Phoronix

One month ago today we were talking about the AMD Ryzen 3000 series processor and new Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards, all manufactured on TSMC's 7nm process. Today, for 7th August, the embargo has now lifted and we are talking about something arguably more exciting, or at least the ability to more profoundly impact an industry (data centers): AMD's EPYC 7002 series is ready and their line-up and ultimately the resulting performance is the most exciting and competitive we have seen ever out of AMD in the server space.

Today is a wild one for open-source/Linux users. Let's begin with the unexpected news: NVIDIA is releasing more GPU hardware documentation at long last! Yes, freely-available hardware interface documentation to assist in the development of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver (Nouveau)...

Yesterday the SWAPGS vulnerability was made public as a new variant of Spectre V1 that affects all operating systems and is believed to affect only Intel CPUs. The SWAPGS discovery by Bitdefender was quietly mitigated by Microsoft for Windows 10 last month while yesterday the patches were posted for the mainline Linux kernel as the Grand Schemozzle. As soon as learning of this SWAPGS vulnerability and seeing the kernel code, I began running some preliminary performance tests to look at the impact of this latest CPU mitigation.

Longtime KDE/Qt developer Lars Knoll (and current CTO of The Qt Company) has shared his technical vision for the upcoming Qt 6 tool-kit...

We've known for months about Canonical working to ramp up their ZFS On Linux support for Ubuntu 19.10 after initially packaging ZoL for Ubuntu years ago and supporting it in the server space. One of the big changes for Ubuntu 19.10 expected is an experimental ZFS root file-system install option for their desktop GUI installer. That's been confirmed today by Canonical along with some of their related ZoL activities...

The Khronos Group has released the OpenCL 2.2-11 specification to address various issues with the existing OpenCL specification while the next major release as "OpenCL-Next" is likely still a number of months away...

AMD sent in their initial pull request of feature changes to their AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager graphics driver to begin queuing in DRM-Next for September's kick off the Linux 5.4 kernel cycle. Notable to this batch of AMDGPU DRM-Next work is a lot of new unreleased GPU support...

Another set of patches was merged on Tuesday for the upcoming Mesa 19.2 to further along its Radeon "Navi" support within the RADV Vulkan driver...

NetworkManager 1.20 is now available as the newest feature update for this widely used configuration component for the Linux networking stack...

Landing on Tuesday ahead of this week's Mesa 19.2 feature freeze is an experimental NIR compiler for the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver that provides open-source OpenGL driver support for Vivante graphics IP...

CVE-2019-1125 was made public today or also referred to as the "SWAPGS" vulnerability as a new variant of Spectre V1 affecting Windows and Linux with Intel (and according to mixed information, AMD - though the current Linux kernel patches at least seem to only apply to Intel) x86_64 processors...

It's been a gripe for many running Linux on low RAM systems especially is that when the Linux desktop is under memory pressure the performance can be quite brutal with the system barely being responsive. The discussion over that behavior has been reignited this week...

For those making use of RHEL7 and not planning to shift to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 anytime soon, RHEL 7.7 is now officially available...

Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver as their new OpenGL Linux driver aiming to be the default Mesa driver by year's end continues seeing more performance optimizations now that the fundamentals are in place. The latest optimization is a one line tweak yielding around one percent higher performance across the board...

Version 5.4 of KDE's KDevelop integrated development environment is now available...

There hasn't been a new FFmpeg release since last November but that finally changed with FFmpeg 4.2 "Ada" being issued today as the newest major release for this multimedia open-source project...

The GNOME 3.34 beta (v3.33.90) release is now available one day early and also marks the point at which the feature freeze is in effect along with the user-interface changes and no API/ABI breakage...

Intel decided today to reveal a few new details about their Xeon "Cooper Lake" processors due out in H1'2020...

An interesting summer internship at Google has led to an experimental effort to get Microsoft Windows running via Kexec from Linux. The engineers involved have been implementing enough of the EFI Boot Services to be able to kexec Windows from Linux...

Last week AMD published their RDNA instruction set architecture documentation. That's a bit heavy reading unless you are a driver developer or low-level engine developer, but for those wanting a bit of a higher-level look at AMD's new RDNA graphics architecture, today they uploaded a new slide deck...