on (#4ARJY)
Linux 5.1 is bringing another change to help bolster the security of Linux systems in light of recent exploits...
Phoronix
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| Updated | 2025-09-17 14:15 |
on (#4ARJZ)
The KDE stack continues seeing a lot of bug fixing and polishing in time for the spring Linux distribution updates...
on (#4ARK0)
It's been just one week since the debut of the big Linux 5.0 kernel release and today that's been succeeded by Linux 5.0.1 as the first fix-things-up release...
on (#4ARDX)
While Fedora is generally known to ship the very latest upstream software with each release, Fedora has continued shipping Mono 4.8 even though Mono 5.0 shipped in May 2017. With the Fedora 31 release due out later in the year, they are finally working on switching to Mono 5...
on (#4ARA5)
The x86 platform driver updates were sent in Friday for the Linux 5.1 kernel...
on (#4AR58)
The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system now has good USB3/XHCI support in place with their latest daily snapshots...
on (#4AQWE)
The Lemote Yeeloong netbooks came out a decade ago and based on the MIPS Loongson 2F processor clocked up to 900MHz, offered up to 1GB of RAM, some models featuring an 8GB SSD, and driving the display was a Silicon Motion controller. The Yeeloong netbooks/laptops were even used by Richard Stallman for being open-source friendly and he used the devices as his own system for several years. Finally in 2019, better mainline Linux kernel support is being worked on...
on (#4AQEH)
Support is coming together within the Linux kernel and QEMU for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack to handle Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) for the virtual displays to handle some practical improvements moving forward...
on (#4AQ5E)
KDE Frameworks 5.56.0 is out as the latest monthly update to this collection of add-on libraries complementing Qt5...
on (#4AQ2W)
With GNOME 3.32 now buttoned up for release next week, the developers are already getting ready to kick off the GNOME 3.34 development cycle...
on (#4APY9)
NVIDIA will no longer be officially supporting Kepler mobile/notebook GPUs by their mainline driver. For now at least they will continue supporting Kepler desktop GPUs by their mainline driver...
on (#4APYA)
The Kbuild updates for the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel have a few worthwhile improvements including the ability to pass optional flags to dpkg-buildpackage when spinning up a Debian kernel package, some minor optimizations, and preparations around LD.LLD support in using the LLVM linker to link the Linux kernel...
on (#4APW5)
The GNOME 3.32 release is due out next Wednesday while over the weekend are the RC2 packages up for testing...
on (#4APPK)
Following the Gallum Nine "TTN" support landing to allow a TGSI-to-NIR code path to be used rather than requiring Gallium3D drivers support the conventional TGSI intermediate representation, Intel's new "Iris" driver now is working with Gallium D3D9 after the final bit of code was merged...
on (#4APHB)
One of the big features coming up with the Qt 5.13 tool-kit release due out in May is support for Lottie files...
on (#4AP3Z)
A month ago we were first to report on Intel posting Linux graphics driver patches for "device local memory" as they prepare for the bring-up of their "Xe Graphics" discrete GPU hardware due out at some point in 2020. To no surprise, there are more patches out today as the Intel open-source developers begin pushing out more code restructuring work for bringing up graphics support past Icelake "Gen 11" graphics...
on (#4AP0A)
As a change in acknowledging the increasing Arm SoC core counts as more vendors take stabs at higher-end server chips, the default 64-bit Arm (ARM64 / AArch64) kernel image as of Linux 5.1 will default to supporting 256 CPUs compared to the current default limit of 64 CPU cores...
on (#4ANKD)
Valve has released Proton 3.16-8 as their newest release to their Wine fork that adds in various improvements for helping Windows games on Linux primarily to bolster their "Steam Play" functionality...
on (#4AN9K)
Feral's GameMode daemon for dynamically tuning Linux systems while gaming and reverting to the default behavior when not running games continues to see new capabilities added...
on (#4AN9M)
One of the milestones we hope will be reached this year is having SPIR-V support in mainline LLVM, but while the Khronos working group engaging on better support around LLVM isn't there yet, the code continues improving out-of-tree...
on (#4AMTY)
In addition to measured boot support being worked on for Coreboot to enhance the security of this open-source BIOS/firmware replacement, support for working with Intel TXT - Trusted Execution Technology - is also happening...
on (#4AMMH)
The Linux kernel's RISC-V processor support is getting into good shape now since the support for this open-source processor ISA was originally introduced back for Linux 4.15. Moving forward, it's now expected the support to be maintained and only improve for the HiFive Unleashed developer board...
on (#4AMHZ)
Besides new/improved CPU targets, C++20 additions, and a lot of other additions to the code-base for GCC 9, there is also continued work on usability improvements for developers to make their lives easier and helping out with more precise error/warning details...
on (#4AMJ0)
The 19.04 release of Ubuntu Studio, the Ubuntu flavor focused on multimedia production / content creation, might not happen unless at least one of their developers are granted package upload rights...
on (#4AM4Z)
Recently I carried out a number of GCC 9 compiler benchmarks on AMD EPYC looking at the performance benefits of "znver1" compiler tuning and varying optimization levels to see when this level of compiler tuning pays off. There was interest from that in seeing some fresh Intel Skylake-X / AVX-512 figures, so here are those benchmarks of GCC 9 with various tuning options and their impact on the performance of the generated binaries.
