Phoronix

While the Linux 5.7 feature merge window just closed yesterday, there is already one feature queued up for Linux 5.8 that caught our eye...

With Ubuntu 20.04 due for release next week, here is a look at how the various CPU vulnerability mitigations compare on that latest Linux software stack when comparing the out-of-the-box mitigations for Spectre, Meltdown, and friends, compared to booting with "mitigations=off" for disabling those mitigations. The desktop tests were done with Intel and AMD processors for reference.

The release candidate to the long-awaited Inkscape 1.0 emerged at the end of last week for this popular cross-platform SVG/vector graphics editor...

ASUS has released a new budget graphics card that could actually be great for those wanting to use the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver stack on Linux...

One of the areas of Intel's Linux support that has been less than ideal is their handling of the Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) for today's ultrabook. Intel has provided some support with a focus on Google's Chromium OS but it's less than complete and notably missing is support for the more advanced "adaptive policy", but that soon could change...

One of the new features to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for those making use of ZFS On Linux with Canonical's Zsys manager is the automated APT snapshots on package transactions to be able to carry out system rollbacks if needed. An important fix around this functionality is on the way...

With yesterday's release of Linux 5.7-rc1 following the two week period of Linux 5.7 tacking on many interesting improvements and new features, here is a look at the current Git development states on the Linux kernel...

The X11 AutoRepeat option is for setting the auto repeat behavior of a keyboard to engage a configurable number of times a key will repeat per second after crossing a configurable delay threshold. While somewhat of an obscure feature, AutoRepeat is coming back after being on hiatus since 2006...

This weekend the FreeBSD project published their quarterly status report concerning Q1'2020 and the progress they made on many fronts...

Following the two week long merge window, Linus Torvalds has announced an Easter day kernel release in the form of the Linux 5.7-rc1 test candidate...

A last minute feature coming into the Linux 5.7 kernel on its last day of the merge window is experimental support for allowing a remote swap setup over a network using SMB3...

Linus Torvalds is expected to deliver an Easter day kernel release in the form of Linux 5.7-rc1. After a two week merge window, Linux 5.7 feature development formally ends today. Here is a look at the many exciting improvements and new features to find with Linux 5.7.

The benchmark result viewer has some more improvements that should be of interest to many for digging into more performance details especially between processors and systems...

Since last year it's been possible to build a mainline x86_64 Linux kernel with a mainline LLVM Clang compiler while for the in-development Linux 5.7 kernel are more improvements on the LLVM front...

A set of patches sent out Sunday morning for "PG_zero" could provide much faster page allocation performance by the Linux kernel...

A public service announcement was issued with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) currently will have issues in running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS so users should either wait for Microsoft to release a fix, upgrade to WSL2, or stick to using the older Ubuntu 18.04 LTS instead...

Some longstanding issues were resolved this week in KDE land that will be to the benefit of many users...

With the push for WebAssembly on the desktop for beautiful cross-platform support, the Wasmtime project has added Go bindings to its portfolio...

At the same time of Linux receiving a new exFAT driver, the Linux kernel is still seeing improvements to its classic FAT file-system code...

Friday marked the release of NetworkManager 1.24-RC1 as the first test candidate for this component important to wired and wireless networking on the Linux desktop...

Following yesterday's release of Wine 5.6 as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot, Alistair Leslie-Hughes has announced Wine-Staging 5.6 as the experimental flavor of Wine with some 850+ extra patches on top...

This week's bombshell that future Qt releases might be restricted to paying customers for a period of twelve months has many open-source users and developers rightfully upset. Qt so far only provided a brief, generic statement but several individuals and projects are already expressing interest in a Qt fork should it come to it...

With the Git 2.26 release at the end of March one of the performance wins comes in the way of Git's grep functionality now being multi-threaded...

At the end of February Intel launched the Xeon Scalable "Cascade Lake Refresh" processors with a number of more aggressively priced SKUs with different core counts and clock speeds compared to the original Cascade Lake CPUs launched last year. Intel recently sent over the Xeon Gold 5220R and Xeon Gold 6226R processors and we've begun our Linux benchmarks of them. In this article is our initial look at their performance using a near-final build of Ubuntu 20.04 and seeing how the performance stacks up in raw performance and performance-per-dollar against the AMD EPYC competition.

