Phoronix

Arch Linux has been working the past several months on transitioning to Zstd-compressed packages in place of XZ compression for faster package installation. At the end of December that package compression scheme changed and the results are impressive...

The Liquorix kernel is the long-standing effort for providing a "better distro kernel" optimized for desktop/multimedia/gaming workloads. As it's been a while since last testing the Liquorix kernel spin of Linux, I recently carried out some tests of its Linux 5.4 based kernel compared to Ubuntu's generic mainline PPA images of Linux 5.4 as well as the low-latency kernel variety.

Last week I wrote about the AMD Secure Processor support for Linux 5.6 being queued as part of the cryptography subsystyem work with supporting the PSP / Secure Processor of Raven Ridge APUs. That AMD Secure Processor support is now rounded out with the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) driver being queued for wiring into that subsystem...

Bram Moolenaar began developing Vim as an improvement over the Vi editor while now he is looking to make improvements over Vim itself with an experimental fork called Vim9...

Zink was one of the Mesa/Gallium3D innovations that saw mainline status in 2019 for offering OpenGL support atop Vulkan hardware drivers. While an interesting approach, so far only the dated OpenGL 2.1 support has been exposed but the Collabora-led effort is closing in on OpenGL 3.0 capabilities...

With Red Hat shifting their support to Wayland and expecting the X.Org Server to go into a hard maintenance mode quickly, in 2019 indeed it did...

Back in late 2018 when Linus Torvalds went on a sabbatical from kernel development to focus on his inter-personal skills, the kernel added a Code of Conduct. To date there hasn't been much transparency into the Code of Conduct committee that acts upon violations, but that is changing in 2020...

While complicated by New Year's festivities, Wine 5.0-RC4 was released today with just fifteen bug fixes for the week -- also a sign of the development cycle winding down for this annual Wine stable release...

For months there has been many different discussions over the Linux desktop's poor performance when under memory pressure / out-of-memory type situations. That has resulted in some upstream work so far like GNOME GLib's GMemoryMonitor as well as discussions by distribution vendors about what solutions they could enable today to help the low memory situations. Fedora 32 could begin shipping and using EarlyOOM by default to help in this area...

Hitting Mesa 20.0-devel a short time ago were a set of patches to the Radeon Gallium3D video code for fixing 10-bit HEVC video decode support...

Your choice of Linux distribution on a budget PC can mean the difference of ~14% performance overall. Here are benchmarks of Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, EndeavourOS, Manjaro Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora Workstation, and Clear Linux on a $50 processor as we roll into 2020 with the newest Linux distribution releases.

Embedded Linux consulting firm Bootlin has been working on improving the security of OpenWrt, the Linux distribution popular for running on routers / networking equipment and other embedded Linux networking use-cases...

For those of you running EXT4 with Direct I/O on the likes of Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory or PMEM simulated via a virtual machine, better write performance is coming when overwriting already allocated blocks...

While we have found recent Linux kernels paired with latest motherboard BIOS releases to work out generally well for recent AMD APUs, not everyone has been having a trouble-free experience on recent kernels. But an affected user has discovered a possible workaround if hitting stability issues...

Just under one month since the libinput 1.15 test release, this input handling library is now out with its official update...

Fedora Linux has long been well known for always shipping with bleeding-edge GCC compiler releases even if it means a near-final pre-release, thanks in part to Red Hat's significant engineering resources to GCC and the GNU toolchain in general. With Fedora 32 it's expected to be no different with having the upcoming GCC 10 compiler...

Building on earlier GCC commits for Arm's BFloat16 (BF16) support and other new extensions, a late change landing for GCC 10 is the command line options for targeting the ARMv8.6-A architecture and optionally toggling i8mm and BF16 extensions...

Mesa3D as principally the collection of Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers is up to 2,996,270 lines of code (and documentation / associated scripts) within its Git tree! That should put it over the three million mark very soon while the Git activity was up by about 20% in 2019...

Fedora 32 is likely to make use of systemd's sysusers.d functionality for packages declaring new system users as part of the package installation process. This change proposal is being led by Red Hat's Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek of their systemd team...

Up to now the most recent Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop with Ubuntu Linux has been using Comet Lake processors while now the 10th Generation XPS 13 Developer Edition has been announced with Ice Lake processors...

Building upon Coreboot Icelake support that has been coming together recently is now the initial Intel support for Jasperlake and Tigerlake. Additionally, when it comes to the Icelake support, there is experimental/work-in-progress support for the Icelake-powered Razer Blade Stealth laptop...

The first batch for 2020 of DRM-Misc updates have been sent to DRM-Next of the smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers and other core / user-space API changes to our favorite subsystem...

As of New Year's morning, systemd's Git tree was at 1,273,896 lines spread across 3,522 commits built up over 42,700+ commits from around 1,500 different authors...

With last month's release of KDE's Kate 19.12 text editor there was an initial plug-in for Language Server Protocol (LSP) support to better allow language-agnostic support for code syntax highlighting and other features. There were some issues in that initial implementation but with Kate 19.12.1 and beyond will be better support...

Christian Hergert of Red Hat who is known for his work on the GNOME Builder IDE has recently been hacking on a new project called Bonsai that is designed as a GNOME-focused multi-device synchronization service akin to a personal cloud...

