Phoronix

As a result of at least "a few AArch64 platforms" lacking firmware support for mitigating Spectre Variant Two, Google engineers are evaluating the possibility of Retpolines for the 64-bit Arm architecture...

Linux 5.8 features for the Radeon "AMDGPU" kernel driver include the likes of Navi soft recovery and better handling of critical thermal faults on Radeon GPUs as well as enabling TMZ support. With feature work being capped off already on the DRM graphics front for Linux 5.8, AMD developers have been tidying up the code and readying more fixes for all of the new code set to premiere with this imminent merge window...

Mesa 20.1 has managed to release on time today as this quarter's feature update to this collection of open-source user-space graphics driver components...

Of the many features coming for Linux 5.8 one of the new drivers we are very much looking forward to is the AMD energy driver for finally exposing per-core and per-socket/package energy reporting of Zen/Zen2 CPUs under Linux. It's working out well so far in my evaluation...

Statsfs is a new RAM-based file-system proposal by a Red Hat engineer that is designed for exposing kernel statistics to user-space...

Given the release last week of GraalVM 20.1 as well as last month's release of Eclipse OpenJ9 0.20, here are some fresh JVM benchmarks up against multiple OpenJDK releases.

The release of Mesa 20.1 is imminent as the latest quarterly feature update to this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers predominantly in use by Linux systems. Here is a look at the many exciting improvements with Mesa 20.1...

For input devices on some laptops that are a combination of a pointing stick and touchpad, the Linux kernel's multi-touch driver will finally begin handling them correctly...

While AMD has been working on AOMP for Radeon OpenMP offloading as their downstream of the LLVM/Clang compiler suited for GPU compute offloading to their hardware, at least some of that work is beginning to appear back in upstream LLVM...

Following yesterday's release of Qt 5.15 LTS as the last series before Qt 6.0, The Qt Company has now released a new Qt Online Installer...

Announced at the end of April was Micron's HSE as a new open-source storage engine designed for offering speedy performance and lower latency on modern solid-based storage, especially for systems employing 3D XPoint technology. Version 1.7.1 of HSE was released today as their first open-source release since going public with this technology...

NVIDIA has been quite aggressive recently with their new Vulkan beta drivers for Windows and Linux with today marking another such release...

If all goes well Linux 5.7 should reach stable this weekend and that in turn will mark the start of the Linux 5.8 merge window. With our monitoring of the various "-next" branches for weeks already, here is a look at some of what is on the table for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Arm today announced the Cortex-A78 as their SoC for next-generation smartphones with up to 20% sustained performance improvements. Arm also announced today the Cortex-X Custom program...

Following the GCC 10.1 compiler optimization benchmarks posted this weekend, a number of readers were wondering about the impact of Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) on the new GCC 10 compiler. Here are some preliminary data points on that front...

It's coming a few days late but The Qt Company's Lars Knoll just announced the official release of Qt 5.15.0...

Reiser5 was announced back on New Year's Eve with support for local volumes and supporting parallel scaling out and other improvements over the long-in-development but never mainlined Reiser4. While Reiser5 was not met with enthusiasm, Edward Shishkin has continued working on this next-generation file-system and today announced the latest round of improvements...

The crew working on the MSM DRM driver from Freedreno / Google / Code Aurora (Qualcomm) have an interesting batch of changes for this open-source GPU driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware come Linux 5.8...

With the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle a quirk is being added to be able to reboot the 2009 era Apple MacBook without needing to boot with any special flags...

Currently if wanting to use Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync variable refresh rate support of the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver you need to be using the xf86-video-amdgpu X.Org driver for proper handling as well, but a port of the DDX bits to the generic xf86-video-modesetting driver is in the works...

One month after the big Phoronix Test Suite 9.6 release, Phoronix Test Suite 9.6.1 is out as the first and only planned point release to this quarter's feature series...

Announced over one month ago was KWinFT as a fork of KDE's KWin with an emphasis on improving the Wayland support and better embracing modern technologies. A beta of KWinFT is now available...

Landing this weekend in hwmon-next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel cycle is the recently reported on "amd_energy" driver for supporting AMD Zen/Zen2 core and package energy sensors...

For several years now GCC has offered a embeddable JIT compiler that for GPL applications can serve as a bytecode interpreter, an experimental Python compiler, and other possible use-cases with this libgccjit library. There now are patches pending for bringing libgccjit to Windows...

An interesting anecdote shared in today's Linux 5.7-rc7 announcement is word that Linux and Git creator Linus Torvalds switched his main rig over to an AMD Ryzen Threadripper...

