Phoronix

KDE has completed its transition to its own self-hosted GitLab instance for Git hosting and other developer services for handling of bug reports and merge requests...

It's been quite an unfortunately wild year thus far with everything going on in the world, but at least within the open-source / Linux scope it's been an exciting time as ever. Here is a look at the top stories on Phoronix during the first half of this year...

Fedora for the past few releases doesn't show the GRUB boot-loader menu by default when only Fedora is installed on the system as there is little purpose for most users and it just interrupts the boot flow. But for those wanting to access the GRUB bootloader menu on reboot, they offer integration in GNOME to easily reboot into this menu. The other exception is the menu will be shown if the previous boot failed. This functionality has relied on downstream patches but now they are working towards a better upstream solution...

Zink is the generic OpenGL over Vulkan driver that has been in development as part of Mesa's Gallium3D code. It was just earlier this month that Zink achieved OpenGL 3.0 support and now it looks like OpenGL 3.1 will soon be flipped on...

Lua 5.4 shipped today as the newest version of the interpreter for this scripting programming language that is particularly popular for embedding within games and other applications...

Recently AMD posted UVD video decode support for GCN 1.0 with the AMDGPU driver, one of the long holdouts for letting the AMDGPU DRM driver approach feature parity with the longstanding Radeon DRM driver that is the default for GCN 1.0/1.1 era GPUs. That AMDGPU UVD GCN 1.0 decode support is going into the Linux 5.9 kernel later this summer after years ago Radeon driver developers largely dismissed the efforts of porting the UVD decode capability for these original GCN graphics cards over to AMDGPU...

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for hosting firmware files to be consumed by Fwupd for firmware updating from Linux is on quite a streak...

Slated for Linux 5.9 is finally mainlining the FSGSBASE patches that have been floating around the kernel mailing list for years. Testing last week showed the tentative x86/fsgsbase patches helping Intel Xeon Linux performance but with AMD also supporting this instruction set extension going back to Bulldozer, how is it looking on the likes of AMD? Here are some benchmarks.

Over the weekend I began running some benchmarks of the Linux 5.8 development kernel on the Lenovo Flex 5 laptop with Ryzen 5 4500U. One of the standouts so far for from this Linux 5.8 testing compared to the stable 5.6/5.7 kernel series is better Radeon graphics performance with the Renoir laptop...

Following the announcement last week that future Apple computers will use in-house ARM-powered chips, some open-source projects have already begun prepping for the future ARM64-supported macOS 11...

Linux 5.6 brought initial USB4 support that primarily was starting things off by basing things off the existing Thunderbolt 3 support in the kernel for which this latest USB standard is based. For the Linux 5.9 kernel later this summer it's looking like there will be further work on getting Linux's USB4 support into good shape ahead of hardware appearing in the months ahead...

On top of an optimization to lower render times and reduce power usage and fixing window culling as another performance optimization, Canonical's Daniel van Vugt also came across another serious optimization for GNOME Shell's icon grid performance...

Linus Torvalds just pushed out Linux 5.8-rc3 as the newest weekly test candidate for the upcoming Linux 5.8 that should debut as stable around early August...

While Ubuntu continues in their path of OpenZFS integration, Fedora is revisiting the possibility of using Btrfs on the desktop, Red Hat is continuing to invest in Stratis, and Reiser5 is being developed, Bcachefs as the file-system born out of the Linux block cache code is continuing to evolve...

While we are most excited about Godot 4.0 for its Vulkan renderer for this leading open-source game engine, there continues to be a lot of other improvements building up for this major release...

Intel's open-source media team has released a new development snapshot of their media driver that provides GPU-accelerated video encode/decode capabilities on Linux...

The open-source Haiku operating system that continues maintaining compatibility with BeOS and inspiration from its design has continued in its quest of better supporting modern hardware...

The Linux kernel is seeing some modern work done to its driver for supporting the Apple Desktop Bus on Macintosh II era systems...

It took until 2020 for an Intel developer to land a patch providing support for two instructions supported by AMD "Excavator" CPUs but not exposed by the "bdver4" target...

Following Linux's UEFI code getting cleaned up earlier this year in preparation for RISC-V support being added and then some early RISC-V UEFI patches, a more comprehensive set of patches for enabling UEFI support on RISC-V under Linux have been sent out...