Phoronix

Coreboot now supports the UP Squared, the new single board computer / maker board based on an Intel Apollo Lake SoC...

Intel announced an interesting development in their oneAPI initiative: they are developing a new programming language/dialect...

Purism today issued their June software status update on how things are going with bringing up their privacy-minded Linux software stack for their Librem 5 smartphone. On the software side things are still moving along though still rather primitive with a goal of shipping in Q3. Similarly, this status update lacks any talk of the hardware progress for seeing how that is moving if there is any chance of shipping their planned phone next month after already having been setback twice...

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has developers contributing to the Coreboot project...

Alpine Linux 3.10 is out today as the newest feature release for this lightweight, security-minded Linux distribution built atop Musl libc and Busybox while catering being quite popular in the container crowd...

Released this week was OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 as the latest major release for this Linux distribution of Mandriva/Mandrake heritage and continues on the interesting trend of innovations. In addition to continuing to use the LLVM Clang compiler by default rather than GCC, among other changes that position it more uniquely than many other Linux distributions out there, their 4.0 release has a "znver1" spin that is optimized for AMD Ryzen/Threadripper/EPYC processors. Here are benchmarks comparing not only OpenMandriva 4.0's x86-64 and Znver1 options but also how that performance compares to the likes of Ubuntu 19.04, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Intel's Clear Linux.

After being marred by delays the past several weeks, Qt 5.13 is shipping today as the latest major update to the Qt5 tool-kit and another step closer towards seeing Qt 6.0 around the end of 2020...

While as of Linux 5.2 the support for Intel's Icelake CPUs appear production ready with all of the bits in place from new IDs to the much enhanced "Gen 11" graphics, there are a few stragglers of items to land with the upcoming Linux 5.3 merge window though could be back-ported to current series. Fortunately, we haven't found anything major to be missing...

In addition to discontinuing i386 support, Canonical announced another change being worked on for Ubuntu 19.10 is compiler hardening...

After Dell Canvas Totem support wasn't merged for libinput 1.13, the code for this nifty input device was merged last week and will be part of the upcoming Libinput 1.14...

Building off the initial Turing mode-setting bits that were in place since Linux 5.0 and have continued stepping along to support newer variants on successive kernel releases, the Linux 5.3 kernel is slated to add support for the TU116 graphics processor...

With the newly released DragonFlyBSD 5.6 there are improvements to its original HAMMER2 file-system to the extent that it's now selected by its installer as the default file-system choice for new installations. Curious how the performance now compares between HAMMER and HAMMER2, here are some initial benchmarks on an NVMe solid-state drive using DragonFlyBSD 5.6.0...

While PCI Express 4.0 up to this point has only been found in a few systems like Talos' POWER9 platforms and coming soon with the new AMD graphics cards and chipsets, the PCI SIG today announced PCI Express 6.0...

Panfrost only made its initial debut as part of the recent Mesa 19.1 release for providing open-source Arm Mali Bifrost/Midgard graphics driver support on Linux independent of Arm and their official binary driver. While the resources are limited, so far Panfrost is making stellar progress...

KDE developer Tomaz Canabrava is working on a set of improvements around their Konsole terminal emulator when running on Wayland...

Ubuntu and their downstream flavors all stopped shipping x86 32-bit images and now for the 19.10 cycle they have decided to stop their i386 support entirely. Beginning with Ubuntu 19.10, the archive/packages will not be built for x86 32-bit...

VKHR is an open-source, real-time hybrid hair renderer written in Vulkan and developed under the support of AMD/RTG...

While the AMDGPU kernel driver has shipped with the long-awaited FreeSync support since the Linux 5.0 release earlier this year and was quickly wired up for the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver in Mesa 19.0 while the recent Mesa 19.1 update brought FreeSync for the RADV Vulkan driver, AMDVLK as AMD's official open-source Vulkan driver isn't yet supporting this variable rate refresh technology...

As Netflix's first security bulletin for 2019, they warned of TCP-based remote denial of service vulnerabilities affecting both Linux and FreeBSD. These vulnerabilities are rated "critical" but already being corrected within the latest Git code...

In addition to Clang-Scan-Deps being merged a few days ago, another new feature for LLVM's Clang is called the Clang Interface Stubs and brings a concept from Windows/macOS over to Linux/ELF systems...

Quietly released last week was Radeon Software for Linux 19.20, the latest quarterly update to AMD's packaged Linux driver that consists of their AMDGPU-PRO binary driver option as well as the AMDGPU-Open packaged components using a snapshot of Mesa...

DragonFlyBSD 5.6 is now available as the latest major update to this popular BSD operating system...

As we've been expecting, AMD's open-source developers today posted their set of patches enabling Navi (10) support within their AMDGPU DRM kernel driver. Bringing up the Navi support in kernel-space are 459 patches amounting to more than four-hundred thousand lines of code, not counting the work done to LLVM as part of their shader compiler back-end or the yet-to-be-published OpenGL/Vulkan driver patches...