While last week's Linux 5.7-rc6 kernel was quite big, Linux 5.7-rc7 is out today and it's on the smaller side of things in reassuring Linus Torvalds that the stable release of this kernel can happen soon...

Stemming from recent kernel discussions over a hypothetical new system call for reading small files more efficiently, Greg Kroah-Hartman has been working on the readfile() system call and it's looking like it is taking shape well enough to premiere soon in a new mainline kernel release...

For those AMD Ryzen laptop users eager to see the Sensor Fusion Hub driver for supporting the different hardware sensors on these AMD Zen laptops, that driver still isn't going to be merged for the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle even after the patches were first published months ago...

While modern AMD EPYC CPUs support Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Intel more recently has been working on MKTME for similarly offering hardware-backed total memory encryption, an Intel open-source engineer has now proposed a software-based solution for protected memory support for KVM virtualization...

Ardour 6.0 is now available as the latest major release of this high-end yet open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) package that runs across all major platforms...

NVIDIA on Friday released Nsight Graphics 2020.3 as the newest version of their proprietary tool for profiling and debugging Direct3D / Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenVR software...

TUXEDO Computers has launched their first AMD-powered Linux laptop! The excitement quickly faded though when seeing it's not a Renoir design...

There is a lot of wireless (and wired) networking activity each kernel cycle but for the upcoming Linux 5.8 merge window it looks like there will be particularly a lot for MediaTek drivers...

The first beta of the forthcoming PostgreSQL 13.0 is now available for evaluation. PostgreSQL 13 is coming with many new features with this article serving as a quick look plus some very preliminary benchmarks...

Published back in February were the Linux kernel enablement patches for a new "ComboPHY" driver for supporting the company's forthcoming Gateway SoC. That code is now set to be included in the next kernel cycle, Linux 5.8...

Linux I/O expert Jens Axboe who oversees the kernel's block layer and is employed by Facebook while working on IO_uring and other storage innovations has recently been working on async buffered reads support...

This week marked the release of the dav1d 0.7 AV1 video decoder with more performance optimizations thanks to more hand-tuned Assembly and other tweaking of this leading CPU-based AV1 video decoder. Here are benchmarks compared to the prior dav1d 0.5 and 0.6 releases...

With KDE Plasma 5.19 due for its stable release in early June, development efforts are beginning to focus on Plasma 5.20 for release later this year...

With the recently minted GCC 10 compiler there was a request to see some fresh benchmarks at different compiler optimization levels and flags like LTO...

Just hours after the release of Wine 5.9, the latest staging release is now available that is re-based to the latest upstream while continuing to toss in over eight hundred extra patches...

While MIPS Release 6 is the latest version of the MIPS ISA, the MIPS Release 5 support is finally set to be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel cycle...

While still on the Solaris 11.4 series and no signs of major advancements beyond it, SRU21 was released this week by Oracle with quite a number of package updates...

Intel is extending their Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) Linux support with battery participant device support...

Wine 5.9 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release for this software allowing Windows games and applications to generally run quite gracefully on Linux...

When it comes to the support for AMD Ryzen 4000 "Renoir" laptop support under Linux, as outlined in my testing so far this month the main caveat is needing Linux 5.6~5.7 for good graphics support but on the likes of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with Linux 5.4 you will not have GPU acceleration. At least in the case of the Lenovo IdeaPad 5 I have been using to test, you also need Linux 5.7 Git for battery sensor support. Another item that in turn is coming with Linux 5.8 is CPU temperature reporting for the Renoir processors...

Last week Amazon AWS promoted their Graviton2 instances to general availability status with a variety of different sized EC2 instances as well as a bare metal instance for tapping the full potential of their new SoC that features 64 Arm Neoverse N1 cores. Last week we ran through many benchmarks looking at Graviton2 on EC2 and bare metal performance while here is a follow-up article with more benchmarks and looking at how the sixty-four core Arm Graviton2 compares to AMD's EPYC 7742 64-core CPU with and without SMT.

The Linux kernel patches that have been spearheaded by Amazon AWS engineers to optionally flush the L1 data cache on each context switch have now been queued in the x86/mm branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel cycle...

There hasn't been too much to report on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" kernel driver in some time since the enabling of Turing and no apparent progress on re-clocking to allow the graphics cards to hit their rated clock frequencies (the longstanding, number one limitation for this open-source driver), but some changes were sent in today for the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel merge window...

Allwinner Tech has prepared their initial Linux kernel patches for bringing up the A100 SoC. The A100 SoC is one of their newest tablet-focused SoCs moving forward...

Facebook's compression experts responsible for Zstandard have today released Zstd 1.4.5 with more performance improvements...