Phoronix

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...

While we are most excited about Godot 4.0 for its Vulkan renderer for this leading open-source game engine, there continues to be a lot of other improvements building up for this major release...

Intel's open-source media team has released a new development snapshot of their media driver that provides GPU-accelerated video encode/decode capabilities on Linux...

The open-source Haiku operating system that continues maintaining compatibility with BeOS and inspiration from its design has continued in its quest of better supporting modern hardware...

The Linux kernel is seeing some modern work done to its driver for supporting the Apple Desktop Bus on Macintosh II era systems...

It took until 2020 for an Intel developer to land a patch providing support for two instructions supported by AMD "Excavator" CPUs but not exposed by the "bdver4" target...

Following Linux's UEFI code getting cleaned up earlier this year in preparation for RISC-V support being added and then some early RISC-V UEFI patches, a more comprehensive set of patches for enabling UEFI support on RISC-V under Linux have been sent out...

Our recent benchmarks have shown WSL/WSL2 performance on the latest Windows 10 builds to generally be quite good compared to running bare metal Linux. But past the May 2020 Update and on the latest Insider Preview builds is the initial support for GPU acceleration in conjunction with updated Windows graphics drivers. The initial emphasis is on GPU compute with DirectML and for NVIDIA hardware CUDA support as well. Here are a couple CUDA benchmarks that ran gracefully under WSL2 albeit the performance leaves a lot to be desired...

This leading open-source physically based renderer is about to get even better with the upcoming LuxCore 2.4 release...

Intel updated their instruction set extensions programming reference guide that along with other additions now details the Intel AMX (Advanced Matrix Extensions) coming with Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs next year...

Linux Mint 20 "Ulyana" is shipping this weekend as the newest major release to this user-friendly desktop Linux distribution derived from the Ubuntu LTS package set...

Following the proposal at the end of last year over GCC 11 aiming to default to C++17 for its C++ front-end, that change is now in place for GNU Compiler Collection 11...

Freedreno Gallium3D is the latest Mesa driver implementing an on-disk shader cache...

KDE developers remain as busy as ever, especially when it comes to fixing bugs...

On Friday the initial batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes were submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.9 merge window happening in August...

The upstream virt-manager project including the virt-manager user-interface is still being maintained, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 has decided to deprecate the virt-manager UI moving forward...

More than a decade ago Fedora was routinely trying to pursue the Btrfs file-system by default but those hopes were abandoned long ago. Heck, Red Hat Enterprise Linux no longer even supports Btrfs. While all Red Hat / Fedora interests in Btrfs seemed abandoned years ago especially with Red Hat developing their Stratis storage technology, there is a new (and serious) proposal about moving to Btrfs for Fedora 33 desktop variants...

As part of our Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U Linux benchmarking there have been multiple requests for showing how various Linux distributions run and perform with these exciting Ryzen 4000 series mobile CPUs. Here are some benchmarks not only looking at six Linux distributions but also the performance of Microsoft Windows 10 as was preloaded on the Lenovo Flex 5 15-inch 2-in-1.

Daniel van Vugt of Canonical who has been responsible for many GNOME performance optimizations in recent years has another tantalizing improvement under review...

For aiding in testing and other purposes, the Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) range for FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync setups will now be exposed via DebugFS with Linux 5.9...