Phoronix

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.0-rc1, what was formerly known as Linux 4.21 over the past two weeks. While the bumping was rather arbitrary as opposed to a major change necessitating the big version bump, this next version of the Linux kernel does come with some exciting changes and new features (of course, our Twitter followers already have known Linux was thinking of the 5.0 re-brand from 4.21). Here is our original feature overview of the new material to find in this kernel.

While Linus Torvalds tends to be very strict about accepting kernel changes that have the potential of breaking user-space, he himself authored a patch today to change the mincore() system call to enhance the security...

Rolled out recently was Bitsum's Coreprio third-party freeware utility designed to offer better Threadripper 2970WX/2990WX performance by its own implementation of AMD Dynamic Local Mode compared to the default Windows scheduler behavior. Here are some benchmarks of Windows 10 against Linux while trying out CorePrio's NUMA Dissociater mode to see how much it helps the performance compared to Ubuntu Linux. Additionally, tests are included of Windows Server 2019 to see if that server edition of Windows is able to offer better performance on this AMD HEDT NUMA platform.

Since November the developers behind Fedora Linux had been discussing whether to significantly delay or even cancel Fedora 31 so they could spend around one year working on re-tooling how the distribution is crafted and work on other fundamental changes. But it turns out now they have decided against this big shake-up delay...

As another optimization for Intel's Clear Linux distribution, a "libSuperX11" library is being considered that fundamentally changes how the X.Org libraries are handled...

Ahead of the big AMD keynote on Tuesday, AMD kicked off CES week today by announcing the Ryzen 3000 Series Mobile Processors...

Waiting until the last day of the Linux 4.21 kernel merge window, Ted Ts'o sent in the fscrypt changes today adding Adiantum crypto support to this file-system encryption framework currently used by F2FS and EXT4...

The initial batch of fixes as well as new device IDs were merged to mainline Linux Git overnight, just in time for today's Linux 4.21-rc1 kernel release (well, looking like it may be 5.0-rc1)...

Just ahead of NVIDIA's expected reveal of new hardware at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), their driver teams have done a Sunday morning drop of new Vulkan beta drivers that match the new functionality offered up by Vulkan 1.1.97...

KDE developers were busy in the first days of 2019 working on Breeze icon improvements and other work so KDE Frameworks 5.54, Plasma 5.15, and KDE Applications 19.04 will be in even better shape...

As the first Vulkan specification update in nearly one month and just ahead of CES where we'll see new graphics hardware, Vulkan 1.1.97 has been released with a handful of new extensions...

Besides the Intel engine-reset graphics driver work, some other interesting activity to report on this weekend in the Intel open-source Linux graphics driver space is the FP16 visual and frame-buffer configuration support that recently debuted...

With the ever increasing usage of RGB LEDs on modern computer systems, Linux kernel developers have begun discussing a formal RGB LED user-space interface...

There is an experimental Rockchip open-source video codec driver for accelerated video encode/decode posted for the Linux kernel but in its current form isn't suited for mainline inclusion...

Google developers working on the Chrome/Chromium web-browser have decided to blacklist the Nouveau driver from having GPU acceleration by default within their web-browser...

At the end of 2018, Canonical's Alan Pope shared the most popular Snap packages for 2018. Now there's a similar list out of the folks maintaining Flathub for Flatpak packages. The list of popular applications is quite different between these app sandboxing/distribution means...

With having a EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 XC GAMING retail graphics card fail on me, I ended up buying an ASUS TURBO-RTX2070-8G. The benefit of this ASUS GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card is that at times can be found for as low as $499 USD, in line with the cheapest RTX 2070 options and lower than many of the other RTX 2070 AIB models and certainly the RTX 2070 Founder's Edition at $599 USD. Should you be considering the ASUS TURBO-RTX2070-8G, here are some benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux.

A few days back there was the main ARM pull request for Linux 4.21 with new SoC and board support. A second ARM pull request has been submitted now during the final moments of the 4.21 kernel merge window and it offers up some new features, most notably the initial i.MX8 SoC support...

Fedora 29 wanted to have the use of LUKS2 by default when going for full-disk encryption compared to the LUKS1 meta-data format, but that didn't turn out in time so now the hope is to have it ready for Fedora 30...

It was recently decided that FreeBSD's ZFS file-system support would be re-based atop ZFS On Linux. That new "ZFS On BSD" implementation based on ZOL continues moving along and it's now easier to test thanks to iX Systems and their TrueOS platform...

In early 2017 was when there was initial work underway for the Intel Linux graphics driver on a new engine reset capability for Broadwell "Gen 8" hardware and newer. This capability allows for per-engine resets rather than resorting to a full GPU reset in the case of hangs. The code at the time didn't end up being merged to the Linux kernel but there is now a revised implementation...

