Phoronix

Independent Linux kernel hacker Con Kolivas has released his newest "ck1" patch-set for the recently released Linux 5.2 kernel code-base. Complementing these kernel changes is his primary focus: the MuQSS scheduler that continues to aim for better interactivity and performance on mobile/desktop systems...

Just as expected, Linus Torvalds this afternoon issued the first release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 5.3 kernel...

Vulkan 1.1.116 was released today as the latest weekly update to this high performance graphics API and comes with one new extension in tow...

The Linux 5.3 kernel merge window is expected to close today so here is our usual recap of all the changes that made it into the mainline tree over the past two weeks. There is a lot of changes to be excited about from Radeon RX 5700 Navi support to various CPU improvements and ongoing performance work to supporting newer Apple MacBook laptops and Intel Speed Select Technology enablement.

Feral developers released a new version of their GameMode Linux game performance optimization daemon/client this weekend in order to allow this update to land in the upcoming Fedora Workstation 31. GameMode 1.4 offers up many features including new interfaces for allowing better GNOME integration and thus the Fedora interest in seeing this version in their autumn Linux distribution update...

With the KDE Plasma 5.17 release, the desktop will make it easy to see a network's QR code for in turn making it super quick and simple for sharing network information with other users and devices...

As a last minute surprise for the Linux 5.3 kernel merge window is support for the keyboard and trackpads on newer Apple MacBooks and MacBook Pro laptops...

IO_uring is designed to deliver fast and efficient I/O operations thanks to a re-designed interface introduced in Linux 5.1 with various efficiency improvements compared to the kernel's existing asynchronous I/O code. But it turns out there was a big bottleneck within the current IO_uring code up until now...

Landing this week in Mesa 19.2 for the Lima Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali 400/450 series hardware is a reworked GPIR register scheduler...

Just one week after releasing DXVK 1.3, lead developer Philip Rebohle has released DXVK 1.3.1 with a few more features plus a number of bug fixes -- including performance work...

Florian Müllner released new development versions of GNOME Shell and Mutter today for this week's GNOME 3.33.4 development milestone...

Adding to the list of new features for systemd 243 is another last-minute addition to this growing init system... Systemd picked up a new service and while some may view it as bloat, should be quite practical at least for those encountering kernel crashes from time to time...

One of the new features to the RDNA architecture with Navi is support for single cycle issue Wave32 execution on SIMD32. Up to now the RadeonSI code was using just Wave64 but now there is support in this AMD open-source Linux OpenGL driver for Wave32...

The Arm SoC/platform changes arrived a bit late to the Linux 5.3 merge window ending this weekend. The Arm SoC/platform changes were only sent in on Friday night but include Librem 5 Developer Kit support in terms of the DeviceTree bits as well as improving the NVIDIA Jetson Nano support and various other SoC/platform additions...

Sent out on Thursday were the NFS client updates for the Linux 5.3 kernel merge window. This time around are a few interesting changes...

Wayland release manager Simon Ser announced the alpha release of the Weston 7.0 reference compositor on Friday that also marks the feature freeze for this Wayland compositor update...

Intel's Clear Linux crew has launched a twelve-question survey seeking feedback on your Linux usage though the survey slightly caters towards developers. While the survey is being put out by Intel's performance-oriented Linux distribution, users of any Linux platform are encouraged to participate...

Back in May there were the plans shared by Red Hat's Matthias Clasen to work out some improvements to the Pango layout engine library after going fairly stale in recent years. That work is coming to fruition with a Pango 1.44 release looking like it will be here soon with new features...

Zstd 1.4.1 is out today as a maintenance release to Facebook's Zstandard compression algorithm but with this update comes even more performance optimizations...

With last week's big DRM pull request for Linux 5.3 that brought Navi support most notably on the AMD side while Intel received HDR display support, continued Icelake/Gen11 work, and more, there weren't any changes to the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver. It was another unfortunate cycle of no major improvements for the Nouveau driver but at least sent out today were a set of new "fixes" for this driver that remains crippled on Maxwell GPUs and newer...

Wayland's Weston compositor for the past year has provided a remoting plug-in for virtual output streaming that was built atop RTP/GStreamer. Now though a new plug-in has landed in the Weston code-base making use of Red Hat's promising PipeWire project...

Linux input expert Peter Hutterer of Red Hat shipped the much anticipated release candidate today for libinput 1.14, the open-source input handling library used by both X.Org and Wayland systems...

Canonical's server team is working on a new means of carrying out automated installations of Ubuntu Server in time for their 20.04 LTS release...

In-step with more RISC-V hardware becoming available over time, the Linux kernel architecture support for RISC-V has continued maturing and with Linux 5.3 is in better shape...

While the Linux 5.3 kernel merge window isn't even over until this weekend when it will kick off with 5.3-rc1 and headlining new features like Radeon RX 5700 series support, AMD has already sent in a batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD fixes. Making these fixes notable are some early fixes around the new open-source Radeon RX "Navi" support...

Following EXT4 getting initial (and opt-in) support for case-insensitive directories/files, the Flash-Friendly File-System has a set of patches pending that extend the case-folding support to this F2FS file-system that is becoming increasingly used by Android smartphones and other devices...