Unigine Corp has announced a new "Community" edition of their visually stunning, cross-platform game/simulation engine that will be available to non-commercial projects and academic entities...

Wine 5.6 is out as the latest bi-weekly snapshot of this program for running Windows applications and games under Linux...

Beyond the new systemd-homed functionality, another improvement to look forward to in the systemd space this calendar year is systemd-oomd materializing as its new out-of-memory daemon...

Given the release of Firefox 75 with Wayland improvements and also Firefox 76 now being in beta with even more work on the Wayland front, here are some web browser benchmarks under Wayland and the X.Org Server session with GNOME Shell 3.36 on Ubuntu 20.04. Additionally, Google Chrome benchmarks on Wayland and X.Org were also carried out.

The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) and now in turn the Intel Compute Runtime have updated their compiler stack against the newly released LLVM Clang 10.0...

The FreeDesktop.org UDisks project that provides a daemon and interface for querying and manipulating storage devices on Linux is approaching its long overdue version 2.9 update...

Last week the XFS file-system saw its first round of updates for the Linux 5.7 kernel cycle that included preparations for supporting online repair in the future as well as many underlying code improvements. A second round of code improvements were sent in on Thursday for this mature file-system...

Intel's open-source teams have been issuing a slew of new packages in recent days...

Three years after the FreeRDP 2.0 release candidates began, version 2.0 of this Free Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation is finally available. FreeRDP remains one of the leading RDP remote desktop solutions for Linux users and is finally ready to lead with its shiny new release...

Following a number of setbacks over recent months, the modern Fortran "f18" compiler front-end to LLVM has been upstreamed under the FLANG branding...

A number of recent id Tech games (though seemingly not DOOM Eternal) have seen another performance optimization with Mesa 20.1's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver...

After they were teasing the new Lemur Pro at the end of March, the Lemur Pro is now ready and formally announced by Linux PC vendor System76...

SUSE and the openSUSE community are working to move SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE Leap closer together...

ReactOS 0.4.13 is out today as the newest feature update to this open-source operating system project continuing to strive for binary software compatibility with Microsoft Windows...

With the new exFAT file-system merged for Linux 5.7, Samsung engineers responsible for this open-source native Linux kernel driver for Microsoft's exFAT file-system support have now issued their first official release of exfat-utils...

Yesterday a KDE developer who serves on the board of the KDE Free Qt Foundation commented that The Qt Company is evaluating restricting new releases to paying customers for 12 months. That was said to be under consideration due to COVID19 / coronavirus impacting their finances and needing to boost short-term revenues. The Qt Company has now come out with an incredibly brief statement on the matter...

The RISC-V architecture changes have been submitted for the Linux 5.7 kernel and includes early work on bringing up a new RISC-V dual-core SoC...

The Ceph open-source distributed storage platform is seeing some nice performance-related work to its kernel component in the Linux 5.7 kernel...

Intel's open-source multimedia crew has released their Media Driver Q1'2020 build for Linux users. This Intel Media driver is what provides Video Acceleration API (VA-API) capabilities for Intel GPU-based video encode/decode for Broadwell through next-gen Tiger Lake...

Last week the X-Plane 11.50 beta was released with its long awaited Vulkan renderer to complement its mature OpenGL rendering code. Since then we've been busy benchmarking with 23 different graphics cards of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce line-ups while running Ubuntu Linux and comparing the OpenGL vs. Vulkan rendering performance for this realistic flight simulator.

LOOPFS is the latest Linux kernel file-system proposal...

Patches have been revised for allowing Linux to support kernel stack base address offset randomization for each system call...

With an apparent blame on the novel coronavirus, The Qt Company is said to be considering restricting new Qt releases to paying customers for a period of twelve months in an effort to boost their near-term finances...

Last week there were a bunch of new improvements and features for the open-source kernel graphics/display drivers merged for Linux 5.7. There were not any feature changes on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver front while this week at least are some fixes/workarounds so it's less buggy for some hardware...

The OverlayFS union mount file-system has a number of fixes and other changes with Linux 5.7...

The Qt Company has made public their 2020 road-map for Qt software releases...