Phoronix

Vulkan 1.1.130 is out today as the newest update to this graphics API that fixes a wide variety of documentation issues and areas in need of clarifications while also introducing a new extension...

The WireGuard secure VPN tunnel kernel code has landed in net-next! This means that -- barring any major issues coming to light that would lead to a revert -- WireGuard will finally reach the mainline kernel with the Linux 5.6 cycle kicking off in late January or early February!..

One of the most frequent complaints we hear from Linux gamers running open-source GPU drivers is over the lack of the hardware vendors supporting any feature-rich control panels like they do on Windows. There are many Linux driver tunables exposed by these open-source graphics drivers, but often they can only be manipulated via command-line options, environment variables, boot parameters, and other less than straight-forward means especially for recent converts from Windows and other novice Linux users. ADriConf has been doing a fairly decent job as a third-party means of helping to improve the situation and now there is talk of it supporting Vulkan driver settings...

Back in September we wrote about Facebook's Roman Gushchin working on a new slab memory controller/allocator implementation that in turn could provide better memory utilization and less slab memory usage. This wasn't ready in time for the 5.5 kernel but a revised patch series was sent out last week...

Fedora users eager to see the Linux 5.4 stable kernel can engage by helping to test their newly-spun 5.4-based kernel image prior to it officially landing as a stable release update...

This weekend was the last-minute pull request by Google's Kees Cook to introduce the new sizeof_member() macro that had been previously rejected from Linux 5.4. Well, it was again rejected by Linus Torvalds prior to tagging the Linux 5.5-rc1 kernel...

While there are some pretty great features for Linux 5.5, one that didn't make it quite in time was the long-awaited introduction of WireGuard as the in-kernel secure VPN tunnel. While it was a bummer it didn't make 5.5, all indications are at this point is that it will be in Linux 5.6...

Linus Torvalds has just issued the first release candidate of the Linux 5.5 cycle following the traditional two week long merge window...

Linux 5.5-rc1 is on the way to mirrors and with that the Linux 5.5 merge window is now over. Here is a look at the lengthy set of changes and new features for this next Linux kernel that will debut as stable in early 2020.

After not being merged for Linux 5.4, the new sizeof_member() macro as a unified means of calculating the size of a member of a struct has been volleyed for Linux 5.5 for possible inclusion on this last day of the merge window...

One of the side projects Mozilla continues to develop is DeepSpeech, a speech-to-text engine derived from research by Baidu and built atop TensorFlow with both CPU and NVIDIA CUDA acceleration. This week marked the release of Mozilla DeepSpeech 0.6 with performance optimizations, Windows builds, lightening up the language models, and other changes...

KDE Plasma is gearing up for 2020 by introducing a built-in emoji picker... Coming with Plasma 5.18 is easier support for inserting Unicode emojis...

Decided back at the GNU Tools Cauldron was a timeline to aim converting from Subversion as their default revision control system to Git over the New Year's holiday. For that to happen, by the middle of December they wanted to decide what conversion system to use for bringing all their SVN commits to Git. As such, now it's heating up ahead of that decision...

Raptor Computing Systems, the libre hardware company behind the POWER9-based Talos II server board and Blackbird micro-ATX desktop, has been working to improve the open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver support for IBM POWER...

Back in 2017 were patches for exposing /proc/cpuinfo data via sysfs for more easily parsing selected bits of information from the CPU information output. That work never made it into the mainline kernel but now SUSE's Thomas Renninger is taking over and trying to get revised patches into the kernel...

Complementing the CentOS 8 benchmarks I did following the release of that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 rebuild in late September, here are tests going back further for showing the performance of CentOS 6, CentOS 7, and CentOS 8 all benchmarked from the same Intel Xeon Scalable server. These tests were done about a month ago albeit with all the hardware launches, new child, and other factors, only now getting to posting the data.

The Valve-backed "ACO" compiler back-end for the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver has added support now for AMD GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" graphics cards...

Outreachy recently kicked off their winter (December to March) round of internships for diversity in tech with 49 individuals tackling a range of open-source tasks...

Weston release manager Simon Ser on Friday released the Wayland's Weston 8.0 reference compositor in alpha form...

IBM's work from over a year ago in working towards secure virtual machines on POWER hardware is finally coming to fruition with Linux 5.5 due out early next year...

As part of the ongoing effort for Intel's plans to use their new Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver by default on next quarter's Mesa 20.0 for Broadwell "Gen8" graphics and newer, another step in that direction was achieved on Friday...

With NFSv4.2 is the server-side copy (SSC) functionality with the Linux 5.5 kernel's NFS client-side support for that support in allowing "inter" copy offloads between different NFS servers...

When it comes to the storage/file-system changes with the in-development Linux 5.5 kernel one of the most prominent end-user-facing changes is more robust RAID1 for Btrfs with the ability to have three or four copies of the data rather than just two copies, should data safety be of utmost importance and concerned over the possibility of two disks in an array failing...

It's been five years already since the vote to transition to systemd in Debian over Upstart while now there is the new vote that has just commenced for judging the interest in "init system diversity" and just how much Debian developers care (or not) in supporting alternatives to systemd...

As expected by Wine's annual release cadence, next week Wine 5.0 will enter its code freeze followed by release candidates until this next stable Wine release is ready to ship around early 2020...

The Kotlin programming language on Android has become very popular and Google announced today nearly 60% of the top 1,000 Android applications are using Kotlin code in some capacity. Beyond their announcement earlier this year of Android development being Kotlin-first, as they look forward to 2020 will be more Kotlin + Android action...

