Phoronix

GNOME has continued its recent trend of offering more point releases to existing stable series for filling the void between the six-month feature releases. Out today is GNOME 3.34.3 with all of the latest fixes, many of which were back-ported from the currently under development GNOME 3.36...

The long in development process of converting GCC's SVN repository to Git for using this modern distributed revision control system for developing the GNU Compiler Collection in the 2020s may finally be complete in the days ahead...

A few days ago I wrote about a big improvement to write performance for EXT4's Direct I/O code path but that is not the only DIO optimization coming for Linux 5.6. Thanks to IBM, another big EXT4 DIO boost can be found for database workloads...

Oracle has released a developer preview of their forthcoming Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 to Oracle Linux users, the company's spin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With Oracle UEK 6, Linux 5.4 serves as the new base...

While the Allwinner VPU "Cedrus" video decode driver is a wonderful success of open-source third-party work expanding Linux's multimedia hardware acceleration capabilities, consulting firm Bootlin who spearheaded this driver is for now at least is ending feature development on this driver...

Separate from the whole Python 2 removal effort with the Python 2.7 that is EOL'ed since the start of the year, Fedora 33 due out later this year is looking to be their first release dropping the even older Python 2.6 series...

While on the back-half of the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle, sent in on Wednesday were an interesting batch of AMDGPU driver fixes that are quite notable...

While no major performance improvements were noted as part of the release notes, given this week's Firefox 72 release here are some fresh benchmarks of Firefox 70/71/72 on Ubuntu Linux benchmarked with and without WebRender being enabled. As well, these numbers show how Firefox on Linux is currently stacking up against Google Chrome 79 as its latest stable release.

While Intel has offered good Ice Lake support since before the CPUs were shipping (sans taking a bit longer for the Thunderbolt support as a key lone exception, since resolved), a feature that's been publicly known since 2017 is the Fast Short REP MOV behavior and finally with Linux 5.6 that is being made use of for faster memory movements...

In addition to Intel IGC network driver performance-boosting TSO support, also queued within Intel's next-queue tree of networking changes is a new software bus called Virtual Bus...

Apple AirScan is akin to their AirPrint technology for supporting various printers from Apple devices without the need for specialized drivers. Multi-function printers compliant with AirPrint also need to implement AirScan for scanner functionality, thus opening up most of today's multi-function printers to supporting this scanning standard. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS could end up supporting AirScan nicely thanks to new SANE back-ends...

Quietly released over the holidays was Intel's quarterly update to the Intel Media Driver that serves as their modern open-source GPU-accelerated video encode/decode solution for Linux systems...

Given the recent discussions over the default performance of the Linux scheduler, the Liquorix patches to the Linux kernel, and other recent forum discussions over different kernel configurations and flavors, here are some reference benchmarks looking at the performance of some of the kernel options available to Clear Linux users...

While more Linux distributions have begun packaging (and in the case of Fedora, potentially deploying by default) EarlyOOM as the out-of-memory monitoring daemon for trying to improve the Linux desktop's handling of low memory situations, systemd ultimately should be picking up its own out-of-memory daemon in the months ahead...

The recent work by longtime kernel developer Andy Lutomirski on improving Linux's random APIs and introducing a new "GRND_INSECURE" option is now queued into the random dev queue ahead of the Linux 5.6 cycle...

At the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas there isn't too often "pure" Linux being showcased aside from the likes of Ubuntu occasionally running on demo machines or servers, the year Canonical was there with Ubuntu TV, and a number of other select mostly small instances where Linux is prominently featured. That's in part why I stopped regularly attending CES (as well as budgetary constraints due to ad-blockers...) but this year at CES there is a large floor showcase of the Linux Foundation's Automotive Grade Linux...

Following Fedora's plans to begin using EarlyOOM by default and other recent upstream discussions about Linux's relatively poor performance when it comes to the Linux desktop not handling memory pressure / low RAM situations well, Intel's Clear Linux looks like it will soon offer EarlyOOM as an option...

For those plagued by OpenGL corruption issues with the RadeonSI driver on Polaris GPUs like the Radeon RX 580, System DMA (SDMA) support is now being disabled as a workaround...

The NIR intermediate representation is already faster than GLSL IR and TGSI but could be seeing even quicker linking speeds moving forward...

For fans of the easy-to-use Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution, 19.0 preview images as the first test builds have begun to surface...

As reported last month, Flang is expected to land in the LLVM 10.0 source tree ahead of the feature freeze for the v10.0 release due out in February. That landing is now scheduled to take place next week...

Stemming from the recent news in Fedora 32 potentially LTO'ing packages by default for better performance and not yet having checked on the Link-Time Optimization performance of the in-development GCC 10, here is a fresh look at the possible performance gains from making use of link-time optimizations for generating faster binaries. This round of testing was done on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and is complementary to the recent Profile Guided Optimization benchmarks.