In addition to Linux 5.3 bringing a VirtIO-IOMMU driver, this next kernel version is bringing another new VirtIO virtual device implementation: PMEM for para-virtualized persistent memory support for the likes of Intel Optane DC persistent memory...

In early May right before the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 we saw the public beta of Oracle Linux 8 while today Oracle Linux 8.0 has been promoted to stable and production ready...

Feature work is over on LLVM 9.0 as the next release for this widely-used compiler stack ranging from the AMDGPU shader compiler back-end to the many CPU targets and other innovative use-cases for this open-source compiler infrastructure...

One of the first PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs to market has been the Corsair Force MP600. AMD included the Corsair MP600 2TB NVMe PCIe4 SSD with their Ryzen 3000 reviewer's kit and for those interested in this speedy solid-state storage here are some benchmarks compared to various other storage devices on Ubuntu Linux.

Looking ahead to Ubuntu 19.10 as the cycle before Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, one of the areas exciting us with the work being done by Canonical is (besides the great upstream GNOME performance work) easily comes down to the work they are pursuing on better ZFS On Linux integration with even aiming to offer ZFS as a file-system option from their desktop installer. A big role in their ZoL play is also the new "Zsys" component they have been developing...

For those making use of the Ceph fault-tolerant storage platform, a number of updated kernel bits are landing in Linux 5.3...

While the Linux 4.4 kernel is quite old (January 2016), DragonFlyBSD has now re-based its AMD Radeon kernel graphics driver against that release. It is at least a big improvement compared to its Radeon code having been derived previously from Linux 3.19...

It's been over one year since the release of Latte Dock 0.8 as this KDE-aligned desktop dock while now the v0.9 release isn't too far away...

At the start of the month we reported on out-of-tree kernel work to support Linux on the newer Macs. Those patches were focused on supporting Apple's NVMe drive behavior by the Linux kernel driver. That work has been evolving nicely and is now under review on the kernel mailing list...

Those running ZFS On Linux (ZoL) on post-5.0 (and pre-5.0 supported LTS releases) have seen big performance hits to the ZFS encryption performance in particular. That came due to upstream breaking an interface used by ZFS On Linux and admittedly not caring about ZoL due to it being an out-of-tree user. But now several kernel releases later, a workaround has been devised...

Three years ago we checked out the CompuLab Airtop as a high-performance fanless PC. Back then it was exciting to passively cool an Intel Core i7 5775C, 16GB of RAM, SATA 3.0 SSD, and a GeForce GTX 950 graphics card. But now in 2019 thanks to the continued design improvements by CompuLab and ever advancing tech, their newly-launched CompuLab 3 can accommodate an eight-core / sixteen-thread Xeon CPU, 64GB of RAM, NVMe SSD storage, and a NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics card without any fans!

For several generations now of Intel graphics there have been the GuC/HuC firmware binaries while beginning with Icelake "Gen 11" graphics those binary blobs will be loaded by default...

Later this month marks two years since the release of OpenGL 4.6 and just ahead of that date it looks like Mesa could finally land its complete GL 4.6 implementation, at least as far as the Intel open-source graphics driver support is concerned...

While it would have been nice seeing this next systemd release sooner due to the Zen 2 + RdRand issue with systemd yielding an unbootable system (that is now also being worked around with a BIOS upgrade), the systemd 243 release looks like it will take place in the near future...

The past few months openSUSE developers have been working on enabling LTO by default for its packages while now finally with the newest release of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed this goal has been accomplished...

OPNsense, the FreeBSD-based pfSense-forked firewall offering that has continued experiencing increased adoption following the closure of m0n0wall, is out with version 19.7 as its newest feature update...

Longtime X.Org developer Alan Coopersmith who also maintains the X.Org stack for Oracle's Solaris has been trying to get out some updated X.Org modules with different code-bases having collected enough changes over the years to warrant new versions...

Coming soon to a kernel near you could be the removal of 32-bit Xen PV guest support as better jiving with Xen's architectural improvements and more of the Linux/open-source community continuing to shift focus to 64-bit x86 with trying to finally sunset 32-bit x86...

While Clear Linux as part of its standard bare metal installations has long defaulted to having an AVX2-optimized GNU C Library installed by default, it turns out that it wasn't part of the default os-core bundle as used by containers. That though is changing and should yield even better out-of-the-box performance when running Clear Linux within containers...

With the VirtIO standard for cross-hypervisor compatibility of different virtualized components there is a virtual IOMMU device that is now backed by a working driver in the Linux 5.3 kernel...

While Mageia 7 released at the start of July for this Mandrake/Mandriva-derived Linux distribution, out today is already Mageia 7.1 as a rush release to fix AMD Zen 2 support...

The Linux Mint crew today released their 19.2 "Tina" beta releases of their Xfce, MATE, and Cinnamon desktop flavors...

With the recent release of Mozilla Firefox 68 there are some nice WebRender performance improvements that Linux users can enjoy. But with Firefox 69 now in beta there is even better performance, including when enabling WebRender on Linux.

Thanks to the upstream work achieved by Red Hat engineers working on Fedora the past few cycles, Ubuntu 19.10 should have a flicker-free boot experience...