Phoronix

Following new Intel Ice Lake CPU microcode being published on Friday without any change-log and not updating prior Intel CPU family microcodes, I've begun looking at the performance as this first Intel CPU microcode update for Linux users since November. From my initial weekend testing there does seem to be some small but measurable and consistent performance impairments for Ice Lake from this microcode upgrade.

Linus Torvalds did his usual Sunday release dance and shipped Linux 5.7-rc5 as the latest kernel test release...

While our benchmarks of Clang 10.0 have generally been favorable or at least no big regressions compared to LLVM/Clang 9.0, it seems the same can't be said for Rust when shifting their compiler base to LLVM 10.0...

EndeavourOS 2020.05.08 has been released as the latest monthly install media for this Arch-based Linux distribution born out of the ashes of the former Antergos Linux...

The FSGSBASE patches for the Linux kernel have been sent out for their 11th time over the past few years to make use of this CPU instruction supported going back to Ivy Bridge hardware...

Intel on Friday quietly released new Intel CPU microcode files for Linux...

Patches are pending that can sharply speed-up mount times of large EXT4 file-systems...

While Radeon graphics cards can work with various external GPU (eGPU) solutions, currently on Linux if trying to hot unplug such a setup can lead to various problems. An experimental patch series out this weekend is seeking to address that problem...

A Phoronix Premium reader recently asked about whether Pop!_OS 20.04 performance differs from Ubuntu 20.04 given some underlying changes made by System76 to their distribution, besides the plethora of higher-level desktop improvements. Well, here are some benchmarks.

You may recall towards the end of last year when the Pango layout engine library dropped support for bitmap fonts, causing frustrations among some users. There now appears to be another Linux font debacle brewing...

Debian 10.4 is out this weekend as their fourth stable update to Debian Buster...

Last week Intel open-source developers sent out their initial kernel driver patches for Rocket Lake graphics support and now the Rocket Lake platform support has been merged for Mesa 20.2 on the OpenGL/Vulkan driver side...

Ubuntu Studio, the spin of Ubuntu focused on multimedia production, announced last month that for their 20.10 release due out later this year they would be transitioning from their long-standing Xfce desktop environment over to using KDE Plasma. While still in early form, the transition is going ahead quite well...

Wine 5.8 was released on Friday with a GIF encoder, more WIneD3D Vulkan progress, and other changes while out today is Wine-Staging 5.8 for this experimental blend...

It's been another busy week for KDE developers even with everything happening globally around the coronavirus there are a lot of open-source desktop innovations continuing...

The FreeType library that is used by many open-source projects for font rendering and other font operations, is out with their first release of the year...

Last month Crucial introduced their P2 NVMe SSD series as their new low-cost successor to their prior P1 series. The Crucial P2 500GB NVMe solid-state drive retails for $60~65 USD which offers good value and yields better performance than their prior low-cost P1 SSDs.

Wine 5.8 has been uncorked for the weekend as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows programs and games on Linux and other platforms...

Xrdesktop, the Valve-funded Linux desktop support for VR headsets and making the likes of GNOME and KDE window managers VR-aware, is out with a new release...

Last month we reported on LibreOffice now preferring its new rendering code be built with LLVM Clang over alternative compilers. When falling back to CPU-based software rasterization, the Clang-generated code performs much better than alternative compilers given Google's own emphasis with Skia on being Clang-focused. LibreOffice 7.0 is now beginning a hard requirement on Clang when building for Windows...