Phoronix

Following the release a few weeks back of the Intel Media Driver Q1-2020 update for this open-source Linux video encode/decode driver for Intel graphics, their first pre-release of the Q2-2020 driver update is now out for testing...

Just days after Canonical shipped the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" release, Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla" is now open for development...

OpenCL 3.0 is being released today in provisional form. OpenCL 3.0 is making OpenCL 2.x functionality now optional to make it better suited for a range of devices plus there is new functionality introduced like subgroups, extensions for asynchronous data copies, and more.

The routine Vulkan 1.2.139 maintenance update brings with it two new extensions...

Linus Torvalds just released the third weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 5.7 kernel...

Manjaro 20.0 "Lysia" is out today with its flagship Xfce spin as well as its GNOME and KDE editions for this popular, desktop-minded, Arch-based Linux distribution...

With the Raptor Blackbird popular among open-source enthusiasts for a libre 64-bit Linux desktop compute and that getting more POWER9 hardware out in the wild, more users are interested in seeing Wine work for 64-bit POWER hardware. Last year was some early porting work done by Raptor Computing Systems but now a cleaned up patch series has been sent out with this very primitive PPC64 work...

Going on since 2016 has been the long-running effort getting the Software Guard Extensions (SGX) support into the mainline Linux kernel. Sent out this week was the SGX foundation patches for the twenty-ninth time as it works to get into shape for upstream acceptance...

Some news that went seemingly unreported at large this month until stumbling across it... AMD has joined the Academy Software Foundation as a premier member. This joint initiative between the Linux Foundation and Academy of Motion Picture Arts is focused on pushing open-source software through the motion picture and content creation industries. Additionally, the Open Shading Language has become a new hosted project under the Academy Software Foundation...

Last year a SUSE developer sent out a set of patches adding authentication support to the Btrfs file-system. Btrfs already has checksums on meta-data blocks and data blocks while the original implementation of these authentication patches was performing HMAC on a SHA256 checksum as a keyed hash. A proper key in turn is then needed to mount a verified file-system...

One of the areas being worked on upstream recently for the RISC-V architecture's Linux kernel support is EFI handling. The preliminary work for supporting EFI on RISC-V is set to land for the Linux 5.8 kernel...

With the somewhat surprising announcement this week that Intel's Clear Linux platform would be divesting from the desktop and focusing on server and cloud workloads, the first visible changes on the desktop side are expected next week...

With JEDEC's Universal Flash Storage (UFS) v3.1 specification from January one of the new features is the Host Performance Booster mode for faster and cheaper UFS capabilities. Micron and others have been working on this UFS Host Performance Booster support for Linux...

As I noted earlier this month, AMD has been amassing many graphics driver improvements for Linux 5.8. On Friday marked their first pull request to DRM-Next of the Radeon graphics driver improvements for this next kernel cycle...

Thanks to a FreeBSD Foundation Community Grant, FreeBSD 13 will be bringing up to a 5x performance improvement for if_bridge, the kernel code for network bridge device support...

Built off yesterday's exciting Wine 5.7 release that brought more WineD3D Vulkan bits and the start of a USB driver, Wine-Staging 5.7 is out with a number of its patches upstreamed into yesterday's release plus a bit of new functionality...

Friday marked the release of LXQt 0.15, the first big update to this lightweight Qt5-based desktop environment since January 2019. There comes a fair number of improvements with this desktop that was born out of the LXDE and Razor-qt initiatives...

In addition to this week seeing the slew of KDE Apps updates, developers working on the applications, Plasma, and other areas of the KDE ecosystem have remained as busy as ever during the COVID-19 crisis for continuing to improve this open-source desktop...

Adding to the growing list of changes building up for Linux 5.8 this summer is now having Tiger Lake Thunderbolt/USB4 support...

One of the lesser known Mozilla software efforts is DeepSpeech as a speech-to-text engine built atop TensorFlow with CPU and GPU (CUDA) acceleration. Friday marked a new release of this DeepSpeech software that is yielding great results for converting spoken audio streams to text...

Earlier this week I highlighted the Dell XPS 7390 "Ice Lake" ultrabook seeing a big performance drop on recent versions of the Linux kernel. Intel engineers seem to have sorted it out and now have a solution in place, which affects those running Linux 5.4 or newer...

Wine 5.7 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release and it's a fun one with multiple interesting advancements...

While there has been the CPU-based "Kazan" Vulkan driver (formerly Vulkan-CPU as a Google Summer of Code project) and Google's SwiftShader has been implementing CPU-based Vulkan support, it turns out Red Hat's David Airlie has been working on a Mesa/Gallium3D-inspired Vulkan software renderer...

NVIDIA has released their latest weekly-ish beta update to their Vulkan Linux driver...

Earlier this month I reported that Linux developers were reviving work on the Intel FSGSBASE patches as a performance helper going back to Ivy Bridge CPUs but for which past patch series never got over the finish line for mainlining. On Thursday a new version of the FSGSBASE patches were sent out...

