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The Linux 5.5 kernel is set to finally eliminate the code backing the sysctl system call, which has been deprecated for about a decade and should have no impact on modern systems of any architecture...

The OpenGL 4.6 extension is nearly two and a half years old while finally the open-source Mesa OpenGL drivers are catching up to this latest OpenGL revision that offers Vulkan/SPIR-V interoperability and other additions...

The SDL2 library has been seeing a number of additions in recent days to its game controller database by Valve's Sam Lantinga. The latest game controller to be added is for Google's now-shipping Stadia Controller...

Greg Kroah-Hartman mailed in the staging area changes today for the Linux 5.5 kernel and they have already been pulled into mainline...

As part of the exciting benchmark week and our ongoing tests of Intel Ice Lake on Linux, this next piece has been driven out of curiosity... While recently I posted new benchmark results of Intel Haswell to Ice Lake laptop performance, what about going further back like to the days of Nehalem? Here is that comparison of Core i7 Nehalem to Core i7 Ice Lake including power / performance-per-Watt data, thermal, and performance-per-MHz data too. Enjoy this fun comparison for how the Intel mobile performance on Ubuntu has evolved over the past decade.

While coming a few weeks later and two months after the original "shipping" of Librem 5 smartphones, the Librem 5 Birch batch has begun shipping to actual consumers who pre-ordered the privacy-minded Linux smartphone...

Flatpak 1.5.1 was released today as a new development release for this Linux application sandboxing technology. With Flatpak 1.5.1 it also begins laying the groundwork for a future payments system around Flathub as what's starting off for allowing donation-based software acquisition but could ultimately turn into a paid app store...

AMD's Vulkan driver team has today volleyed their third open-source "AMDVLK" code drop of the quarter. This AMDVLK 2019.Q4.3 driver comes with new extensions as well as Navi 14 enablement...

It's been a wild past few weeks for WireGuard as the secure VPN tunnel destined for the mainline Linux kernel and also supported on all other major platforms. It turns out WireGuard could quite well end up in the Linux 5.5 kernel rather than having to wait until Linux 5.6...

Complementing our launch-day Intel Core i9 10980XE and AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X Linux benchmarks, here is much more data now that we've had the additional time for carrying out more tests... For your viewing pleasure this US holiday week are more than 330 benchmarks carried out on both the Core i9 10980XE and Threadripper 3960X in the same configuration while running Ubuntu Linux.

Recently the CentOS Board met for the first time since the recent CentOS 8.0 and CentOS Stream releases. It was an interesting outcome...

While the release of Linux 5.3-ck1 with MuQSS was quite tardy and only arrived a few weeks ago, Con Kolivas has returned to his punctuality in releasing Linux 5.4-ck1 with the updated MuQSS scheduler intended to improve the responsiveness of desktop/mobile class Linux systems...

Simon Ser has stepped up again to manage the upcoming release of the Weston 8.0 Wayland reference compositor. No Wayland update itself is planned with nothing real to release at this point, but Weston 8.0 should arrive before the end of January...

The RISC-V kernel code has some interesting changes ready for Linux 5.5...

As covered earlier this month, the next version of the Linux kernel is finally offering mainline support for SGI's Octane / Octane II MIPS workstations from the SGI IRIX days about two decades ago. Not only is the vintage SGI IP30 hardware seeing mainline kernel support, but there is other new MIPS hardware support too...

The X.Org Server and its integrated "modesetting" DDX driver that is most commonly used on modern Linux systems in place of hardware-specific DDX drivers is finally getting more robust with xorg-server 1.21... It will no longer rely upon the server's PCI ID driver mapping for figuring out the DRI driver to load as needed for GLAMOR 2D acceleration over OpenGL...

It's that time of the year for our annual promotion of Phoronix Premium for the US Thanksgiving / Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales week... Here is the latest on how you can show your support for our Linux and open-source news coverage and benchmarking while enjoying the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits...

Just under three months past Lutris 0.5.3 as this open-source game manager/platform tool particularly for Wine-based gaming outside of Steam, Lutris 0.5.4 is now available in getting Linux gamers ready for any extra holiday-time gaming...

While AMD announced ROCm 3.0 earlier this month at SuperComputing 19 as the next major iteration to Radeon Open Compute, it looks like they aren't quite ready to ship it and instead released ROCm 2.10...

The Linux 5.2 kernel and newer appears to be suffering from an AVX register corruption bug stemming from signal delivery. This register corruption issue is manifesting itself at least for Golang programs leading to a variety of bug reports when running on Linux 5.2 through at least the newly-minted Linux 5.4...

While the Motorola 68000 32-bit processors are from the 80's and early 90's, there still is a loyal following of hobbyists who managed to save the "m68k" compiler back-end from being removed in GCC 11...

As part of the sound subsystem updates coming with the Linux 5.5 kernel is wake-on-voice capabilities with newer Google Chromebook device hardware...

For several release cycles already the Linux kernel has supported Intel's 5-level paging for increasing the virtual and physical address space available to systems while for Linux 5.5 the five-level support is being enabled by default...

Currently Fedora Linux supports empty passwords for local users by default but that could change with next year's Fedora 32 release...

A few weeks back AMD published a TEE "Trusted Execution Environment" driver for APUs on Linux for utilizing the controversial AMD Secure Processor...

The FreeBSD Q3-2019 quarterly report is now available. One of the interesting bits from this report is the FreeBSD Foundation planning to buy one or more families of new laptops to supply to their core developers in working to improve the modern hardware support...

