Phoronix

It has been just under one month since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 while available this morning is the first development snapshot/milestone on the road to next quarter's Phoronix Test Suite 9.6-Nittedal feature release...

Habana Labs, the AI accelerator start-up being acquired by Intel, has more driver improvements on tap for Linux 5.7...

Intel is working to enable OpenGL 4.x functionality for their OpenSWR software rasterizer within Mesa...

The latest LLVM 11 development code has enabled support for NVIDIA CUDA GPU device offloading from 64-bit ARM...

One of the interesting innovations for the eBPF in-kernel virtual machine in recent times is the work by Google on supporting MAC and audit policy handling by it. This stems from currently custom real-time security data collection and analysis of Google servers internally for real-time threat protection and this patch-set is part of their work on allowing similar functionality in the upstream Linux kernel...

Being introduced by Linux 5.6 is optional F2FS transparent data compression support that was implemented with LZO and LZ4. Now for the Linux 5.7 kernel there is Zstd compression support on the way...

As part of the ZFS improvements for Ubuntu 20.04 with Canonical's Zsys initiative is the ability to automatically take snapshots on APT operations for being able to do a system rollback/revert if necessary following package management changes. I've begun trying out the ZFS/Zsys changes for Ubuntu 20.04 and so far is working well...

Valve today released their Half-Life: Alyx virtual reality first-person shooter game and built atop their Source 2 engine...

NVIDIA has released a new feature update to their Nsight Graphics standalone developer tool for debugging and profiling applications/games built atop a variety of 3D APIs...

For those stuck in home isolation amid the coronavirus pandemic, MythTV 31 has been released for any open-source DVR and HTPC needs...

The second beta of the forthcoming Qt 5.15 tool-kit is now available for testing...

Richard Hughes of Fwupd/LVFS, PackageKit, and Colord notoriety last month announced Jcat as a new open-source project he initiated to serve as an alternative to Microsoft's Catalog files proprietary format...

While we have been seeing Ubuntu 20.04 LTS offer better performance with newer hardware platforms, how does the performance compare to Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux? Here are some benchmarks on both AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and Intel Core i9 9900KS systems.

More improvements were queued in recent days to sched/core of CPU scheduler improvements on the table for the forthcoming Linux 5.7 kernel cycle...

Linus Torvalds commented that while Linux 5.6-rc7 may be going through strange times, the Linux 5.6 kernel development is looking normal...

Git 2.26 is out as the newest feature release for this distributed revision control system...

VMware's VMWGFX open-source Linux graphics driver stack for interfacing with their virtualization software to offer guest VM 3D acceleration that is in turn handled by the host's drivers will soon be offering OpenGL 4.x support...

While Ubuntu is based on Debian, for those wondering how the performance of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is looking not only compared to the previous 19.10 and 18.04.4 LTS releases but also Debian 10.3 stable and Debian Testing, here are some benchmark results on an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X system.

For longtime Linux users who were fans of the XMMS audio player in the early 2000's, Audacious 4.0 has been released as the newest version of this XMMS-inspired audio player...

Linux 5.7 is seeing some infrastructure work to provide better out-of-the-box support for some touchscreens on Linux...

In recent days we have seen Intel refining their list of PCI IDs for the next-gen and highly anticipated "Gen12" graphics within the open-source Linux Mesa 20.1 driver stack...

KDE development is moving full-speed ahead amid the various lock-downs and other happenings around the world stemming from the novel coronavirus. This week saw a lot of interesting improvements for the open-source desktop...

Google open-source engineers have been working on a temperature driver for AMD's SoC SB-TSI emulated temperature sensor for the Linux kernel...

Hard to believe that former Linux developer Hans Reiser was already eligible for parole, but it was denied this month. The former developer responsible for creating the once-promising ReiserFS and Reiser4 file-systems will remain locked up for at least three more years...

GNU Automake 1.16.2 is out this weekend as the first update to this important piece of the GNU build system in two years. While such length of time has passed, Automake 1.16.2 is only made up of just over three dozen commits...

There has been a lot of interesting work happening in the Linux storage space in recent time like IO_uring, the countless file-system innovations, and other features -- including one addition that's now up to its nineteenth revision and is for providing more VFS/file-system and mount topology information...

