Phoronix

While there are a lot of new end-user features with Linux 5.6, there are also some changes not yet mainlined. Here are six that come to mind as missing out on the Linux 5.6 merge window...

For those using OpenBLAS as your BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) implementation, OpenBLAS 0.3.8 was released this weekend and coming with it are more AVX2/AVX-512 kernels and other optimizations...

AMD this morning announced the Radeon Pro W5500 as their latest workstation graphics card designed for modern design and engineering needs...

While there are many new features in the forthcoming Linux 5.6 kernel, the ongoing Address Space Isolation support is not one of them...

The Outreachy application period opened at the end of January for their summer 2020 internship round while just two weeks remain to get in your applications should you looking to be getting involved with open-source/Linux development...

Red Hat's Karol Herbst who has spent years now working on Nouveau SPIR-V support and other GPU open-source compute efforts around Mesa has provided a trivial implementation of clCreateCommandQueueWithProperties() that is now enough to begin running the OpenCL 2.0 conformance test suite on the Gallium3D "Clover" state tracker...

Linus Torvalds has just tagged Linux 5.6-rc1 as the first test kernel of the forthcoming Linux 5.6. This is going to be a jam-packed big update debuting as stable at the end of March or early April...

Out this Sunday is OpenShot 2.5 as the non-linear video editor's biggest release yet for this cross-platform, open-source solution...

The Linux 5.6 merge window is anticipated to be ending today followed by the Linux 5.6-rc1 test release. This kernel is simply huge: there is so many new and improved features with this particular release that it's mind-boggling. I'm having difficulty remembering such a time a kernel release was so large.

One of the last features to land today for Linux 5.6 ahead of the merge window closure is Western Digital's Zonefs file-system...

After being added to Linux 5.4 and then being ejected a week later when it was clear not enough testing took place, the VirtualBox Shared Folder "VBOXSF" driver is now trying to make it into Linux 5.6...

KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS is planned for release on Tuesday, 11 February, which means a mad rush of last minute fixes for this desktop as well as developers already working on Plasma 5.19 that is aiming for release in early June...

As first to write about yesterday, Linux 5.6 Arm platform changes now support the original Amazon Echo. While this allows the first-generation Amazon Echo to run with a mainline Linux kernel and is exciting for hobbyists, it's not really practical at this stage or even in the long-run...

Fedora 30 and Fedora 31 users will soon see Linux 5.5 come down as a stable update, but before then you can help if so inclined to test this new kernel revision on Fedora...

The X11 client support for Mir that leverages XWayland is graduating from its "experimental" status...

For those using GNU Make in particular as their build system, the parallel build times are about to be a lot faster beginning with Linux 5.6 for large core count systems. This landing just after the AMD Threadripper 3990X 64-core / 128-thread CPU launch is one example of systems to benefit from this kernel change when compiling a lot of code and making use of many GNU Make jobs...

GNOME 3.35.90 is available this weekend as the first of two betas towards GNOME 3.36...

There is a lot of new Arm SoCs and boards/platforms to be supported by the Linux 5.6 kernel...

Out this weekend is GDB 9.1 as the newest feature update to the GNU Debugger...

Out this weekend are the stable updates Debian 10.3 and Debian 9.12...

With having the initial AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X Linux benchmarks out of the way, I did some fun Friday night benchmarking with this 64-core HEDT CPU... Seeing how the 3990X performance compares to some CPUs used when starting out Phoronix back in 2004 as well as also for fun seeing how the Threadripper 3990X compares to the notorious AMD FX-9590...

As we've been expected, Rav1e 0.3 is now out the door for this open-source Rust-based AV1 encoder that now runs faster at higher encode levels...

Intel's open-source group continues working on Cloud-Hypervisor as a Rustlang-written hypervisor for modern Linux VMs and building off the shoulders of Google's CrosVM, Firecracker, and Rust-VMM. Cloud-Hypervisor 0.5 was released on Friday as a big update to this cloud-centered hypervisor...

Zink, the project going on for almost two years for implementing OpenGL over Vulkan, might soon be exposing OpenGL 3.0 and OpenGL ES 2.0 within mainline Mesa...

It's been nearly three years since the Stack Clash vulnerability was really tossed into the spotlight while such vulnerabilities have existed longer. Now finally in 2020, the LLVM compiler stack -- and years after GCC's mitigation -- is preparing its stack clash protection...

Valve has just released Proton 5.0-1 as a big upgrade to their Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux under Steam...

