Phoronix

Queued up as one of the early changes in the cryptographic subsystem ahead of the Linux 5.8 kernel cycle this summer is an Arm CryptoCell driver...

While there exists DXVK offering great Direct3D 9/10/11 support atop Vulkan that is used by Steam Play / Proton and others, Wine developers continue working on their Vulkan back-end to WineD3D as a similar Direct3D-over-Vulkan approach for pre-D3D12...

FreeBSD developers have been working on transitioning to using OpenZFS as their ZFS file-system upstream code rather than the dormant Illumos base. That initial FreeBSD support has been mainlined this week into the OpenZFS repository, now providing a common code-base between for the open-source ZFS file-system code between Illumos, FreeBSD, Linux, and work-in-progress macOS...

AMD has finally released their first "Radeon Software for Linux" packaged driver release to succeed their Radeon Software for Linux 19.50 driver series that saw its last update in December. Radeon Software for Linux 20.10 is available today as their first packaged Linux driver update of 2020 for AMD Radeon Linux owners as the packaged solution intended for easy installation of their All-Open and "PRO" driver components...

Following the release of Chrome 81 earlier this month, Chrome 83 is now in beta with Google having skipped Chrome 82 due to delays / internal issues...

With Linux 5.7 the kernel is preparing to use the Schedutil governor more often on Intel systems. That change affects the CPUfreq default as well as the Intel P-State driver when in passive mode. While Schedutil holds a lot of hope, at least on Linux 5.7 with the testing I've done thus far the results show the raw performance slipping while testing on more platforms is forthcoming.

Less than one week since the release of Linux 5.7-rc1, Intel's large open-source graphics team has already submitted their first pull request to DRM-Next of changes for Linux 5.8...

Besides the long-running FSGSBASE patch series that has the ability to help the performance for CPUs going back years, another engineer on Intel's open-source team has been working on a separate but enticing patch in the name of performance...

Canonical is transitioning Ubuntu's support in the Amazon AWS environment to have a rolling-release model for its kernel albeit other packages will remain under their traditional stable release update handling. At least though it's good they will be more punctually offering new kernel versions in the cloud..

Facebook and Intel have been working on being able to enable Xeon Scalable Open Compute Project systems with an open-source FSP...

Hopefully it won't be like many Fedora releases in the past that were dragged out for weeks at a time due to blocker bugs (thankfully, recent Fedora releases have been tremendously better in that regard), but Fedora 32 will not be debuting next week as planned due to bugs...

It looks like better support for Windows programs running under Wine interacting directly with USB devices could finally be on the horizon...

It turns out our recent OpenJDK 8 through OpenJDK 14 benchmarks caught some on Oracle's Java team by surprise. But they were able to replicate the outcome and as a result OpenJDK 15 will be seeing better out-of-the-box performance...

Earlier this week I published new benchmarks looking at the desktop CPU security mitigation impact with Ubuntu 20.04. Here are similar tests done in looking at the server mitigation impact with the near-final Ubuntu 20.04 LTS while testing server workloads on Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server platforms. Like the desktop tests, the mitigation impact with the out-of-the-box protections against Spectre, Meltdown, and friends is being compared to booting the same Ubuntu 20.04 release with "mitigations=off" for run-time disabling of the relevant mitigations on each platform.

Mir 1.8 is available today as the newest feature update to this display stack developed by Canonical that currently is focused on providing a pleasant Wayland compositor experience especially for kiosk-type environments and others wanting to transition from X11 to Wayland...

AMD released today their first update of the quarter for their open-source AMDVLK Vulkan Linux driver...

A big change was just merged today for the in-development GNOME 3.38 that will benefit Wayland gamers and others...

If you tried out Linux 5.7-rc1 at the start of the week you may have found your system unbootable if using EFI... Fortunately, those EFI fixes have now been merged several days later...

There are many new and exciting features of Linux 5.7 but also some material that didn't make the cut this window that we are now hoping will see mainline status for Linux 5.8 or another kernel this year...

The GCC compiler's libstdc++ library has continued receiving more last minute C++20 work...

With Linux 5.6 the flash-focused F2FS file-system added LZO and LZ4 compression support for enhancing performance and ideally extending flash storage life by reducing the amount of writes. Added meanwhile for the current Linux 5.7 cycle was F2FS Zstd compression support. Now looking ahead to Linux 5.8, it looks like LZO-RLE support is being baked...

Various patches are pending for improving the Linux support for onboard audio with motherboard sporting the AMD TRX40 chipset for 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadripper systems...

Following the surprise announcement last month that Microsoft's GitHub would be acquiring NPM Inc, the company behind the popular JavaScript package manager, that acquisition is now complete...

Longtime KDE developer and former Blue Systems engineer, Roman Gilg, has announced his forking of KDE's KWin window manager / compositor and the subsequent first release of this new KWinFT project...

