Phoronix

It's another busy week in the KDE land from their Wayland session finally supporting middle-click paste to Konsole now able to display image thumbnail previews when hovering over filenames with this KDE terminal emulator...

Following the recent release candidate, the Valve and CodeWeavers developers have officially promoted this latest Wine-based downstream for empowering Steam Play to their latest stable release...

Wine Staging 5.10 is out today as the latest version of this experimental blend of Wine that is re-based off yesterday's Wine 5.10 codebase...

LunarG in cooperation with The Khronos Group has released Vulkan SDK 1.2.141...

POWER10 is the forthcoming IBM + OpenPOWER processor expected to be shipping in 2021 and manufactured on a 7nm process and offer big improvements over the existing POWER9 microarchitecture...

Wine 5.10 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source project for allowing Windows games and applications to run generally gracefully on Linux (and other) platforms...

Today marks sixteen years since I started Phoronix.com for Linux hardware reviews as well as twelve years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0...

Given the recent release of the Windows 10 May 2020 Update, here are some fresh benchmarks showing how the latest Windows 10 software update paired with the latest AMD drivers performs against the latest 2020 Linux distribution releases. This testing was done on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X box given the interesting performance differences we have seen in the past to Linux's advantage with these HEDT processors. The Linux distributions tested against Windows 10 May 2020 Update were Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Arch-based Manjaro 20.0.2, Clear Linux 33250, and Fedora Workstation 32.

Ted Ts'o sent in the EXT4 file-system changes on Thursday for Linux 5.8 as the summer 2020 kernel release...

Following VMware making the VMWGFX kernel changes for supporting OpenGL 4.x, the SVGA Gallium3D driver is now exposing OpenGL 4.1 in compatibility profile contexts for this open-source graphics driver used as part of the VMware virtualization stack...

With today's Intel Compute Runtime 20.22.16952 release there is now OpenCL 3.0 support exposed for Tiger Lake...

There is new hardware support as part of the sound subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel...

Today AMD and Amazon announced the general availability of 2nd Gen AMD EPYC "Rome" processors available via the Elastic Compute Cloud. AMD EPYC "Rome" on EC2 with the new "C5a" instance types offer very competitive performance against the latest Intel Xeon instance types, Amazon's own Graviton2 Arm-based instances, and a big upgrade compared to the first-generation EPYC processors in the cloud.

A feature proposal raised by Red Hat's Jeff Law would allow Fedora packages to be built under the LLVM Clang compiler rather than defaulting that all packages to be built under GCC. Clang-built packages would happen where the upstream software recommends using Clang by default or for software without an upstream to let the packager(s) make their own decision...

David Miller on Tuesday sent in all of the networking subsystem updates for the Linux 5.8 kernel and there is a lot in store...

Following the initial benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U performance a few days ago, here is another more exhaustive look at the performance of this six-core Zen 2 mobile processor as well as that of the eight core Ryzen 7 4700U and several competing Intel CPUs in 140+ benchmarks.

The GNU Linux-libre 5.7-gnu kernel was released following last weekend's Linux 5.7 kernel release. But the info-gnu mailing list was slow and thus just hitting the wire today for the latest version of this sanitized version of the Linux kernel. One interesting change in GNU Linux-libre 5.7-gnu is dropping the Intel Gen7 "iGPU Leak" security mitigation over not liking the sources...

The Linux 5.8 media subsystem changes restore a previously dropped driver for supporting the cameras found on multiple generations of Intel Atom devices...

Version 2.1 of Red Hat's Stratis daemon is now available that aims to bring Btrfs/ZFS-like functionality atop the XFS file-system paired with LVM...

While there have been out-of-tree Linux patches offering this support already, with the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel comes a mainline solution for allowing the Fn and left Control keys to be swapped on Apple keyboards...

Intel has released oneAPI DPC++ Compiler 2020-05 as their latest snapshot for the current state of their LLVM-based Data Parallel C++ Compiler...

This week marks 16 years since starting Phoronix.com and 12 years since the Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 release, so what better way to celebrate than a new development release of the Phoronix Test Suite...

As part of the many areas of the kernel managed by Ingo Molnar, on Tuesday he submitted the pull request with all of the scheduler code updates for Linux 5.8...

Complementing the new AMD Energy Driver in the hwmon subsystem for Linux 5.8 to provide per-socket/core reporting, the Linux perf subsystem in this new kernel version has run-time average power limiting (RAPL) framework integration for AMD Zen/Zen2 CPUs...

