As a change in acknowledging the increasing Arm SoC core counts as more vendors take stabs at higher-end server chips, the default 64-bit Arm (ARM64 / AArch64) kernel image as of Linux 5.1 will default to supporting 256 CPUs compared to the current default limit of 64 CPU cores...
Valve has released Proton 3.16-8 as their newest release to their Wine fork that adds in various improvements for helping Windows games on Linux primarily to bolster their "Steam Play" functionality...
Feral's GameMode daemon for dynamically tuning Linux systems while gaming and reverting to the default behavior when not running games continues to see new capabilities added...
One of the milestones we hope will be reached this year is having SPIR-V support in mainline LLVM, but while the Khronos working group engaging on better support around LLVM isn't there yet, the code continues improving out-of-tree...
In addition to measured boot support being worked on for Coreboot to enhance the security of this open-source BIOS/firmware replacement, support for working with Intel TXT - Trusted Execution Technology - is also happening...
The Linux kernel's RISC-V processor support is getting into good shape now since the support for this open-source processor ISA was originally introduced back for Linux 4.15. Moving forward, it's now expected the support to be maintained and only improve for the HiFive Unleashed developer board...
Besides new/improved CPU targets, C++20 additions, and a lot of other additions to the code-base for GCC 9, there is also continued work on usability improvements for developers to make their lives easier and helping out with more precise error/warning details...
The 19.04 release of Ubuntu Studio, the Ubuntu flavor focused on multimedia production / content creation, might not happen unless at least one of their developers are granted package upload rights...
Recently I carried out a number of GCC 9 compiler benchmarks on AMD EPYC looking at the performance benefits of "znver1" compiler tuning and varying optimization levels to see when this level of compiler tuning pays off. There was interest from that in seeing some fresh Intel Skylake-X / AVX-512 figures, so here are those benchmarks of GCC 9 with various tuning options and their impact on the performance of the generated binaries.
As the latest on the Spectre/Meltdown front for the Linux kernel, the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel is bringing an optimization for Retpolines "return trampolines" so GCC will generate more efficient code on x86/x86_64 in its mitigations against Spectre Variant Two...
LLVM for a while has offered a "Shadow Call Stack" pass used to protect programs against stack buffer overflows. While the 64-bit ARM (AArch64) shadow call stack has worked out well, the x86_64 implementation has been deemed insufficient and is now removed...
GraphicsFuzz is the 3D GPU driver fuzzer that was born out of academia research for finding GPU driver bugs and ended up being acquired by Google and then open-sourced...
Following the recent emergency release of Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS to get out updated install media that addresses the recent APT security vulnerability and in the process other bug fixes too, Ubuntu 14.04.6 has now been released as a similar update...
A seldom advertised experimental feature of the AMDGPU kernel driver has long been the GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics support. By default these Southern Islands and Sea Islands graphics processors default to the Radeon DRM driver, but with some kernel command lime parameters can use the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver. The AMDGPU code path is better maintained since it's used for all modern Radeon GPUs, using AMDGPU opens up Vulkan driver support, and possible performance benefits. It's a while since last testing the Radeon vs. AMDGPU driver performance for these original GCN graphics cards, so here are some fresh benchmarks using the Linux 5.0 kernel and Mesa 19.1-devel.
In addition to the staging changes submitted on Tuesday for the Linux 5.1 kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman also sent out pull requests on the various other trees he maintained...
Mesa 19.0-RC7 was released on Wednesday rather than the official release due to four blocker bugs remaining, but this seventh weekly release candidate does have a number of fixes to offer...
These changes really shouldn't come as much of a surprise considering all of the major changes we've covered individually in recent weeks on Phoronix, but the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver changes have now been submitted for the Linux 5.1 kernel...
While there were many Linux gaming benchmarks within our recent GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Linux review, there were requests for 1080p tests and some other benchmarks... For honoring those requests, with some of them being made by our premium supporters, here are 117 graphics benchmarks tested not only on the GTX 1660 Ti but also the RTX 2060 and on the AMD side was the Radeon RX 590 and RX Vega 56 for an interesting mid-range graphics card comparison.
AMD released their newest xf86-video-amdgpu DDX driver today with various additions for enabling new functionality where needed by this X.Org display driver...
Purism announced this morning that their PureOS Linux distribution for their Librem laptops and forthcoming Librem 5 platform has achieved the goal of "convergence"...
Intel has been developing "i10nm_edac" as the new Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver for supporting their next-generation 10nm-based server CPUs...
Linux has supported ELF binaries since the 1.x kernel days and now 25 years later, its support for the a.out file format is finally on the way out the door...
The Gallium Nine TTN support for "TGSI to NIR" to allow this Direct3D 9 state tracker to use the NIR intermediate representation as an alternative to Gallium's default TGSI representation has been merged to Git for Mesa 19.1...
With the in-development Linux 5.1 is a big step forward to the kernel's live-patching infrastructure for this functionality that allows primarily applying security updates against the running kernel without the need for reboots...
Recently I published a number of Linux 5.0 I/O scheduler benchmarks on laptop and desktop hardware with solid-state storage. A number of Phoronix readers were interested in seeing similar tests done but with traditional hard drives, so here are those results using two different drives and the different blk-mq I/O scheduler options with the new Linux 5.0 kernel.
One week ahead of the official debut of GNOME 3.32, the release candidate will be out this week and GNOME Shell along with the Mutter compositor have outed their 3.31.92 release...
With the initial Iris Gallium3D driver that was merged into Mesa at the end of February from our tests on UHD Graphics the performance is quite promising considering the early stage of this new open-source OpenGL driver and it not yet being fully tuned/optimized. The Iris Gallium3D driver support goes back to Broadwell CPUs so I decided to run some benchmarks with the legendary Core i7 5775C that features the Iris Pro Graphics 6200 with 128MB of eDRAM.
For years Debian developers have been planning for a merged /usr concept where the /{bin,sbin,lib}/ directories becoming symbolic links to /usr/{bin,sbin,lib}/. With the upcoming Debian 10 Buster is the initial step of their plan after it was postponed from Debian Stretch...
While Intel may be developing the Iris Gallium3D driver as their future OpenGL driver, they haven't given up all work on their existing "i965" classic Mesa driver. Hitting Mesa 19.1's development code this morning is support for threaded OpenGL with this existing and widely-used driver on Linux systems...
The x86/pti updates for Linux 5.1 is bringing a new PR_SPEC_DISABLE_NOEXEC option where speculation protection for SSBD doesn't end up being passed to new processes started by exec in such use-cases where it's safe to do so. Utilizing this option will thus eliminate the overhead associated with this Spectre Variant 4 "Speculative Store Bypass" behavior...
While the upstream Linux kernel developers may not be interested in adding all of the CPU compiler tuning optimizations carried by Gentoo for their kernel builds, if you are after just "-march=native" compiler tuning to optimize your kernel build for the CPU being used, an updated patch is now available...
Now that the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and Fwupd updating mechanism for firmware/BIOS updates is supported by all major vendors and has already served up more than five million firmware files, their newest focus is on easing the roll-out of firmware updates in enterprise settings...
Quietly released last week was Wireshark 3.0, the open-source packet analyzer software formerly known as Ethereal and previously as a GTK user-interface but now exclusively Qt...
While we are very much looking forward to the huge ZFS On Linux 0.8 release, as a new stable release for offering up compatibility with the newly minted Linux 5.0 is now the ZoL 0.7.13 milestone...
The upstream Linux kernel support for the MIPS architecture continues to be improved upon, which is great news especially with this processor ISA going open-source. With the Linux 5.1 kernel are more MIPS improvements...
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