Phoronix

Intel Blackhole Render support was finally merged today for the new Intel "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL driver default, the older i965 driver for pre-Broadwell hardware, and also the Mesa state tracker for Gallium3D drivers...

Here are some fresh numbers looking at the current performance of various AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors up against Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors when using an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development snapshot and also upgrading to Linux 5.5 as the latest stable kernel. Beyond raw performance, power efficiency and performance-per-dollar for these different server CPUs are being compared as well for these sub-$5000 processors.

Flatpak 1.6.2 is out and users are encouraged to upgrade due to a recent Flatpak + OSTree regression that leads to slow install times...

Beyond the Linux kernel patches presented earlier this week for AMD SEV-ES "Encrypted State" support, another Linux patch series out overnight provides another improvement to Secure Encrypted Virtualization with AMD EPYC server processors...

The release of the long sought after GTK 4.0 is one step closer to finally becoming reality with the slightly delayed GTK 3.98 now being available for testing...

Making use of Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) and Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) is currently being talked about by Mesa developers for their release builds in potentially squeezing out better performance...

Quibble is a new open-source bootloader that supports booting Windows XP through Windows 10 and opens up new possibilities like booting a Windows installation off Btrfs...

It's been a while since last having any new magical optimizations to talk about by DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon, but on Wednesday he landed some significant temporary file-system "TMPFS" optimizations for better throughput including with swap...

It looks like the Cavium/Marvell OCTEON MIPS-based processor support is being restored for Linux systems after some of its drivers were briefly removed...

Collabora under contract with SK Telecom has been working on Hwangsaeul as a new open-source platform for relaying security system surveillance video feeds from multiple sources, recording them on the centralized server, and supports connected clients for watching the feeds...

Given this week's release of Firefox 73 stable that also puts Firefox 74 into beta state, here are fresh Firefox browser benchmarks of Firefox 72/73/74 on Ubuntu Linux with and without WebRender as well as how it compares to the current state of Google Chrome.

After a one week delay, Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS is available today as the newest long-term support point release...

Since the release of Linux 5.6-rc1 that is coming in as a very feature-packed kernel, here are benchmarks of Linux 5.5 stable up against Linux 5.6-rc1 on a few of the systems tested so far while more results are in-progress...

While Linux 5.5 is out in the wild now as the latest stable version of the Linux kernel, it turns out some Intel kernel graphics driver patches were overlooked and this can spell trouble for some users...

One of the letdowns of the forthcoming Linux 5.6 kernel is that AMD's long-awaited Sensor Fusion Hub "SFH" open-source driver wasn't ready in time for merging this cycle, but it continues moving forward with hopes of seeing it in Linux 5.7...

RISC-V's Supervisor Binary Interface "SBI" is the interface between the platform-specific firmware and the running operating system or hypervisor for interacting with the supervisor execution environment in the higher privileged mode. The Linux kernel has been working to support a newer version of the SBI that is more extensible moving forward...

With the big Linux 5.6 kernel on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver side there is finally accelerated support for the GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" graphics cards (when paired with binary-only microcode). With that initial cut support is no GeForce 16 series Turing support, but that is now on-deck for Linux 5.7...

There is experimental work pending that plumbs support into MEMFD for creating "secret" memory areas. This secret memory support would then be exposed to user-space for different use-cases...

Wayland 1.18 is out today as the first update to the core Wayland code in nearly one year...

One of the interesting takeaways from my pre-launch briefing with AMD on the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X was AMD representatives actually recommending Clear Linux for use on this 64-core / 128-thread HEDT processor and the platform to which they've found the best performance. Yet, Clear Linux is an Intel open-source project. In any case, here are benchmarks of how Clear Linux performs against other Linux distributions on the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X within the System76 Thelio Major. And, holy crap, with the Threadripper 3990X on Clear Linux I managed to build the x86_64 default Linux kernel in under 20 seconds!

While the Godot 4.0 release is still months away from seeing its stable debut with the new Vulkan renderer, the Vulkan renderer branch was today merged to mainline...

While since 2016~2017 AMD has been posting Linux kernel patches for Secure Memory Encryption (SME) and Secure Encrypted Virtualization, coming out this morning is finally the first public patch series wiring up the Linux kernel for SEV-ES as further enhancing virtualization encryption...

The KDE community has released Plasma 5.18 as the newest version of their desktop and a release that is also a long-term support release, succeeding the aging Plasma 5.12 LTS...

Just as scheduled, earlier this month the feature freeze went into effect for Qt 5.15 as the last major step for Qt5 before seeing Qt 6.0 hopefully arrive towards the end of the year...

