME conference kicked off today, GUADEC 2020, and one of the talks was focused on running "GNOME OS" on real hardware...

It was just at the start of July that the LLVMpipe software driver gained OpenGL 4.0 support at long last. Days after that milestone OpenGL 4.2 support was reached for this driver that offers OpenGL acceleration atop CPUs either for fallback purposes or a vendor-neutral debug path. Now just days before the Mesa 20.2 branching, OpenGL 4.3 support has been cleared!..

Well known open-source AMD graphics driver developer Marek Olšák has landed a set of 15 patches into Mesa 20.2 for improving the RadeonSI driver's handling within virtualized environments...

With 129 tests carried out while also looking at the CPU power consumption and temperatures during benchmarking, here is a look at how the CPU frequency scaling governor plays a role in the performance of the latest-generation AMD Ryzen 4000 "Renoir" laptops for Linux.

Stemming from documentation released by NVIDIA last year, the forthcoming Linux 5.9 kernel will feature CRC support on the display side thanks to the development work by Red Hat...

Fedora 33 is already set to be one of their largest releases ever and it's only getting bigger...

The KDE Slimbook is getting a big upgrade in the form of the ProX and ProX 15 that are powered by AMD's Ryzen 7 4800H "Renoir" processor for offering much better performance and all-around better specs...

With LLVM Clang 9 and Linux 5.3 the mainline kernel can be built following a years-long effort to be able to build the mainline Linux x86_64 kernel with Clang rather than GCC, which followed the AArch64 efforts in a similar achievement. Now with Linux 5.9 coming later this year, the i386 / 32-bit x86 mainline kernel will also now be capable of building under Clang...

Out this evening is OpenRGB v0.3 as the newest feature release of this open-source RGB lighting control solution that works on both Windows and Linux. ASUS, ASRock, Corsair, GSKILL, Gigabyte, Kingston, MSI, Razer, and Thermaltake are among the brands of devices supported by this growing software package...

Version 0.13 of the Build2 build toolchain is now available, the open-source project inspired by the Rust programming language's Cargo system but instead tooled for C/C++ while serving not only as the build system but also a package and project manager...

LLVM 10.0 released back in March and today marks the first point release finally shipping. Normally they try to be a bit more punctual in shipping the seldom point releases to LLVM but today marks LLVM 10.0.1 finally being available, just over one month out from the planned LLVM 11.0 debut...

Back in June when Arm disclosed their Straight Line Speculation (SLS) vulnerability affecting their modern ARM processor designs there wasn't a whole lot of attention. It seems SLS is serious enough that Arm is working on bringing their compiler-based mitigations to existing GCC releases beyond it already being in the current development code...