Phoronix

Linus Torvalds is expected to release Linux 5.8-rc1 following the two week long Linux 5.8 kernel merge window. Here is our overview of all the big changes coming with this next version of the Linux kernel.

As part of our ongoing testing of the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U "Renoir" mobile processors, here is some Wayland vs. X.Org data with the GNOME desktop on Fedora Workstation 32...

With Ubuntu 18.04 when running on its Linux 4.15 kernel and not one of the newer hardware enablement kernels, in the mess of patches back-ported to the release it ends up being vulnerable to bypassing the kernel lockdown security and compromising UEFI Secure Boot that is persistent across reboots...

The beta of Linux Mint 20 "Ulyana" is available this weekend as the popular desktop distribution now based on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS package set...

LibVNCServer is the cross-platform library allowing the accelerated development of VNC server / Remote Framebuffer Protocol functionality into applications. LibVNCServer 0.9.13 is out as the first update to this library in more than one year and now comes with better cross-platform support...

The DirectFB library once popular with embedded systems and other environments needing formerly a full X11 stack (or now, Wayland) remains in an abandoned state with no real upstream development any longer and the project site long dead, but with a newly proposed Vulkan extension could allow this modern graphics API to run on top of it...

Merged this weekend ahead of Linux 5.8-rc1 is the long-standing work on introducing a general notification queue for the kernel. The general notification queue was pushed back last year from merging but now the initial code is in shape for Linux 5.8...

There is a new packaged AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver release now available...

Linux kernel developer Thomas Gleixner sent in the RAS/core changes on Friday night for the Linux 5.8 kernel merge window that is wrapping up this weekend...

Cloud-Hypervisor as the Intel-backed Rust-based VMM built on top of Linux's KVM now has experimental 64-bit ARM (AArch64) support...

Given this week's successful launch of Plasma 5.19, KDE developers have begun focusing more work on Plasma 5.20 as the desktop's next feature release...

Recently there has been an uptick in Linux upstream support activity around Loongson CPUs, the Chinese-made MIPS64 CPUs. With Linux 5.8, the newest Loongson 3 CPU models can even begin supporting KVM-based virtualization...

Given the increasing number of security issues requiring compiler-based security mitigations with the likes of the Intel LVI attack to Arm Straight Line Speculation just being the two latest examples, Apple's LLVM team has been spearheading a new security group for the upstream LLVM developer community to better manage security-related matters...

The Linux kernel's 9P protocol support with the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel will see the potential for faster performance with its Xen transport code...

Last year Valve in cooperation with consulting firm Collabora published their work on extending the futex system call for more optimal thread pool synchronization with a means of waiting on any of several futexes. This kernel-level work paired with patched user-space for Wine/Proton allows better matching behavior on Windows. It's been months since hearing anything on Valve's futex effort while today a futex2 system call was published for discussion...

Following our Intel Core i5 10600K and Core i9 10900K Linux benchmarks, here is a look at the lowest-end Core "Comet Lake" processor in the form of the Core i3 10100. Thanks to the increased pressure from AMD Ryzen, Intel now has a 4 core / 8 thread Core i3 processor at less than $150 USD. Here is a head-to-head matchup of the AMD Ryzen 3 3300X and Intel Core i3 10100 processors in more than 350 benchmarks while also looking at the power and thermal efficiency in this largest comparison to date for these low-end desktop CPUs.

Merged overnight into the Linux 5.8 code-base is KCSAN, the Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer that is a dynamic race detector for spotting flaws in the kernel code...

The latest Linux kernel patch work we are seeing out of AMD in preparations for Zen 3 processors coming later this year is INVPCID instruction support for KVM virtualization guests...

The first round of "x86/urgent" fixes have been sent in to Linux 5.8 just ahead of this weekend's 5.8-rc1 milestone while many of these fixes are marked for back-porting to the stable series...

With Mesa 20.1.1 having shipped, Mesa 20.0.8 was released today as the final point release of last quarter's Mesa 20.0 series...

AMD has shared with us that they have published a video to explain in basic terms for the audience at large "What is ROCm?", a.k.a. the Radeon Open Compute stack...

Legendary processor engineer Jim Keller has resigned from Intel just over two years since he joined the company to much fanfare...

For those making use of GNU's "adns" asynchronous DNS client library, important security updates are out today...

Following last week's big Proton 5.0-8 release, Valve and CodeWeavers have just released Proton 5.0-9 as a quick bug fix release...

Linux enthusiasts have long been after System76 to offer an AMD Ryzen powered laptop and today they announced such in the form of the new Serval WS...

Last week I provided some fresh benchmarks of Windows 10 May 2020 vs. Linux on AMD. As has been common across multiple systems particularly with Threadripper, using Linux leads to a ~20% uptick in performance at large over Windows. While at times we have seen similar advantages for Intel CPUs on Linux, with the new Intel Core i9 10900K Comet Lake processor it is a very competitive race between Windows 10 May 2020 Update and Ubuntu Linux.

