Phoronix

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.

The IOMMU changes have been sent in for the ongoing Linux 5.6 kernel merge window...

The Bareflank Linux hypervisor that is written in modern C++ and focused on security and serving as a framework/SDK for other hypervisors, finally experienced its big 2.0 release...

Systemd 245 is soon shipping as the first feature update of 2020 and it's another big one...

Oreboot is the effort that has been taking shape over the past year as an open-source focused, Rustlang-based downstream of Coreboot. Oreboot continues advancing in its own right concurrent to the wonderful Coreboot advancements...

The second test release of Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 is now available with this latest update focusing on improvements to the result viewer...

Debuginfod is the new ELFUTILS HTTP web server for providing debug information or even source code on-demand to debuggers and related development utilities...

Not yet mainlined in the Linux kernel but currently queued as part of the x86/cpu changes for next round is the ability for the kernel to detect split locks and either warn the offending applications or kill the processes...

Now promoted out of beta is the Google Chrome 80 web browser...

Fuzzing is an important means of finding unintended/invalid behavior within software and now there exists a fuzzer for providing Spectre-type vulnerabilities...

Intel firmware expert Brian Richardson was at FOSDEM 2020 to talk up UEFI Capsule Update functionality and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for allowing OEMs/ODMs to easily distribute firmware updates to Linux users for application with the Fwupd firmware updating utility...

With last month's release of the Radeon RX 5600 XT as quite a capable sub-$300 graphics card there was a new video BIOS at launch-day to significantly improve the performance even more. But that updated vBIOS was causing issues with the Linux driver. The necessary fix has now landed in linux-firmware.git as the necessary SMC firmware update for Navi...

Rav1e v0.2 brought 40~70% speed improvements over its previous release for this Rustlang-based AV1 video encoder but the upcoming Rav1e 0.3 will be even faster...

For those building an Intel Core X-series system, the Gigabyte X299X DESIGNARE 10G is the board we have been relying upon for our Cascadelake-X testing over the past two months and it has continued working out phenomenally for being a feature-rich platform while playing nicely with the various Linux distributions and BSDs tested.

Siemens continues investing in Jailhouse as a Linux-based simplicity-minded partitioning hypervisor catering to bare metal appliances. Jailhouse 0.12 is out today as their first feature update since last summer and comes with numerous hardware support improvements and new features...

While the standard is now two decades old and has yet to unseat the JPEG image standard in popularity, there is renewed interest in JPEG2000 with High Throughput JPEG 2000 (HTJ2K) and finally seeing increased software support. Collabora's Aaron Boxer thinks that JPEG2000 could finally be going mainstream...

There had been a proposal to better compress the Fedora 32 install media via SquashFS without the nested EXT4 file-system setup for its live images and also ramping up the XZ compression. But this proposal was rejected at yesterday's engineering meeting on the basis that a more optimal compression path could be utilized...

The seL4 micro-kernel that is focused on delivering robust security and performance is being ported to the RISC-V architecture...

Following last week's release of Linux 5.5, Con Kolivas is out today with his latest "CK" patch-set and MuQSS scheduler for this new kernel version...

Not yet mainlined but there is a Git repository offering up a Wine Wayland driver implementation for letting Windows applications/games run atop a Wayland compositor without any dependence on X11/XWayland...

While merging of the Flang "f18" Fortran compiler into the LLVM source tree was delayed in January, this is still looking like the most exciting Fortran open-source compiler in development...

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...