Phoronix

Drew DeVault of Sway/WLROOTS fame has been dabbling with his first Vulkan extension as part of work with other upstream Wayland developers on DRM lease support and better supporting VR headsets under Wayland...

David Sterba sent in the Btrfs file-system updates on Monday for the Linux 5.3 kernel...

The past few weeks while AMD open-source developers were busy getting their Navi enablement code public and aligned for the Linux 5.3 merge window, the display core "DC" frequent code drops ceased. Every so often AMD developers volley their DC patches from their internal development trees to the public mailing list for queuing ahead of the next cycle. Now that Navi is out there and getting stabilized, they've issued a new set of DC patches and it's coming in heavy...

The x86 platform driver updates were sent in and already merged for the ongoing Linux 5.3 kernel. It's the x86 platform driver updates that bring the recently mentioned Intel Speed Select Technology for Linux driver but there is also more...

Remember last September when that AMD Arcturus codename dropped in our forums for what at first appeared to be a successor to Navi but later clarified to be used as a Linux driver enablement codename? Well, the Linux kernel driver patches for this "Arcturus" GPU have just been posted...

It was just earlier this month that D9VK 0.13 was released with new features while now a "0.13f" Hypnofrog release is available in pre-release form...

With the in-development Linux 5.3 kernel is now support for Intel Speed Select Technology (SST) that was introduced as part of Cascade Lake processors. Speed Select Technology allows optimizing the system with per-core performance configurations to prioritize certain workloads while lowering the performance envelope for other cores...

AMD Zen 2 processors feature hardware-based mitigations for Spectre V2 and Spectre V4 SSBD while remaining immune to the likes of Meltdown and Zombieload. Here are some benchmarks looking at toggling the CPU speculative execution mitigations across various Intel and AMD processors.

For those in the market for an AMD X570 high-end motherboard for use with the new Zen 2 processors, the ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO was one of the boards sent out as part of the reviewer's kit and it's been working out quite well...

At 479,818 lines of new code and just 36,145 lines of code removed while touching nearly two thousand files, the Direct Rendering Manger (DRM) driver updates for Linux 5.3 are huge. But a big portion of that line count is the addition of AMD Radeon RX 5000 "Navi" support and a good portion of that in turn being auto-generated header files. Navi support is ready for the mainline Linux kernel!..

With more tier-one Linux distributions working on plans for doing away with 32-bit x86 support, if you are looking for a new distribution to play nicely with older hardware, Q4OS 3.8 may be it...

The char/misc changes with each succeeding kernel release seem to have less changes to the character device subsystem itself and more just a random collection of changes not fitting in other subsystems / pull requests. With Linux 5.3 comes another smothering of different changes...

While OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 was just released last month, we are already looking forward to OpenMandriva 4.1 for a number of improvements and some new features...

Various Chrome OS hardware platform support improvements have made it into the Linux 5.3 kernel for those after running other Linux distributions on Chromebooks and the like as well as reducing Google's maintenance burden with traditionally carrying so much material out-of-tree...

The UBIFS file-system for usage on un-managed flash memory devices now has support for Zstd compression...

Vulkan has been sticking to its weekly release regiment this summer. While recent weekly updates have introduced new Vulkan extensions, with today's Vulkan 1.1.115 release there are not any new extensions in tow...

While newer Linux distributions have run into problems on the new AMD Zen 2 desktop CPUs (fixed by a systemd patch or fundamentally by a BIOS update) and DragonFlyBSD needed a separate boot fix, FreeBSD 12.0 installed out-of-the-box fine on the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X test system with ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO WiFi motherboard.

For those that generally wait for the first point release before upgrading to a new kernel series, Greg Kroah-Hartman released Linux 5.2.1 this Sunday morning...

There is less than two months to go until KDE's annual Akademy conference, which this year is being hosted in Milan, Italy. But even with summer activities, KDE development remains quite busy. KDE developer Nate Graham has written another one of his weekly blog posts highlighting the interesting development work going into this open-source desktop environment...

Contributed by Mellanox to the Linux 5.3 kernel is an IPMB driver for the Intelligent Platform Management Bus...

The proposed change to no longer build i686 Linux kernel packages beginning with the Fedora 31 release later this year has been approved. Additionally, they might also begin removing some 32-bit repositories...

Epic Games released the first public preview this week of Unreal Engine 4.23...

The input and HID subsystem updates were sent in this week with various hardware support additions and improvements...

Philip Rebohle released version 1.3 of DXVK today, the widely-used Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan translation layer for accelerating Windows gaming on Linux under Wine and most known with Steam Play...