While not the long-awaited GIMP 3.0, GIMP 2.10.20 is out today as the newest stable release for this open-source image editor alternative to the likes of the proprietary Photoshop software...

Disclosed back in March was the LVI attack (Load Value Injection) affecting Intel CPUs. Mitigating LVI requires compiler toolchain changes and LLVM 11 merged its LVI mitigation last month that adds a load fence after each instruction that may be vulnerable to this attack, similar to the GNU Assembler changes. Now though LLVM is adding an unoptimized version of their LVI pass...

Martin Peres who is known for his decade plus in the X.Org community for his longstanding work on the open-source Nouveau driver and in recent years working on Intel's open-source graphics driver team has been brewing a new hobby project around generic open-source Linux drivers for FPGAs...

While Intel's CrossTalk/SRBDS vulnerability dominated the conversation on Tuesday, Arm quietly revealed a new speculative execution vulnerability of its own called Straight Line Speculation...

With Intel supporting Adaptive-Sync/VRR with Gen11+ graphics and these days with effectively only supporting xf86-video-modesetting for X.Org-driven Linux desktops rather than their basically dead xf86-video-intel driver, the Intel open-source Linux developers continue working on plumbing variable refresh rate support into this generic modesetting DDX...

Sent in last week to the Linux 5.8 mainline kernel were all the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates...

The LLVMpipe software OpenGL implementation that recently has seen work on MSAA, tessellation shader support, and other improvements, now has a working on-disk shader cache implementation...

The Linux MTD subsystem that abstracts raw flash devices will allow emulating MLC NANDs as SLC in an attempt to boost reliability...

Mesa 20.1 was released at the end of May while now Mesa 20.1.1 is out as the first point release to this Q2'2020 driver series...

The ACPI-defined Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) CPUFreq driver will support "boosting" to the optimal performance level with the Linux 5.8 kernel...

Intel has provided more public details today on their hybrid processor efforts, initially with their "Lakefield" CPUs for small form factor devices...

Following yesterday's disclosure of CrossTalk / SRBDS after a nearly two year embargo period for this Special Register Buffer Data Sampling vulnerability, I have been running benchmarks on multiple systems for the past nearly 24 hours. Here are some preliminary data points for both synthetic and real-world workloads on various Intel CPUs before/after mitigating SRBDS with the updated Intel microcode.

The previously reported on Sienna Cichlid support for AMD's RadeonSI OpenGL driver has finished its quick review process and now merged for Mesa 20.2...

On the desktop side for Ubuntu 20.10 one of the changes we have been eager to see is ZFS encryption support on new installations in an easy-to-use manner and extending their existing OpenZFS file-system support. That ZFS encryption support has begun to land...

Jaegeuk Kim has sent in the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) improvements for the Linux 5.8 kernel...

While Linux 5.6-ck1 was much delayed due to Dr. Con Kolivas being busy designing COVID-19 equipment, that work has settled down and the retired anaesthetist is out with his newest Linux patches for improving system responsiveness...

Following a survey of FreeBSD developers gauging interest in a new Code of Conduct and then a follow-up survey of keeping their current CoC versus adopting one similar to the LLVM or Go projects, FreeBSD has now settled on a new document...

Following today's disclosure by Intel of the CrossTalk/SRBDS vulnerability that is MDS-based and vulnerable across physical cores with affected instructions, Intel released new CPU microcode to mitigate the most prone/significant instructions. I've been benchmarking the impact of this new microcode on multiple systems and will have a full report tonight or tomorrow morning... But here is a look specifically at the look at the impact on the RdRand performance...

Haiku, the nearly two decade old open-source operating system still preserving compatibility with BeOS, is out with its second beta release...

This morning I noted CrossTalk / SRBDS as the newest side-channel vulnerability following Intel's monthly security advisories being sent out. It turns out Intel broke their own embargo on the disclosure and I happened to spot it quickly before they retracted it. In the hours since, the university researchers behind this CrossTalk vulnerability reached out and have provided an embargoed copy of the whitepaper. As of now, the formal disclosure time has passed so information on this new side-channel Intel CPU vulnerability is public and it shows for the first time that speculative execution can enable attackers to leak sensitive information across physical cores on Intel CPUs.

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for serving up firmware/BIOS files to Linux users has now served over 16 million downloads thanks to cooperation from over 80 vendors that have uploaded more than 4,000 firmware files...

Details are still coming in but INTEL-SA-00320, a.k.a. "CrossTalk", is the newest Intel side-channel CPU vulnerability...

The open-source Nouveau kernel driver has supported Volta GPUs for some time and since Linux 5.6 also supported open-source initialization of Turing GPUs for hardware acceleration. But missing for Volta and Turing has been the Mesa-side support for enabling 3D (OpenGL) and compute (OpenCL) functionality on these newer GPUs. That is finally changing with pending Mesa patches...

Consulting firm Igalia that has been working under contract with the Raspberry Pi Foundation on developing a Raspberry Pi Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 and future SBCs has provided a status update on their development efforts...