Phoronix

As part of the initial set of changes merged today for Linux 5.8 was the x86/mm material that included the controversial feature of opt-in flushing of the L1 data cache on context switching. Linus Torvalds ended up deciding to revert this functionality as for now at least he views it as crazy...

One of the use-cases for this new "initrdmem" option in Linux 5.8 can be for storing an initial ramdisk (initrd) on a motherboard flash chip in the space available after stripping out Intel's Management Engine (ME) code...

Hitting the mailing list just minutes ago were a set of more than 200 patches bringing up support for the previously unheard of Sienna Cichlid GPU...

Git 2.27 is out as the newest version of this widely-used distributed revision control system...

A few weeks back I began delivering Ryzen 7 4700U Linux laptop benchmarks for this 8-core Zen 2 mobile CPU with Vega graphics. The results have been very good and the support is in good shape with the latest Linux kernel, but many have been wondering about the Ryzen 5 4500U. The Ryzen 5 4500U is beginning to appear in several $500~600 USD laptops and offers six cores. Here are benchmarks and initial impressions with the Lenovo Flex 5 that features a 14-inch 1080p display, 16GB dual channel memory, 256GB SSD, and the Ryzen 5 4500U all for just $599!

For those very concerned about CPU data sampling vulnerabilities, the Linux 5.8 kernel comes with the ability to flush the L1 data cache on each context switch. That's good for security, but will hurt the system performance with all the excess L1 cache flushing...

Linux Mint 20 is in the works as the re-base off this popular desktop Linux distribution that in turn is derived from the Ubuntu package set. With Linux Mint 20 they are re-basing to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS packages but with better measures to ensure Snap packages don't end up on user systems...

There still is two months to go until the stable release of LibreOffice 7.0 but today marks the availability of the first beta...

Adding to the multiple new AMD drivers coming with Linux 5.8 is their new SPI controller driver...

The MMC changes for new kernel cycles don't tend to be particularly noteworthy but it's a different story with the new Linux 5.8 kernel cycle...

Linux's pstore "persistent storage" code is seeing a number of improvements for the Linux 5.8 kernel...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were sent in today for the newly-opened Linux 5.8 merge window...

As expected, Linus Torvalds just released the stable Linux 5.7 kernel...

The Linux kernel has officially deprecated its coding style that the length of lines of code comply with 80 columns as the "strong preferred limit"...

Newer Windows games/applications are making use of system call instructions from the application code without resorting to the WinAPI and that is breaking Wine emulation support. A Linux kernel patch is now being worked on for addressing this issue in the form of system call isolation based on memory areas while having a smaller performance hit than alternatives...

Google's Chrome/Chromium web browser is finally reaching the stage where having both the X11 support and Ozone abstraction layer for Wayland can be enabled concurrently in the same build...

NetworkManager 1.25.2-dev is the latest development version of this important Linux networking component in the road towards NetworkManager 1.26...

While the Linux 5.7 kernel is likely being released as stable today, the Reiser4 port to the Linux 5.6 kernel is out this weekend...

At least for the workloads tested this round, when booting the new Intel Core i9 10900K "Comet Lake" processor with the software-controlled CPU security mitigations disabled, the overall performance was elevated by about 6% depending upon the workload. Here is a look at the out-of-the-box security mitigations for this new Intel desktop CPU against foregoing the default CPU security mitigations and running an unprotected configuration to see what the pre-Spectre performance looks like.

Next week on 5 June already marks sixteen years since I started Phoronix.com as well as twelve years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0!..

One of the interesting new happenings in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver space is a Generic USB Display stack including a USB gadget driver that together allow for some interesting generic USB display setups. This work was motivated by being able to turn a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero into a USB to HDMI display adapter...

KDE Plasma 5.19 is due for release very soon (9 June) but that hasn't kept KDE developers from already working on Plasma 5.20 and other components for this open-source desktop...

Valve developers have been working on Vulkan shader pre-caching with their latest Steam client betas to help in allowing Vulkan/SPIR-V shaders to compile ahead of time, letting them be pre-cached on disk to allow for quicker game load times and any stuttering for games that otherwise would be compiling the shaders on-demand during gameplay, especially under Steam Play...

