Phoronix

There are many new and exciting features of Linux 5.7 but also some material that didn't make the cut this window that we are now hoping will see mainline status for Linux 5.8 or another kernel this year...

The GCC compiler's libstdc++ library has continued receiving more last minute C++20 work...

With Linux 5.6 the flash-focused F2FS file-system added LZO and LZ4 compression support for enhancing performance and ideally extending flash storage life by reducing the amount of writes. Added meanwhile for the current Linux 5.7 cycle was F2FS Zstd compression support. Now looking ahead to Linux 5.8, it looks like LZO-RLE support is being baked...

Various patches are pending for improving the Linux support for onboard audio with motherboard sporting the AMD TRX40 chipset for 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadripper systems...

Following the surprise announcement last month that Microsoft's GitHub would be acquiring NPM Inc, the company behind the popular JavaScript package manager, that acquisition is now complete...

Longtime KDE developer and former Blue Systems engineer, Roman Gilg, has announced his forking of KDE's KWin window manager / compositor and the subsequent first release of this new KWinFT project...

Following the Proton 5.0-6 release candidate from earlier this month that brought out-of-the-box support for DOOM Eternal under Linux, Valve today promoted Proton 5.0-6 to being officially available...

After being in code review the past half-year, support for Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) within Gallium3D's "Clover" OpenCL state tracker was just merged for Mesa 20.1...

Released this month was the X-Plane 11.50 beta flight simulator that introduced a Vulkan renderer for this cross-platform, realistic flight simulator that long relied upon an OpenGL pipeline. Last week we published OpenGL vs. Vulkan X-Plane 11 benchmarks for both NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics. In this article is a look at the X-Plane 11.50 beta Vulkan performance across the different Radeon Vulkan driver options.

While GNOME 3.36 shipped just last month, the GNOME user experience team is already working on improvements that could potentially make it into GNOME 3.38 this autumn for further polishing the UX of the desktop...

It's been nearly one year since the release of GNU Guix 1.0 as the transactional package manager and GNU/Linux system distribution while today that has been succeeded by Guix 1.1...

Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman has delegated a set of individuals to serve as the Debian Community Team, the project's replacement to the former Debian Anti-Harassment Team...

Fedora 33 this autumn is looking to make use of systemd-resolved by default rather than NSS-DNS for name resolution...

Blend2D, a software-based 2D renderer with JIT pipeline construction with aims to be a high performance vector graphics engine, is now faster thanks to multi-threading...

With no sign of Solaris.Next either as Solaris 11.5 or Solaris 12, nor is it really expected to happen following Oracle's actions in recent years from layoffs to dismissing Solaris 12 when it was on their road-map at one point for 2017, Solaris 11.4 continues just being SRU'ed...

Future AMD CPUs (more than likely, Zen 3) will be bearing larger CPU microcode sizes, resulting in the Linux kernel needing a change to load them...

Lutris 0.5.6 is out today as the popular open-source Linux game manager/launcher...

For years there have been patches floating around for helping the performance of context switching sensitive workloads going back to "Ivy Bridge" CPUs but without ever crossing the finish line to get this "FSGSBASE" support merged. But now in 2020 it's once again being attempted...

Git 2.26.1 along with new point releases going back to Git 2.17 were issued today as a result of a security issue...

Radeon GPU Analyzer 2.3.1 is now available as the GPUOpen utility for analyzing Vulkan / DirectX / OpenGL / OpenCL code across platforms for performance profiling and other purposes...

AMD today is announcing three new EPYC 7002 "Rome" SKUs in the form of the 7F32, 7F52, and 7F72 processors. The AMD 7F52 processors we have been recently testing and offers some impressive performance potential as while it's a 16-core / 32-thread part it offers an impressive 256MB L3 cache (16MB per core). Here are our initial Linux benchmarks of the AMD EPYC 7F52 in 1P and 2P configurations up against various AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors.

While the Linux 5.7 merge window just ended on Sunday, with the DRM-Next cutoff for new material coming weeks prior to that, AMD developers working on their AMDGPU DRM kernel driver already have over 200 patches accumulated for the next cycle...

It's been a while since last having any news to report on GNUstep, the free software re-implementation of the Apple Cocoa / OpenStep frameworks. But GNUstep is alive and well and today several of its components saw new releases -- among the feature work is improving its multi-monitor handling...

Fwupd 1.4 is available today as the latest major update to this open-source, Linux-focused firmware updating solution that ties into the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS)...

There hasn't been much to report on this year for EROFS as the Huawei-developed read-only Linux file-system with Android devices in mind. But out this week is now erofs-utils as an update to the user-space utilities around this file-system...

