Phoronix

Well this is a huge Friday morning bummer: the GNU C Library (glibc) is dropping support for the very interesting Restartable Sequences (RSEQ) as some design changes need to be made, thus restarting work on restartable sequences...

There is finally a new release of the Thunderbird mail/RSS client available as the annual update to this longtime Mozilla mail client. Thunderbird 78 is the new version out and serves as an Extended-Support Release with many improvements in tow...

Longtime FreeBSD/Linux network stack developer and former Qualcomm Atheros engineer Adrian Chadd is back to working on FreeBSD wireless networking improvements...

Joining Sway 1.5 for an exciting week in the Wayland space is an update to Cage, the Wayland compositor designed for kiosk-like experiences...

Fedora 33 is easily shaping up to be one of the biggest releases ever for this long-time Linux distribution formerly known as Fedora Core. It's just not a few big features like Fedora desktop variants defaulting to Btrfs but even just on feature count alone it's looking by far to be one of the biggest at least in a number of years if not ever...

On top of the recent UVD video decode for AMD Radeon "GCN 1.0" GPUs with the AMDGPU kernel driver to complement the existing Radeon kernel driver support, these aging "Southern Islands" graphics cards also continue to see patchwork on enabling "Display Core" (DC) display support with the AMDGPU driver option...

With the Intel 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable (Cascade Lake) processors having turned a year old in April and next month marking one year since the launch of the AMD EPYC 7002 (Rome) series, here are fresh benchmarks of the dual Xeon Platinum 8280 versus the AMD EPYC 7742 when testing the Linux software stack from early 2019 and then again using a bleeding-edge Linux software stack as of this month. This shows how the Linux software performance has evolved over the past year for both Intel and AMD on the server front as well as how the current top-end SKUs are competing right now.

In recent months KDE's Konsole terminal emulator has been seeing a lot of new features while even more are in the works...

Announced earlier this year was WirePlumber as a new session manager for PipeWire with its role in managing of audio/video streams to/from hardware/software components as well as handling security/permissions, device monitoring, and other session management functionality...

QEMU 5.1-rc0 is available as the first step towards this next feature release of this important component to the Linux virtualization stack...

While we remain eager to find out more about (and benchmark) Intel Gen12 graphics in Tiger Lake and Xe discrete graphics with this generation bringing the biggest changes to the ISA since i965, Linux patches and bug reports do continue offering new tid-bits of information on Gen12...

In addition to the "Sienna Cichlid" support recently published for the open-source AMD Radeon Linux kernel graphics driver, there is another new graphics processor being added to their driver: Navy Flounder...

As we have been anticipating for weeks, initial (but still early) enablement of the Intel DG1 graphics card on their open-source driver stack will indeed be sent in for the upcoming Linux 5.9 cycle and is currently being queued in the DRM-Next repository...

Sway 1.5 is out as a big feature update to this Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager. A big user-facing feature with Sway 1.5 is support for Adaptive Synchronization / Variable Refresh Rate, such as AMD FreeSync...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee formally signed off today on allowing Fedora 33 desktop variants to default to using the Btrfs file-system rather than the existing EXT4 default or other alternatives...

Valve and CodeWeavers have rolled out a release candidate of Proton 5.0-10 as the newest update to their Wine-based software powering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

The FreeBSD project has published their Q2'2020 status report that outlines their nearly-complete work on migrating from Subversion to Git plus many hardware support improvements for this BSD operating system and more...

The Matrox G200 series desktop graphics cards released in the late 90's are now seeing open-source DRM kernel driver support emerge in 2020...

Longtime open-source Intel Linux kernel graphics driver developer Chris Wilson has out a big new set of patches...

The GCC crew is preparing to issue their first stable point release to the GCC 10 series next week...

LLVM 11 feature development has ended with the code having been branched in Git this morning and the first release candidate expected shortly...

WebAssembly has seen much greater industry interest and adoption than Google's former Native Client (NaCl) effort for sandboxed applications that can be run within web browsers. Native Client hasn't seen any real activity in years and continues fading away...

Intel's Elkhart Lake as the Denverton successor for ultra-low power use-cases has a few more device IDs now in place for the Gen11 graphics...

It's been over a half-year already for the current libinput 1.15 series for this input handling library used on both X.Org and Wayland environments. But libinput 1.16 is finally en route with the first release candidate out today...

While being very eager to learn more about Intel next-gen Ice Lake Xeon processors as their move in the server space finally from 14nm to 10nm+, we continue to learn new tid-bits from the open-source Linux kernel activity...