Mozilla Firefox 73 is available this morning as the latest update to this open-source cross-platform web browser...

Red Hat's Stratis storage project for offering enterprise storage capabilities on Linux to compete with the likes of ZFS and Btrfs while being built atop LVM and XFS saw the first update to its daemon of 2020...

Following this weekend's GNOME 3.36 beta, WebKitGTK 2.27.90 is available as a snapshot of this GTK-catered version of the WebKit layout engine on its path towards version 2.28...

With the recently released Linux 5.5 and its new features, one of the prominent changes on the storage front was the Btrfs file-system picking up new "RAID1C3" and "RAID1C4" modes for allowing either three or four copies of RAID1 data across more drives to potentially allow up to three of four drives to fail in a RAID1 array while still being able to recover that data for this file-system with its native RAID capabilities...

Now that the merge window is over for Linux 5.6, where the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver managed GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" series accelerated support, a new feature addition landed Monday in the Nouveau kernel development tree for the next cycle...

While not yet suitable for gamers or serious end usage, the Radeon "R600" Gallium3D driver that supports the Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 (pre-GCN) graphics cards now has an experimental NIR back-end...

For those still fond of the GNOME 2 desktop environment, the MATE Desktop Environment that's been living on as a continuation fork of GNOME2 is out with its version 1.24 update...

For those that may be looking to run an air-cooled AMD Ryzen 9 3950X especially in a rack-mount 4U chassis, here are some recent results I did from some testing using a Noctua NH-U9S with two 92mm fan configuration. Additionally, these results contain performance metrics from both CPUFreq Ondemand vs. Performance governors as an additional point of interest...

While there are a lot of new end-user features with Linux 5.6, there are also some changes not yet mainlined. Here are six that come to mind as missing out on the Linux 5.6 merge window...

For those using OpenBLAS as your BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) implementation, OpenBLAS 0.3.8 was released this weekend and coming with it are more AVX2/AVX-512 kernels and other optimizations...

AMD this morning announced the Radeon Pro W5500 as their latest workstation graphics card designed for modern design and engineering needs...

While there are many new features in the forthcoming Linux 5.6 kernel, the ongoing Address Space Isolation support is not one of them...

The Outreachy application period opened at the end of January for their summer 2020 internship round while just two weeks remain to get in your applications should you looking to be getting involved with open-source/Linux development...

Red Hat's Karol Herbst who has spent years now working on Nouveau SPIR-V support and other GPU open-source compute efforts around Mesa has provided a trivial implementation of clCreateCommandQueueWithProperties() that is now enough to begin running the OpenCL 2.0 conformance test suite on the Gallium3D "Clover" state tracker...

Linus Torvalds has just tagged Linux 5.6-rc1 as the first test kernel of the forthcoming Linux 5.6. This is going to be a jam-packed big update debuting as stable at the end of March or early April...

Out this Sunday is OpenShot 2.5 as the non-linear video editor's biggest release yet for this cross-platform, open-source solution...

The Linux 5.6 merge window is anticipated to be ending today followed by the Linux 5.6-rc1 test release. This kernel is simply huge: there is so many new and improved features with this particular release that it's mind-boggling. I'm having difficulty remembering such a time a kernel release was so large.

One of the last features to land today for Linux 5.6 ahead of the merge window closure is Western Digital's Zonefs file-system...

After being added to Linux 5.4 and then being ejected a week later when it was clear not enough testing took place, the VirtualBox Shared Folder "VBOXSF" driver is now trying to make it into Linux 5.6...

KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS is planned for release on Tuesday, 11 February, which means a mad rush of last minute fixes for this desktop as well as developers already working on Plasma 5.19 that is aiming for release in early June...

As first to write about yesterday, Linux 5.6 Arm platform changes now support the original Amazon Echo. While this allows the first-generation Amazon Echo to run with a mainline Linux kernel and is exciting for hobbyists, it's not really practical at this stage or even in the long-run...

Fedora 30 and Fedora 31 users will soon see Linux 5.5 come down as a stable update, but before then you can help if so inclined to test this new kernel revision on Fedora...

The X11 client support for Mir that leverages XWayland is graduating from its "experimental" status...

For those using GNU Make in particular as their build system, the parallel build times are about to be a lot faster beginning with Linux 5.6 for large core count systems. This landing just after the AMD Threadripper 3990X 64-core / 128-thread CPU launch is one example of systems to benefit from this kernel change when compiling a lot of code and making use of many GNU Make jobs...

GNOME 3.35.90 is available this weekend as the first of two betas towards GNOME 3.36...

There is a lot of new Arm SoCs and boards/platforms to be supported by the Linux 5.6 kernel...