Phoronix

For those with extra time on their hands due to being at home and social distancing, Canonical released the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS beta today for testing...

Last month I noted a new Linux driver for a buggy and funky looking mouse. A special driver was created by a community developer due to not all the mice button working otherwise due to not abiding by HID specifications. Now that the driver was merged for Linux 5.7, Linus Torvalds had words to share on this open-source driver...

POCL 1.5 has been released as the "Portable CL" implementation for running OpenCL on CPUs and other devices with LLVM back-ends...

Intel on Thursday released version 1.3 of their Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL) formerly known as MKL-DNN in offering a open-source performance library for deep learning applications...

SUSE's Takashi Iwai who oversees the sound subsystem for the Linux kernel sent in his changes on Thursday that are ready for the 5.7 kernel...

One of the common criticisms for those trying to use Clear Linux on the desktop is that it lacks easy access to proprietary packages like Google Chrome and Steam. There has been plumbing within its swupd package/bundle management system to support third-party repositories to expand the ecosystem and now we're finally seeing that happen...

While NetBSD 9.0 has been out since mid-February, for those still on the NetBSD 8 series the NetBSD 8.2 milestone is now available with various fixes. As a result of the coronavirus, the NetBSD 7 series is also being extended...

Andy Shevchenko submitted on Tuesday the x86 platform driver updates targeting the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window...

For the past two months we have been testing the System76 Thelio Major and it's been working out extremely well with performance and reliability. The Thelio Major offering with options for Intel Core X-Series or AMD Ryzen Threadripper and resides between their standard Thelio desktop with Ryzen/Core CPUs and the Thelio Massive that sports dual Intel Xeon CPUs.

For years we have been looking forward to X-Plane with a new Vulkan renderer to replace its aging OpenGL renderer. Finally today the X-Plane 11.50 Beta has been made public for this realistic flight simulator that supports Metal on Apple platforms and Vulkan everywhere else...

Following last month's release of GNOME 3.36 with its many new features and performance improvements, GNOME 3.36.1 is out today with the first batch of updates/fixes to this H1'2020 open-source desktop...

Well known open-source AMD OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has enabled more Linux games to run with Mesa's GLTHREAD functionality enabled for helping with the performance...

Ahead of the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release later this month, the Canonical folks working on LXD for Linux containers and VMs have released LXD 4.0 LTS...

SUSE's David Sterba sent in the Btrfs file-system updates this week for the Linux 5.7 kernel...

Yesterday we noted Intel's programming reference manual being updated with new Golden Cove instructions for Sapphire Rapids and Alder Lake and with that Intel's open-source developers have begun pushing their changes to the compilers. The latest updates add TSXLDTRK, a new HYBRID bit for Core+Atom hybrd CPUs, and a new SERIALIZE instruction. After GCC was receiving the patch attention yesterday, LLVM is getting its attention today...

Basically a half-week after Linux 5.6 shipped as stable, we are up to the second point release of it...

Days after AMD announced their full Ryzen 4000 series mobile CPU line-up, Intel has now introduced their 10th Gen Core H-series processors...

The month of April usually sees the new annual GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) feature releases and for GCC 10 in the form of GCC 10.1 as the first stable release in the series does stand chances of releasing this month...

A few months back when we last looked at the performance impact of having SELinux enabled there was a hit but not too bad for most workloads. But we'll need to take another look soon as with the Linux 5.7 kernel are some performance improvements and more for SELinux...

While many of you are users of Mesa Git for experiencing the bleeding-edge graphics drivers especially if you are a gamer wanting peak performance, for those on the Mesa stable series the Mesa 20.0.3 update has now shipped...

Seemingly at first thinking it was just an April Fools' Day joke, but it turns out the GNU Guix developers responsible for their package manager and operating system are actually working to replace their Linux (GNU Linux-libre to be exact) kernel with GNU Hurd...

GTK 3.98.2 is out as the latest development snapshot in the road to the overdue but much anticipated GTK 4.0...

Upstreaming of LLVM's Fortran front-end developed as "f18" and being upstreamed with the Flang name was supposed to happen back in January. Three months later, the developers still are struggling to get the code into shape for integration...

The Linux 5.7 crypto subsystem updates include new drivers...

