Phoronix

Greg Kroah-Hartman began sending in his feature pull requests this morning for the newly-started Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle...

Red Hat developers continue advancing the capabilities of the GFS2 cluster file-system and this week Andy Price shared an update on their efforts at the Open-Source Summit Europe in Edinburgh...

The next Linux kernel has scheduler improvements that will benefit some tasks when running on ARM big.LITTLE type systems where select CPU cores are more much more powerful than the other cores...

The changes are not as notable as Btrfs having multiple performance improvements or multiple new features for F2FS, but the XFS and EXT4 mature file-systems have their latest advancements now queued for the next kernel cycle...

Across Ingo Molnar 's x86-focused kernel branches (including x86 64-bit) there are some performance optimizations to note in this new material for Linux 4.20~5.0...

The past month Linux PC/laptop vendor System76 has been teasing its open-source fan-base about building a new "open-source" PC with their new Colorado factory...

Following last week's release of the Intel Core i9 9900K, I spent several days testing various Linux distributions on this latest Core i9 CPU paired with the new ASUS Z390-A PRIME motherboard. I was testing not only to see that all of the Linux distributions were playing fine with this latest and greatest desktop hardware but also how the performance was looking. Benchmarked this round on the i9-9900K was Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS, Ubuntu 18.10, Clear Linux 25720, Debian Buster Testing, Manjaro 18.0-RC3, Fedora Workstation 29, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and CentOS 7.

After it was delayed last week, the beautiful Fedora 29 will greet the world next week...

With Google Chrome/Chromium 70 having debuted last week, promoted now from dev to beta is Chrome 71...

As the latest to the NVIDIA 410 Linux driver series, rolling out today is the 410.73 Linux stable driver update...

We've known that the X.Org Server security has been a "disaster" (according to security researchers) and while many bugs have been fixed in recent years, not all of the security bugs date back so far in the decades old code-base. Out today is X.Org Server 1.20.3 to fix a new CVE issued for X.Org Server 1.19 and newer...

UPower, the power management abstraction layer born out of DeviceKit for providing information on power sources and other data, is still on the trek towards version 1.0...

Modern Intel SoCs support S0ix low-power states during idle periods, which are sub-states of ACPI S0 that increase power-savings while supporting an instant-on experience for providing lower latency than ACPI S3...

SUSE's Takashi Iwai has sent in the big batch of sound/audio hardware improvements for the in-development Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel...

The Qt Company has announced the availability today of Qt Design Studio 1.0, a new program for user-interface design and development that can handle complex and scalable UIs...

Ahead of the Zen 2 processors expected in 2019, it appears AMD developers have begun working on their Linux kernel support patches for these next-generation CPUs. In particular, it appears the flow of Linux kernel code for supporting EPYC 2 "Rome" processors has begun...

David Airlie has submitted the main feature pull request of the plethora of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) enhancements for the next kernel release that includes a lot of Intel and AMD Radeon graphics driver work...

The initial round of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates has been sent in for the in-development Linux 4.20/5.0 kernel...

Originally attempted for the Linux 4.19 kernel but not merged that cycle was the STACKLEAK GCC plug-in that was ported for the mainline code-base from the Linux GrSecurity patch-set. That plug-in is now trying to get into the Linux 4.20 (or perhaps relabeled as 5.0) kernel...

Primarily for Linux workstation customers, AMD today released Radeon Software 18.40 as the collection of their closed-source Vulkan/OpenGL components as well as PAL OpenCL driver plus the option of using their packaged "All-Open" driver stack that is a snapshot of their Mesa-based driver components...

Building off Monday's release of Linux 4.19 is now the downstream GNU Linux-libre 4.19-gnu kernel that strips away code contingent upon closed-source microcode/firmware images as well as removing the ability to load closed-source kernel modules...

At this week's Open-Source Summit in Edinburgh there was a kernel internship panel discussion focused on the work done by Outreachy participants, the program paying women and other under-represented groups $5,500 USD for contributing to various open-source projects over a three month period...

Blender 2.80 development had been running a few months behind schedule but coming out in the next few weeks will be their beta milestone...

The recently covered PCI peer-to-peer memory support for the Linux kernel has indeed landed for the 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle. This is about PCI Express devices supporting peer-to-peer DMA that can bypass the system memory and processor via a standardized interface...

Last week Corsair announced the Force Series MP510 M.2 PCIe NVMe solid-state drives as the company's fastest SSDs to date. While being Corsair's latest and fastest NVMe SSDs, the pricing is competitive with the 240GB model starting out at $70 USD, 480GB for $130 USD, $239 for 960GB, or $475 for a 1920GB version.

