Phoronix

It was another busy week in KDE space with a lot of bug fixing and last minute work around KDE Plasma 5.16. In case you missed it, this week Plasma 5.16 reached beta...

Chengdu Haiguang IC Design Co with its Hygon Dhyana processor that is based on AMD Zen IP appears to be pursuing Coreboot support...

The past few days I've begun exploring the performance implications of the new Microarchitectural Data Sampling "MDS" vulnerabilities now known more commonly as Zombieload. As I shared in some initial results, there is a real performance hit to these mitigations. In this article are more MDS/Zombieload mitigation benchmarks on multiple systems as well as comparing the overall performance impact of the Meltdown/Spectre/Foreshadow/Zombieload mitigations on various Intel CPUs and also AMD CPUs where relevant.

We've had a number of articles covering the interesting news out of Intel's 2019 Open-Source Technology Summit (OSTS) held at Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, Washington. Here's a look back at the news out of the open-source event as well as some other smaller bits of information shared during the event...

Work by NVIDIA to provide separate per-client vendor mappings for GLXVND were merged to X.Org Server 1.21 Git as another step towards improving the PRIME GPU offloading support when multiple GPU drivers are at play...

Xfce's Xfdesktop 4.13.4 was released on Friday as the newest stepping stone on the long and winding journey towards Xfce 4.14...

With the Linux 5.2 kernel an AMD-supplied change by AMDGPU developer Christian König allows for supporting peer-to-peer DMA between any devices on AMD Zen systems...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes were sent out on Friday of the new feature updates for the Linux 5.2 kernel that is nearing the end of its merge window...

Of Intel's keynote announcements this week kicking off their first public Open-Source Technology Summit, surprisingly not attracting too much attention this week was news of their ModernFW initiative to create a new modular and open-source firmware solution to replace aging legacy code on motherboards...

Yesterday I published some initial MDS/Zombieload mitigation impact benchmarks while coming out still later today is much more data looking at the CPU/system performance impact... But is the gaming performance impaired by this latest set of CPU side-channel vulnerabilities?..

Developers at Mozilla, Facebook, Cloudflare, and elsewhere have been drafting "BinaryAST" as a new over-the-wire format for JavaScript...

While upstream SSH has disabled password logins for the root user as their default configuration the past number of years and that has carried over into being the out-of-the-box behavior for many operating systems, Fedora continues allowing password-based SSH root log-ins by default. But with the next Fedora release they are thinking about changing that default behavior...

The GCC 10 code compiler merged support to begin emulating MMX intrinsics using SSE...

Olof Johansson sent in the SoC updates on Thursday for the Linux 5.2 kernel merge window that is nearing the end. There is new SoC support for this new kernel and a number of new boards also being supported...

Veteran Linux multimedia developer Paul Kocialkowski summed up the current situation this week of many hardware platforms having a general purpose micro-controller running a non-free firmware blob for coordinating the video decoding work. It makes it easier to program with this firmware-based approach but makes the driver less free and now with recent Linux infrastructure improvements could better support dealing with the video hardware itself...

Following last week's big feature update to the DRM graphics drivers, an initial batch of "fixes" has now been merged to the early Linux 5.2 development code for these Direct Rendering Manager drivers...

In addition to DragonFlyBSD seeing MDS "Zombie Load" mitigations this week, the DragonFlyBSD kernel now has better Spectre Variant Two coverage with making use of the GCC compiler support...

While Intel's open-source Linux support is largely stellar and was a big focus of this week's Open-Source Technology Summit in Washington, their FreeBSD support isn't nearly as polished but over the past roughly year and a half they've been establishing a FreeBSD team and working towards feature parity and supporting critical functionality for their customers...

The Free Software Foundation has certified a new batch of hardware for being libre and meeting their "Respect Your Freedom" requirements. This newly-approved hardware for free software enthusiasts includes certifying an USB-to-parallel printer cable in 2019...

The KDE community today rolled out the beta of the Plasma 5.16 desktop upgrade and it's huge...

The default Linux mitigations for the new Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) vulnerabilities (also known as "Zombieload") do incur measurable performance cost out-of-the-box in various workloads. That's even with the default behavior where SMT / Hyper Threading remains on while it becomes increasingly apparent if wanting to fully protect your system HT must be off...

Of Intel's many open-source projects, taking a central role at this year's Intel Open-Source Technology Summit was Clear Linux. Most Intel open-source efforts mentioned during the event point back to Clear Linux in some capacity and at OSTS2019 we finally heard some of the companies that are beginning to make use of Clear Linux...

A few days back I posted a number of Intel OpenCL benchmarks between their former Beignet and new "NEO" Linux compute stacks that was done using a Skylake NUC for the Iris Pro 580 graphics. For those wondering how these two open-source Intel OpenCL implementations compare for the more common UHD Graphics 630, here are some benchmarks using an Intel Core i9 8700K "Coffeelake" processor...