While GCC 10 isn't even out for a few more weeks, looking ahead to next year's GCC 11 release is already one interesting planned change...

The networking changes for the Linux 5.7 kernel have already been merged and as usual there is a lot of new wired and wireless networking driver activity...

Intel has seemingly just updated their public programming reference manual as well as sending out some new patches to the GCC compiler for supporting new instructions on yet-to-be-released CPUs...

The Linux 5.7 Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates have been submitted as the kernel graphics driver changes for this next kernel feature release. As usual, there is a lot of work especially on the Intel and AMD Radeon side while nothing was queued for the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver...

If you are looking for a new desktop-friendly BSD with TrueOS being phased out, GhostBSD 20.03 is out as the promising desktop-focused OS based on FreeBSD and using the MATE desktop environment as a decent out-of-the-box experience...

QEMU 5.0-rc1 was released on Tuesday as the latest development release in the path to QEMU 5.0.0 expected to be achieved later this month...

Ingo Molnar on Monday sent in the scheduler updates for the Linux 5.7 kernel that saw its merge window open at the start of this week. For the Linux 5.7 cycle are a number of prominent scheduler additions...

During the month of March on Phoronix were 277 original news articles written by your's truly along with another 20 featured benchmark articles / Linux hardware reviews. Here is a look back at what is exciting Linux/open-source enthusiasts with so many hardware and software happenings...

Oracle has announced their newest major release of their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" that they continue spinning as an option for users of Oracle Linux and being the default within the Oracle Cloud...

The media subsystem updates have landed for the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window...

The 64-bit ARM architecture code will support several new features with the in-development Linux 5.7 kernel...

Linux Mint is joining the ranks of most other major desktop Linux distributions in abandoning their 32-bit support...

With last week's release of LLVM/Clang 10.0, here are our first benchmarks looking at the stable release of the Clang 10.0 C/C++ compiler compared to its previous (v9.0.1) release on various Intel and AMD processors under Ubuntu Linux.

Intel's Rafael Wysocki who oversees the kernel's power management area has sent in his relevant pull requests for the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window...

Sway's Wayland compositor recently added Variable Refresh Rate / Adaptive-Sync support to help avoid tearing and stuttering while now GNOME's Mutter is working on similar VRR support on the desktop...

Following the release of Linux 5.6 and WireGuard 1.0 declared, Google has now enabled WireGuard within their Android open-source Linux kernel build...

Last year Intel outlined the Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) as a feature on future Intel CPUs for high-performance data movement and transformation operations for networking and storage / persistent memory. We are now seeing more of the Intel DSA work beginning to take shape for the Linux kernel...

To date Fedora has defaulted to Java 1.8 / OpenJDK 8 as the default system JDK version but for Fedora 33 later this year they plan to transition to OpenJDK 11...

Ingo Molnar on Monday began sending in his feature pull requests for the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window. Of the pull requests worth noting are the EFI changes...

With the newly-minted Linux 5.6 kernel is initial support for USB4 based on Intel's Thunderbolt code while for Linux 5.7 is a wide variety of other USB changes...

Red Hat's David Howells has sent in pull requests introducing the new fsinfo() system call and mount/superblock notifications and as part of that a general notification mechanism for the kernel...

In the past using the Wayland-based GNOME Shell session and other Wayland compositors has generally resulted in a performance hit in going through (X)Wayland but that is much less so these days. Here are some initial benchmarks of Ubuntu 20.04 running various Steam Linux gaming benchmarks both under the default X.Org-based session and then again when using the Wayland session and its (X)Wayland support.

The previously reported work on split lock detection due to its big performance hit is now queued up for Linux 5.7...

Nearly one year after announcing OpenTelemetry as the merger of the OpenCensus and OpenTracing projects, Google has announced today OpenTelemetry has advanced to its beta phase...

Greg Kroah-Hartman began sending in his pull requests this morning for the areas of the Linux kernel he oversees. With the staging area changes for Linux 5.7 there is some nice spring cleaning...

For those that are normally spinning their own kernels and punctually upgrading to new releases, you will want to hold off on the new Linux 5.6 kernel for the moment if you use the Intel "IWLWIFI" WiFi driver...