Following the Linux 5.5 NFS client adding support for server-to-server cross-device offloaded copies, the NFSD side for Linux 5.6 is now enabling its portion of handling server-side copies...

Following last week's Mesa 20.0 feature freeze and code branching with the first release candidate, the second release candidate is out today for this quarterly Mesa3D update...

GNOME 3.36 is due for release in just over one month's time and is shaping up to be another great release building upon all of the polishing and other evolutionary improvements we've seen particularly over the past two or three years...

It looks like with the Linux 5.7 kernel cycle this spring there should be proper backlight support when using this AMD Radeon kernel graphics driver with modern HDR/OLED displays...

If you are looking for the absolute best single-socket workstation performance for Linux, there has already been the Threadripper 3970X that easily outperforms the likes of the Core i9 10980XE as Intel's top-end HEDT product, but now the Threadripper 3990X is shipping. The Threadripper 3990X is AMD's first 64-core / 128-thread desktop/workstation processor and will love your multi-threaded workloads from code compilation to content creation. As shown in our benchmarks, this single CPU is indeed faster than $20k worth of Intel Xeon Platinum CPUs.

One of the complaints we here most frequently about the Linux-focused PC vendors is that they tend to most often offer just Intel-based hardware. Well, for those wanting a pre-built Linux workstation powered by AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X / 3970X / 3990X, System76 has launched a new line of their Thelio Major desktops powered by these HEDT CPUs.

Last week the main set of kernel graphics driver improvements were merged while today is an interesting secondary batch of changes for the in-development Linux 5.6 kernel...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced their first feature update to their Debian-based Raspbian operating system of 2020...

Philip Rebohle has released another update to DXVK 1.5, in time for any weekend gamers wanting to enjoy the latest Direct3D-over-Vulkan experience...

Booting the generic Ubuntu 20.04 LTS install media on a "Certified OEM" Ubuntu device could yield a different experience compared to running Ubuntu on a system not certified by Canonical...

Coming with the imminent systemd 245 is systemd-homed that is making fundamental changes to Linux home directories. Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering presented at FOSDEM 2020 last weekend on systemd-homed and that video recording is now up...

Following last year's resignation of Richard Stallman from the Free Software Foundation under public pressure but remaining as head of the GNU Project for these tight-knit organizations, the two organizations have needed to figure out how to cooperate moving forward...

With the NFS client are a few new features with its code to be found in Linux 5.6...

GNOME Shell and Mutter are out with their v3.35.90 releases today for the planned GNOME 3.36 beta...

AMD is adding a MIGraphX/ROCm back-end to Microsoft's ONNX run-time for machine learning inferencing to allow for Radeon GPU acceleration...

Given this week's release of Google Chrome 80, here are fresh benchmarks of Chrome 80 against Firefox 72 on Linux plus also a run with Firefox's WebRender option being enabled. This round of tests was under an Ubuntu 20.04 snapshot with AMD Ryzen processor and AMD Radeon VII graphics.

A second round of KVM virtualization updates were sent out today for the Linux 5.6 merge window that is still open through the weekend...

Mozilla developer Dzmitry Malyshau has provided an update on WGPU, their implementation of WebGPU built off GFX-RS and Rust for next-gen graphics and compute on the web...

Debian developer Mike Gabriel in cooperation with the UBports developers continuing to maintain Ubuntu Touch and Unity 8 are working to offer Unity 8 (and in turn, Mir) packages within Debian...

As another step towards tightening up the Linux kernel security, Intel's Kristen Carlson Accardi has proposed "FGKASLR" as a significant step forward for better enhancing the Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization...

Added back to Linux 5.4 was VirtIO-FS for better file/folder sharing with guest VMs that makes use of the FUSE protocol but is much faster than the likes of virtio-9p...

While the Linux 5.5 is out as stable today and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS isn't shipping until late April, it looks like they are settling on the use of the Linux 5.4 series, rather than the newer 5.5 and Linux 5.6 would be cutting too close to release anyhow for making this long-term support release...

It has been a while since there has been any new developments to report on BFQ, the Budget Fair Queueing I/O scheduler that offers both low-latency and high throughput modes, bandwidth and latency guarantees, and other functionality. With the ongoing Linux 5.6 cycle, BFQ at least has picked up some fixes...

The latest in our benchmarking fun with the $199+ Motile M141 laptop is seeing how well Intel's Clear Linux performs on it in relation to Ubuntu and Fedora.