One of the latest performance optimizations being pursued by Intel on the open-source Linux side is providing an AVX-512-optimized container for Golang usage...

Monado as the leading open-source OpenXR implementation for AR/VR headsets is out with a new release...

Version 3.12 of the Alpine Linux lightweight distribution built around musl libc and Busybox is now available for this platform popular with containers and other embedded use-cases...

Following the Xeon Gold 6250 vs. EPYC 7F32 benchmarks from earlier this month, here is a look at the latest x86_64 server CPUs we have our hands on with the EPYC 7F72 and Xeon Gold 6258R being benchmarked against a lineup of other competing AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors under the new Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Adding to the expected changes for Linux 5.8 is improved EXT4 and XFS file-system direct access "DAX" support...

The FSGSBASE Linux kernel patches that have the potential of helping performance going back to Intel Ivy Bridge era CPUs in select workloads have now hit their 13th revision to the series in the long-running effort to getting this support mainlined...

OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 has progressed to its release candidate phase ahead of the official release planned for the first week of July...

While we have been eager for Godot 4.0 as the open-source game engine update bringing big renderer improvements and initial Vulkan support, it also turns out there will be a new offering on the editor front.....

Assuming no last minute concerns, the Linux 5.7 kernel is set to debut as stable this weekend. Given all the weeks since the merge window and our many articles covering all the feature activity at that point (and not to be confused with our activity of new work being queued for the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle), here is a look back at some of the top features of the Linux 5.7 kernel...

In addition to the AMD Zen "amd_energy" driver coming for Linux 5.8, another late change now queued into hwmon staging is introducing notification support for the hardware monitoring subsystem...

While the Tegra X1 SoC (Tegra210) has been available for several years, finally with the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel is a mainline driver contributed by NVIDIA for the video input support...

Following the recent Chrome 83 release, Chrome 84 has now been promoted to beta...

In aiming to promote freedom-respecting video conferencing at a time when other platforms like Facebook and Zoom are exploding in popularity as a result of the coronavirus crisis, the Free Software Foundation is offering a video conferencing system for its associate members...

Android Studio 4.0 is out today with this IDE bringing a number of improvements for developing Google Android apps...

Following our initial Core i5 10600K and Core i9 10900K Linux benchmarks last week, here is a much larger comparison I have been working on since then in looking specifically at the Ryzen 9 3900X and 3950X against the Core i9 10900K. It's the largest to date with nearly 400 benchmarks being tested, most of them real-world test cases.

As the first open-source code drop in two weeks, AMDVLK 2020.Q2.4 is out today as the latest update to this official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver stack for Linux...

It's been a while since hearing of OpenVG as The Khronos Group's hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics API. But today they announced a "Lite" version of OpenVG 1.1...

Version 20.05 of the Genode open-source operating system framework is now available with many improvements...

For those making use of the Subversion centralized version control system as an alternative to Git, SVN 1.14 LTS is now available...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a new Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM...

With the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel merge window one of the features you still won't find in the mainline kernel is the VC4 DRM kernel driver supporting the Broadcom BCM2711 SoC and in turn the Raspberry Pi 4 open-source display support...

Following recent announcements, Red Hat is now ready in fully supporting Quarkus to enhance its Kubernetes support...

As a result of at least "a few AArch64 platforms" lacking firmware support for mitigating Spectre Variant Two, Google engineers are evaluating the possibility of Retpolines for the 64-bit Arm architecture...

Linux 5.8 features for the Radeon "AMDGPU" kernel driver include the likes of Navi soft recovery and better handling of critical thermal faults on Radeon GPUs as well as enabling TMZ support. With feature work being capped off already on the DRM graphics front for Linux 5.8, AMD developers have been tidying up the code and readying more fixes for all of the new code set to premiere with this imminent merge window...

Mesa 20.1 has managed to release on time today as this quarter's feature update to this collection of open-source user-space graphics driver components...

Of the many features coming for Linux 5.8 one of the new drivers we are very much looking forward to is the AMD energy driver for finally exposing per-core and per-socket/package energy reporting of Zen/Zen2 CPUs under Linux. It's working out well so far in my evaluation...

Statsfs is a new RAM-based file-system proposal by a Red Hat engineer that is designed for exposing kernel statistics to user-space...