Phoronix

Introduced last month was Zonefs as a new Linux file-system developed by Western Digital. It's looking like that new file-system could be ready for introduction with the upcoming Linux 5.6 cycle...

LLVM project founder Chris Lattner has proposed a new decision making process for the LLVM compiler stack around new sub-project proposals, new social policies, changes to core infrastructure, and other key changes...

Yesterday we noted that the Linux kernel picked up a patch mitigating an Intel Gen9 graphics vulnerability. It didn't sound too bad at first but then seeing Ivy Bridge Gen7 and Haswell Gen7.5 graphics are also affected raised eyebrows especially with that requiring a much larger mitigation. Now in testing the performance impact, the current mitigation patches completely wreck the performance of Ivybridge/Haswell graphics performance.

As we mentioned back in December, a Kubuntu-powered laptop is launching with the blessing of Canonical and the Kubuntu Community Council. That laptop, the Kubuntu Focus, will begin shipping at the beginning of February while the pre-orders opened today as well as the embargo lift. We've been testing out the Kubuntu Focus the last several weeks and it's quite a polished KDE laptop experience for those wanting to enjoy KDE Plasma for a portable computing experience without having to tweak the laptop for optimal efficiency or other constraints.

CentOS 8 1911 has been released today as the community rebuild rebased to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 that debuted back in November...

This morning's release of Vulkan 1.2 is off to a great start...

Coming up next month already will mark four years since the release of Vulkan 1.0 but for today is an early surprise... Vulkan 1.2! The Khronos Group has prepared Vulkan 1.2 for release as the newest major update to this graphics and compute API. Several vendors also have Vulkan 1.2 support in tow.

Here is another big feature coming for Linux 5.6: the Nouveau driver will have initial accelerated support for NVIDIA "Turing" GPUs! This is coming at long-last with NVIDIA set to release publicly the Turing firmware images needed for hardware initialization...

Intel's open-source graphics driver crew has submitted a final batch of updates to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.6 kernel merge window. The DRM-Next cut-off is this week ahead of the Linux 5.6 window opening up at the start of February...

The Valve-backed ACO compiler back-end that is optionally used by the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver has continued growing in popularity with Linux gamers and also has continued maturing a lot for Mesa 20.0 that is due out later this quarter...

Without seeing a new release of Wayland itself in nearly one year, a plan has been rolled out for having Wayland 1.18 in mid-February...

Coming to Linux last year with the 5.3 kernel was Intel Speed Select Technology support as a Cascade Lake feature for optimizing the per-core performance configurations to favor certain cores at the cost of reducing the performance capacity for other CPU cores. That Intel Speed Select (SST) support for Linux is now being enhanced with core-power controls...

Earlier today we were first to report on an Intel graphics driver patch mitigating a "Gen9" graphics hardware vulnerability. Details on that new security disclosure are coming to light and it turns out older Intel "Gen" graphics are also affected...

With Ubuntu 20.04 to see installation on many desktops (and servers) given its Long-Term Support status, Canonical and the Yaru community team have begun working on a successor to the Yaru theme for this Linux distribution release due out in April...

The Wine-downstream Proton that powers Valve's Steam Play is up to version 4.11-12 following a release today by a CodeWeavers developer...

Within GCC's newly minted Git repository is a big last minute feature for the GCC 10 release: a long-awaited static analyzer...

Not only is Linux increasingly used within automobiles but it turns out at least one automobile manufacturer is even using Coreboot within their vehicles...

On top of the Intel graphics driver patches back from November for denial of service and privilege escalation bugs, the Linux kernel received a new patch today for "CVE-2019-14615" regarding a possible data disclosure with Gen9 graphics hardware...

Back in 2018 a time namespace was proposed for the Linux kernel and now in 2020 it looks like this kernel functionality will be merged for mainline, likely with the upcoming Linux 5.6 cycle...

Vulkan could soon be used indirectly on safety critical military and aerospace displays thanks to CoreAVI's VkCoreGL SC1...

Longtime Red Hat developer Richard Jones has begun developing "Goals" as a new tool to improve upon Make, the common build automation tool...

It's too bad that it has taken so many months after AMD Zen 2 based Ryzen and EPYC processors began shipping to see this compiler support in place, but the good news now is that for the upcoming release of LLVM 10.0 is now the Zen 2 scheduler model being added to the "znver2" target...

AOMP is the AMD GPU compiler for OpenMP and HIP support on GPUs as part of Radeon Open Compute 3.0 (ROCm 3.0). Now they have begun providing PowerPC 64-bit LE builds of AOMP as part of allowing Radeon GPU compute to happen on POWER9 systems...

Last week we reported on "FC" as a new LLVM Fortran compiler targeting the new MLIR intermediate representation. That new Fortran compiler is now public and open-source...

With no sign of X.Org Server 1.21 on the horizon, the X.Org Server 1.20 point releases continue rolling on...

