Phoronix

As what was formerly FreeNAS, the first beta of TrueNAS CORE 12.0 is available for testing of this BSD-based operating system for NAS devices and other storage setups...

Back in March I benchmarked the Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG) as a means of achieving additional security safeguards for a ~5% performance hit. With LKRG 0.8 having been released a few days ago, here is a fresh look at the LKRG performance compared to the stock kernel on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

There is finally a new release out of The Dark Mod, the original total conversion mod for Doom 3 that transformed into its own standalone game powered by the open-source id Tech 4 engine. This remains the lone flagship example of the open-source id Tech 4 game engine in action by the community (besides the DHEWM3 / RBDOOM-3-BFG engine work) with ioDoom3 having never taken off like ioquake3...

Last month you may recall that the free software purists maintaining the GNU Linux-Libre kernel dropped the Intel "iGPU Leak" security fix for Ivybridge / Haswell as they considered the compiled shaders/kernels responsible for clearing those residual contexts to be binary blobs. A resolution is now pending for upstream...

With it already having been a few months since systemd 245 debuted with systemd-homed, the systemd developers have begun their release dance for what will be systemd 246...

While RDNA/Navi brought Wave32 support, the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for Linux has decided to switch to make greater use now of Wave64 for more shaders...

Following recent talk of Fedora potentially switching to Btrfs and Red Hat's Storage Instatiation Daemon among other Linux storage areas pursued by Red Hat, it turns out "Project Springfield" is some effort being pursued by the enterprise Linux giant for improving in this area...

Aside from the H1'2020 open-source/Linux highlights, here is our look at the top stories for June 2020 on Phoronix with many interesting software and hardware topics...

AOMP 11.6-2 is out this evening as the final Radeon Open Compute update for H1'2020. This is AMD's LLVM Clang downstream focused on providing OpenMP offloading to Radeon GPUs...

Intel has introduced a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver for Linux...

As one of the last minute change proposals for Fedora 33 is to introduce the Red Hat backed Storage Instantiation Daemon "SID" though at least for this first release would be off by default. The Storage Instantiation Daemon is one of the latest storage efforts being worked on by Red Hat engineers...

The Crust CRM suite that aims to compete with Salesforce has been open-source under an Apache 2.0 license but now its paywall has been dropped to make it more compelling as a free software CRM suite...

Fedora stakeholders are debating the merits of potentially ending legacy BIOS support for the Linux distribution and to only support UEFI-based installations...

One of the security improvements being worked on in recent months by Intel's open-source team has been FGKASLR. But how is the performance overhead compared to just traditional KASLR? Here are benchmarks looking at the performance impact of FGKASLR on top, just KASLR, and then no address space layout randomization.

The Khronos Group has announced the provisional specification of SYCL 2020 as the newest version of this higher-level programming model originally designed for OpenCL that is based on pure single-source C++...

Firefox 78.0 is available this morning as the newest version of Mozilla's web browser. Firefox 78.0 is also significant in being the newest Extended Support Release (ESR) series...

The AMD Radeon Vulkan driver developers are ending out June by shipping their sixth open-source snapshot of the quarter...

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...