Phoronix

At $39 to $66 USD depending upon model, the ROCK Pi 4 is evolving to offer nice open-source support down to the Arm Mali graphics thanks to the Panfrost Mesa driver and also works nicely with Wayland...

Last week was the Intel Gallium driver one line patch to boost performance by 1%. Today's code churn within Mesa for Intel's open-source Linux graphics drivers were larger but also with a more profound performance impact with some workloads now being faster by around 20%. Making this more exciting is that today's round of driver optimizations apply to the very common and mature "Gen 9" graphics hardware...

DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 is out today as the newest version of this popular BSD operating system...

AMD Mesa lead developer Marek Olšák has landed a set of improvements to the TGSI-to-NIR pass today for Mesa 19.2 to enhance the RadeonSI driver's support for using this intermediate representation...

One month ago we were told that AMD released a BIOS fix to their motherboard partners for addressing the systemd boot issue with Ryzen 3000 series processors that stems from an RdRand instruction issue. Finally over the past week we've seen motherboard vendors pushing out BIOS updates for the prominent motherboards and indeed this takes care of the issue...

Gentoo's AArch64/ARM64 support for 64-bit ARM should now be in good shape...

With last week's dramatic EPYC "Rome" launch where AMD has blown past Intel Xeon "Cascadelake" performance in a majority of server benchmarks, helping the successful launch of these Zen 2 server processors has been Intel's repeated delays of 10nm/Icelake CPUs and also the Spectre / Meltdown / Zombieload / Foreshadow mitigations. Out of curiosity, I've run some unmitigated benchmarks for the various relevant CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities on both the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 Cascadelake and AMD EPYC 7742 Rome processors for seeing how the performance differs.

We have seen Intel's compiler gurus contributing new enablement patches for Tiger Lake support with GCC 10 due out next year while now they have also landed their initial Tiger Lake support into the LLVM Clang 10 code compiler also due out in H1'2020...

It was just yesterday that Vulkan 1.1.118 was released with two new extensions while now this Monday morning Vulkan 1.1.119 was released as a third extension was accidentally left out of yesterday's weekly revision...

Sway and WLROOTS creator Drew DeVault on top of his several open-source projects has also been working on improving the VR infrastructure support on Wayland as part of contract work for Status.im. The secure communication company is looking to build a Wayland-driven VR workspace but for that the VR headset support on Wayland needs to be improved...

The GNU toolchain crew released today GCC 9.2 as the newest stable release to their compiler stack...

After more than four years in development there is finally the release of Xfce 4.14...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.3 release candidate 4 as the latest weekly test release for this new kernel version...

Another week, another new Vulkan update...

Greg Kroah-Hartman issued the Linux 4.4.189 and Linux 4.9.189 LTS kernels on Sunday morning that address the new Spectre V1 "SWAPGS" variant mitigations...

The Linux 5.4 kernel will deprecate and mark as obsolete the Wireless USB (WUSB) and Ultra-wideband (UWB) subsystems within the kernel...

Fscrypt is the common Linux kernel framework leveraged by the likes of the EXT4, F2FS, and UBIFS file-systems for providing native encryption support. While that Fscrypt-based file encryption has been part of the kernel for several releases now, there's been some shortcomings in how the encryption keys are handled but that should be cleared up for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle...

Out this Sunday is the KDE Frameworks 5.61 update that most notable addresses the recently exposed vulnerability to KDE where specially crafted .desktop and .directory files could automatically execute arbitrary code on users' systems...

System76 has been making good strides on their Coreboot support for their hardware and they are now readying a System76 Darter Pro OSFC Edition as their apparent first laptop to ship with Coreboot in place of the proprietary BIOS...

WEV is a new Wayland utility developed by Drew DeVault of Wayland notoriety for his work on the Sway i3-inspired compositor and the WLROOTS library...

It's been an exciting week in the KDE space...

Adding to the changes to find with the eventual X.Org Server 1.21 release is a change from Red Hat that has been carried by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora for years...

For more than one year we've been hearing of Clear Linux working on Windows WSL support to allow for this performance-optimized Linux distribution to run within Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux. There isn't an official release yet, but at least now is a third-party installer/script for making it possible to setup such a configuration...

For those with extra time on their hands over the weekend and having a spare Ubuntu Touch supported mobile device, Ubuntu Touch OTA-10 is now available in testing form...

After being in development for more than six years, GNU Radio 3.8 is now available and is in fact considered a minor release update...

Following the Chrome 76 release from just over one week ago, Google has now issued the beta for the Chrome/Chromium 77 series...

Earlier this week was the GNOME 3.34 beta release that also marked the UI/feature/API/ABI freezes for this six month update to the GNOME desktop The GNOME Shell and Mutter are late to the party but on Friday evening saw their 3.33.90 (3.34 beta) releases...

Intel's open-source SVT video encoder team today released a new feature update to their HEVC/H.265 open-source video encoder...

AMD is striking well over the past month with their Linux hardware bring-up. In the past month we've seen the Navi 10/12/14 support get in order for Linux as well as support for the future Vega-based Arcturus GPU and now we see the initial enablement patches for their next-generation APUs, Renoir...

