Phoronix

With upstream work Red Hat is engaged in for supporting HP and Lenovo laptops on Linux, a new standardized sysfs interface is being discussed for exposing the performance-profile option on newer laptops so users can more easily select their desired laptop power/performance characteristics...

While the wiesn (Oktoberfest) was cancelled this year, a few Phoronix readers inquired whether I was going to offer the traditional "Oktoberfest special" sale for Phoronix Premium to help support our daily Linux/open-source news, hardware reviews, and benchmarking during this turbulent year. So, yes, here is our annual Oktoberfest special if you would like to show your support during these COVID times...

Vulkan 1.2.156 was released this morning and while it's a small revision to the API documentation it does come with a new extension...

NVIDIA's online GTC 2020 event kicks off today with a ton of announcements coming across the wire but not one many Linux users have been clamoring to hear more about...

Last year NVIDIA announced the Jetson Nano at $99 USD as their lowest-priced ARM SBC board to date focused on inference, robotics, and other GPU-accelerated tasks in a small, low-power form factor. The Jetson Nano at $99 USD is already significantly cheaper than the other numerous Jetson boards over the past several years while now today they are introducing a $59 board.

AMD released an updated Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver at the end of September that went seemingly unnoticed. Only today when seeing "20.40" firmware binaries hitting the linux-firmware.git tree was I even aware of this updated packaged AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver focused on enterprise distributions...

Canonical kernel engineer Andrea Righi has sent out an updated patch series implementing opportunistic memory reclaim support as a way of forcing the kernel to attempt to reclaim system memory...

Windows x86 binaries can now run on POWER9 hardware under Linux with Wine thanks to Hangover...

Presumably with Xe-HP in mind, Intel engineers continue working on adding DMA-BUF support to the Linux kernel's RDMA code...

The Free Software Foundation on Sunday marked thirty five years since its founding by Richard Stallman...

With the new OpenBenchmarking.org that's been out in public form since last month and being developed as part of the soon-to-be-released Phoronix Test Suite 10.0, here is the latest feature now enabled in making it much easier for quickly carrying out high-level processor (CPU) and graphics card (GPU) component comparisons along with other improvements...

While normally the Linux kernel sees its stable releases after about seven weeks worth of release candidates, today Linux 5.9-rc8 was issued in allowing an extra week of testing...

It's been eight years already since the launch of the OUYA game console built atop Android and initially driven up by hype as a new low-cost gaming platform only to turn out to be a commercial failure. Razer bought out OUYA's software assets in 2015 and last year finally shutdown all of the console services. But if you still have the OUYA hardware it soon may start running off the mainline Linux kernel...

The Linux 5.9 kernel could be released as soon as today but more than likely will be pushed back to next Sunday given Torvalds' comments last week and continuing to see plenty of merge requests in recent days. But in any case when Linux 5.9 does ship very soon it comes with an abundance of new features and improvements...

SHADERed as the open-source, cross-platform shader integrated development environment now has a compute shader debugger built-in...

Linux 5.10 will bring a new driver for the Intel MAX10 BMC...

If you frequently put your system(s) through hibernation cycles, the performance should be much better beginning with the soon-to-start Linux 5.10 cycle...

The EXT4 file-system with the upcoming Linux 5.10 kernel has an optimization yielding big benefits for file overwrites in some circumstances...

The first patchwork is building up for Intel's "Meteor Lake" on Linux...

Intel updated their programming reference manual this week with some interesting new additions, primarily around user interrupts and the enhanced hardware feedback interface...

KDE developers for more than one year have been working to evolve the default Breeze theme and the work by the KDE Visual Design Group is finally paying off with the initial "Breeze Evolution" changes landing...

The first release candidate of TVM 0.7, the Apache incubator project providing a deep learning compiler stack, is now available...

XCP-ng as the open-source hypervisor built atop XenServer is preparing for its 8.2 LTS release while this week marked the availability of the first beta...

Intel engineers today sent out their initial Linux kernel patches for bringing up the company's forthcoming hybrid architecture processors...

AMD has been sending out a lot of new Linux graphics driver enablement code recently for the Linux with the newest being the "Green Sardine" platform...

Given that Ubuntu 20.10 will be shipping with Linux 5.8 out-of-the-box along with other autumn 2020 Linux distributions where Linux 5.9 is landing too late, here is a fresh comparison of several different AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" and Intel Xeon "Cascade Lake" processors on this current stable kernel release for seeing how the performance is standing up as we approach this next round of Linux distribution releases.