GNOME 3.32 fixes a frustrating issue if you have tried using GNOME on Wayland (or even just the GDM log-in manager with Wayland) while running on ASpeed graphics as is common to many workstation/server boards: it's no longer horrendously slow...

Due to Christmas and New Year's, the latest Wine 4.0 release candidate is a petite bottle...

For Canonical's fiscal year ending 31 March 2018, the company behind Ubuntu just filed their latest financial documents in the UK on Thursday. These documents with UK's Companies House offer a first look at the financial performance of Canonical since their 2017 shift to focus on profitability and doing away with Unity 8 and mobile/convergence work while laying off a sizable portion of their staff in the process...

With it quickly approaching two years since the launch of the original AMD Ryzen processors and complementing our other end-of-2018 Linux performance benchmarks, in this article are some fresh benchmarks seeing how the Linux performance at the start of 2017 on the Ryzen 7 1800X compares to the latest Linux performance at the start of 2019.

It's been nearly seven years already since some kernel developers called for deprecating FBDEV drivers. FBDEV is still alive and well within the Linux kernel but at least more embedded/mobile developers are pursuing DRM/KMS drivers these days and less code targeting these frame-buffer device drivers. With Linux 4.21, FBDEV is picking up a few improvements...

The kernel work has been revived for supporting encryption and authentication of hibernation snapshot images for better security...

The latest change/feature proposal is to ship Fedora 30 with Go 1.12...

With the proposed Libre RISC-V Vulkan accelerator aiming to effectively be an open-source GPU built atop the open-source RISC-V ISA there were recently some new details published on how the design is expected to work out...

Debhelper, the package offering various scripts to assist in the creation of Debian packages, has reached version 12 in time for Debian Buster...

Fedora 29 aimed to provide UEFI support for ARMv7 given the maturing support to U-Boot and other components, but that didn't turn out as planned so is now being worked on for Fedora 30...

While the long-awaited Haiku R1 Beta debuted back in September, development activity didn't lighten up after that point but the developers of this open-source BeOS-inspired operating system were very busy through the holidays...

Fedora 29 succeeded at a long elusive and rather mystical flicker-free boot experience that has continued to improve since release. With Fedora 30, that flicker-free boot experience should be in even better standing...

For Debian Developers and other contributors that list their personal blog(s) on Planet Debian, there is a new set of rules for DD blogs being aggregated by their site...

The NVIDIA 410.93 Linux driver is out today as the company's first Linux driver release of 2019...

SUSE's Jiri Kosina sent in the HID subsystem pull request today with some interesting additions that we've been monitoring in recent weeks...

Back in November was the surprising announcement of the Necunos Mobile as an open-source Linux phone making use of KDE Plasma Mobile. That phone is now preparing to ship and pre-orders are open, but I wouldn't get too excited at this stage...

Is there enough interest in seeing new point releases for older X.Org Server release branches to ship fixes almost exclusively aimed at improving decades old graphics/display hardware? We'll see, but at least one person wants to work on such releases...

Back during the Linux 4.20 kernel cycle, support for the C-SKY CPU architecture was introduced while now for Linux 4.21 it has seen its first round of improvements...

While a few days ago I wrote about the Reiser4 port to the Linux 4.20 kernel being a work-in-progress, now it's officially been released with their first tagged patch release since Linux 4.18...

Up to now the AMDKFD kernel driver needed for running the ROCm user-space has only worked on x86_64 CPUs, but with some simple changes, it turns out this Radeon compute kernel driver can work on 64-bit ARM as well...

Spun on top of last Friday's Wine 4.0-RC4 release is now the Wine-Staging re-base update...

Finally with the in-development Linux 4.21 kernel will be the input driver for supporting the Raspberry Pi 7-inch touchscreen...

The UBports folks that continue to maintain and advance Ubuntu Touch are preparing their OTA-7 update for release with a few new features...

As the first update to the GNU Tar program in more than one year, Tar 1.31 is out today and it has support for Zstd compression...

Khronos President Neil Trevett just commented on the current state of Vulkan/OpenCL compute and reaffirmed that OpenCL will continue to evolve as well...

As a longtime Thunderbird user going back to its original release, the details Mozilla revealed today about their development focus on their mail client for 2019 have me excited and adding to what I am looking forward to in 2019...

With 2019 started and also the 15th year since starting Phoronix.com, what am I most excited for in 2019 from a Linux/open-source perspective? Here is a look at what has me motivated for the year ahead...

It was another busy year for the Phoronix Test Suite in 2018, which also marked ten years since the public debut of the Phoronix Test Suite for open-source, cross-platform automated performance benchmarking...

The GIMP team has posted their 2018 redux covering the debut of GIMP 2.10 and the various improvements they focused on over the past year. Additionally, they provided a sneak peak of where they will be focusing their development efforts for 2019...