Following the Proton 5.0-6 release candidate from earlier this month that brought out-of-the-box support for DOOM Eternal under Linux, Valve today promoted Proton 5.0-6 to being officially available...

After being in code review the past half-year, support for Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) within Gallium3D's "Clover" OpenCL state tracker was just merged for Mesa 20.1...

Released this month was the X-Plane 11.50 beta flight simulator that introduced a Vulkan renderer for this cross-platform, realistic flight simulator that long relied upon an OpenGL pipeline. Last week we published OpenGL vs. Vulkan X-Plane 11 benchmarks for both NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics. In this article is a look at the X-Plane 11.50 beta Vulkan performance across the different Radeon Vulkan driver options.

While GNOME 3.36 shipped just last month, the GNOME user experience team is already working on improvements that could potentially make it into GNOME 3.38 this autumn for further polishing the UX of the desktop...

It's been nearly one year since the release of GNU Guix 1.0 as the transactional package manager and GNU/Linux system distribution while today that has been succeeded by Guix 1.1...

Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman has delegated a set of individuals to serve as the Debian Community Team, the project's replacement to the former Debian Anti-Harassment Team...

Fedora 33 this autumn is looking to make use of systemd-resolved by default rather than NSS-DNS for name resolution...

Blend2D, a software-based 2D renderer with JIT pipeline construction with aims to be a high performance vector graphics engine, is now faster thanks to multi-threading...

With no sign of Solaris.Next either as Solaris 11.5 or Solaris 12, nor is it really expected to happen following Oracle's actions in recent years from layoffs to dismissing Solaris 12 when it was on their road-map at one point for 2017, Solaris 11.4 continues just being SRU'ed...

Future AMD CPUs (more than likely, Zen 3) will be bearing larger CPU microcode sizes, resulting in the Linux kernel needing a change to load them...

Lutris 0.5.6 is out today as the popular open-source Linux game manager/launcher...

For years there have been patches floating around for helping the performance of context switching sensitive workloads going back to "Ivy Bridge" CPUs but without ever crossing the finish line to get this "FSGSBASE" support merged. But now in 2020 it's once again being attempted...

Git 2.26.1 along with new point releases going back to Git 2.17 were issued today as a result of a security issue...

Radeon GPU Analyzer 2.3.1 is now available as the GPUOpen utility for analyzing Vulkan / DirectX / OpenGL / OpenCL code across platforms for performance profiling and other purposes...

AMD today is announcing three new EPYC 7002 "Rome" SKUs in the form of the 7F32, 7F52, and 7F72 processors. The AMD 7F52 processors we have been recently testing and offers some impressive performance potential as while it's a 16-core / 32-thread part it offers an impressive 256MB L3 cache (16MB per core). Here are our initial Linux benchmarks of the AMD EPYC 7F52 in 1P and 2P configurations up against various AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors.

While the Linux 5.7 merge window just ended on Sunday, with the DRM-Next cutoff for new material coming weeks prior to that, AMD developers working on their AMDGPU DRM kernel driver already have over 200 patches accumulated for the next cycle...

It's been a while since last having any news to report on GNUstep, the free software re-implementation of the Apple Cocoa / OpenStep frameworks. But GNUstep is alive and well and today several of its components saw new releases -- among the feature work is improving its multi-monitor handling...

Fwupd 1.4 is available today as the latest major update to this open-source, Linux-focused firmware updating solution that ties into the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS)...

There hasn't been much to report on this year for EROFS as the Huawei-developed read-only Linux file-system with Android devices in mind. But out this week is now erofs-utils as an update to the user-space utilities around this file-system...

Fedora 33 later this year will see a new "Enterprise Linux Next" (ELN) buildroot and compose setup for testing new changes potentially destined for the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Most notable from the original ELN proposal is on potentially raising the x86_64 CPU requirements. ELN is now approved to take place...

While the Linux 5.7 feature merge window just closed yesterday, there is already one feature queued up for Linux 5.8 that caught our eye...

With Ubuntu 20.04 due for release next week, here is a look at how the various CPU vulnerability mitigations compare on that latest Linux software stack when comparing the out-of-the-box mitigations for Spectre, Meltdown, and friends, compared to booting with "mitigations=off" for disabling those mitigations. The desktop tests were done with Intel and AMD processors for reference.

The release candidate to the long-awaited Inkscape 1.0 emerged at the end of last week for this popular cross-platform SVG/vector graphics editor...

ASUS has released a new budget graphics card that could actually be great for those wanting to use the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver stack on Linux...

One of the areas of Intel's Linux support that has been less than ideal is their handling of the Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) for today's ultrabook. Intel has provided some support with a focus on Google's Chromium OS but it's less than complete and notably missing is support for the more advanced "adaptive policy", but that soon could change...

One of the new features to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for those making use of ZFS On Linux with Canonical's Zsys manager is the automated APT snapshots on package transactions to be able to carry out system rollbacks if needed. An important fix around this functionality is on the way...