Phoronix

Linus Torvalds just announced the release of the Linux 5.6 stable kernel a few minutes ago. This also means the Linux 5.7 merge window is now open for business...

There is less than one month to go until the official release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" but we've already begun experimenting with it for weeks across a variety of platforms. For the most part we have found Ubuntu 20.04 slated to offer some nice performance improvements, especially if upgrading from the existing LTS series, Ubuntu 18.04. In this article are our initial benchmarks looking at the Intel Xeon Scalable from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to the current 20.04 near-final state.

Earlier this month there was the proposal by a Linux kernel engineer for Amazon to flush the L1 data cache on context switches as another safeguard against the ever increasing CPU vulnerabilities...

Lead Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver developer Jason Ekstrand has ported an optimization from the Valve-backed AMD "ACO" compiler over to the NIR code-base for delivering some sizable performance improvements...

This week in KDE land there weren't too many new features introduced but a lot of low-level work to foster future features...

While we were hoping to see the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub driver introduced in Linux 5.7 for improving the AMD Ryzen Linux laptop experience, that now looks quite unlikely...

For the very common Intel "Gen9" graphics found on pretty much all current pre-Icelake hardware that is available through retail channels, high dynamic range (HDR) display support could soon be enabled under Linux for a subset of devices...

Following Friday's release of Wine 5.5, Wine-Staging 5.5 is now available as the experimental blend of Wine with some 850+ patches atop the upstream code-base with various features in testing...

The Linux 5.6 stable kernel could be released as soon as tomorrow if Linus Torvalds is comfortable with its current state to avoid having an eighth weekly release candidate. Whether Linux 5.6 ends up being released tomorrow or next weekend, this kernel is bringing many exciting changes...

In hopefully meaning less regressions moving forward for DXVK with the latest open-source Vulkan drivers, the Mesa continuous integration (CI) infrastructure saw support added for playing DirectX (DXGI) traces with DXVK/Wine...

Open-source video editors over the years have generally fallen well short of the stability and feature set offered by proprietary video editing solutions but in recent years at least there has been some measurable progress to the likes of Kdenlive and OpenShot. Out this weekend for testing is the Kdenlive 20.04 beta...

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has been experimenting with compute-based culling for GFX10/Navi hardware...

It's been on life support for a while but to much sadness, TrueOS indeed is no longer being maintained as the once very promising downstream of FreeBSD that for a while offered arguably the best out-of-the-box BSD desktop experience...

POCL 1.5 is on the way for release in April as the first feature update to this Portable OpenCL implementation since the previous release last September...

Debian developers are wanting to do their part to take on the global coronavirus pandemic by hosting a COVID-19 Biohackathon...

Wine 5.5 is out as the latest bi-weekly Wine development snapshot for running your favorite Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 will likely see support for older x86_64 CPUs eliminated to focus on more modern x86_64 Intel/AMD families. With that, Red Hat developers working on Fedora have been working on an "Enterprise Linux Next" proposal to not only vet such x86_64 build changes but also to provide a feedback workflow for other changes...

When it comes to the AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors we have looked at the various higher-end SKUs since their launch last August up to and including the EPYC 7742 with its 64 cores / 128 threads per socket. But for those wondering about the EPYC 7002 series performance at the bottom end of the spectrum, here are some fun benchmarks of the EPYC 7232P and EPYC 7262 on the near-final Ubuntu 20.04 LTS state compared to various vintages of Intel Xeon CPUs -- most notably, a curiosity driven look at the 8 core / 16 thread Intel Haswell Xeon performance.

With the Linux 5.7 cycle kicking off in April with its merge window opening upon the release of Linux 5.6, here is a look at some of the changes and new features that have been on our radar for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Intel Software has increased their developer funding provided to Blender, the leading open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software...

Following two and a half years of development, the first pre-release of the forthcoming Ardour 6.0 digital audio workstation is now available for testing...

AMDVLK 2020.Q1.4 is out today as the fourth and last open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver code drop of the quarter...

Plasma Bigscreen is a new KDE project aiming to provide a user interface for television screens..

It remains to be seen if it will make it for the upcoming Linux 5.7 kernel merge window, but the FSCRYPT inline encryption functionality has now made it up to its ninth revision for offering better file-system encryption performance on modern mobile SoCs...

One of many new features in the GCC 10 code compiler releasing in about one month's time is finally having a built-in static analyzer. This static analyzer can be enabled with the -fanalyzer switch and has been maturing nicely for its initial capabilities in the GNU Compiler Collection 10...

It shouldn't come as a big surprise but PHP 7.4 has now landed in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to replace the existing PHP 7.3 support within the "Focal Fossa" package archive...

Following the virtual Linaro Tech Days this week, Nuvia's VP of Software, Jon Masters, has begun talking up the Arm server start-up's Linux/open-source support plans...

