Phoronix

It's possible this afternoon Linus Torvalds will release Linux 5.4 stable but considering his communications in recent weeks and many changes still flowing in this week, it's more than likely he will divert and release Linux 5.4-rc8 today and then ship this next stable kernel update on the next Sunday...

Key stakeholders of the Arch Linux distribution quietly met in Berlin last month for their first conference...

With the upcoming Mesa 19.3 release one of the big new features is the "Zink" driver that provides a Mesa OpenGL implementation over Vulkan. This in theory allows for a generic OpenGL driver running over Vulkan hardware drivers, but there is a lot of work ahead before it's really a viable option.

DragonFlyBSD developer François Tigeot has continued doing a good job in continually updating their kernel's graphics driver code with a port of the AMD Radeon graphics source code from the Linux kernel along with related components like TTM memory management...

For KDE users often still running GNOME/GTK applications from the Plasma desktop, the experience is about to get a lot better with Plasma 5.18...

Clang's static analyzer has become quite popular with developers for C/C++ static analysis of code while now the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) might finally see a mainline option thanks to Red Hat...

A few days ago I wrote about the OpenMP / OpenACC offloading patches for Radeon "GCN" GPUs being posted and seeking inclusion in the GCC 10 compiler that will be released in a few months. Those patches were successfully merged meaning this next annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection will feature initial OpenMP/OpenACC code offloading support to supported AMD GPU targets...

The upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel cycle should bring an improvement for power management on Intel's latest-generation Ice Lake processors...

Released at the end of October was Intel's IWD 1.0 wireless daemon while hitting the web this week was version 1.1...

Following the decision by Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman to seek a general resolution over init system diversity and just how much Debian developers care about supporting systemd alternatives, the general resolution vote is moving closer...

GCC developers recently have been discussing a new proposal over an option for preserving the command-line flags/options used when building a binary as well as the associated compiler version...

Using Firefox 70 (including WebRender) and Google Chrome 78, here are our latest round of Linux web browser benchmarks tested on the Dell XPS Ice Lake laptop. Making this round of Linux browser benchmarking more interesting is also including power consumption and RAM usage metrics for the different browser benchmarks.

Debian 10.2 is out this morning as the latest point release to the "Buster" series...

Wine 4.20 came out last night while out today is Wine-Staging 4.20 as this experimental blend of Wine with more than eight-hundred extra patches on top...

With a change merged Friday night for the nearly over Linux 5.4 cycle, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme 2nd Gen laptop should see better touchpad input support...

While most Linux gamers don't appear to be into GPU overclocking, one of the limitations of the Radeon RX 5000 "Navi" series support with the AMD open-source driver to date has been no overclocking support. With the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel that is set to change...

For the past four years going back to Linux 5.5 has been EXT4 native file-system encryption making use of the kernel's FSCRYPT framework that is shared between several file-systems. That support has continued to improve with time and with Linux 5.5 another limitation will be dropped...

Wine 4.20 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot for this open-source project allowing Windows games and applications to run on Linux and other non-Microsoft platforms...

Making waves this afternoon is word of the NUVIA server CPU start-up landing its series A funding round and thus making more information known on this new silicon start-up...

Librem 5 "Birch" batch was supposed to be shipping from 29 October to 26 November. They are now preparing to start shipping this second iteration of the Librem 5 Linux smartphone after early units in this batch were missing a resistor...

Drew DeVault of Sway/WL-ROOTS notoriety and longtime Wayland developer Simon Ser have started development on WXRC, a new Wayland compositor...

Purism has finally published their blog post outlining the software work they accomplished during October on bringing up the Librem 5 smartphone...

OnLogic (formerly known as Logic Supply until a recent rebranding) announced the Karbon 700 back in August as a durable Linux-friendly computer largely intended for industrial applications but nothing prevents the user from using it as a passively, well-built desktop PC either. OnLogic recently sent over the Karbon 700 and it's been working out very well even with passively cooling an Intel Xeon eight-core / sixteen-thread processor, 16GB of RAM, 512GB NVMe storage, and more.

While Android 10 is the latest release of Google's mobile operating system, the downstream Android-x86 has been on the Android 8 "Oreo" series for stable while now the first release candidate of Android-x86 9.0 is available for testing...

The crypto code within the Linux kernel for the upcoming 5.5 cycle finishes converting the drivers to making full use of the four-year-old SKCIPHER interface so that the old ABLKCIPHER code can be removed...

The Intel developers working on their open-source compute run-time this morning released a new version as they continue making improvements to their Gen11 Ice Lake support as well as further bringing up the Gen12/Xe Tiger Lake support...

The DXVK Direct3D 10/11 over Vulkan implementation to date has been built as a Windows library run under Wine along with the game/software being rendered for converting the calls to Vulkan for execution by the host drivers. There is now experimental work for building DXVK as a native Linux library for converting D3D10/D3D11 calls to Vulkan outside of Wine...

