Phoronix

Mesa 20.1 feature development is now over with it being branched from Git master and subsequently Mesa 20.1-RC1 being released this evening...

Popcorn Linux has been a multi-year effort out of Virginia Tech's Software and Systems Research Group for distributed thread execution across systems and even potentially different ISAs/accelerators given today's heterogeneous hardware...

It looks like AMD Zen 3 CPUs will finally be supporting PCID! And memory protection keys are coming too, at least according to AMD's latest programmer reference manual...

A premium supporter was asking this week whether for those newly-upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS if the graphics stack is in good enough shape or if I would recommend running Mesa 20.1-devel for better AMD Linux gaming performance... The short answer, sans any particular changes you are after in Mesa 20.1-devel, the bigger gain for running on this new Ubuntu release is to instead enable RADV+ACO as a much more pressing boost...

VESA announced today version 2.0 of the DisplayPort Alternate Mode specification...

Adding to the last minute AMD Radeon additions for making the Mesa 20.1 feature cut-off is enabling displayable DCC support for Navi 12 and Navi 14 graphics processors...

Longtime Linux DRM developer Noralf Trønnes has written a new driver for Linux to serve generic USB display purposes. This driver was written following his idea of turning a Raspberry Pi Zero into a USB to HDMI display adapter...

If you are still running any pre-Sandybridge Intel hardware, you should really consider upgrading to modern hardware for the performance and efficiency gains... But should you still be tied to an old i865-based system, there is an improvement coming in 2020 for Linux users...

Back in 2018 Microsoft announced Shader Conductor as one of their newest open-source projects at the time for cross-compiling HLSL to other shading languages like GLSL. Out this morning is Shader Conductor v0.3...

Jolla announced today Sailfish OS 3.3 "Rokua" as the newest version of their Linux-based smartphone platform...

The Trinity Desktop Environment is marking its tenth anniversary with a new release of this desktop forked from the KDE 3.5 code-base...

BLAKE3, the cryptographic hash function that advertises itself as being "much faster" than the likes of SHA1 and MD5 and its predecessor BLAKE2 while being more secure and highly parallelizable has seen an experimental implementation for GPU-based acceleration using the Vulkan API...

There's been a lot of interesting work hitting Mesa Git this week ahead of the Mesa 20.1 code branching and feature freeze. Merged this afternoon was a rather simple optimization benefiting Gen11 (Icelake) and newer for their open-source Vulkan driver, it's such a simple change it is almost surprising it took so long to benefit...

QEMU 5.0 is out today for this processor emulator that is a key piece to the Linux virtualization stack...

Valve along with their comrades at CodeWeavers are preparing Proton 5.0-7 as the newest version of their Wine-based software powering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Last month we provided some early benchmarks looking at the Ubuntu 20.04 X.Org vs. Wayland gaming performance under GNOME 3.36, but now that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS has been officially released, here is a look at the AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance across a wide variety of desktops on both X.Org and Wayland where supported.

Fedora 32 has officially been released as the latest installment of this Red Hat supported community Linux distribution known for its bleeding-edge features and packages...

The Intel P-State driver has been going through a number of improvements recently including transitioning to the "Schedutil" governor by default on some systems so far in this governor making use of scheduler utilization data. But Intel's graphics team meanwhile has been working on P-State changes to improve the GPU-bound energy efficiency and that is now spun as a new "adaptive" governor...

One of the many new features coming in Mesa 20.1 is experimental NIR support for the vintage Radeon "R600g" driver. That NIR back-end isn't yet to feature parity but is now one step closer with tesselation support now being available along this code path...

Con Kolivas is out with his Linux 5.6-ck1 optimization patch-set and version 0.199 of the MuQSS scheduler. This re-base against the Linux 5.6 stable kernel is coming late due to Kolivas leading a team making 3D printed COVID-19 equipment in Australia...

After the merge request was open for more than a half-year, Mesa 20.1 has landed a Vulkan device selection layer for choosing between multiple Vulkan-enabled GPUs on a given system as the default device...

Those running the RADV Vulkan driver on AMD APUs could soon find themselves having even better performance in select games...

Announced back on 14 April were AMD's newest members of the EPYC 7002 "Rome" family, the 7Fx2 high frequency processors. Back on launch day we posted the AMD EPYC 7F52 Linux benchmarks for that 16-core/32-thread CPU with a staggering 256MB cache and clocking up to 3.9GHz. In this article today are our initial benchmarks of the EPYC 7F32 as the 8-core/16-thread processor yielding a 128MB L3 cache and clock speeds up to 3.9GHz.

Micron announced today the "World’s First Open-Source Storage Engine Designed for SSDs and Storage Class Memory"... Or simply put, yet another key-value store database and this time designed for high performance SSDs and persistent memory...

For the past five months there has been a bug report affecting the likes of Pop OS 19.10 and Fedora 31 over the GNOME Shell Calendar server using "20~25% CPU all the time" and "every 2-3 seconds or so there is a CPU usage spike where the calendar processes eat something like 20-25% of the CPU." That is significant on modern CPUs as well as on battery life for laptops while finally the issue has been fixed...

