Phoronix

Longtime X11 developer Keith Packard who has been working on various infrastructure improvements to the Linux desktop in recent years under contract for Valve has been eyeing the creation of a new Vulkan extension for dealing with frame timing behavior for Vulkan apps/games...

Towards the end of last year Intel quietly released an "ignition firmware" for the Management Engine (ME) on their Cascade Lake platform that is also their first ME firmware release to be under a license permitting redistribution...

The vkBasalt open-source project began as just providing Contrast Adaptive Sharpening support for Linux/Vulkan games similar to Radeon Image Sharpening. This Vulkan post-processing layer then added an option for applying FXAA anti-aliasing and then SMAA and other effects. Now vkBasalt 0.3 is out today with even more post-processing features...

While KDE Plasma 5.18 is dropping soon, feature work is already underway on Plasma 5.19 and other areas of the KDE desktop stack...

Lightworks 2020.1 is on the way as this professional-grade video editing system's first release of the year and a change in their versioning scheme. Out this week is the first public beta of the still-proprietary video editing system for Windows, macOS, and Linux...

LLVM 10.0 was branched in mid-January but it took until Thursday to get the first release candidate out the door. That first step towards the release of LLVM 10.0 and sub-projects like Clang 10.0 is now moving along and you can enjoy testing the compiler stack this weekend...

In recent Linux kernel releases we have seen a new gaming keyboard driver, better wireless device support, and a number of new device additions to the Logitech HID driver. With Linux 5.6, there is more Logitech work in tow but not quite as much as the recent kernels...

Valve has just reported their January 2020 numbers from the controversial Steam Survey...

Following the recent beta release with a Clang-built kernel option and experimental Zypper as an alternative to DNF, OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 has been released as part of FOSDEM 2020 celebrations over in Brussels...

The new "cpuidle_cooling" thermal driver in Linux 5.6 is similar to Intel's PowerClamp driver and RAPL framework but is generic for working across CPUs/architectures as an idle cooling driver to cool down CPUs/SoCs by injecting idle cycles at run-time...

Red Hat's Karol Herbst spoke at the FOSDEM 2020 conference in Brussels on the state of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Linux graphics driver stack...

The Linux 5.6 media driver updates have landed in the kernel...

Two important pieces of the GNU toolchain saw new releases to kickoff February...

There is plenty of PCI work that landed for the Linux 5.6 kernel merge window...

During the first month of 2020 on Phoronix were 305 original news stories and another 18 Linux hardware reviews / featured-length articles. Here is a look back at what has been exciting Linux and open-source enthusiasts so far in 2020...

Intel on Friday released Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL) version 1.2, formerly known as MKL-DNN. With this release comes both new features and better performance...

The random changes have been sent in for Linux 5.6 that yield /dev/random behavioral changes and a new random flag...

Adding to the Linux 5.6 excitement is the hardware enablement of the MIPS-based Ingenic X1000 SoC...

University of Illinois and associated developers have released HPVM 0.5, their LLVM-based compiler infrastructure for Heterogeneous Parallel Systems with CPU execution and OpenCL-based NVIDIA GPU support...

Following on from last week's story that it was looking like Linux 5.6 would drop Intel MPX support, that has now taken place...

GNU C Library 2.31 (Glibc 2.31) should be releasing in the days ahead and is now under a hard freeze for this next feature release to this important libc implementation...

When carrying out our Windows vs. Linux benchmarks we normally are doing so on interesting high-end hardware but for today's benchmarking is a look at how a $199 USD laptop powered by an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor compares between Windows 10 as it's shipped on the laptop against the forthcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux distribution.

Earlier this month when Intel disclosed CVE-2019-14615 as a security vulnerability affecting their graphics architecture, older Gen7 graphics saw a huge hit to their performance with the initial patches for addressing this vulnerability on Ivy Bridge and Haswell processors. Fortunately, a new mitigation patch series was sent out this week where they believe the performance costs are now avoided...

In addition to Linux Mint 20 coming this year that will be based off Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the Linux Mint crew is preparing LMDE 4 as their re-base of the Debian based variant...

With the V3D Gallium3D driver hitting OpenGL ES 3.1 compliance, the Raspberry Pi Foundation and their partners have turned to focusing on getting their Vulkan driver off the ground for Raspberry Pi 4 and future SBCs...

NVIDIA has sent out word that they no longer plan to issue anymore driver updates for their 340 series Linux legacy branch...