Following the announcement this summer of Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) as an exciting feature coming to Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs next year, Intel's open-source engineers quickly began with patches to LLVM and GNU toolchain support for AMX. Now Intel engineers have sent out their patches in preparing the Linux kernel for AMX...

A proposal is being discussed over the possibility of beginning to make use of the Rust programming language within Mesa 3D for this open-source OpenGL/Vulkan driver stack along with the likes of Gallium3D video acceleration...

While the Mesa "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver's "ACO" back-end was developed and funded by Valve with gaming in mind to optimize game load times and help with delivering optimal performance, it turns out ACO works damn well for some Vulkan compute workloads too...

For a while now there have been references to "Vivaldi" as a new Chromebook keyboard firmware for future devices. References in Chromium OS repositories have pointed to expanded keyboard layouts and other new features with Vivaldi. Coming with the Linux 5.10 kernel is now a new HID driver for supporting some of the differences with Vivaldi...

Valve has updated their monthly Steam Hardware/Software Survey statistics for September and they indicate the closest we've seen in a while for Steam on Linux closing back in on the 1.0% threshold...

The Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla" beta is now available for testing of Ubuntu Desktop / Cloud / Server products as well as derivatives like Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu...

The third release candidate of OpenZFS 2.0 is now available for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently for Linux and FreeBSD platforms...

The first release candidate of the big PHP 8.0 is now available for testing...

Linux 5.10 is set to bring a major rework to the Spectre mitigation handling for the 64-bit ARM architecture...

It's always great starting off a new month seeing new work on low-level kernel optimizations...

When Intel announced 11th Gen "Tiger Lake" last month it wasn't clear how long it would be until seeing systems actually appear with these new processors. Fortunately, the new Dell XPS systems with Tiger Lake and Intel EVO certification are on sale beginning today with shipping dates reported to be later this month...

Mesa's Vulkan software implementation built atop LLVMpipe was developed as Vallium (Vulkan + Gallium3D) but has been renamed to Lavapipe within Mesa 20.3...

While Plasma 5.20 isn't shipping until later this month, already for Plasma 5.21 down the pipe is a big change and that is the optional support for systemd starting up of the Plasma session. This can lead to faster startup/load times and other improvements while even the process of bringing up the systemd support helped uncover other KDE bugs...

From new hardware releases to figuring out that Linux 5.9 performance regression to interesting open-source software advancements, September was an interesting trek with 259 original articles on the site and another 15 featured articles / multi-page Linux hardware reviews...

Following yesterday's release of the finalized OpenCL 3.0 specification, open-source Intel developers have released OpenCL Intercept Layer 3.0...

In addition to the last minute AMDGPU fixes for Linux 5.9 that include work on the RDNA2 new GPU support and promoting Navi 12 out of the experimental status, an initial batch of fixes for AMDGPU were also sent in to DRM-Next on Wednesday in addressing early fallout from the new feature code slated for Linux 5.10...

One of the fundamental changes with Fedora 33 is making use of systemd-resolved by default for network name resolution. A number of users testing out Fedora 33 on desktops and servers have run into various issues with systemd-resolved and sought to revert and delay this default behavioral change until a later release...

GTK4 continues running behind earlier release plans, but GTK 3.99.2 is out today as another development snapshot towards the upcoming GTK 4.0 release...

A batch of fixes to the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver were sent in today for Linux 5.9. While AMDGPU fixes this late in the kernel cycle tend to not be too notable, this time around there are some prominent items worth covering...

Following last week's news of Firefox Nightly flipping on their new JIT "Warp" update I was eager to run fresh benchmarks of the current Firefox releases compared to Google Chrome under Ubuntu Linux.

Just in time for the end of the quarter Intel's open-source multimedia team has released the Media Driver 2020.3 package for the Intel graphics accelerated media encode/decode component on Linux platforms...

Back in April was the provisional release of OpenCL 3.0 with making CL 2.x features optional while adding async DMA extensions and more. Today the finalized version of OpenCL 3.0 has been released plus also introducing an official Khronos OpenCL SDK...

The sixth spin of Intel DG1 discrete graphics card patches have now been sent out for review, amounting to just about 700 lines of new driver code due to building off the existing DG1 work and more broadly the Gen12/Xe support that's been refined in mainline for months. With these patches it would appear the Intel DG1 is then in good shape under Linux but due to the timing is unlikely to be mainlined until a stable kernel release in early 2021...

Last week on the GNU toolchain side was initial work on supporting Intel Key Locker while this week Key Locker support has come to LLVM...