Phoronix

Kernel Address Space Isolation is an experimental feature in development by Oracle in aiming to prevent leaking sensitive data from Intel Hyper Threading due to speculative execution attacks like L1TF...

Valve's Steam Labs is the new centralized place for their different experiments around the Steam marketplace...

It's on a daily basis we are seeing improvements to the newly-added Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" support with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack. Today brings geometry shader support for the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver...

While just being a few days into the two-week long merge window for Linux 5.3, it's certainly another busy cycle even when considering the summer months tend to be a bit slower for developers...

One of the areas that I always have "fun" benchmarking for new CPU launches is looking at the compiler performance. Following the recent Ryzen 3000 series launch I carried out some initial benchmarks looking at the current Zen 2 performance using the newest GCC 9 stable series with its "znver2" optimizations. Here is a look at how the Znver2 optimizations work out when running some benchmarks on the optimized binaries with a Ryzen 9 3900X running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

AMD's GPUOpen group has released a new version of their GPU Performance API (GPA) with Navi support...

While currently Ubuntu makes use of GNOME Software as their "software center" (or "app store") with Snap integration, as we wrote about recently Canonical has begun writing their own Snap Store. Given this and that they don't plan to use GNOME Software in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and thus have taken their developers away from working on the upstream support, GNOME developers are planning to disable the Snap plug-in for GNOME Software...

The recent work on enabling "-Wimplicit-fallthrough" behavior for the Linux kernel has culminated in Linux 5.3 with actually being able to universally enable this compiler feature...

Separate from the Linux boot issue affecting AMD Ryzen 3000 (Zen 2) processors that has been attributed to RdRand, DragonFlyBSD is the first BSD at least we've seen getting a separate fix to be able to boot these new AMD processors...

The EXT4 file-system updates have already landed for the Linux 5.3 kernel merge window that opened this week...

Snow Ridge is the SoC Intel announced last December as a 10nm product intended for 5G products. With the in-development Linux 5.3 kernel is initial "perf" subsystem support for Snow Ridge...

AMD Zen 2 CPUs support ACPI's Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) for tuning the system to energy and/or performance requirements. AMD has now published a new CPUfreq driver for handling their CPPC implementation and the new controls found with their new processors...

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai sent in the big set of audio driver changes for Linux 5.3...

In addition to better Wine support on NetBSD thanks to Google Summer of Code 2019, another student developer has been working on DRM ioctl support including when running their Linux emulation packages. Ultimately the hope is they can run the Steam Linux binary on NetBSD to enjoy gaming with DRM+Mesa...

The scheduler changes for the Linux 5.3 kernel are as busy as ever...

Microsoft's exFAT file-system is more than one decade old and while there has been out-of-tree efforts, the mainline Linux kernel as of yet does not support the file-system even with it appearing on more SD cards and other devices. But there is now a renewed effort to get an exFAT driver into the Linux kernel...

Under the Fedora umbrella has been the "Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux" to complement the official RHEL packages with extra packages largely based on Fedora packages. While RHEL 8.0 launched in May, there hasn't been full support for EPEL-8 yet but it's being worked on...

Herbert Xu sent out the crypto subsystem updates on Monday for the in-development Linux 5.3 kernel...

It's just not the RADV Vulkan driver seeing lots of Navi activity but the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver and RadeonSI OpenGL Mesa driver are also off to the races in improving their newly-enabled Navi / Radeon RX 5700 series support...

After going through 9+ rounds of revisions for the Amlogic video decode driver, it's now been part of the media subsystem updates for the Linux 5.3 kernel...

Following the Radeon RX 5700 series launch, AMD has now open-sourced their Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) technology under FidelityFX on GPUOpen...

Genode continues advancing as an open-source operating system framework and with that their effort to develop Sculpt OS as a general purpose operating system has continued in-step. Out now is Sculpt OS 19.07 as their latest operating system release...

The power management changes for Linux 5.3 merge window don't offer any P-State changes or other prominent Intel changes this cycle but there is some other improvements as well as new CPUFreq drivers for CPU frequency scaling...

For those wondering if upgrading your RAM to higher frequency DIMMs is worthwhile when moving to AMD X570 and a new Zen 2 processor like the Ryzen 9 3900X, here are some reference benchmarks at different frequencies while maintaining the same timings.

The first release candidate of Samba 4.11 is now available while Samba 4.12 begins development on Git master...

While FreeBSD 12 is the latest and greatest FreeBSD release, FreeBSD 11.3 is now available as the newest for those sticking to the former series...

