Phoronix

Facebook Opens Up CacheLib As Their New Caching Engine

Wed, 09/08/2021 - 18:22

Facebook last week formally announced CacheLib as their new open-source caching engine designed for web scale services and to make for effective non-volatile memory caching to offset the increasing costs of DRAM...

Intel Working On DP 2.0 Panel Replay Power Savings For Linux

Wed, 09/08/2021 - 17:57

Last month Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers began posting patches working on DisplayPort 2.0 support for their driver with DG2/Alchemist now set to be Intel's first GPU supporting the newest DP standard. DP 2.0 enablement work continues with Panel Replay being the latest feature being worked on for their Linux driver...

Linux 5.15 Hit By Some Early Performance Regressions But Quickly Reverted

Wed, 09/08/2021 - 17:37

In addition to Linus Torvalds dealing with the -Werror fallout, separately in kernel land there were also some significant performance regressions introduced during the Linux 5.15 that led to Linus reverting some of the changes...

Linux 5.15's New "-Werror" Behavior Is Causing A Lot Of Pain

Wed, 09/08/2021 - 08:48

Landing this past weekend was the surprise move by Linus Torvalds to enable "-Werror" behavior by default for all kernel builds. That compiler flag addition makes all warnings be treated as errors, which in turn stops the kernel build. As expected, this change has led to quite a mess...

GhostBSD 21.09.06 Released For This FreeBSD-Based Desktop OS

Wed, 09/08/2021 - 06:07

GhostBSD 21.09.06 is now available as the latest release of this desktop-minded, FreeBSD-based operating system...

Linux 5.15 KVM Defaults To The New x86 TDP MMU, Enables AMD SVM 5-Level Paging

Wed, 09/08/2021 - 02:43

The Linux 5.15 Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes this cycle are quite exciting on the x86 (x86_64) front with several prominent additions...

The Khronos Group Is Hosting A Virtual Vulkan Event Next Month

Wed, 09/08/2021 - 01:23

While The Khronos Group previously hosted in-person Vulkan events, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic their "Vulkanised 2021" event next month has morphed into a free virtual event...

AMD Ryzen 5 5600G / Ryzen 7 5700G Linux Gaming Benchmarks

Tue, 09/07/2021 - 21:20

Recently with my Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 5600G and Ryzen 7 5700G Zen 3 APUs with Radeon Vega graphics I touched on the GPU graphics/compute performance in some of the basic benchmarks while in this article are a number of Steam Play and native Linux gaming benchmarks for looking at the potential for these latest-generation desktop APUs for Linux gaming.

OpenSSL 3.0 Officially Released

Tue, 09/07/2021 - 21:08

After many development snapshots and three years worth of work, OpenSSL 3.0 is now available as a major update to this widely-used SSL library...

X.Org DMX Dropped After More Than A Decade Of Crashes

Tue, 09/07/2021 - 19:53

The X.Org Distributed Multihead X (DMX) DDX driver has been dropped from the X.Org Server source tree due to its rather broken state for more than one decade...

FUSE With Linux 5.15 Now Allows Mounting An Active FUSE Device

Tue, 09/07/2021 - 19:44

While Linus Torvalds isn't much of a fan of FUSE / user-space file-systems, the FUSE code within the kernel does continue making improvements...

Vulkan 1.2.191 Released With New Extension To Make Wiser Memory Decisions

Tue, 09/07/2021 - 17:56

Vulkan 1.2.191 is out this morning as the latest update to this graphics/compute API. As usual is a variety of bug fixes / clarifications to the specification while this time around is also one new extension...

Finer Grained KASLR Patches Revived For The Linux Kernel To Enhance Security

Tue, 09/07/2021 - 15:00

For more than a year there has been work on FGKASLR for finer grained kernel address space layout randomization. While KASLR is widely-used these days, with enough guessing or unintentional kernel leakage, the base address of the kernel can be figured out. Finer grained KASLR allows for randomization at the per-functional level to dramatically boost defenses. The latest take on FG-KASLR has now been published...

Linux 5.15 Adds New Syscall To More Quickly Free Memory Of Dying Processes

Tue, 09/07/2021 - 07:23

To help out memory pressure / out-of-memory killing solutions like systemd-oomd or Android's LMKD, Linux 5.15 is introducing the "process_mrelease" system call to more quickly free the memory of dying processes...

Linux 5.15 Further Tunes Its RISC-V Support

Tue, 09/07/2021 - 03:13

The RISC-V architecture updates have landed in the Linux 5.15 kernel with more software features now being supported...

Notcurses 2.4 Released - Now Works On Windows & macOS For Terminal "Bling"

Tue, 09/07/2021 - 01:39

Notcurses as an open-source library designed for complex and "blingful" text user interfaces and character graphics, now works not only on Linux but also Windows and macOS. Notcurses makes it easy for CLI-based programs to support a wide range of colors, multimedia, Unicode, and other features not normally associated with command-line applications...