Phoronix

August was an interesting month in terms of Linux/open-source activity though still another tough month during the coronavirus pandemic...

Going back to earlier this year has been work on an "adaptive" mode for P-State to improve GPU bound efficiency when the CPU is forced to share a power/thermal budget with other components like onboard graphics. That work is still advancing and an update was provided on it last week...

At the beginning of August we reported on Google engineers proposing the Machine Function Splitter to LLVM as a means of making binaries up to a few percent faster thanks to this code generation optimization pass for splitting code functions into hot and cold portions. That work has now been merged into LLVM 12.0 with very promising results...

As noted this weekend, Lenovo has begun offering Fedora pre-loaded on their systems beginning with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8 laptop. Red Hat's Christian Schaller who serves as the senior manager for desktop chimed in with some additional thoughts and details on this achievement...

With last week having delivered some current NVIDIA Linux gaming performance metrics ahead of the anticipated GeForce RTX 3000 "Ampere" series launch this week, here are some fresh compute metrics for those interested.

Blender 2.90 is out as a huge feature update to this widely-used, cross-platform and open-source 3D modeling solution...

Aleksa Sarai of SUSE and Christian Brauner of Canonical presented at last week's Linux Plumbers Conference with a call for more extensible system calls moving forward in aiming to enhance the Linux user-space API...

Red Hat engineers in recent weeks began working on a new project called "starved" though recently renamed to "stalld". The stalld service is for serving as a Linux thread stall detector...

In making for easier code re-use among file-systems and allowing a unified implementation to focus on a single code-base for optimizations moving forward, a generic case-folding implementation for Linux file-systems is being prepared for mainline...

Manjaro Linux developer Tobias Schramm brought to light that only single data rate mode is currently being used for micro SD cards and eMMC storage with Raspberry Pi 4 Model B SBCs. But with a two line kernel patch, the double data rate mode can be enabled...

In addition to talking about code/hardware obsolescence from the Linux kernel, prominent upstream Linux kernel developer Arnd Bermann also presented at last week's Linux Plumbers Conference on the current SoC landscape and sharing his predictions for ten years down the road...

The Genode OS project is out with its 20.08 version bump that brings some high profile improvements for this open-source operating system framework...

Linus Torvalds has released the sixth weekly test version of the forthcoming Linux 5.9 kernel...

At the GNU Tools Track during this week's Linux Plumbers Conference was an interesting talk by Red Hat's Ben Woodard. He shares his perspective on how the GNU dynamic linker (ld.so) could be ripe for an overhaul in the 2020's...

There has been the out-of-tree DKMS hid-nintendo driver to support the Nintendo Switch controller on Linux while with the Linux 5.10 kernel later this year that driver will be merged...

Judging from the latest FUSE Git activity, it's looking like the VirtIO-FS DAX patches that have been around since last year could be merged for Linux 5.10. This can provide a significant speed-up for those making use of this FUSE file-system for sharing files/folders with guest VMs...

Like most conferences this year, the annual LLVM Developers' Meeting has become an online-only affair...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 5.16 as the newest snapshot for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms, Wine-Staging 5.16 is now available as the latest release for this more bleeding-edge version of Wine...

As a follow up from the news earlier this summer of Lenovo planning to certify their ThinkPad and ThinkStation lines for Linux from Ubuntu and Red Hat while also offering distribution choices like Fedora, that work is proceeding with Lenovo now offering up their first system from their web store that comes pre-loaded with Fedora...

It was the recent Facebook patches for implementing NetGPU that with one of the NVIDIA-focused patches led to the recent controversy around "GPL condoms" in the kernel and ultimately leading to new protections with Linux 5.9. That NetGPU code is still being worked on by Facebook with upstream hopes but now in addition to the NVIDIA driver support they are also working on AMD GPU support with the open-source driver...