While the Open Sound System (OSS) usage hasn't been prevalent on Linux systems in many years, on NetBSD there still is some software making use of the OSS interfaces in not supporting the native NetBSD audio interfaces. Better OSS compatibility via a translation layer is available while ultimately they are working on transitioning more open-source software to support the native interfaces...

The Qt Company has published an initial release schedule for Qt 6.0...

The new spi-amd driver looks like it could make its debut in Linux 5.8...

Following the release a few weeks back of the Intel Media Driver Q1-2020 update for this open-source Linux video encode/decode driver for Intel graphics, their first pre-release of the Q2-2020 driver update is now out for testing...

Just days after Canonical shipped the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" release, Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla" is now open for development...

OpenCL 3.0 is being released today in provisional form. OpenCL 3.0 is making OpenCL 2.x functionality now optional to make it better suited for a range of devices plus there is new functionality introduced like subgroups, extensions for asynchronous data copies, and more.

The routine Vulkan 1.2.139 maintenance update brings with it two new extensions...

Linus Torvalds just released the third weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 5.7 kernel...

Manjaro 20.0 "Lysia" is out today with its flagship Xfce spin as well as its GNOME and KDE editions for this popular, desktop-minded, Arch-based Linux distribution...

With the Raptor Blackbird popular among open-source enthusiasts for a libre 64-bit Linux desktop compute and that getting more POWER9 hardware out in the wild, more users are interested in seeing Wine work for 64-bit POWER hardware. Last year was some early porting work done by Raptor Computing Systems but now a cleaned up patch series has been sent out with this very primitive PPC64 work...

Going on since 2016 has been the long-running effort getting the Software Guard Extensions (SGX) support into the mainline Linux kernel. Sent out this week was the SGX foundation patches for the twenty-ninth time as it works to get into shape for upstream acceptance...

Some news that went seemingly unreported at large this month until stumbling across it... AMD has joined the Academy Software Foundation as a premier member. This joint initiative between the Linux Foundation and Academy of Motion Picture Arts is focused on pushing open-source software through the motion picture and content creation industries. Additionally, the Open Shading Language has become a new hosted project under the Academy Software Foundation...

Last year a SUSE developer sent out a set of patches adding authentication support to the Btrfs file-system. Btrfs already has checksums on meta-data blocks and data blocks while the original implementation of these authentication patches was performing HMAC on a SHA256 checksum as a keyed hash. A proper key in turn is then needed to mount a verified file-system...

One of the areas being worked on upstream recently for the RISC-V architecture's Linux kernel support is EFI handling. The preliminary work for supporting EFI on RISC-V is set to land for the Linux 5.8 kernel...

With the somewhat surprising announcement this week that Intel's Clear Linux platform would be divesting from the desktop and focusing on server and cloud workloads, the first visible changes on the desktop side are expected next week...

With JEDEC's Universal Flash Storage (UFS) v3.1 specification from January one of the new features is the Host Performance Booster mode for faster and cheaper UFS capabilities. Micron and others have been working on this UFS Host Performance Booster support for Linux...

As I noted earlier this month, AMD has been amassing many graphics driver improvements for Linux 5.8. On Friday marked their first pull request to DRM-Next of the Radeon graphics driver improvements for this next kernel cycle...

Thanks to a FreeBSD Foundation Community Grant, FreeBSD 13 will be bringing up to a 5x performance improvement for if_bridge, the kernel code for network bridge device support...

Built off yesterday's exciting Wine 5.7 release that brought more WineD3D Vulkan bits and the start of a USB driver, Wine-Staging 5.7 is out with a number of its patches upstreamed into yesterday's release plus a bit of new functionality...

Friday marked the release of LXQt 0.15, the first big update to this lightweight Qt5-based desktop environment since January 2019. There comes a fair number of improvements with this desktop that was born out of the LXDE and Razor-qt initiatives...

In addition to this week seeing the slew of KDE Apps updates, developers working on the applications, Plasma, and other areas of the KDE ecosystem have remained as busy as ever during the COVID-19 crisis for continuing to improve this open-source desktop...

Adding to the growing list of changes building up for Linux 5.8 this summer is now having Tiger Lake Thunderbolt/USB4 support...

One of the lesser known Mozilla software efforts is DeepSpeech as a speech-to-text engine built atop TensorFlow with CPU and GPU (CUDA) acceleration. Friday marked a new release of this DeepSpeech software that is yielding great results for converting spoken audio streams to text...

Earlier this week I highlighted the Dell XPS 7390 "Ice Lake" ultrabook seeing a big performance drop on recent versions of the Linux kernel. Intel engineers seem to have sorted it out and now have a solution in place, which affects those running Linux 5.4 or newer...

Wine 5.7 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release and it's a fun one with multiple interesting advancements...