I am still finishing up work on my Linux 4.19 kernel stable benchmarks given it's been (and continues to be) a very busy month for Linux hardware testing, but of interest so far has been seeing a few EPYC performance improvements in some of the real-world workloads...

While Btrfs has been sorting out performance improvements, the crew working on the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) have been working on a number of feature additions for this next Linux kernel under development...

A new release of the Illumos-powered OpenIndiana Hipster operating system is now available as one of the leading open-source Solaris-derived operating systems...

With just one week of feature development remaining for the in-development Mesa 18.3, the race is on for landing the remaining feature work ahead of this next quarterly Mesa3D stable version...

The Qt Project has been the latest open-source community constructing a Code of Conduct. The motivation for this CoC in the Qt camp has been driven to "establish a formal line-in-the-sand about what is unacceptable behavior. We want new members of the Qt community to feel comfortable and accepted, and we want to foster a healthy working environment for both current and new members."..

Overnight the networking subsystem changes were merged into the mainline kernel for the Linux 4.20~5.0. Sadly not part of this pull request is the much sought after WireGuard secure VPN tunnel but it does bring one of the other features we've been monitoring: the new Intel 2.5G Ethernet driver...

The EFI support code within the mainline Linux kernel continues to be improved upon. While EFI firmware has matured in the past few years to become more reliable, there still are systems/motherboards shipping with various bugs. One of the additions for this next kernel release will better handle rare cases where buggy firmware could hang the kernel...

Google engineers are developing the DM-BOW device mapper driver with plans to use the code on Android devices to provide a restoration path should a system upgrade fail...

Going back several release cycles has been an effort to add the XArray data structure to the Linux kernel but to date that hasn't happened. It wasn't accepted for Linux 4.19 and now Matthew Wilcox -- who began this work about two years ago as a programmer at Microsoft -- is hoping Linux 4.20~5.0 will be the lucky release...

The HID driver updates have a few nice improvements for the recently opened Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel merge window...

Just ahead of the Fedora 29 release where Fedora Silverblue has become quite usable for a Flatpak-focused, atomic experience built using OSTree, Fedora developers have unveiled Fedora Toolbox...

Intel open-source developer Dylan Baker has laid out a proposed release schedule for the upcoming Mesa 18.3 quarterly feature release...

On the Spectre front for the recently-started Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel is STIBP support for cross-hyperthread Spectre Variant Two mitigation...

Hygon's Dhyana SoC, the facsimile of the AMD Zen microarchitecture as a result of the AMD-Chinese joint venture to begin spinning up domestic x86 chips for the Chinese data center market, will be supported by the next version of the Linux kernel...

Red Hat announced this morning they are collaborating with NVIDIA around open-source innovations for emerging workloads such as artificial intelligence and deep learning...

Earlier this year the Speck encryption algorithm was added to the Linux kernel as at the time Google intended to use it for EXT4/fscrypt file-system encryption with low-end Android devices. But Speck with all its controversy due to being developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) led to immediate backlash. The removal of Speck from the Linux kernel tree is finally happening...

We've long been looking forward to WARHAMMER II on Linux and it looks like that could be realized next month...

Oracle's Munich developers responsible for maintaining the VirtualBox virtualization software this morning announced the first public test release of the upcoming VirtualBox 6.0...

Intel's Rafael Wysocki sent in the power management updates today for the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle...

The open-source display driver for supporting these graphics cards where 32MB of SDRAM was suitable, 250 nm fabrication was standard, and core clocks around 100MHz were competitive is still being maintained... Two decades after the release of the ATI RAGE series, the open-source Linux driver continues seeing some activity and in fact a new driver release...

Should you be into Linux on z Systems, the IBM s390 code for the Linux 4.20~5.0 cycle is coming with several feature additions...

Yesterday OpenBenchmarking.org, our "cloud" component to the open-source Phoronix Test Suite open-source benchmarking framework, served up its thirty-five millionth test profile / test suite download...

It's not often we get to talk about the LED drivers for the Linux kernel... Yes, the class of Linux kernel drivers to support controlling the brightness of LEDs via supported drivers and exposing that to user-space. With Linux 4.20~5.0 comes finally the ability to program "patterns" for LEDs...

Adding to the excitement around Linux 4.20~5.0 are now multiple performance improvements to the Btrfs file-system to be presented for this next Linux kernel release...

Last week I wrote about new patches adding Coreboot Flashrom support for Radeon GPUs for being able to re-program the SPI blocks on AMD graphics processors. Initially that was for old Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series hardware but now it's moved onto the GCN world...