AMDVLK 2019.Q4.3 Released With New Extensions + Navi 14 Support
AMD's Vulkan driver team has today volleyed their third open-source "AMDVLK" code drop of the quarter. This AMDVLK 2019.Q4.3 driver comes with new extensions as well as Navi 14 enablement...
WireGuard Could Be Mainlined Before Christmas
It's been a wild past few weeks for WireGuard as the secure VPN tunnel destined for the mainline Linux kernel and also supported on all other major platforms. It turns out WireGuard could quite well end up in the Linux 5.5 kernel rather than having to wait until Linux 5.6...
300+ Benchmarks With AMD Threadripper 3960X vs. Intel Core i9 10980XE
Complementing our launch-day Intel Core i9 10980XE and AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X Linux benchmarks, here is much more data now that we've had the additional time for carrying out more tests... For your viewing pleasure this US holiday week are more than 330 benchmarks carried out on both the Core i9 10980XE and Threadripper 3960X in the same configuration while running Ubuntu Linux.
CentOS Working To Increase Transparency, Revamp Branding
Recently the CentOS Board met for the first time since the recent CentOS 8.0 and CentOS Stream releases. It was an interesting outcome...
Linux 5.4-ck1 Kernel Released With MuQSS Patched In
While the release of Linux 5.3-ck1 with MuQSS was quite tardy and only arrived a few weeks ago, Con Kolivas has returned to his punctuality in releasing Linux 5.4-ck1 with the updated MuQSS scheduler intended to improve the responsiveness of desktop/mobile class Linux systems...
Wayland's Weston 8.0 Bringing Direct-Display Extension, HDCP On DRM Back-End + More
Simon Ser has stepped up again to manage the upcoming release of the Weston 8.0 Wayland reference compositor. No Wayland update itself is planned with nothing real to release at this point, but Weston 8.0 should arrive before the end of January...
Many RISC-V Improvements Ready For Linux 5.5: M-Mode, SECCOMP, Other Features
The RISC-V kernel code has some interesting changes ready for Linux 5.5...
Newer Loongson 3A Variant Being Supported By Linux 5.5 Along With The SGI Octane
As covered earlier this month, the next version of the Linux kernel is finally offering mainline support for SGI's Octane / Octane II MIPS workstations from the SGI IRIX days about two decades ago. Not only is the vintage SGI IP30 hardware seeing mainline kernel support, but there is other new MIPS hardware support too...
X.Org's Modesetting Driver Gets Smarter - Queries Mesa For Which GL Driver To Use
The X.Org Server and its integrated "modesetting" DDX driver that is most commonly used on modern Linux systems in place of hardware-specific DDX drivers is finally getting more robust with xorg-server 1.21... It will no longer rely upon the server's PCI ID driver mapping for figuring out the DRI driver to load as needed for GLAMOR 2D acceleration over OpenGL...
Lutris 0.5.4 Released For This Linux Game Management Tool
Just under three months past Lutris 0.5.3 as this open-source game manager/platform tool particularly for Wine-based gaming outside of Steam, Lutris 0.5.4 is now available in getting Linux gamers ready for any extra holiday-time gaming...
Radeon ROCm 2.10 Released With SUSE 15 SP1 Support, rocBLAS For Complex GEMM
While AMD annouced ROCm 3.0 earlier this month at SuperComputing 19 as the next major iteration to Radeon Open Compute, it looks like they aren't quite ready to ship it and instead released ROCm 2.10...
Linux 5.2+ Hit By AVX Register Corruption Bug - Affecting At Least Golang Programs
The Linux 5.2 kernel and newer appears to be suffering from an AVX register corruption bug stemming from signal delivery. This register corruption issue is manifesting itself at least for Golang programs leading to a variety of bug reports when running on Linux 5.2 through at least the newly-minted Linux 5.4...
Motorola m68k Support Improved Upon In GCC - Saved From Being Removed In GCC 11
While the Motorola 68000 32-bit processors are from the 80's and early 90's, there still is a loyal following of hobbyists who managed to save the "m68k" compiler back-end from being removed in GCC 11...
Linux 5.5 Adding Wake-On-Voice Support - Capable On Some Chromebook Hardware
As part of the sound subsystem updates coming with the Linux 5.5 kernel is wake-on-voice capabilities with newer Google Chromebook device hardware...
Linux 5.5 To Enable Intel's 5-Level Paging Support By Default
For several release cycles already the Linux kernel has supported Intel's 5-level paging for increasing the virtual and physical address space available to systems while for Linux 5.5 the five-level support is being enabled by default...
Fedora 32 Might Disallow Empty Passwords For Local Users By Default
Currently Fedora Linux supports empty passwords for local users by default but that could change with next year's Fedora 32 release...
AMD's TEE Driver For Loading "Trusted Applications" On Their Secure Processor Under Linux
A few weeks back AMD published a TEE "Trusted Execution Environment" driver for APUs on Linux for utilizing the controversial AMD Secure Processor...
FreeBSD Foundation Buying Newer Laptops To Help Improve Hardware Support
The FreeBSD Q3-2019 quarterly report is now available. One of the interesting bits from this report is the FreeBSD Foundation planning to buy one or more families of new laptops to supply to their core developers in working to improve the modern hardware support...
Blender 2.81 Benchmarks On 19 NVIDIA Graphics Cards - RTX OptiX Rendering Performance Is Incredible
Last week marked the release of Blender 2.81 with one of the shiny new features being the OptiX back-end for the Cycles engine to provide hardware-accelerated ray-tracing with NVIDIA RTX graphics processors. Long story short, OptiX is much faster for Blender than using NVIDIA's CUDA back-end -- which already was much faster than the OpenCL support within Blender. For your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of 19 different graphics cards looking at the CUDA performance from Maxwell to Pascal to Turing and then for the RTX graphics cards also the OptiX performance.
Linux 5.5's Scheduler Sees A Load Balancing Rework For Better Perf But Risks Regressions
Ingo Molnar sent in the kernel's scheduler changes along with the other material he is overseeing for Linux 5.5. With this next version of the Linux kernel comes a rework to the Completely Fair Scheduler's load balancing logic. This is helping some workloads at least but with the intrusive change runs the risk of possible regressions...