Phoronix

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...

Arch Linux has been working the past several months on transitioning to Zstd-compressed packages in place of XZ compression for faster package installation. At the end of December that package compression scheme changed and the results are impressive...

The Liquorix kernel is the long-standing effort for providing a "better distro kernel" optimized for desktop/multimedia/gaming workloads. As it's been a while since last testing the Liquorix kernel spin of Linux, I recently carried out some tests of its Linux 5.4 based kernel compared to Ubuntu's generic mainline PPA images of Linux 5.4 as well as the low-latency kernel variety.

Last week I wrote about the AMD Secure Processor support for Linux 5.6 being queued as part of the cryptography subsystyem work with supporting the PSP / Secure Processor of Raven Ridge APUs. That AMD Secure Processor support is now rounded out with the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) driver being queued for wiring into that subsystem...

Bram Moolenaar began developing Vim as an improvement over the Vi editor while now he is looking to make improvements over Vim itself with an experimental fork called Vim9...

Zink was one of the Mesa/Gallium3D innovations that saw mainline status in 2019 for offering OpenGL support atop Vulkan hardware drivers. While an interesting approach, so far only the dated OpenGL 2.1 support has been exposed but the Collabora-led effort is closing in on OpenGL 3.0 capabilities...

With Red Hat shifting their support to Wayland and expecting the X.Org Server to go into a hard maintenance mode quickly, in 2019 indeed it did...

Back in late 2018 when Linus Torvalds went on a sabbatical from kernel development to focus on his inter-personal skills, the kernel added a Code of Conduct. To date there hasn't been much transparency into the Code of Conduct committee that acts upon violations, but that is changing in 2020...

While complicated by New Year's festivities, Wine 5.0-RC4 was released today with just fifteen bug fixes for the week -- also a sign of the development cycle winding down for this annual Wine stable release...

For months there has been many different discussions over the Linux desktop's poor performance when under memory pressure / out-of-memory type situations. That has resulted in some upstream work so far like GNOME GLib's GMemoryMonitor as well as discussions by distribution vendors about what solutions they could enable today to help the low memory situations. Fedora 32 could begin shipping and using EarlyOOM by default to help in this area...

Hitting Mesa 20.0-devel a short time ago were a set of patches to the Radeon Gallium3D video code for fixing 10-bit HEVC video decode support...

Your choice of Linux distribution on a budget PC can mean the difference of ~14% performance overall. Here are benchmarks of Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, EndeavourOS, Manjaro Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora Workstation, and Clear Linux on a $50 processor as we roll into 2020 with the newest Linux distribution releases.

Embedded Linux consulting firm Bootlin has been working on improving the security of OpenWrt, the Linux distribution popular for running on routers / networking equipment and other embedded Linux networking use-cases...

For those of you running EXT4 with Direct I/O on the likes of Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory or PMEM simulated via a virtual machine, better write performance is coming when overwriting already allocated blocks...

While we have found recent Linux kernels paired with latest motherboard BIOS releases to work out generally well for recent AMD APUs, not everyone has been having a trouble-free experience on recent kernels. But an affected user has discovered a possible workaround if hitting stability issues...

Just under one month since the libinput 1.15 test release, this input handling library is now out with its official update...

Fedora Linux has long been well known for always shipping with bleeding-edge GCC compiler releases even if it means a near-final pre-release, thanks in part to Red Hat's significant engineering resources to GCC and the GNU toolchain in general. With Fedora 32 it's expected to be no different with having the upcoming GCC 10 compiler...

Building on earlier GCC commits for Arm's BFloat16 (BF16) support and other new extensions, a late change landing for GCC 10 is the command line options for targeting the ARMv8.6-A architecture and optionally toggling i8mm and BF16 extensions...

Mesa3D as principally the collection of Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers is up to 2,996,270 lines of code (and documentation / associated scripts) within its Git tree! That should put it over the three million mark very soon while the Git activity was up by about 20% in 2019...

Fedora 32 is likely to make use of systemd's sysusers.d functionality for packages declaring new system users as part of the package installation process. This change proposal is being led by Red Hat's Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek of their systemd team...

Up to now the most recent Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop with Ubuntu Linux has been using Comet Lake processors while now the 10th Generation XPS 13 Developer Edition has been announced with Ice Lake processors...

Building upon Coreboot Icelake support that has been coming together recently is now the initial Intel support for Jasperlake and Tigerlake. Additionally, when it comes to the Icelake support, there is experimental/work-in-progress support for the Icelake-powered Razer Blade Stealth laptop...

The first batch for 2020 of DRM-Misc updates have been sent to DRM-Next of the smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers and other core / user-space API changes to our favorite subsystem...

As of New Year's morning, systemd's Git tree was at 1,273,896 lines spread across 3,522 commits built up over 42,700+ commits from around 1,500 different authors...

With last month's release of KDE's Kate 19.12 text editor there was an initial plug-in for Language Server Protocol (LSP) support to better allow language-agnostic support for code syntax highlighting and other features. There were some issues in that initial implementation but with Kate 19.12.1 and beyond will be better support...

Christian Hergert of Red Hat who is known for his work on the GNOME Builder IDE has recently been hacking on a new project called Bonsai that is designed as a GNOME-focused multi-device synchronization service akin to a personal cloud...

Among the issues that game developers have been facing in bringing their games to Linux for Google's Stadia cloud gaming service apparently stem from kernel scheduler issues. We've known the Linux kernel scheduler could use some improvements and independent developers like Con Kolivas with BFS / MuQSS have pushed for such, but hopefully in 2020 we'll see some real action...

In addition to Clear Linux seeing more performance optimizations in 2019 (more so than Fedora and Ubuntu during the year), it also benefited from a new desktop installer, new help forums, and more of Intel's partners talking about their current or planned usage of Clear Linux...

There hasn't been a new GNU Hurd release since the microkernel's 0.9 release back in 2016, but at least other areas of the stack continue inching further. Glibc as an important piece to the GNU toolchain saw some improvements for Hurd during December...

As of this morning in the Linux kernel Git source tree, the kernel weighs in at 27.8 million lines!..

For those interested in benchmarks of the $99+ PineBook ARM Linux laptop, more results continue to be uploaded on OpenBenchmarking.org...

Drew DeVault released Sway 1.3 RC1 on New Year's Eve as the latest test release for this increasingly popular i3-inspired Wayland compositor built off his WLROOTS library...

KDE developer Nate Graham who is well known for his weekly development summaries in the KDE space has shared his opinions on the desktop's features he expects to see materialize this year as well as some of the less likely bits...

Godot lead developer Juan Linietsky provided a New Year's Eve look at the origins of this wildly successful open-source game engine from their beginnings, the technical advancements of this open-source game engine, the big step forward with Godot 3.0, and what's on the horizon with Godot 4.0...

Happy New Year to all Phoronix readers...

Greg Kroah-Hartman took time out of his New Year's Eve festivities to release Linux 5.4.7, 4.19.92, and 4.14.161 as the newest supported stable releases of the Linux kernel...