Phoronix

Firmware developer Michał Żygowski of embedded consulting firm 3mdeb has provided a convenient overview over the current state of AMD Coreboot support for booting with this open-source alternative to conventional proprietary BIOS...

Intel's Linux graphics stack has seen a lot of major changes in recent years besides the addition of their "ANV" Vulkan driver. The Intel Linux OpenGL driver saw their new Gallium3D driver, NIR has come about as the new intermediate representation used across their drivers, and other fundamental changes and improvements. The latest underlying work is introducing a pattern-based code generator for their graphics compiler...

Last week we published benchmarks of the Motile M141, Walmart's private-label tech branch, and the M141 being a Ryzen 3 3200U powered laptop that has been retailing for just $199 USD. In those initial benchmarks was an extensive look at the Windows vs. Linux performance while this article today is looking at the performance of this AMD Ryzen 3 laptop against a number of old and new Intel laptops, all tested using a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Codeplay announced last year they were working on an open-source layer for running Intel's oneAPI and Data Parallel C++ on NVIDIA GPUs and as part of that supporting Khronos' SYCL on NVIDIA hardware. Today they revealed more details on this achievement and new software layer...

NVIDIA has kicked off February by releasing the 440.59 Linux driver as their newest stable driver...

Landing in the LLVM compiler infrastructure code-base in January was finally an AMD Zen 2 scheduler model optimized for the latest-generation AMD processors when compiling code with Clang using the -march=znver2 targeting. However, now some important fixes to this scheduler model have landed...

Oracle's Daniel Kiper provided an update on the GRUB boot-loader efforts and their hopes on sticking to a yearly release cadence...

Hikari is a stacking window manager with tiling support that has also work-in-progress code for serving as a Wayland compositor. However, unlike most X11 window managers and Wayland compositors being focused on Linux systems, Hikari is BSD-focused...

Over the past week have been two patch series in working to enable BACO (Bus Active, Chip Off) support and in turn power management capabilities when using AMDKFD (Kernel Fusion Driver) for compute workloads...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system that has been in development since 2001 saw its long-awaited beta release in late 2018 while it looks like a second beta release could be on approach for this open-source operating system...

The second release candidate of NetBSD 9.0 is now available for testing of what should be the last test candidate before the stable NetBSD 9 unveiling in the very near future...

Version 5.5 of KDevelop, the KDE-focused integrated development environment, is now available with various language integration improvements...

Following the release of Wine 5.0 about two weeks ago as the annual stable feature release of Wine, Wine 5.1 is out today in kicking off the next bi-weekly development series in the path towards Wine 6.0 due out next January...

Out this weekend is Lumina 1.6 as the latest release of this Qt-powered desktop environment originally developed by iXsystems as part of PC-BSD / TrueOS...

FS-VERITY came in Linux 5.4 as a means of transparent integrity and authenticity support for read-only files. This Google creation is seeing better performance with Linux 5.6...

Longtime X11 developer Keith Packard who has been working on various infrastructure improvements to the Linux desktop in recent years under contract for Valve has been eyeing the creation of a new Vulkan extension for dealing with frame timing behavior for Vulkan apps/games...

Towards the end of last year Intel quietly released an "ignition firmware" for the Management Engine (ME) on their Cascade Lake platform that is also their first ME firmware release to be under a license permitting redistribution...

The vkBasalt open-source project began as just providing Contrast Adaptive Sharpening support for Linux/Vulkan games similar to Radeon Image Sharpening. This Vulkan post-processing layer then added an option for applying FXAA anti-aliasing and then SMAA and other effects. Now vkBasalt 0.3 is out today with even more post-processing features...

While KDE Plasma 5.18 is dropping soon, feature work is already underway on Plasma 5.19 and other areas of the KDE desktop stack...

Lightworks 2020.1 is on the way as this professional-grade video editing system's first release of the year and a change in their versioning scheme. Out this week is the first public beta of the still-proprietary video editing system for Windows, macOS, and Linux...

LLVM 10.0 was branched in mid-January but it took until Thursday to get the first release candidate out the door. That first step towards the release of LLVM 10.0 and sub-projects like Clang 10.0 is now moving along and you can enjoy testing the compiler stack this weekend...

In recent Linux kernel releases we have seen a new gaming keyboard driver, better wireless device support, and a number of new device additions to the Logitech HID driver. With Linux 5.6, there is more Logitech work in tow but not quite as much as the recent kernels...

Valve has just reported their January 2020 numbers from the controversial Steam Survey...

Following the recent beta release with a Clang-built kernel option and experimental Zypper as an alternative to DNF, OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 has been released as part of FOSDEM 2020 celebrations over in Brussels...