Lead UBports developer Marius Gripsgard has shared some exciting news: their Unity 8 code is now riding happily on Wayland...

Following the Xen hypervisor in mitigating against a possible Spectre Variant One and L1 Terminal Fault combination attack, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) has added its own protections with the Linux 5.6 kernel on top of all the other mitigations they've had to endure as a result of CPU vulnerabilities over the past two years...

We previously covered how CERN has moved away from Microsoft products over licensing fees and instead has begun employing various open-source alternatives. Now this European Organization for Nuclear Research is moving away from Facebook Workplace to instead make use of more open-source software packages...

The F2FS file-system compression functionality is the main feature addition for this flash-optimized file-system coming with the Linux 5.6 kernel. This native LZO/LZ4 compression support is geared for optimizing the lifespan of SSDs/flash memory thanks to reducing disk writes...

While not as exciting as the USB4 support and staging code lightening for these areas managed by Linux's second in command Greg Kroah-Hartman, he also sent out the char/misc updates this week with other hardware support improvements...

We've seen a lot of odd products pick up the Free Software Foundation's "Respect Your Freedom" endorsement like a USB microphone, various re-branded motherboards, and even last year certified a USB to parallel printer cable. The latest product they are endorsing -- and their first endorsement of 2020 -- is a USD 802.11 a/b/g/n PCIe half-mini card starting out at $59 USD but going up to $79 for this outdated wireless adapter...

Mesa 20.0 feature development is over with the code now being branched from Git master and the first of several release candidates issued...

Among many other Valve ACO back-end improvements for Mesa 20.0, one of the notable additions is this AMDGPU LLVM alternative now working for Radeon "Southern Islands" / GCN 1.0 graphics cards. With this, these original AMD GCN graphics cards may have some extra life out of Linux gaming boxes thanks to slightly higher performance some eight years after these graphics cards first launched in the Radeon HD 7000 series.

While WireGuard was merged into Linux 5.6, the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release is currently tracking Linux 5.4 and for the April release is likely to be shipping with Linux 5.5 as the 5.6 release will be cutting it too close. But Ubuntu 20.04's kernel has now back-ported WireGuard...

Google today announced OpenSK as an open-source Rust-based security key implementation supporting FIDO U2F and FIDO2 standards...

File-system / storage activity is as busy as always during the Linux kernel merge windows...

Succeeding last week's DXVK 1.5.2 is now a version 1.5.3 release with various fixes...

In addition to the new openat2() system call in Linux 5.6, pidfd_getfd() has landed with growing interest from many different parties for what will be an increasingly used syscall moving forward...

Systemd-homed has been merged as the latest (optional) fundamental change to Linux distributions in how home directories are handled...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver updates were sent in today for Linux 5.6 with plenty of fun features in tow...

Earlier this month AMD finally published their Sensor Fusion Hub driver for Linux to improve the Ryzen laptop support. That new "SFH" driver hasn't been queued as part of any Linux 5.6 pull request but a second version of the driver did make it out this week...

With Linux 5.6 the staging area has seen new functionality but thanks to removing old code it ends up removing a fair number of lines of code from the kernel...

The folks at iXsystems have released FreeNAS 11.3, their latest big update to this FreeBSD-based operating system designed around the OpenZFS file-system for offering advanced network-attached storage capabilities...

On top of the last minute Radeon Vulkan "RADV" improvements landing on Wednesday for Mesa 20.0, another big ticket item landed... Well, re-enabled...

Ahead of USB4 devices expected to begin appearing later this year, the Linux 5.6 kernel is wired up with initial USB4 support...

On top of all the spectacular work coming with Linux 5.6, here is another big improvement that went under my radar until today: Linux 5.6 is slated to be the first mainline kernel ready for 32-bit systems to run past the Year 2038!..

With LLVM Clang 10 having added a Zen 2 scheduler model tuned for the latest AMD CPUs over the existing "znver2" tuning that had just copied the Zen 1 scheduler, here are some benchmarks looking at the LLVM Clang 9 vs. 10 compiler performance on AMD EPYC when making use of "-march=znver2" optimizations...

Since the stable release of Linux 5.5 this weekend I have been carrying out benchmarks for looking at how the performance of this newly-minted kernel compares to older releases. Here are benchmark results of Linux 5.3 vs. 5.4 vs. 5.5 with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X but the results are similar to other HEDT and lower-end systems we've tested thus far...

A new system call added to the very feature rich Linux 5.6 kernel is openat2() for more extensible behavior compared to the existing openat() functionality...