AMD has issued their first update to the open-source Radeon GPU Profiler since the v1.6 update last July that introduced initial RDNA/Navi support...

Wiring up an additional feature for Intel's IGC Linux network driver that is for their 2.5G Ethernet devices is allowing data to be sent up to 7% or so faster...

Similar to Fedora's move last year to compress RPMs with Zstd rather than XZ for much faster decompression speeds and a better compression ratio at the highest level, OpenMandriva has now enacted a similar change...

This weekend I posted some fresh benchmarks of the Liquorix kernel against upstream Linux 5.4 and found the gaming performance to be rather disappointing for that kernel flavor derived from the "Zen" patches and more. Fortunately, the Zen kernel patches now include a fix that should make their gaming performance more competitive...

Last week I reported on a possible workaround for helping AMD APUs with stability issues on recent Linux kernels. That behavior will now be the new temporary default in dealing with stability issues on Raven APUs...

Adding to the many changes on the way with Linux 5.6 is the Rockchip DRM display driver supporting the PX30 SoC...

A late change proposal for Fedora 32 would jump the shipped Mono package from version 5.20 to version 6.6...

It was just shy of a month ago in Mesa 20.0-devel code that RadeonSI enabled NIR by default to enjoy OpenGL 4.6 support and now already ahead of the Mesa 20.0 branching the previous TGSI code-path has been removed. TGSI has been the default intermediate representation of RadeonSI and other Gallium3D drivers but these days NIR has become the go-to IR for Mesa drivers...

Following AMD's keynote with announcing the Ryzen 4000 series + RX 5600 XT + Threadripper 3990X, Intel now has up their address from the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Here are all the highlights from the perspective of a Linux user...

Kicking off the Consumer Electronics Show 2020 in Las Vegas, AMD CEO Lisa Su has begun with some interesting product announcements.....

Firefox 72 is now available from Mozilla's FTP server as their first release of 2020 and ahead of their more aggressive release cycle moving forward...

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has shared his vision for Fedora over the next decade and is encouraging discussions about the direction of this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution over the next five to ten years...

This morning's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting approved more changes for this spring's release of Fedora 32...

With Python 2 having reached end-of-life at the start of 2020, Ubuntu and Debian developers continue their work on removing Python 2 at least from the base OS. Work continues on transitioning packages to Python 3 or otherwise ultimately dropping unmaintained packages...

A new work-in-progress feature for systemd is "PathImages" though there is a suggestion this option be renamed to "MountPaths", but in any case is about allowing arbitrary images / block devices to be mounted at any path by systemd...

While there still is several weeks to go until the Linux 5.5 kernel reaches stable and that marking the start of the Linux 5.6 merge window, already from the work we've been tracking in the various "next" branches, this first full kernel cycle of 2020 is going to be a big one...

Shortly before Christmas were a couple open-source Nouveau driver patches volleyed by NVIDIA. Some of that work is now queuing in the Nouveau DRM tree ahead of the Linux 5.6 merge window...

While still a draft standard, support for the RISC-V "V" Vector Extension support for the Linux kernel is currently being prepared...

Linux 5.5 development has been picking up in recent days following Christmas week and New Year's but now more upstream developers returning to their keyboards in order to get this next kernel update buttoned up for its debut around month's end...

While Fedora 32 is already making it so CD / DVD install issues shouldn't block releases given most users are doing USB-based installations for the past number of years, Fedora is still trying to decrease the amount of space the install media takes up regardless of CD/DVD/USB media...

GNOME Shell 3.35.3 and Mutter 3.35.3 were released today as part of the next development step on the path towards GNOME 3.36 coming out in March...

When navigating the AMD.com driver downloads area the Radeon Software for Linux 19.30 driver is still referred to, which was released back on 5 November. That 19.30 driver series has been around for a while and we've been waiting for the 19.50 series driver to match their recent Windows driver update. It turns out there is a Radeon Software for Linux 19.50 driver that is public albeit not widely advertised...

Linux 5.5 as of this morning should have one less performance regression in tow if you are running on Debian/Ubuntu or otherwise having AppArmor enabled...

As you may recall a few days ago there was the information on the Linux kernel scheduler causing issues for Google Stadia game developers. The scheduler was to blame and in particular Linux's spinlocks. Linus Torvalds has now commented on the matter...

While New Year's festivities lightened the development activity this past week, KDE developers still managed to accomplish a fair amount this first week of January...

For those looking for some family-friendly, open-source gaming fun this weekend, SuperTuxKart 1.1 has been released as the Mario Kart inspired cross-platform racing game...

Ahead of this week's Consumer Electronics Show, the Wi-Fi Alliance has announced WiFi 6E...

It's 2020 and GIMP remains one of the last holdouts for a major software application still relying upon the GTK2 tool-kit even with GTK4 potentially coming around the end of the calendar year. Fortunately, at least, the GIMP 2.99.x development releases on the path to the GTK3-based GIMP 3.0 should be starting up soon...