Phoronix

The "Data Streaming Accelerator" (DSA) is a new block on future Intel CPUs that hasn't been talked about much publicly... Until now. Intel's open-source crew has begun detailing DSA for future Intel CPUs that will offer high-performance data movement and transformation operations. The Linux driver enablement has begun...

Mesa 19.2.5 is out today as the latest bi-weekly stable update to the current Mesa 19.2 series...

With Linux 5.4 due to be released this coming Sunday, 24 November, one of the big "winners" of this next kernel are AMD Radeon customers. Linux 5.4 brings support for new GPUs as well as better performance for existing graphics cards. Here are some fresh benchmarks of the performance wins as a result of the LRU bulk moves functionality.

Last week ago we provided a number of benchmarks looking at the performance impact from Intel's Jump Conditional Code (JCC) Erratum that required a CPU microcode update to mitigate but that comes with a performance hit. At least Intel has pending GNU Assembler patches to help offset that performance hit. In time for last week's articles I didn't have a chance to perform Skylake Xeon Scalable (1st Gen) benchmarks but now here are some metrics alongside Cascade Lake...

NVIDIA has released CUDA 10.2 for SuperComputing 19 week. CUDA 10.2 comes with some interesting changes, including to be the last release that will support Apple's macOS and the introduction of a standard C++ library for GPUs...

Intel's SVT-AV1 video encoder for AV1 is currently the fastest AV1 CPU-based encoder we have seen but it's looking like in due time Rav1e could be closing in on it if they continue with their current trajectory...

The latest enterprise push by Ubuntu maker Canonical is Charmed OSM as their own commercial flavor of Open-Source MANO...

The Intel "Gen11" Iris Plus Graphics on Ice Lake are a big upgrade over earlier Intel graphics generations but the gains are even more enticing if making use of their new Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver...

The long overdue X.Org Server 1.21 still hasn't been organized for release but at least the extra time is allowing more XWayland bits to land...

While there is no sign of Solaris 11.5 or Solaris.Next (last year was a road-map pointing to Solaris 11.Next in H2'19 or H1'20 that has since been removed), Oracle does continue putting out more updates to the Solaris 11.4 series...

It's been three weeks already since the last DXVK update but that was succeeded this evening by DXVK 1.4.5 as another notable update to this project mapping Direct3D 10/11 onto Vulkan for speeding up the Wine/Proton-based Windows gaming experience on Linux...

With the many Intel Ice Lake Linux benchmarks we began publishing over the past month since picking up a Dell XPS with Core i7-1065G7, there have been many benchmarks compared to the likes of the Core i7 Whiskey Lake and Kaby Lake processors. For those curious how the performance stacks up going further back, here are some Ubuntu 19.10 laptop benchmarks putting it up against the likes of Core i7 Haswell and Broadwell processors.

A few days ago Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman laid out the proposals for the upcoming Debian General Resolution vote concerning "init system diversity" and just how much Debian developers still care in 2019 about supporting non-systemd init systems within the Linux distribution...

The open-source vkBasalt project was started as a layer implementing Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (akin to Radeon Image Sharpening) for any Vulkan-using GPU/driver/software. The vkBasalt project then picked up FXAA support for this Vulkan post-processing layer while now a new release is out with more functionality added...

Coreboot 4.11 was released today as the tagged autumn build of Coreboot that is used as an alternative to proprietary BIOS/firmware on motherboards...

Mainlining of the WireGuard secure VPN tunnel was being held up by its use of the new "Zinc" crypto API developed in conjunction with this network tech. But with obstacles in getting Zinc merged, WireGuard was going to be resorting to targeting the existing kernel crypto interfaces. Instead, however, it turns out the upstream Linux crypto developers were interested and willing to incorporate some elements of Zinc into the existing kernel crypto implementation...

Flax Engine is the latest game engine seeing native Linux support and in the process the renderer also picked up Vulkan support...

While the patches overnight about "substantial" improvement in power usage for Intel graphics on Linux were exciting on first look, it's less so now as it turns out last week's graphics driver security fixes is what regressed the Intel graphics power-savings...

In addition to AMD's SC19 announcements yesterday, their embargo just lifted on the Radeon Pro W5700 as their first 7nm workstation graphics card build on their new RDNA architecture...

Announced earlier this month, the Athlon 3000G is shipping today a week ahead of the Ryzen Threadripper 3000 series. The Athlon 3000G is AMD's new sub-$50 processor for lightweight desktop purposes...