While AMD's hardware folks were launching the EPYC 7002 series, their software crew was pushing out the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler 2.0 with support/optimizations for the Zen 2 micro-architecture. Using the top-end AMD EPYC 7742 in a 2P Linux server configuration, here are C/C++ compiler benchmarks looking at the performance when built by the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), LLVM Clang, and AOCC 2.0.

EXT4 set off the new trend for opt-in, per-directory case-insensitive file/folder support on Linux systems. EXT4 picked up that optional case-insensitive support for Linux 5.2 while the for Linux 5.4 kernel cycle the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is set to receive similar support...

While the tide may be eventually turning, as it stands today for those wanting to run Coreboot on x86 desktop/server hardware you are largely limited to generations-old platforms. But now there is a new option and that is a Coreboot port having been completed to a modern Supermicro motherboard for use with Intel Xeon "Kabylake" processors...

Drew DeVault is working on buttoning up the Sway 1.2 Wayland compositor release as the newest feature update to this i3 window manager inspired compositor...

Canonical's designers have been working to update their Yaru desktop theme ahead of the upcoming Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" release...

Following the big Proton 4.11 update for Valve's Steam Play that just arrived over one week ago, a second update to this Wine-derived software is now available for enhancing the Windows games on Linux experience...

If you didn't have a chance since last night to check out our benchmarks of the AMD EPYC 7742 and EPYC 7502 Linux performance, I certainly encourage you to do so. Even if you aren't a server enthusiast, it's incredible to see the engineering achievement of AMD with Zen 2 and how the race is certainly back on in the CPU space. If you are short on time, here's the quick summary of our initial AMD EPYC 7002 benchmark results...

Canonical has announced the immediate availability of Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS as the newest update to this long-term support series...

By now you've likely seen the fantastic performance out of AMD's new "Rome" 7002 series processors. The performance is phenomenal and generally blowing well past Intel's Xeon Cascade Lake processors. So that's all good and it can get even better outside of performance: I asked AMD about the prospects of Coreboot / open-source BIOS support and got a surprising response...

After a slight delay, The Document Foundation this morning announced the release of the LibreOffice 6.3 cross-platform open-source office suite...

Red Hat has joined the RISC-V Foundation to help foster this open-source processor ISA...

Yesterday marked the release of GTK-VNC 1.0 as GNOME's VNC viewer widget for the GTK tool-kit...

Coinciding with yesterday's glorious AMD EPYC "Rome" 7002 series CPU launch, AMD's software folks released AOCC 2.0 as their LLVM/Clang-based compiler optimized for Zen processors. AOCC 2.0 brings optimized compiler support now for Zen 2 processors not just only the EPYC 7002 line-up but also the Ryzen 3000 series consumer processors...

Version 1.14 of the libinput library for unified input handling on Linux X.Org and Wayland systems is now available...

Now that you have read our AMD EPYC "Rome" 7002 series overview, here is a look at the initial performance benchmarks from our testing over the past few weeks. This testing focused on the new AMD EPYC 7502 and EPYC 7742 processors in both single (1P) and dual (2P) socket configurations using AMD's Daytona server reference platform. Tests were done on Ubuntu Linux and compared to previous AMD EPYC processors as well as Intel Xeon Scalable.

One month ago today we were talking about the AMD Ryzen 3000 series processor and new Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards, all manufactured on TSMC's 7nm process. Today, for 7th August, the embargo has now lifted and we are talking about something arguably more exciting, or at least the ability to more profoundly impact an industry (data centers): AMD's EPYC 7002 series is ready and their line-up and ultimately the resulting performance is the most exciting and competitive we have seen ever out of AMD in the server space.

Today is a wild one for open-source/Linux users. Let's begin with the unexpected news: NVIDIA is releasing more GPU hardware documentation at long last! Yes, freely-available hardware interface documentation to assist in the development of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver (Nouveau)...

Yesterday the SWAPGS vulnerability was made public as a new variant of Spectre V1 that affects all operating systems and is believed to affect only Intel CPUs. The SWAPGS discovery by Bitdefender was quietly mitigated by Microsoft for Windows 10 last month while yesterday the patches were posted for the mainline Linux kernel as the Grand Schemozzle. As soon as learning of this SWAPGS vulnerability and seeing the kernel code, I began running some preliminary performance tests to look at the impact of this latest CPU mitigation.

Longtime KDE/Qt developer Lars Knoll (and current CTO of The Qt Company) has shared his technical vision for the upcoming Qt 6 tool-kit...

We've known for months about Canonical working to ramp up their ZFS On Linux support for Ubuntu 19.10 after initially packaging ZoL for Ubuntu years ago and supporting it in the server space. One of the big changes for Ubuntu 19.10 expected is an experimental ZFS root file-system install option for their desktop GUI installer. That's been confirmed today by Canonical along with some of their related ZoL activities...

The Khronos Group has released the OpenCL 2.2-11 specification to address various issues with the existing OpenCL specification while the next major release as "OpenCL-Next" is likely still a number of months away...