Radeon Open Compute 3.5 (ROCm 3.5) is now available with a number of improvements but surprisingly still no GFX10/Navi support...

Blender 2.83 is out today as the project's first long-term support release (LTS) while still introducing many new features and improvements for existing functionality...

TPAUSE is the new Intel instruction for supporting lightweight power/performance optimized and improved power/performance states for sleeping until the timestamp counter (TSC) has reached a desired value. This new instruction with Intel's Tremont architecture will now be used by Linux 5.8+ on supported CPUs for an optimized power state while waiting on a delay event...

Valve and CodeWeavers have been preparing a new release of the Proton 5.0 series for powering Steam Play with running modern Windows games on Linux...

Besides disabling CPU security mitigations (not recommended if security is of importance), for those wanting to squeeze extra performance out of Intel CPUs like Comet Lake with the Core i9 10900K, loading Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux is one such way. Here is a look at the current performance that can be gained out of using the latest rolling-release Clear Linux on the i9-10900K in comparison to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

The improved DAX code led by Intel has landed in the Linux 5.8 kernel with EXT4 and XFS being the initial file-systems to make use of this improved direct access mode...

The usual assortment of cryptography updates have landed within Linux 5.8...

Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver is now enabling the "zero vRAM" option for all VKD3D games -- Direct3D 12 titles running on Steam Play / Wine with this D3D12 to Vulkan layer -- in order to workaround various rendering bugs...

The 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture changes have already landed into the progressing Linux 5.8 codebase...

As part of their work on ZFS support improvements for the in-development Ubuntu 20.10, Zsys 0.5 has been tagged and landing in the "Groovy Gorilla" repository for this ZFS daemon spearheaded by Canonical developers...

Two years after the release of Devuan 2.0 and just a few months since the Beowulf beta, Devuan 3.0 "Beowulf" is now officially available as this Linux distribution providing a Debian package set not dependent upon systemd...

Security Enhanced Linux is seeing some nice optimizations with the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel...

While iXsystems has been known as one of the leading FreeBSD-focused vendors with their various BSD-powered storage devices and servers as well as contributing significantly to upstream FreeBSD in addition to their former work on TrueOS/PC-BSD, they are now developing a new platform called TrueNAS SCALE that is based on Linux...

Back in April was the announcement that Lenovo would begin shipping some devices with Fedora Linux while now the story gets much juicier today...

Linux power management / ACPI maintainer Rafael Wysocki of Intel has sent in the usual big batch of PM/ACPI changes for the next version of the kernel, Linux 5.8...

With the PHP 8.0 schedule putting the first alpha release for the middle of June, I've been trying out its latest Git state in recent days for looking at its performance as well as when enabling its brand new JIT (Just In Time) compiler support that is new to PHP8. The results are quite compelling and here are metrics going back to the days of PHP 5.4 for comparison.

Mozilla's more rapid release schedule continues and that means today is Firefox 77.0 day...

A number of x86 (x86_64) pull requests have been sent in for the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates have been sent in as the open-source graphics/display driver updates for Linux 5.8 amounting to around 42k lines of new code and some 21k lines of code being removed...

Shipping one week from today is KDE Plasma 5.19 and among many other improvements is also significantly enhancing its Wayland support...

During the month of May on Phoronix were 252 original news articles and 20 featured Linux hardware reviews / benchmark specials written by your's truly. This included some surprising announcements from Microsoft, Linux 5.7 getting wrapped up and Linux 5.8 features being firmed up ahead of the now-open merge window, AMD Renoir mobile being a big success, and other milestones for open-source software...

SUSE's David Sterba was quite punctual in getting all of the Btrfs file-system updates submitted quickly for the newly-opened Linux 5.8 kernel merge window...

Valve's May 2020 numbers show another uptick for Steam Linux gaming usage, pointing towards the Linux marketshare continuing to increase with the overall Steam user-base in this coronavirus period leading to record usage with the extra time spent by gamers at home...

As part of the initial set of changes merged today for Linux 5.8 was the x86/mm material that included the controversial feature of opt-in flushing of the L1 data cache on context switching. Linus Torvalds ended up deciding to revert this functionality as for now at least he views it as crazy...

One of the use-cases for this new "initrdmem" option in Linux 5.8 can be for storing an initial ramdisk (initrd) on a motherboard flash chip in the space available after stripping out Intel's Management Engine (ME) code...

Hitting the mailing list just minutes ago were a set of more than 200 patches bringing up support for the previously unheard of Sienna Cichlid GPU...