OpenWrt 19.07 is on the way as the next feature release to this router/network focused Linux distribution that remains quite popular with hobbyists...

Longtime X11 developer Keith Packard has spent a lot of time in recent months while being employed by SiFive working on Picolibc as a new C library for embedded systems...

Debian's APT package manager has supported the --no-install-recommends for years so only the main dependencies are installed and not the "recommended" packages. Seemingly it's taken Canonical until now to figure out how practical that option is for reducing the size of their Docker containers...

Fresh off the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 at the beginning of November, Oracle is now shipping Oracle Linux 8 Update 1 as their spin of RHEL 8.1 with various changes on top -- including their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" option...

The sixth and final release candidate of PHP 7.4 is now available with it being on track for the general availability release before month's end...

While this week we have posted a number of benchmarks on the JCC Erratum and its CPU microcode workaround that introduces new possible performance hits, also being announced this week as part of Intel's security disclosures was "Zombieload Variant Two" as the TSX Async Abort vulnerability that received same-day Linux kernel mitigations. I've been benchmarking the TAA mitigations to the Linux kernel since the moment they hit the public Git tree and here are those initial benchmark results on an Intel Cascade Lake server.

Darktable 3.0 is coming soon as the next major release for this open-source RAW photography workflow software...

For those still on the GCC 7 series, GCC 7.5 was released this morning as the final point release to this compiler series with that branch that saw its original release in 2017 now closed...

When writing about the Intel Jump Conditional Code (JCC) Erratum and how Intel is working to mitigate the performance hit of the CPU microcode update with patches to the GNU Assembler, there was some concern expressed by readers that it might hurt AMD performance. That does not appear to be the case...

Released on Wednesday was the NVIDIA 435.27.06 Linux driver as their newest beta build focused on offering better Vulkan driver support...

Mesa 19.2.4 was released on Wednesday as an "emergency release" after a bug was discovered that made last week's Mesa 19.2.3 version buggy for all OpenGL drivers...

CodeWeavers is looking to hire another developer to work on Wine's graphics stack and in particular the WineD3D code while having an emphasis that it's part of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) efforts...

With yesterday's overview and benchmarks of Intel's Jump Conditional Code Erratum one of the areas where the performance impact of the updated CPU microcode exceeding Intel's 0~4% guidance was on the web browser performance. Now with more time having passed, here are more web browser benchmarks on both Chrome and Firefox while comparing the new CPU microcode release for the JCC Erratum compared to the previous release. Simply moving to this new CPU microcode does represent a significant hit to the web browser performance.

As of this morning LibreOffice 6.4 was branched from master and the beta release tagged with those LO 6.4 Beta binaries expected out shortly...

AMD on Tuesday released their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 19.Q4 for Linux package as their newest quarterly driver release intended for their professional graphics card offerings...

The Khronos Group has been expanding into a lot of new areas in recent times from OpenXR to 3D Commerce to NNEF and now forming an exploratory group for creating an analytic rendering API...

The second development release of Phoronix Test Suite 9.2-Hurdal is now available for open-source, cross-platform and fully-automated benchmarking...

Another Intel change being sent off for Linux 5.4 and to be back-ported to current stable series is disabling of HPET for Coffee Lake systems...

Over the past year Code Sourcery / Mentor Graphics has been working extensively on the new AMD Radeon "GCN" back-end for the GCC code compiler. With the code that is found in GCC 9 and up to now in GCC 10 hasn't supported OpenMP/OpenACC parallel programming interfaces but that could soon change with patches under review...

Now that Intel lifted its embargo on the "Jump Conditional Code" erratum affecting Skylake through Cascade Lake processors, while Intel's own Clear Linux was first to carry these patches they have now been sent out on the Binutils mailing list for trying to get the JCC optimization patches into the upstream Binutils/GAS code-base...

Merged to the mainline Linux kernel last week was a driver providing VirtualBox guest shared folder support with the driver up to now being out-of-tree but important for sharing files between the host and guest VM(s). While the driver was part of Linux 5.4-rc7, Linus Torvalds decided to delete this driver on Tuesday...

This morning I provided a lengthy look at the performance impact of Intel's JCC Erratum around the CPU microcode update issued for Skylake through Cascade Lake for mitigating potentially unpredictable behavior when jump instructions cross cache lines. Of the many benchmarks shared this morning in that overview, there wasn't time for any gaming tests prior to publishing. Now with more time passed, here is an initial look at how the Linux gaming performance is impacted by the newly-released Intel CPU microcode for this Jump Conditional Code issue.

Of the 77 security advisories Intel is making public and the three big ones of the performance-sensitive JCC Erratum, the new ZombieLoad TAA (TSX Asynchronous Abort), and iTLB Multihit No eXcuses, there are also two fixes to their kernel graphics driver around security issues separate from the CPU woes...