Among the issues that game developers have been facing in bringing their games to Linux for Google's Stadia cloud gaming service apparently stem from kernel scheduler issues. We've known the Linux kernel scheduler could use some improvements and independent developers like Con Kolivas with BFS / MuQSS have pushed for such, but hopefully in 2020 we'll see some real action...

In addition to Clear Linux seeing more performance optimizations in 2019 (more so than Fedora and Ubuntu during the year), it also benefited from a new desktop installer, new help forums, and more of Intel's partners talking about their current or planned usage of Clear Linux...

There hasn't been a new GNU Hurd release since the microkernel's 0.9 release back in 2016, but at least other areas of the stack continue inching further. Glibc as an important piece to the GNU toolchain saw some improvements for Hurd during December...

As of this morning in the Linux kernel Git source tree, the kernel weighs in at 27.8 million lines!..

For those interested in benchmarks of the $99+ PineBook ARM Linux laptop, more results continue to be uploaded on OpenBenchmarking.org...

Drew DeVault released Sway 1.3 RC1 on New Year's Eve as the latest test release for this increasingly popular i3-inspired Wayland compositor built off his WLROOTS library...

KDE developer Nate Graham who is well known for his weekly development summaries in the KDE space has shared his opinions on the desktop's features he expects to see materialize this year as well as some of the less likely bits...

Godot lead developer Juan Linietsky provided a New Year's Eve look at the origins of this wildly successful open-source game engine from their beginnings, the technical advancements of this open-source game engine, the big step forward with Godot 3.0, and what's on the horizon with Godot 4.0...

Happy New Year to all Phoronix readers...

Greg Kroah-Hartman took time out of his New Year's Eve festivities to release Linux 5.4.7, 4.19.92, and 4.14.161 as the newest supported stable releases of the Linux kernel...

Back in September was an initial "request for comments" by Google on some kernel work they are doing with Kernel Runtime Security Instrumentation (KRSI) for providing eBPF-powered security helpers, ultimately for creating dynamic MAC and audit policies. Just before Christmas the first official version of this new eBPF-based instrumentation was sent out and is being prepared for deployment within Google...

One of the interesting milestones this year in the compiler world was the ability with LLVM Clang 9.0 to compile Linux 5.3+ for x86_64 without needing any extra patches to either the kernel or the LLVM/Clang compiler. That initial support in Linux 5.3 was not without a few issues, but on Linux 5.5 the experience is in great shape with the stable Clang compiler.

Well, this is a hell of a way to surprisingly end the 2010s... Reiser5. Reiser5 brings a new format to the Reiser file-system and brings some new innovations to this file-system while keeping to its controversial name...

With bisecting one of the big regressions in Linux 5.5 and finding the culprit to be an AppArmor change while using Hackbench as one of the most affected tests, I was curious to see what other workloads are impacted big by AppArmor on the current Linux 5.5 Git code. Here are 72 tests with the Threadripper 3970X on Linux 5.5 Git when toggling AppArmor...

Jolla has been working on Sailfish OS for nearly a decade now and for 2020 they are planning more improvements to their Linux-based smartphone OS as well as working to push Sailfish into new markets...

Nearly two years after the release of Trisquel 8, the release of Trisquel 9 "Etiona" for this Free Software Foundation approved Linux distribution is quickly approaching. An alpha/development release of Trisquel 9 is available for testing...

Some Intel server platforms could see better performance with the Linux 5.6 kernel cycle...

Going along with our other end of year and decade recaps, here is a look back at the Linux kernel highlights for the 2010s...

By default the Linux kernel selects the aging Radeon DRM driver for GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" and GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" hardware (as well as all older ATI/AMD GPUs) while it's GCN 1.2 and newer that defaults to the modern AMDGPU kernel driver. But for years there has been experimental GCN 1.0/1.1 support available via kernel module options, but now for the original GCN GPUs that code is at risk of being dropped...

Landing as a great Christmas present for LLVM developers interested in heterogeneous hardware compilation, TensorFlow and other machine learning use-cases was MLIR within the LLVM source tree...

Fwupd 1.3.6 was released today for ending out a very successful year for this firmware updating utility that works in-step with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for allowing hardware firmware/BIOS updating on Linux systems...

As part of our year-end articles we already provided benchmarks looking at the Radeon OpenGL / Vulkan driver performance for 2019. That testing was done using Polaris and Vega given their GPU support prior to 2019, but for those wondering about the Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" performance for these GPUs that launched this summer, here are some end-of-year tests.

Just a friendly reminder that if you wish to show your support in 2019 and take part in our Christmas / New Year's deal, time is quickly running out...

For those still having fond memories for the KDE 3 desktop days as we roll into 2020, the Trinity Desktop Environment as a fork of K Desktop Environment 3.5 is still pushing along with maintaining these aging open-source software packages...

Similar to the trend with other Mesa drivers, the Radeon R600g driver for supporting Radeon HD 2000 through Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards has been seeing experimental work to introduce a NIR back-end for this modern intermediate representation. That R600 NIR support now has a merge request open meaning it could possibly land still for Mesa 20.0...