While lossy compression audio formats like MP3 are not recommended for use within professional audio tasks, for those using the open-source Ardour digital audio workstation (DAW) software as of today there is finally native MP3 import support...

Announced back in September at the All Systems Go event in Berlin was systemd-homed as a new effort to improve home directory handling. Systemd-homed wants to make it easier to migrate home directories, ensure all user data is self-contained, unify user-password and encryption handling, and provide other modern takes on home/user directory functionality. That code is expected to soon land in systemd...

With AMD last week having enabled OpenGL 4.6 for their RadeonSI OpenGL Linux driver when enabling the NIR intermediate representation support, you may be wondering how using NIR is stacking up these days compared to the default TGSI route. Here are some benchmarks on Polaris, Vega, and Navi for comparing this driver option that ultimately allows OpenGL 4.6 to be flipped on.

Red Hat has been working on a "general notification queue" that is built off the Linux kernel's pipe code and will notify the user-space of events like key/keyring changes, block layer events like disk errors, USB attach/remove events, and other notifications without user-space having to continually poll kernel interfaces. This general notification queue was proposed for Linux 5.5 but has been pushed back to at least 5.6...

Opportunistic Wireless Encryption (OWE) provides a means of encrypting wireless data transfers without having any secret/key. Opportunistic Wireless Encryption is advertised as Wi-Fi Certified Enhanced Open...

One of the prominent additions coming with the C++20 programming language is the consistent comparison operator, or "spaceship operator" as it's commonly referred to. The support was merged for GCC 10 last month ahead of entering stage three development while this week some more improvements were made to the implementation...

Following last week's Arm architecture updates for Linux 5.5, sent in via four pull requests on Thursday was all the new and improved hardware enablement for the SoCs and single-board computer platforms...

While we aren't even half-way through the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development cycle yet, Ubuntu's Trello board provides a look at some of the changes and new features being at least considered for this next Ubuntu long-term support release...

Debian 11 "Bullseye" isn't expected to be released until well into 2021 but out today is the first alpha release of the Debian Installer that will ultimately power that next major Debian GNU/Linux release...

Start looking forward to March when NVIDIA looks to have some sort of open-source driver initiative to announce -- likely contributing more to Nouveau and we're crossing our fingers they will have sorted out the signed firmware situation to unblock those developers from delivering re-clocking support to yield better driver performance...

Purism announced today a Librem 5 USA model of their smartphone that has the same specifications and features of their Librem 5 Linux smartphone but manufactured in the US. That pushes the 720x1440 display, i.MX8M, 3GB RAM, 32GB eMMC, 802.11n device from $699 USD to $1,199 USD. Update: Errr the price was raised now apparently to $1999 USD...

Back at SC19 Intel released a beta of their oneAPI Base Toolkit for software developers to work on performance-optimized, cross-device software. Complementing that initial software beta is now the oneAPI Level 0 Specification...

Since the AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" series launch in August we have continue to be captivated by the raw performance of AMD's Zen 2 server processors across many different workloads as covered now in countless articles. The performance-per-dollar / TCO is also extremely competitive against Intel's Xeon Scalable line-up, but how is the power efficiency of these 7nm EPYC processors? We waited to deliver those numbers until having a retail Rome board for carrying out those tests and now after that and then several weeks of benchmarking, here is an extensive exploration of the AMD EPYC 7002 series power efficiency as well as a look at the peak clock frequencies being achieved in various workloads to also provide some performance-per-clock metrics compared to Naples.

The open-source Haiku operating system project working off inspirations from BeOS continued to be quite active over the past two months in adding various modern features and fixes to their platform...

Even with the holidays fast approaching Mesa developers continue to be quite busy in landing new features ahead of next quarter's Mesa 20.0 release. The Lima Gallium3D driver and Turnip Vulkan driver are the latest benefiting from the Git code...

Peter Hutterer has been preparing libinput 1.15 as the next update to this open-source input handling library used by Linux systems both on X.Org and Wayland...

In addition to the discussion over potentially dropping non-Gallium3D drivers from Mesa or otherwise potentially forking a portion of the code, AMD's Marek Olšák made a separate proposal about renaming the Gallium3D "state tracker" concept to being "API" implementations...

The Flash-Friendly File-System continues to be refined and with the forthcoming Linux 5.5 kernel are more improvements albeit largely bug fixes...

For years there has been work on a Wayland back-end to Ozone, the Google component for abstracting user-interface elements and input/window handling among other tasks across platforms. It looks like in 2020 the Ozone Wayland support will be in good standing and promoted out of beta...

With each new release of Firefox we set out to see how the performance is looking on the Linux desktop. One discovery we've made is that when using Intel's Clear Linux the Firefox performance is a lot more competitive to Google Chrome than we traditionally see on Ubuntu Linux. But with Firefox 71 we're seeing the performance trending lower compared to Firefox 69 and 70...

Mesa 19.3 continues running behind schedule but stands chances for releasing next week if the lingering blocker bugs are closed...

For those looking to spend less than $200 USD on a graphics card, the recently launched NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER offers great value starting at $159 USD and working well with the NVIDIA Linux driver for providing decent 1080p Linux gaming performance as well as OpenCL / CUDA support. Here are benchmarks of the GTX 1650 SUPER alongside a total of 18 lower-end/mid-range AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux.

While missing the original release target of the end of November, The Qt Company is buttoning up Qt 5.14 for debut next week. Today, however, marks the release candidate availability for those wanting to test out this forthcoming Qt5 release prior to more of the development efforts shifting to Qt 6.0...

AMD's GPUOpen team has released their first official update to the open-source Vulkan Memory Allocator project in nearly one year...