on (#4AM2M)
As the latest on the Spectre/Meltdown front for the Linux kernel, the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel is bringing an optimization for Retpolines "return trampolines" so GCC will generate more efficient code on x86/x86_64 in its mitigations against Spectre Variant Two...
on (#4AKS8)
LLVM for a while has offered a "Shadow Call Stack" pass used to protect programs against stack buffer overflows. While the 64-bit ARM (AArch64) shadow call stack has worked out well, the x86_64 implementation has been deemed insufficient and is now removed...
on (#4AKPA)
NVIDIA's Andy Ritger has contributed a simple yet long overdue addition to the X.Org Server with the new "NoOutputInitialSize" option...
on (#4AKB5)
The mature XFS file-system continues seeing new improvements and with the Linux 5.1 kernel is a fair amount of new material...
on (#4AK1Z)
GraphicsFuzz is the 3D GPU driver fuzzer that was born out of academia research for finding GPU driver bugs and ended up being acquired by Google and then open-sourced...
on (#4AK20)
Following the recent emergency release of Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS to get out updated install media that addresses the recent APT security vulnerability and in the process other bug fixes too, Ubuntu 14.04.6 has now been released as a similar update...
on (#4AJMT)
A seldom advertised experimental feature of the AMDGPU kernel driver has long been the GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics support. By default these Southern Islands and Sea Islands graphics processors default to the Radeon DRM driver, but with some kernel command lime parameters can use the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver. The AMDGPU code path is better maintained since it's used for all modern Radeon GPUs, using AMDGPU opens up Vulkan driver support, and possible performance benefits. It's a while since last testing the Radeon vs. AMDGPU driver performance for these original GCN graphics cards, so here are some fresh benchmarks using the Linux 5.0 kernel and Mesa 19.1-devel.
on (#4AJ37)
The upcoming Linux hardware accelerator subsystem could get even bigger with Xilinx now wanting to mainline their FPGA accelerator drivers...
on (#4AHYN)
There is new Arm hardware to be supported by the Linux 5.1 kernel...
on (#4AHVV)
Derek Foreman has announced the beta releases of Wayland 1.17 and Weston 6.0 with hopes of officially shipping these new releases this month...
on (#4AHPN)
In addition to the staging changes submitted on Tuesday for the Linux 5.1 kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman also sent out pull requests on the various other trees he maintained...
on (#4AHMT)
Mesa 19.0-RC7 was released on Wednesday rather than the official release due to four blocker bugs remaining, but this seventh weekly release candidate does have a number of fixes to offer...
on (#4AH71)
Fedora Silverblue (formerly known as Fedora Atomic Workstation) now has support for running with NVIDIA's binary graphics driver stack...
on (#4AGZQ)
These changes really shouldn't come as much of a surprise considering all of the major changes we've covered individually in recent weeks on Phoronix, but the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver changes have now been submitted for the Linux 5.1 kernel...
on (#4AGR7)
The UBports community that continues maintaining Ubuntu Touch has today released their OTA-8 update...
on (#4AGEC)
While there were many Linux gaming benchmarks within our recent GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Linux review, there were requests for 1080p tests and some other benchmarks... For honoring those requests, with some of them being made by our premium supporters, here are 117 graphics benchmarks tested not only on the GTX 1660 Ti but also the RTX 2060 and on the AMD side was the Radeon RX 590 and RX Vega 56 for an interesting mid-range graphics card comparison.
on (#4AGED)
AMD released their newest xf86-video-amdgpu DDX driver today with various additions for enabling new functionality where needed by this X.Org display driver...
on (#4AG9M)
Greg Kroah-Hartman sent out the staging subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.1...
on (#4AFZ2)
Purism announced this morning that their PureOS Linux distribution for their Librem laptops and forthcoming Librem 5 platform has achieved the goal of "convergence"...
on (#4AFQ5)
The HID subsystem updates for Linux 5.1 is another busy cycle with new hardware support...
on (#4AFM4)
Intel has been developing "i10nm_edac" as the new Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver for supporting their next-generation 10nm-based server CPUs...
on (#4AFEV)
Linux has supported ELF binaries since the 1.x kernel days and now 25 years later, its support for the a.out file format is finally on the way out the door...
on (#4AFA6)
The Gallium Nine TTN support for "TGSI to NIR" to allow this Direct3D 9 state tracker to use the NIR intermediate representation as an alternative to Gallium's default TGSI representation has been merged to Git for Mesa 19.1...
on (#4AF32)
With the in-development Linux 5.1 is a big step forward to the kernel's live-patching infrastructure for this functionality that allows primarily applying security updates against the running kernel without the need for reboots...
on (#4AET1)
Recently I published a number of Linux 5.0 I/O scheduler benchmarks on laptop and desktop hardware with solid-state storage. A number of Phoronix readers were interested in seeing similar tests done but with traditional hard drives, so here are those results using two different drives and the different blk-mq I/O scheduler options with the new Linux 5.0 kernel.