Fedora 33 later this year will see a new "Enterprise Linux Next" (ELN) buildroot and compose setup for testing new changes potentially destined for the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Most notable from the original ELN proposal is on potentially raising the x86_64 CPU requirements. ELN is now approved to take place...

While the Linux 5.7 feature merge window just closed yesterday, there is already one feature queued up for Linux 5.8 that caught our eye...

With Ubuntu 20.04 due for release next week, here is a look at how the various CPU vulnerability mitigations compare on that latest Linux software stack when comparing the out-of-the-box mitigations for Spectre, Meltdown, and friends, compared to booting with "mitigations=off" for disabling those mitigations. The desktop tests were done with Intel and AMD processors for reference.

The release candidate to the long-awaited Inkscape 1.0 emerged at the end of last week for this popular cross-platform SVG/vector graphics editor...

ASUS has released a new budget graphics card that could actually be great for those wanting to use the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver stack on Linux...

One of the areas of Intel's Linux support that has been less than ideal is their handling of the Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) for today's ultrabook. Intel has provided some support with a focus on Google's Chromium OS but it's less than complete and notably missing is support for the more advanced "adaptive policy", but that soon could change...

One of the new features to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for those making use of ZFS On Linux with Canonical's Zsys manager is the automated APT snapshots on package transactions to be able to carry out system rollbacks if needed. An important fix around this functionality is on the way...

With yesterday's release of Linux 5.7-rc1 following the two week period of Linux 5.7 tacking on many interesting improvements and new features, here is a look at the current Git development states on the Linux kernel...

The X11 AutoRepeat option is for setting the auto repeat behavior of a keyboard to engage a configurable number of times a key will repeat per second after crossing a configurable delay threshold. While somewhat of an obscure feature, AutoRepeat is coming back after being on hiatus since 2006...

This weekend the FreeBSD project published their quarterly status report concerning Q1'2020 and the progress they made on many fronts...

Following the two week long merge window, Linus Torvalds has announced an Easter day kernel release in the form of the Linux 5.7-rc1 test candidate...

A last minute feature coming into the Linux 5.7 kernel on its last day of the merge window is experimental support for allowing a remote swap setup over a network using SMB3...

Linus Torvalds is expected to deliver an Easter day kernel release in the form of Linux 5.7-rc1. After a two week merge window, Linux 5.7 feature development formally ends today. Here is a look at the many exciting improvements and new features to find with Linux 5.7.

The benchmark result viewer has some more improvements that should be of interest to many for digging into more performance details especially between processors and systems...

Since last year it's been possible to build a mainline x86_64 Linux kernel with a mainline LLVM Clang compiler while for the in-development Linux 5.7 kernel are more improvements on the LLVM front...

A set of patches sent out Sunday morning for "PG_zero" could provide much faster page allocation performance by the Linux kernel...

A public service announcement was issued with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) currently will have issues in running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS so users should either wait for Microsoft to release a fix, upgrade to WSL2, or stick to using the older Ubuntu 18.04 LTS instead...

Some longstanding issues were resolved this week in KDE land that will be to the benefit of many users...

With the push for WebAssembly on the desktop for beautiful cross-platform support, the Wasmtime project has added Go bindings to its portfolio...

At the same time of Linux receiving a new exFAT driver, the Linux kernel is still seeing improvements to its classic FAT file-system code...

Friday marked the release of NetworkManager 1.24-RC1 as the first test candidate for this component important to wired and wireless networking on the Linux desktop...

Following yesterday's release of Wine 5.6 as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot, Alistair Leslie-Hughes has announced Wine-Staging 5.6 as the experimental flavor of Wine with some 850+ extra patches on top...

This week's bombshell that future Qt releases might be restricted to paying customers for a period of twelve months has many open-source users and developers rightfully upset. Qt so far only provided a brief, generic statement but several individuals and projects are already expressing interest in a Qt fork should it come to it...

With the Git 2.26 release at the end of March one of the performance wins comes in the way of Git's grep functionality now being multi-threaded...

At the end of February Intel launched the Xeon Scalable "Cascade Lake Refresh" processors with a number of more aggressively priced SKUs with different core counts and clock speeds compared to the original Cascade Lake CPUs launched last year. Intel recently sent over the Xeon Gold 5220R and Xeon Gold 6226R processors and we've begun our Linux benchmarks of them. In this article is our initial look at their performance using a near-final build of Ubuntu 20.04 and seeing how the performance stacks up in raw performance and performance-per-dollar against the AMD EPYC competition.