While Canonical no longer develops their Unity 8 stack for Ubuntu, the UBports crew continues advancing Ubuntu Touch mobile as a community project and as part of that they do work on Unity 8 for their devices and desktop support. But if you're hoping to see Unity 8 running nicely on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, that could be a while...

While Wayland's Weston reference compositor has been using the Meson build system for about the past year, only this week did Wayland itself see Meson support introduced...

Several months ago we learned of the Xfce 4.16 plans to drop GTK2 support and explore client-side decoration goals among other changes for this lightweight desktop environment release expected in late 2020...

Sent out shortly before the holidays was an Intel Uncore Frequency driver for Linux servers. That driver has now been revised with the latest fixes and is looking like it could soon land in mainline for helping latency-sensitive servers...

Back in December was the proposal to finally enable FSTRIM by default for Fedora 32 in benefiting solid-state storage. Today the formal approval was given by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee to go ahead with this long overdue change...

Git 2.25 is out today with over 500 commits making up this latest feature release...

Last week marked the two year anniversary since the formal public disclosure of the Spectre and Meltdown disclosures. To commemorate that anniversary, I was running some fresh benchmarks of various Intel desktop and server processors with the in-development Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to look at the performance impact today with the default CPU vulnerability mitigations and then again with the mitigations disabled at run-time.

The first development release of Phoronix Test Suite 9.4-Vestby is now available for evaluation...

Following the long-awaited GCC transition from SVN to Git that took place this weekend, the GNU Compiler Collection is kicking off this week by transitioning to "stage four" development on the GCC 10 compiler...

The NGG (Next-Gen Geometry) support with Navi continues to be refined by the open-source AMD Linux graphics drivers with the RADV Vulkan driver seeing a fresh batch of fixes/clean-ups, inspired in part by the NGG code from the RadeonSI and AMDVLK drivers...

One of the set of patches for Intel's Linux kernel graphics driver that have been floating around for more than one year is about exposing per-client (process) statistics in how each application is making use of the GPU's render/blitter/video hardware and various insightful statistics related to that. The patches aren't queued for mainline yet but at least a new revision of the work was published...

Linus Torvalds has just issued Linux 5.5-rc6 as the latest test release ahead of the stable Linux 5.5 kernel due out in a few weeks...

At the end of 2019 I ran some GCC 5 through GCC 10 compiler benchmarks while here are the similar tests conducted on the LLVM side for seeing how the Clang C/C++ compiler performance has evolved over the past few years...

Wine 5.0 is still going through weekly release candidates but the stable release of Wine 5 is expected to land in the back-half of January. With that imminent release, here is a look at the big changes to find with this annual Wine update...

Here is another long overdue kernel change... For more than a decade there have been patches trying to get SATA/SCSI drive temperature monitoring working nicely within the Linux kernel but none of that work ever made it through for mainlining. That has left various user-space tools to provide the functionality, but in doing so that has required root access and not to mention the need to first install said utilities. Well, with Linux 5.6 in 2020, there is finally a proper drive temperature driver for disks and solid-state drives with temperature sensors...

Making rounds in Q4 of last year was the little known Project Trident open-source operating system switching from its TrueOS/FreeBSD base to in turn moving to Void Linux as a base for their platform. Towards the end of the year they offered some initial images of their reborn OS while now Project Trident based on Void Linux has reached beta...

Marvell has been preparing the Octeon TX2 processor support for the GCC compiler, their next-generation version of the (originally Cavium) infrastructure/network processors now based on their ThunderX2 line...

I refrained from writing about Valve's Steam Survey numbers at the start of January when they were posted for December as the numbers didn't seem up to scratch. But half-way through the month now, the same numbers are up with no edits by Valve, as we've seen in some months when they refine their measurements...

I reported a few days ago GCC was hoping to transition to Git this weekend from their large SVN repository. Going into this weekend I wasn't going to be the least bit surprised if this transition got delayed again given all of the months of delays already, but actually, they went ahead and migrated to Git!..

KDE developers fixed a number of Wayland and KWin bugs this week along with a number of other annoying bugs as well as making several other noteworthy refinements to the growing KDE ecosystem...

Wine-Staging 5.0-RC5 is out today as usual, arriving just one day after the upstream Wine 5.0-rc5 release...

While the Flang/f18 compiler is expected to land in the LLVM 10.0 source tree on Monday, another Fortran LLVM front-end continues in development...

For those wanting to run Debian from the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) as the root file-system, that support is emerging...

Back in October 2018 was a patch series out of Linaro for "thermal pressure" support in the Linux kernel for providing better task placement when CPUs are running hot/overheating to the extent their CPU frequencies are being downclocked/limited. Out this weekend is a revised version of that Linux thermal pressure support...

One of the missing features for those with AMD Ryzen laptops has been the lack of a Sensor Fusion Hub driver that is needed for supporting the accelerometer and gyroscopic sensors for the display and related laptop sensor functionality. This week AMD finally posted patches for a Sensor Fusion Hub Linux driver...