The new "cpuidle_cooling" thermal driver in Linux 5.6 is similar to Intel's PowerClamp driver and RAPL framework but is generic for working across CPUs/architectures as an idle cooling driver to cool down CPUs/SoCs by injecting idle cycles at run-time...

Red Hat's Karol Herbst spoke at the FOSDEM 2020 conference in Brussels on the state of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Linux graphics driver stack...

The Linux 5.6 media driver updates have landed in the kernel...

Two important pieces of the GNU toolchain saw new releases to kickoff February...

There is plenty of PCI work that landed for the Linux 5.6 kernel merge window...

During the first month of 2020 on Phoronix were 305 original news stories and another 18 Linux hardware reviews / featured-length articles. Here is a look back at what has been exciting Linux and open-source enthusiasts so far in 2020...

Intel on Friday released Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL) version 1.2, formerly known as MKL-DNN. With this release comes both new features and better performance...

The random changes have been sent in for Linux 5.6 that yield /dev/random behavioral changes and a new random flag...

Adding to the Linux 5.6 excitement is the hardware enablement of the MIPS-based Ingenic X1000 SoC...

University of Illinois and associated developers have released HPVM 0.5, their LLVM-based compiler infrastructure for Heterogeneous Parallel Systems with CPU execution and OpenCL-based NVIDIA GPU support...

Following on from last week's story that it was looking like Linux 5.6 would drop Intel MPX support, that has now taken place...

GNU C Library 2.31 (Glibc 2.31) should be releasing in the days ahead and is now under a hard freeze for this next feature release to this important libc implementation...

When carrying out our Windows vs. Linux benchmarks we normally are doing so on interesting high-end hardware but for today's benchmarking is a look at how a $199 USD laptop powered by an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor compares between Windows 10 as it's shipped on the laptop against the forthcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux distribution.

Earlier this month when Intel disclosed CVE-2019-14615 as a security vulnerability affecting their graphics architecture, older Gen7 graphics saw a huge hit to their performance with the initial patches for addressing this vulnerability on Ivy Bridge and Haswell processors. Fortunately, a new mitigation patch series was sent out this week where they believe the performance costs are now avoided...

In addition to Linux Mint 20 coming this year that will be based off Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the Linux Mint crew is preparing LMDE 4 as their re-base of the Debian based variant...

With the V3D Gallium3D driver hitting OpenGL ES 3.1 compliance, the Raspberry Pi Foundation and their partners have turned to focusing on getting their Vulkan driver off the ground for Raspberry Pi 4 and future SBCs...

NVIDIA has sent out word that they no longer plan to issue anymore driver updates for their 340 series Linux legacy branch...

Lead UBports developer Marius Gripsgard has shared some exciting news: their Unity 8 code is now riding happily on Wayland...

Following the Xen hypervisor in mitigating against a possible Spectre Variant One and L1 Terminal Fault combination attack, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) has added its own protections with the Linux 5.6 kernel on top of all the other mitigations they've had to endure as a result of CPU vulnerabilities over the past two years...

We previously covered how CERN has moved away from Microsoft products over licensing fees and instead has begun employing various open-source alternatives. Now this European Organization for Nuclear Research is moving away from Facebook Workplace to instead make use of more open-source software packages...

The F2FS file-system compression functionality is the main feature addition for this flash-optimized file-system coming with the Linux 5.6 kernel. This native LZO/LZ4 compression support is geared for optimizing the lifespan of SSDs/flash memory thanks to reducing disk writes...

While not as exciting as the USB4 support and staging code lightening for these areas managed by Linux's second in command Greg Kroah-Hartman, he also sent out the char/misc updates this week with other hardware support improvements...

We've seen a lot of odd products pick up the Free Software Foundation's "Respect Your Freedom" endorsement like a USB microphone, various re-branded motherboards, and even last year certified a USB to parallel printer cable. The latest product they are endorsing -- and their first endorsement of 2020 -- is a USD 802.11 a/b/g/n PCIe half-mini card starting out at $59 USD but going up to $79 for this outdated wireless adapter...

Mesa 20.0 feature development is over with the code now being branched from Git master and the first of several release candidates issued...

Among many other Valve ACO back-end improvements for Mesa 20.0, one of the notable additions is this AMDGPU LLVM alternative now working for Radeon "Southern Islands" / GCN 1.0 graphics cards. With this, these original AMD GCN graphics cards may have some extra life out of Linux gaming boxes thanks to slightly higher performance some eight years after these graphics cards first launched in the Radeon HD 7000 series.

While WireGuard was merged into Linux 5.6, the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release is currently tracking Linux 5.4 and for the April release is likely to be shipping with Linux 5.5 as the 5.6 release will be cutting it too close. But Ubuntu 20.04's kernel has now back-ported WireGuard...