Facebook is looking to hire more compiler engineers as they ramp up their investment in LLVM and its sub-projects like the Clang C/C++ compiler and LLD linker...

For those looking to work on Blender 3D modeling from a laptop, having a NVIDIA RTX graphics processor can do wonders with the OptiX back-end for dramatically speeding up render times. Here is a look at how the different back-ends compare when running the HP ZBook 17 G6 mobile workstation with Quadro RTX 5000 graphics...

System76 is preparing to begin shipping their new Lemur Pro laptop in early April. This will be their most open laptop yet albeit still based on Intel. But it looks like when they move on with their ambitious plans to begin manufacturing their own devices, we may finally see a System76 AMD-powered laptop...

For those wondering what the buzz was about earlier this month when there was word of a high quality GPU compression codec going open-source, details on that have now been revealed...

Well known open-source AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák has been focusing recently on improvements to glthread for OpenGL threading that is generally able to offer better performance...

Debian is the latest Linux distribution flipping on WireGuard within their kernel builds...

Even Apple is on the bandwagon of transitioning select C code-bases of theirs over to Rust as well as expanding the code they are writing in Rust...

Disclosed last week was the Load Value Injection attack affecting Intel CPUs and requiring new mitigations. While the GNU Assembler mitigation options were quickly added, on the LLVM toolchain side the developers there continue evaluating the proposed LVI mitigation along with another option that looks to mitigate more than just LVI. The "SESES" proposal looks more broadly at mitigating CPU side-channel vulnerabilities but with shattering performance hits...

As another update to their Wine-based Proton 5.0 series for powering Steam Play, Valve has been readying their next update for enhancing the experience of running Windows games on Linux under Steam...

TrueNAS 12.0 CORE, which up until the new TrueNAS / FreeNAS branding unification would have been called FreeNAS, will in its next release support ZFS async copy-on-write functionality...

Intel's open-source team responsible for their Rust-based cloud hypervisor today issued a big feature update...

DXVK 1.6 is out in time for weekend gamers wishing to enjoy recent Windows games on Linux...

Given this week's general availability release of OpenJDK 14, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at all the major releases from OpenJDK 8 through 14 while looking at the JVM performance across multiple workloads.

The Linux Mint crew has released LMDE 4 "Debbie" as their hedge against anything dramatic happening to Ubuntu that would limit their ability to offer Linux Mint and for those preferring the upstream Debian base...

Intel's IWD wireless daemon for Linux systems has added full MAC randomization support as well as manual MAC override capabilities, similar to the MAC spoofing capabilities generally offered by other Linux networking components...

With the forthcoming Linux 5.7 kernel Intel Tiger Lake "Gen12" Xe graphics are considered stable as in enabled by default but that doesn't mean they are done working on features for the highly-anticipated next-gen Intel graphics...

Passing the point that new feature code is generally permitted into DRM-Next for in turn hitting the next mainline kernel merge window, AMD's open-source graphics driver developers have been turning their attention to bug fixes for all the new feature code set for Linux 5.7...

This should come as little surprise to regular Phoronix readers and those that follow the Mesa release cadence, but Mesa 20.1 as the next quarterly feature release now has a release calendar putting its debut towards the end of May...

The os108 project is one of the few (or only?) distributions based on NetBSD currently providing a MATE-based desktop experience atop this BSD. The os108 9.0 release is now available that re-bases against the recent NetBSD 9.0 release while continuing to provide its out-of-the-box desktop goodness...

Debian has the debian.social domain where they are looking to deploy a set of services to share content and collaborate among Debian contributors as their own federated social platform...

Going back to Ivy Bridge processors, Intel has supported "PPIN" as the Protected Processor Identification Number as a globally unique identification number set in the factory. It turns out recent AMD CPUs are also supporting PPIN and that reading their value is about to be supported on Linux...

For those that may be working from home more frequently now and looking for a very capable laptop to serve as a mobile workstation, HP's ZBook 17 G6 is the most powerful contender we have tested to date that offers great performance potential paired with very reliable build quality and also offering easy upgrade potential.

While not Linux specific news, for those interested in graphics APIs or cross-platform aspects of gaming, Microsoft today announced DirectX 12 Ultimate...

LLVM 10.0 along with the likes of Clang 10.0 were supposed to be out nearly one month ago but instead a fifth release candidate arrived today...