For those eager to see CentOS 8.0 as the community open-source rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0, progress is being made but it looks like the release is still some weeks out...

Debian's Apt packaging system was tagged today as 1.9.0 experimental and is already in the process of being added to Ubuntu 19.10. Apt 1.9 is working towards the eventual Apt 2.0 release...

NVIDIA announced this morning for ISC 2019 that they are bringing CUDA to Arm beyond their work already for supporting GPU computing with lower-power Tegra SoCs...

With Debian 10 "Buster" due to be releasing in early July, I've begun testing the near-final Buster images on various systems. Here is a look at a common Intel Core i7 system comparing the current performance of Debian 10.0 to the current stable 9.9 release...

The FSGSBASE instruction set has been present on Intel processors going back to Ivy Bridge processors and while there have been Linux kernel patches for this feature going on for years, it looks like with the Linux 5.3 kernel cycle is this support for merging. Making us eager for this support is the prospect of better performance, especially for context switching workloads that already have been suffering as a result of recent CPU mitigations...

Debian's RISC-V support has been coming together but how's the state of affairs for the imminent Debian 10.0 "Buster" release?..

Currently NVIDIA's packaged drivers on Ubuntu can get a bit stale on Ubuntu stable releases since they aren't updated in-step with the latest driver releases. But a new stable release update (SRU) policy/exception similar to the Firefox approach is being made for Ubuntu so that new releases will end up working their way into currently supported Ubuntu series...

Arm's Wilco Dijkstra landed some more optimizations this past week in the Glibc development code for the upcoming GNU C Library 2.30 release...

NetworkManager 1.19.4 is the newest snapshot of this widely used Linux networking library on its road to version 1.20...

With Linux 5.2-rc5 providing no upsets and the release candidate smaller than the one last week, things are looking good for seeing the stable Linux 5.2 kernel release happen in early July...

Details are light up to this point but in fifteen days EndeavourOS will be announced as a new Arch-based Linux distribution aiming to continue where Antergos Linux left off...

Landing this week in the LLVM Clang 9.0 development code-base is the new clang-scan-deps tool for much faster scanning of files for dependencies compared to the traditional pre-processor based approach...

New to the GCC 10 compiler code-base this week is a port for the Texas Instruments Programmable Real-Time Unit (PRU) processor found on various boards, including the likes of the BeagleBone Arm SBCs...

The long-awaited OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 distribution update has set sail this weekend...

Making KDE's Baloo file indexing/searching framework really efficient appears to be a never-ending task. Baloo is already much less bloated recently than it's been hungry for resources in the past and with KDE Frameworks 5.60 will be slightly more fit...

For those wondering how Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux is comparing to the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution, here are a number of benchmarks on the same Intel Core i7 8700K in seeing how these rolling-release distros are competing for summer 2019...

In time for those planning to spend some time this weekend gaming, DXVK lead developer Philip Rebohle announced the release of DXVK 1.2.2 that will hopefully soon be integrated as part of a Proton update for Steam Play but right now can be built from source...

In hoping to catch more bugs quickly, systemd now has continuous fuzzing integration via the new "Fuzzit" platform that provides continuous fuzzing as a service...

The Intel open-source/Linux compute stack has added Comet Lake support along with more Icelake PCI IDs in its latest round-up...

It was nearly a decade ago the high-end, commercial video software editing solution Lightworks announced they would be going open-source but to this day that milestone has yet to be materialized. Lightworks though does continue advancing with their v14.6 release on the horizon and at least their added Linux support continues to be expanded upon...

The past few years there's been the me_cleaner software for disabling and stripping parts of Intel's Management Engine for soft-disabling the notorious bit on modern Intel boards. ME_Cleaner has been making much progress and now there is work pending for being able to disable the newer Management Engine 12 found on more recent Intel motherboards...

FreeBSD 11.3 is lining up for release in July while this weekend the first release candidate is available for testing...

Released at the end of May was the huge ZFS On Linux 0.8 release with many new features like native encryption, TRIM/discard support for SSDs, device removal, Python 3 compatibility with its tooling, pool check-points, and much more. Out today is now the first maintenance release following that big release...

Since the release of WSL2 as a Windows 10 Insider Preview update this week, we've been putting the new Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 under some benchmarks compared to WSL1 and bare metal Linux. While WSL2 has improved the I/O performance thanks to the new Hyper-V-based virtualization approach employed by WSL2, the performance has regressed in other areas for running Linux binaries on Windows 10. Here are our preliminary benchmark results.

At the start of May there were the initial patches out of AMD for implementing a better runtime linker in its graphics stack. That code has now been merged into Mesa 19.2 and is being used by the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Wacom's second-generation Intuos Pro Small digital drawing tablet will be supported by the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel...

To be exposed via /proc/[pid]/arch_status is a new interface for exposing architectural-specific information for a given Linux process...