For those managing to get their hands on a recently released Loongson 3A4000/3B4000 or even older Loongson 3 MIPS64 processors, improving the support is on the way with the upcoming Linux 5.7 kernel...

In addition to the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub driver that we are hopeful could land in Linux 5.7 albeit not yet queued in the iio-next branch, another AMD driver that has been around for a few months in patch form but yet to be mainlined is the AMD PassThru DMA Engine driver...

Given the release earlier this month of DragonFlyBSD 5.8 along with the recent debut of the FreeBSD-based desktop-focused GhostBSD 20.02, here are benchmarks looking at their performance up against FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE as well as the current state of Ubuntu 20.04. Tests were done both with the LLVM Clang and GCC compilers.

Well known open-source AMD OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has introduced an off-by-default option to help with the performance for at least some CAD-type applications...

Should you still have an HP 100BaseVG AnyLAN network adapter from the mid-to-late 90's, the mainline Linux kernel is finally preparing to eliminate its driver...

Today marks twenty-one years since the Apache Software Foundation was created out of the Apache Group and incorporated as a non-profit organization...

VirtIO-Video is a VirtIO-based video driver for a virtual V4L2 streaming device with input/output buffers for sharing of video devices with guests. VirtIO Video has existed for a while now but it looks like it could be getting close to upstreaming in the Linux kernel...

File this under the "I can't believe it took this long" or "why wasn't this done before" section... Thanks to SUSE, there are finally patches pending to allow easily setting sysctl parameters from the kernel command line using a generic infrastructure...

Going back to over a year ago were discussions by Oracle engineers and others about a secure launch boot protocol for the Linux kernel to in turn tie into the Trenchboot open-source project working on various system integrity features. We are now finally seeing new patches out of Oracle for wiring more Trenchboot support into the Linux kernel...

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has sent out a reminder to Fedora contributors to "be excellent to each other" while announcing the project has a new vision statement...

Following last week's benchmarks of OpenJDK 8 through the newly-released OpenJDK 14 JVM benchmarks, some Phoronix readers expressed interest in seeing Java benchmarks with Oracle's GraalVM as well as Amazon's Corretto JVM implementations. Here are some benchmarks of those benchmarks up against OpenJDK both for Java 8 and Java 11 releases.

Cloudflare employs Linux disk encryption on their servers and with some optimizations have made it at least two times faster throughput while also lowering the latency...

It's long overdue but AMD engineers are now looking at refactoring the GNU C Library (Glibc) platform support to enhance the performance for AMD Zen processors...

Released at the end of February was the long overdue stable release of Android-x86 9.0 that re-based this Intel/AMD focused Android spin atop the 9.0 "Pie" Android Open-Source Project state plus with various additions/improvements for running on x86_64 laptop/desktop hardware. Out today is the second stable update to the Android-x86 9.0 series...

Longtime open-source Linux graphics developer Thomas Hellström of VMware has sent out a patch series aiming for Linux 5.7 or 5.8 to introduce support for huge and giant page-table entries for the TTM memory management code and TTM-enabled graphics drivers...

Intel open-source developers have released IWD v1.6 as their open-source, embedded-friendly wireless daemon for Linux systems as an alternative to WPA_Supplicant...

Disclosed back in mid-November was the Intel JCC Erratum that required a CPU microcode update to mitigate and that in turn had broad performance hits. But via toolchain updates, some of that overhead can be offset. The GNU Assembler patches were quickly merged and new options exposed for helping to decrease that performance hit but on the LLVM side the developers are still working on their mitigation with some design decisions still to be made...

Introduced into the Linux 4.18 kernel back in June 2018 was the new RSEQ system call for "Restartable Sequences" to provide faster user-space operations on per-CPU data by avoiding atomic operations updates. Sadly, seeing user-space make use of RSEQ has been a slow process...

Doom Eternal was released this week by id Software as their first game atop the Vulkan-focused id Tech 7 engine. While it's another id Software game not seeing a native Linux port, with some tweaking the game can run under Steam Play / Proton. And now Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver has landed a fix for AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 era GPUs with a fix allowing those older graphics cards to handle this latest Doom title...

The Oracle Linux team has released Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 Update 3 as the newest version of their optimized downstream Linux kernel catering to cloud workloads...

Microsoft and Collabora are today announcing a partnership for building OpenCL and OpenGL mapping layers over DirectX (D3D12)...

We are used to seeing tier-one Linux distributions outperforming Microsoft Windows on hardware ranging from $199 laptops to HEDT and server processors and everything in between. Thus it came as a large surprise to us when finding Windows 10 outperforming multiple Linux distributions on a new Intel laptop. Not only was Windows 10 leading, but the performance paradigm shifted that Ubuntu was even outperforming Clear Linux, which normally is the fastest of Linux distributions out-of-the-box.

The release cycle was dragged out an extra month due to bugs and there ended up even being a last minute sixth release candidate yesterday, but LLVM 10.0 and its sub-projects like Clang 10.0 and LLDB 10.0 were just tagged...