Complementing the recent comparison of Radeon RX 560/570/580 vs. GeForce GTX 1060/1650/1660 Linux Gaming Performance benchmarks, in this article are 102 Linux graphics tests (mostly games) looking more closely at the performance of the sub-$150 GeForce GTX 1650 and Radeon RX 570 graphics cards...

While it's just the DeviceTree additions needed to the kernel for enabling the Librem 5 Developer Kit to boot with the mainline kernel, the DT files are up to their twelfth patch revision...

After a successful Kickstarter campaign and honoring those obligations, the Atomic Pi recently hit retail channels (albeit sold out currently) as a $35 Intel Atom powered single board computer to compete with the likes of the Raspberry Pi...

Con Kolivas has posted his latest patches that re-base his MuQSS scheduler to the new Linux 5.1 kernel...

For those interested in compiler optimization/tuning with AMD Ryzen Threadripper hardware, here are some follow-up benchmarks to Tuesday's GCC 9 vs. Clang 8 C/C++ Compiler Performance On AMD Threadripper, Intel Core i9...

For those with reasons sticking to formal Wine stable releases as opposed to the feature-progressing Wine bi-weekly snapshots, Wine 4.0.1 is now the latest and greatest...

Valve issued a new Steam beta release that contains a lot of changes across the board, including Linux...

The lengthy battle of converting the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to using a Git workflow from SVN might be getting closer to finally culminating... Linaro developer Maxim Kuvyrkov has jumped on the task of converting the GCC repository from SVN to Git and did so without much fuss...

The latest in our benchmarking with the new GeForce GTX 1650 is some "fun" tests seeing how its performance compares to that of the GeForce GTX 650 Kepler. Various OpenGL and Vulkan Linux gaming tests were carried out as well as some compute tests and throughout monitoring the AC power consumption to yield the performance-per-Watt metrics.

When Spectre and Meltdown came to light, there was some frustrations in the BSD community that it took time for them to be briefed and ultimately handling the mitigations for these CPU security vulnerabilities. Fortunately, with the new Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS, also dubbed "Zombieload") vulnerabilities, the key BSDs have seen punctual patches...

Right now the low-end Allwinner ARM SBC boards featuring a SATA port have been running at a measly 36~45MB/s but with changing around a single line of kernel code, that can jump to 120MB/s...

For those wondering how Intel's new Gallium3D-based OpenGL driver is performing relative to various NVIDIA and AMD discrete graphics cards, here are some quick tests of older/lower-end parts...

While formally the X.Org Server aimed to put out a new feature update every six months, in recent years they have been well off that trajectory with not much feature activity going on especially now that GLAMOR / XWayland / xf86-video-modesetting have stabilized and many Linux distributions eyeing Wayland by default. But there is now at least some little bit of interest in what's going into X.Org Server 1.21...

While no flashy features like EXT4's case-insensitive option with Linux 5.2, the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) did see a good amount of fixes and other improvements for this new kernel round...

Red Hat is hiring for their open-source graphics driver team...

Intel is running their once internal-only Open-Source Technology Summit (OSTS) in Washington this week but for a first time they have begun inviting customers and industry stakeholders and others to this annual open-source shindig. We're out here for the very interesting event with Imad Sousou and Raja Koduri talking today and some highly interesting technical talks ahead tomorrow. Here is the initial slew of announcements...

Valve has just released Proton 4.2-4 as their newest downstream of Wine that is used by Steam Play for running Steam Windows games on Linux...

Following today's disclosure of the new MDS vulnerabilities affecting Intel CPUs, a slew of new Linux kernel stable releases have been issued...

We are coming up on the Mesa 19.1 quarterly feature release hopefully by the end of the month while out today is the second release candidate for evaluating this next big update to these OpenGL and Vulkan driver implementations...

Intel just disclosed a new speculative execution side-channel vulnerability in its processors similar to the existing Spectre/L1TF vulnerabilities. This new disclosure is called the Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS)...

NVIDIA released the 430.14 Linux driver today as their first non-beta driver build in this 430 branch...

Longtime Red Hat developer Hans de Goede who has been responsible for many Linux desktop improvements over the years from laptop support fixes to open-source GPU driver fixes to most recently flicker-free boot has a new area of hacking: taking care of the pain points under Wayland...

Merged today to the mainline Clang compiler front-end is the initial C2x language mode support as what will eventually be the successor to the C18 programming language...

Since the release of the GCC 9 stable compiler suite earlier this month we have begun firing up a number of compiler benchmarks for this annual feature update to the GNU Compiler Collection. For your viewing pleasure today is looking at the performance of GCC 8 against GCC 9 compared to LLVM Clang 8 as the latest release of this friendly open-source compiler competition. This GCC 8 vs. GCC 9 vs. Clang 8 C/C++ compiler benchmarking was done on an Intel Core i9 7980XE and AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX high-end desktop/workstation systems.

Intel "Comet Lake" CPUs look like they will be well supported when running on the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel or later...

If you make use of BCache as a Linux block cache so that an SSD cache for a slower HDD, watch out as there is an active corruption bug...

Could 2019 be the year that SYCL really takes off for this single-source C++-based programming model? There's certainly a lot of interesting projects going on around SYCL...