For those using the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver on an IBM POWER system, it could be a while before seeing Linux 5.3+ kernel support. Upstream has removed code depended upon by the NVIDIA binary driver for supporting the POWER architecture and as is the case they don't care that it will break NVIDIA driver support since it's binary/out-of-tree...

Nearly three years after OpenHMD 0.2, the OpenHMD 0.3 release is now available for the open-source SDK and support for various AR/VR headsets...

The networking subsystem updates were sent out on Wednesday for the Linux 5.3 kernel and include a bunch of improvements to many different drivers...

Today marks the immediate availability of KDE Frameworks 5.60...

Back in April I wrote about Coreboot seeing AMD Picasso APU enablement work as the first Zen/Ryzen processor target being handled by this open-source BIOS alternative. It now looks like that Picasso support is all squared away and ready for use by future AMD-powered Google Chromebooks...

While there is another nineteen years to go until the Year 2038 problem manifests, the GNU C Library "glibc" is one of the key software components still needing some fixes for this issue where this problem where storing the Unix time as a 32-bit signed integer will wrap around and become a negative number...

Simon Ser who has been serving as the Wayland/Weston release manager has laid out a schedule for getting out the next major release of Wayland's reference compositor...

While not too eventful on the end-user feature front, the XFS file-system has seen another round of clean-ups with the ongoing Linux 5.3 merge window...

Purism has shared their July update on their Librem 5 Linux smartphone progress, which is mostly focused around inching along their software support but without any update on their hardware or final design. While their latest public information has continued to report a "Q3" ship date, that's looking increasingly unlikely...

AMD has just alerted us that they have released a BIOS fix to their motherboard partners that takes care of the issue around booting newer Linux distributions on the new Zen 2 processors...

It's been (and still is) a particularly busy few weeks for benchmarking. For those curious about the Raspberry Pi 4 performance that was announced at the end of June along with Raspbian 10, here are our initial performance benchmarks of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B in 2GB and 4GB variants compared to various other ARM SBCs.

Collabora's Pekka Paalanen landed another optimization this week into GNOME's Mutter for further enhancing the performance of using DisplayLink hardware and similar secondary GPUs under this Linux desktop...

F2FS is already very fast compared to the long-standing Linux file-systems when benchmarking on solid-state drives while for Linux 5.3 this file-system is getting in even better shape...

With the growing number of devices requiring loadable firmware/microcode at run-time and Linux continuing to simply support a lot more hardware, the size of /lib/firmware has ballooned in recent years while now for the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel release is the ability to compress these firmware files for fairly significant space savings...

An Intel open-source developer contributed support to Wayland's reference Weston compositor for enabling HDCP support on a per-output basis using a new allow_hdcp option...

Weeks ahead of SIGGRAPH and days ahead of the LLVM 9.0 code branching, a number of big "GFX908" commits have been landing in the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end over the past day...

Kernel Address Space Isolation is an experimental feature in development by Oracle in aiming to prevent leaking sensitive data from Intel Hyper Threading due to speculative execution attacks like L1TF...

Valve's Steam Labs is the new centralized place for their different experiments around the Steam marketplace...

It's on a daily basis we are seeing improvements to the newly-added Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" support with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack. Today brings geometry shader support for the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver...

While just being a few days into the two-week long merge window for Linux 5.3, it's certainly another busy cycle even when considering the summer months tend to be a bit slower for developers...

One of the areas that I always have "fun" benchmarking for new CPU launches is looking at the compiler performance. Following the recent Ryzen 3000 series launch I carried out some initial benchmarks looking at the current Zen 2 performance using the newest GCC 9 stable series with its "znver2" optimizations. Here is a look at how the Znver2 optimizations work out when running some benchmarks on the optimized binaries with a Ryzen 9 3900X running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

AMD's GPUOpen group has released a new version of their GPU Performance API (GPA) with Navi support...

While currently Ubuntu makes use of GNOME Software as their "software center" (or "app store") with Snap integration, as we wrote about recently Canonical has begun writing their own Snap Store. Given this and that they don't plan to use GNOME Software in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and thus have taken their developers away from working on the upstream support, GNOME developers are planning to disable the Snap plug-in for GNOME Software...

The recent work on enabling "-Wimplicit-fallthrough" behavior for the Linux kernel has culminated in Linux 5.3 with actually being able to universally enable this compiler feature...

Separate from the Linux boot issue affecting AMD Ryzen 3000 (Zen 2) processors that has been attributed to RdRand, DragonFlyBSD is the first BSD at least we've seen getting a separate fix to be able to boot these new AMD processors...

The EXT4 file-system updates have already landed for the Linux 5.3 kernel merge window that opened this week...