With last week's release of Radeon Software for Linux 20.10 as AMD's first packaged graphics driver update for Linux of 2020, here are some benchmarks showing how the performance compares to what is shipped by Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS as well as when using the newer Mesa and Linux kernel releases for the very latest open-source performance, including switching over to RADV+ACO for Vulkan gaming.

When it comes to finding laptops with Linux pre-loaded by the OEM, it's mostly Ubuntu or its derivatives found most often on these devices. But Lenovo and Red Hat are announcing today that Fedora Workstation 32 will begin appearing soon on select ThinkPad laptops...

Either a ploy by Ubuntu developers / Canonical staffers or it's looking like Ubuntu 20.10 could be known as the Groovy Gorilla...

Intel's ISPC compiler (Implicit SPMD Program Compiler) for targeting its C-based single-program, multiple data language is out now with a new feature release...

Just a friendly reminder that this premium special expires at end of day Saturday if you would like to show your support during these troubling and unprecedented times. Thanks for your support of our daily Linux benchmarking, open-source hardware coverage, and more with the Phoronix sixteen year anniversary approaching in June...

A number of additional game controllers / gamepads / input devices have been added to the SDL2 code-base in recent days...

Last month Marvell announced the ThunderX3 server processors with up to 96 ARM cores per SoC and with 4-way SMT means up to 384 threads per socket. This 7nm Arm server processor also supports eight DDR4-3200 memory channels, 64 lanes of PCIe 4.0, and other advancements to provide more competitiveness in the Arm server space. Marvell is now working on getting the ThunderX3 software support ironed out, including for the GCC compiler...

Due to unclear communication over patches queued for a given Mesa point release and ensuring all relevant patches are included, Mesa developers will begin making use of Gitlab's "milestones" functionality for tracking the work to be included in the next point release...

Many likely didn't realize the functionality was still in place, but LibreOffice 7.0 will finally phase out its export support for Adobe Flash (SWF)...

After it was delayed last week, Fedora 32 will now be released next week...

KDE today released its April 2020 Apps Update, what formerly would have been known as KDE Applications 20.04...

The latest Firefox Nightly builds have the experimental WebGPU support working in early form. WebGPU is the W3C-backed web standard for modern graphics and compute that is based upon concepts from the likes of Vulkan and Direct3D 12...

After showing yesterday how the performance has changed from Fedora 31 to Fedora 32, you may be wondering about how Fedora 32 -- which is due to be released next week -- stacks up against the brand new Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release. Here are the results from dozens of benchmarks and with some areas seeing some clear performance differences.

While the future of Qt as an open-source project isn't too clear for now it's progressing as if all is well. One of the new items being discussed on the Qt 6 front is discussing a possible LLVM Clang based tool to help developers in automatically converting all of their Qt 5 syntax into a Qt 6 compatible manner...

Ubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa" is now available as the distribution's newest long-term support release...

Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux has made some inroads in the desktop space over the past two years with providing a nice desktop installer last year, enhancing their documentation, and making available more desktop packages. Clear Linux has offered some of the fastest performance even for desktop workloads like web browser performance and has worked out equally well on AMD hardware. But moving forward they are going to be shifting back to their roots on focusing on server and cloud workloads...

With the open-source Panfrost Gallium3D driver having its Arm Midgard graphics support in order, the developers involved have begun working more on the newer Bifrost architecture...

A few weeks ago the Samsung engineers responsible for the new Microsoft exFAT Linux kernel driver released exFAT-Utils as their user-space utilities for managing and creating exFAT file-systems under Linux. A new release is out and exFAT-Utils has been re-spun as exfatprogs...

A few weeks ahead of Qt 5.15, The Qt Company has released Qt Creator 4.12 as their Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment that also supports other languages via the Language Server Protocol...

Facebook engineer Roman Gushchin presented a new slab memory controller for Linux last September. The new memory controller has been very promising with the potential of using 30~40% less memory and less memory fragmentation, among other benefits. The third revision to that kernel work has now been sent out for evaluation...

Loongson, the Chinese MIPS64 CPUs that are becoming more common within China but not so much internationally, continues seeing better Linux kernel support. There has been a fair amount of Loongson Linux work in recent months including in the current 5.7 cycle while more should be on tap for Linux 5.8...

While Mesa 20.1 will soon be hitting its feature freeze with hopes of releasing as stable in May, for now the Mesa 20.0 series is the "latest and greatest" on the stable front. Mesa 20.0.5 rolled out today with three weeks worth of fixes...

While the C language committing is still evaluating adding N-bit integer support to the programming language, LLVM's Clang compiler has already added its experimental _ExtInt() implementation...

At the beginning of the month I wrote about the Dell XPS with Core i7 1065G7 Ice Lake running much slower when upgrading to the development release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS from 19.10. It turns out the performance hit is due to an upstream kernel regression that's thrashing the performance...

Fedora 32 isn't making it out this week due to last minute blocker bugs but should hopefully surface next week. In any case, here are some initial benchmarks looking at the performance of Fedora 32 in its effectively final state compared to Fedora 31 for seeing how the performance has shifted with its plethora of updates.