Last week marked the release of Blender 2.81 with one of the shiny new features being the OptiX back-end for the Cycles engine to provide hardware-accelerated ray-tracing with NVIDIA RTX graphics processors. Long story short, OptiX is much faster for Blender than using NVIDIA's CUDA back-end -- which already was much faster than the OpenCL support within Blender. For your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of 19 different graphics cards looking at the CUDA performance from Maxwell to Pascal to Turing and then for the RTX graphics cards also the OptiX performance.

Ingo Molnar sent in the kernel's scheduler changes along with the other material he is overseeing for Linux 5.5. With this next version of the Linux kernel comes a rework to the Completely Fair Scheduler's load balancing logic. This is helping some workloads at least but with the intrusive change runs the risk of possible regressions...

While the Radeon "ACO" compiler back-end performance is already looking very good in the speed department over the AMDGPU LLVM back-end for the Vulkan driver as shown in recent benchmarks, it's getting even better...

Since 2016 the Linux kernel on ARM has invoked the EFI random number generator (RNG) protocol for serving as an additional source of entropy during early boot. With Linux 5.5 in early 2020 that code is finally happening for x86/x86_64...

Intel's crew maintaining the Scalable Video Technology open-source video encoders on Monday issued a new pre-release of SVT-AV1 in an effort to further speed-up AV1 video encoding on CPUs...

The cryptography subsystem changes for the Linux 5.5 kernel are notable...

The Fedora Workstation working group has been weighing the matter of the GNOME Software "app store" recommending/promoting proprietary software. But this isn't something that is done out-of-the-box but rather when activating Flathub where Flatpaks can be installed for both open and closed-source software...

Devuan 2.1 is available as the latest release of this spin of Debian GNU/Linux that works without a dependence on systemd. Devuan 2.1 remains focused on "init freedom" though this new release is still tracking the older Debian 9 "Stretch" branch...

The in-development Linux 5.5 kernel will begin sanity checking the RdRand instruction output for randomness on CPU boot/resume due to the recent spat of AMD CPUs that have yielded non-random RdRand output...

Adding to the list of changes on deck for the Linux 5.5 kernel is a new "sanitizer" for spotting data race conditions...

After the embargo on the Intel Core i9 10980XE expired a few hours ago, now we are allowed to share the performance numbers on the new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X processors. These new Zen 2 HEDT CPUs pack a real performance punch, but do come in as more expensive than the i9-10980XE and there is one boot-stopping Linux bug to mention with a workaround... But besides that lone Linux support caveat, the Threadripper 3960X and Threadripper 3970X absolutely dominate in performance.

As outlined in our AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X / 3970X Linux review, these new Zen 2 Threadripper processors are phenomenal processors that offer significant uplift over earlier Threadripper CPUs and easily dominate over Intel's Core i9 HEDT competition. But there is one big issue right now with the Linux support: on Ubuntu and the like, it doesn't boot without a workaround. Here's that workaround for easy future reference...

Vulkan 1.1.129 is out this morning as another weekly update to this graphics API specification and in tow comes one new extension...

Months ago we reported on vendors and cloud providers being interested in restoring parallel CPU microcode updates on Linux for helping large core count servers. With Linux 5.5 that change is coming...

Just hours after Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.4, the GNU folks maintaining "GNU Linux-libre" released their v5.4 kernel that continues "deblobbing" the kernel for ensuring no proprietary firmware/microcode can be loaded by the drivers nor support for loading closed-source kernel modules...

Last month Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver developers introduced a "secure compile" feature to the Radeon Vulkan driver to do just as the name implies and making use of SECCOMP filters for enforcing the security aspect. They have now revised this implementation in order to provide faster shader compile times...

Intel today is rolling out the Core i9 10980XE as their new Cascade Lake X-Series processor that features 18 cores / 36 threads with a maximum turbo frequency of 4.6GHz and TBM 3.0 frequency of 4.8GHz. Following a last minute change, Intel moved up the embargo lift time of the Core i9 10980XE so here are the results we can share with you right now.

With the Linux 5.5 kernel now in development the Habana Labs AI startup is preparing for supporting future chips with their open-source Linux kernel driver...

The UBports community developers maintaining Ubuntu Touch have landed the 64-bit ARM (ARM64/AArch64) version of libhybris into their "Edge" development branch. This in turn opens up Ubuntu Touch to more easier porting to newer Android devices...

Linus Torvalds has officially released the Linux 5.4 "Kleptomaniac Octopus" kernel this evening as was expected. Linux 5.4 is the last major stable kernel release of the year and brings a lot of new hardware support particularly on the graphics processor front, Microsoft exFAT support is finally available, and a plethora of other new features and improvements to existing functionality...

GNOME 3.35.2 is out as the latest development release on the route to GNOME 3.36 due out next March...

While NVIDIA graphics in IBM POWER systems have been known to make a powerful combination for supercomputer deployments, for those wanting a libre GPU compute experience can also use POWER with AMD Radeon's open-source driver with a pending patch to the kernel driver...

Following the initial tests earlier this month from the disclosures of the JCC Erratum (Jump Conditional Code) that required updated Intel CPU microcode to address and on the same day the TSX Async Abort (TAA) vulnerability that required kernel mitigations to address, which I have run benchmarks of those CPU performance impacts individually, readers have requested tests looking at the current overall impact to the mitigations to date.

As part of the KSelfTest updates sent in early for the Linux 5.5 merge window opening tonight/tomorrow, Google's KUnit is included in this pull request as the basic kernel unit testing framework...