ROCm 2.6 was released overnight and when initially seeing this new Radeon Open Compute support come right after the Radeon RX 5700/5700XT launch, I was hopeful it would bring Navi support but sadly there are no signs of it in this release. But at least ROCm 2.6 is bringing other features...

NVIDIA today issued the 430.34 Linux driver as their newest update in the 430 stable series...

Mozilla rolled out Firefox 68.0 as the newest version of their web-browser...

Bolt, the Red Hat led project for managing Thunderbolt devices on Linux and their security, is out with their version 0.8 update to introduce better security for the growing number of Thunderbolt devices...

D9VK 0.13 is now available as the newest release of this project mapping Direct3D 9 atop Vulkan for accelerated Windows gaming on Linux...

After announcing the deal last October, IBM today closed on its acquisition of Red Hat...

Back on 7 July, the open-source Mesa RADV Vulkan driver managed to deliver launch-day Navi support for these new 7nm GPUs. That first-cut support for this "community" open-source driver was working but various optimizations and features lacking. The developers at Valve, Red Hat, and Google have continued refining this Navi/GFX10 support for RADV...

For those riding the Mesa 19.1 stable release train, Mesa 19.1.2 is now available as the second point release to this quarterly update to this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers for the Linux desktop...

After being delayed from earlier kernel cycles, Linux 5.3 will allow for tracking the last time a process made use of AVX-512 in order for user-space schedulers to provide better task placement...

LLVM's RISC-V CPU back-end has made immense progress over the past few years and now for the LLVM 9.0 release due out at the end of August or early September could become official...

During H1'2019 on Phoronix.com were 1,766 original news articles and 130 original Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark multi-page articles. Here is a look back at the most popular articles during the first half of the year on Phoronix...

Back in March 2019 when Intel announced Sound Open Firmware, they also announced ACRN as a small footprint hypervisor intended for real-time and safety-critical use-cases. Now with Linux 5.3 this IoT-focused hypervisor can handle Linux guests on the ACRN hypervisor...

As a change we had been expecting this cycle, Ubuntu 19.10 has upgraded to GCC 9 as the default system compiler over GCC 8...

Intel's patches for supporting the multi-die topology of Cascadelake-AP processors is now going into the Linux 5.3 kernel...

Vulkan 1.1.114 is another weekly update to the Vulkan graphics API specification... With this update does come a new extension of some interest...

Last week Valve formally announced their new Radeon shader compiler for AMD's open-source Linux graphics drivers. At this stage it's an out-of-tree solution providing generally faster performance to the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver over the current AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler but they also have ambitions of wiring it up to the RadeonSI OpenGL driver once mature too, assuming AMD's developers are willing to make use of this new compiler code. For those wondering about the Vulkan performance, here are our independent benchmarks of the current Mesa 19.2 RADV performance with the LLVM shader compiler compared to Valve's new "ACO" compiler back-end and then also using AMD's official AMDVLK reference driver that is also leveraging LLVM.

Following last night's Linux 5.2 kernel release, the GNU folks maintaining their GNU Linux-libre off-shoot that de-blobs the kernel of being able to load binary-only firmware/microcode files or the ability to load binary-only kernel modules is out with their re-based kernel...

As outlined yesterday, AMD's Ryzen 3000 processors are very fast but having issues booting newer Linux distributions. The exact issue causing that boot issue on 2019 Linux distribution releases doesn't appear to be firmly resolved yet but some are believing it is an RdRand instruction issue on these newer processors manifested by systemd...

Thomas Gleixner sent in his various x86 code updates early this morning for the just kicked off Linux 5.3 kernel cycle...

The GPIO updates for the newly-opened Linux 5.3 kernel merge window is dropping the FMC subsystem as they deem it easier to re-start from scratch writing that code than to try to repair it, or "start over using the proper kernel subsystems than try to polish the rust shiny." Funny enough, this code is being used by the CERN's well known Large Hadron Collider...

The past several years Siemens and others have been working on Jailhouse as a Linux-based partitioning hypervisor for bare metal appliances. Their previous release was all the way back during last year's Oktoberfest and now with construction for this year's fest kicking off at the wiesn, the developers happen to be releasing their next version of Jailhouse...

It's 2019 and OpenGL 4.6 remains the latest version of this once predominant graphics API yet Mesa's Gallium3D LLVMpipe software rasterizer is still only exposing OpenGL 3.3...

Due to summer holidays, the 64-bit ARM (AArch64/ARM64) architecture changes were already sent in days ago for the Linux 5.3 kernel merge window...

While back in May we provided a Linux 5.2 feature overview following the closure of its merge window, given Sunday's release of the Linux 5.2 Bobtail Squid kernel, if you've lost track of what there is to get excited about in this new kernel, this article is for you...