Flow Queue Proportional Integral controller Enhanced (FQ-PIE) that has been mainline for a while in the Linux kernel's networking code will now be supported as an option for the default queuing discipline (qdisc) with the Linux 5.9 kernel...

JEDEC today published their long-awaited JESD79-5 DDR5 SDRAM standard...

Building off last year's successful Ryzen Threadripper 3000 series and the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X that launched back in February, today AMD is announcing the Zen 2 based Ryzen Threadripper PRO processors targeted for workstation usage.

The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver stack reached a new milestone today with the user-space code in Mesa 20.2 finally flipping on the Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support...

The storage capabilities for ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" project has long been in poor shape relative to the other subsystems, but ReactOS Deutschland has hired a developer to work full-time on making improvements in storage and related areas...

For those thinking of picking up one of the new AMD Ryzen 3000XT series processors and weighing whether it's worthwhile on your budget picking up DDR4-3600 memory or other higher frequency DDR4 modules, here are some fresh benchmark results with the Ryzen 9 3900XT looking at 100 different tests on Linux and showing how the performance changes from DDR4-2133 through DDR4-3800...

The patches talked about last month for a new "energy efficiency" tunable for the Intel P-State driver for Kabylake / Coffeelake CPUs is set to go into Linux 5.9 for those wanting to increase the energy efficiency of these CPUs on Linux albeit with reduced performance...

A new feature that's been in development for a while with the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) looks set to land with the forthcoming Linux 5.9 cycle...

In addition to Linux 5.9 poised to bring ARMv8 Memory Tagging Extension support (MTE), another ARM architectural feature now queued up for introduction in this next kernel cycle is Translation Table Level support...

The newest addition to Mesa's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is support for the recently published VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state extension...

With the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" recently switching its default to the ACO shader compiler back-end that is developed with the support of Valve rather than the existing AMDGPU LLVM back-end that is the official open-source AMD shader compiler solution, here are some fresh Linux gaming benchmarks of the RADV driver on the in-development Mesa 20.2 comparing the now-default RADV+ACO configuration against that of the RADV AMDGPU LLVM back-end.

With systemd 246 releasing soon, it looks like the new out-of-memory daemon will be merged shortly afterwards in allowing sufficient time for testing ahead of systemd 247...

Several months have passed since there was any news to report on KDE Frameworks 6 but the coronavirus pandemic as well as Qt uncertainties have not caused KF6 development to slow down for this next-generation set of KDE add-on libraries complementing Qt...

Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt has been engaged in several weeks now in optimizing GNOME for a faster 4K experience particularly when using Intel graphics but many of these optimizations pan out for other GPUs and resolutions too. Over the past week he's been working on yet more optimizations...

The first public beta of the forthcoming Qt Creator 4.13 integrated development environment is available for testing...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.8-rc5 and he is not particularly enthusiastic about its size with this being the largest RC5 release candidate of any of the Linux 5.x series...

Intel's open-source compiler engineers have been quite timely in getting the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) support out in the relevant components since Intel formally outlined AMX in last month's programming reference manual...

Recently there have been a lot of open-source Linux patches flowing concerning Intel's bring-up of their DG1 discrete graphics card for developers. That work continued this week with the latest patches in wiring up LMEM support...

At this week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting, more features were approved for the Fedora 33 release due out this fall...

This week Canonical and Google announced they were working together to bring the Flutter application toolkit to Ubuntu/Linux. Flutter is the cross-platform, open-source UI toolkit developed by Google for use from Android to Linux and iOS and Fuschia as well as for web interfaces...

While Lenovo recently committed to certifying more systems for Linux use and upstreaming drivers / hardware support for Linux moving forward, there remains a backlog of existing Lenovo devices that still have less than desire Linux support. But thanks to Red Hat and others, the hardware support does continue advancing...

Linux creator Linus Torvalds had some choice words today on Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) found on select Intel processors...

The toolchain support for the Synopsys DesignWare ARC HS processors is now ironed out with the GNU C Library (glibc) finally mainlining the ARC port...

Kernel developers appear to be eager to debate the merits of potentially allowing Rust code within the Linux kernel. Linus Torvalds himself has made some initial remarks on the topic ahead of the Linux Plumbers 2020 conference where the matter will be discussed at length...

While Mozilla has been gradually enabling WebRender out-of-the-box in more Windows configurations with succeeding Firefox releases, up to now there hasn't been much visible effort in getting WebRender enabled out-of-the-box for any Linux configurations. But fortunately that is finally changing...