Back in October 2018 was a patch series out of Linaro for "thermal pressure" support in the Linux kernel for providing better task placement when CPUs are running hot/overheating to the extent their CPU frequencies are being downclocked/limited. Out this weekend is a revised version of that Linux thermal pressure support...
One of the missing features for those with AMD Ryzen laptops has been the lack of a Sensor Fusion Hub driver that is needed for supporting the accelerometer and gyroscopic sensors for the display and related laptop sensor functionality. This week AMD finally posted patches for a Sensor Fusion Hub Linux driver...
One of the many devices being pursued by the PINE64 crew is the PineTab open-source ARM 64-bit tablet. Thanks to being another Allwinner A64 product and not using any too bleeding edge tech, the PineTab has patches available to get it running off a mainline Linux kernel...
In addition to their AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature updates sent out on Thursday, AMD also sent in a special pull request to DRM-Next on its own of a new feature: DP MST DSC...
We've already been looking forward to Linux 5.6 with already there being a lot of good stuff coming and now it's even more exciting: at least the prerequisites have been merged overnight for Multipath TCP (MPTCP) support!..
Time is quickly running out to get new code into DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.6 merge window. AMD on Thursday did send out another feature pull request with some interesting additions worth mentioning...
It's been four years since last testing out the XanMod kernel as a spin of the Linux kernel with various patches and extra tuning designed to offer better desktop/workstation performance, similar to the Liquorix kernel. But given the recent Liquorix kernel testing and discussions over kernel schedulers and more, here are some fresh benchmarks of the latest XanMod kernel. Long story short, I am quite impressed by these latest XanMod results.
AMD "Pollock" is a new chip similar to Dali and looking like it may be used for some Ryzen embedded purposes. AMD Pollock was plumbed into the Linux driver yesterday and was the first time we've heard this codename...
Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds doesn't recommend using ZFS On Linux at least until Oracle were to re-license the code to make it friendly for mainline inclusion. But even then he doesn't seem turned on by the ZFS features or general performance...
DXVK 1.5.1 is out today as the latest feature update for this project implementing Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan for faster Wine/Proton Linux gaming performance. This is the first update since the big DXVK 1.5 release that integrated D9VK for D3D9 support...
There hasn't been a new Mesa stable release in a number of weeks due to the Christmas and New Year's holidays but that changed today with Mesa 19.3.2 as the first significant point release of Mesa 19.3...
GNOME has continued its recent trend of offering more point releases to existing stable series for filling the void between the six-month feature releases. Out today is GNOME 3.34.3 with all of the latest fixes, many of which were back-ported from the currently under development GNOME 3.36...
The long in development process of converting GCC's SVN repository to Git for using this modern distributed revision control system for developing the GNU Compiler Collection in the 2020s may finally be complete in the days ahead...
A few days ago I wrote about a big improvement to write performance for EXT4's Direct I/O code path but that is not the only DIO optimization coming for Linux 5.6. Thanks to IBM, another big EXT4 DIO boost can be found for database workloads...
Oracle has released a developer preview of their forthcoming Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 to Oracle Linux users, the company's spin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With Oracle UEK 6, Linux 5.4 serves as the new base...
While the Allwinner VPU "Cedrus" video decode driver is a wonderful success of open-source third-party work expanding Linux's multimedia hardware acceleration capabilities, consulting firm Bootlin who spearheaded this driver is for now at least is ending feature development on this driver...
Separate from the whole Python 2 removal effort with the Python 2.7 that is EOL'ed since the start of the year, Fedora 33 due out later this year is looking to be their first release dropping the even older Python 2.6 series...
While no major performance improvements were noted as part of the release notes, given this week's Firefox 72 release here are some fresh benchmarks of Firefox 70/71/72 on Ubuntu Linux benchmarked with and without WebRender being enabled. As well, these numbers show how Firefox on Linux is currently stacking up against Google Chrome 79 as its latest stable release.
While Intel has offered good Ice Lake support since before the CPUs were shipping (sans taking a bit longer for the Thunderbolt support as a key lone exception, since resolved), a feature that's been publicly known since 2017 is the Fast Short REP MOV behavior and finally with Linux 5.6 that is being made use of for faster memory movements...
In addition to Intel IGC network driver performance-boosting TSO support, also queued within Intel's next-queue tree of networking changes is a new software bus called Virtual Bus...
Apple AirScan is akin to their AirPrint technology for supporting various printers from Apple devices without the need for specialized drivers. Multi-function printers compliant with AirPrint also need to implement AirScan for scanner functionality, thus opening up most of today's multi-function printers to supporting this scanning standard. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS could end up supporting AirScan nicely thanks to new SANE back-ends...
Quietly released over the holidays was Intel's quarterly update to the Intel Media Driver that serves as their modern open-source GPU-accelerated video encode/decode solution for Linux systems...
Given the recent discussions over the default performance of the Linux scheduler, the Liquorix patches to the Linux kernel, and other recent forum discussions over different kernel configurations and flavors, here are some reference benchmarks looking at the performance of some of the kernel options available to Clear Linux users...
While more Linux distributions have begun packaging (and in the case of Fedora, potentially deploying by default) EarlyOOM as the out-of-memory monitoring daemon for trying to improve the Linux desktop's handling of low memory situations, systemd ultimately should be picking up its own out-of-memory daemon in the months ahead...
The recent work by longtime kernel developer Andy Lutomirski on improving Linux's random APIs and introducing a new "GRND_INSECURE" option is now queued into the random dev queue ahead of the Linux 5.6 cycle...
At the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas there isn't too often "pure" Linux being showcased aside from the likes of Ubuntu occasionally running on demo machines or servers, the year Canonical was there with Ubuntu TV, and a number of other select mostly small instances where Linux is prominently featured. That's in part why I stopped regularly attending CES (as well as budgetary constraints due to ad-blockers...) but this year at CES there is a large floor showcase of the Linux Foundation's Automotive Grade Linux...
Following Fedora's plans to begin using EarlyOOM by default and other recent upstream discussions about Linux's relatively poor performance when it comes to the Linux desktop not handling memory pressure / low RAM situations well, Intel's Clear Linux looks like it will soon offer EarlyOOM as an option...
For those plagued by OpenGL corruption issues with the RadeonSI driver on Polaris GPUs like the Radeon RX 580, System DMA (SDMA) support is now being disabled as a workaround...
As reported last month, Flang is expected to land in the LLVM 10.0 source tree ahead of the feature freeze for the v10.0 release due out in February. That landing is now scheduled to take place next week...
Stemming from the recent news in Fedora 32 potentially LTO'ing packages by default for better performance and not yet having checked on the Link-Time Optimization performance of the in-development GCC 10, here is a fresh look at the possible performance gains from making use of link-time optimizations for generating faster binaries. This round of testing was done on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and is complementary to the recent Profile Guided Optimization benchmarks.
Wiring up an additional feature for Intel's IGC Linux network driver that is for their 2.5G Ethernet devices is allowing data to be sent up to 7% or so faster...
Similar to Fedora's move last year to compress RPMs with Zstd rather than XZ for much faster decompression speeds and a better compression ratio at the highest level, OpenMandriva has now enacted a similar change...
This weekend I posted some fresh benchmarks of the Liquorix kernel against upstream Linux 5.4 and found the gaming performance to be rather disappointing for that kernel flavor derived from the "Zen" patches and more. Fortunately, the Zen kernel patches now include a fix that should make their gaming performance more competitive...
Last week I reported on a possible workaround for helping AMD APUs with stability issues on recent Linux kernels. That behavior will now be the new temporary default in dealing with stability issues on Raven APUs...