Phoronix

AMD this year not only delivered the very powerful Ryzen 5000 "Zen 3" desktop processors and initial Radeon RX 6000 "Big Navi" graphics cards but for exciting Linux users was the timely open-source support for the new GPUs well in advance (and also already preparing for some 2021 graphics products) as well as more timely support around Zen 3 thermal support and other additions. AMD's open-source timing is still improving although not yet optimal but all in it was a hell of a year for AMD Linux users...

Following the recent AMD Zen 3 tests on Intel's Clear Linux a user expressed curiosity over the Intel-backed Linux distribution on Tiger Lake hardware given I hadn't done a multi-distribution comparison there yet. Using the Dell XPS 9310 as my lone Tiger Lake notebook I ran some benchmarks of Clear Linux, Ubuntu, Manjaro, and Fedora. For a change, Clear Linux wasn't the distant front-runner.

Patches posted on Monday by independent open-source contributor Mario Kleiner would enable FP16 pixel format support for older generations of AMD Radeon GPUs...

Ubuntu had a rather successful 2020 with the well received Ubuntu 20.04 LTS debut to continuing to make upstream improvements to GNOME, their adoption in the cloud and Windows Subsystem for Linux remaining strong, and all around Ubuntu being on steady footing across all areas of focus...

Longtime Intel open-source graphics driver developer Chris Wilson sent out a set of 56 patches today working to improve their kernel graphics driver's scheduling performance...

It turns out the Intel/AMD AES-NI implementation of XTS regressed hard from the Retpolines functionality merged nearly three years ago for mitigating Spectre... But now the crypto performance with the AES-NI XTS implementation is set to recover from that regression with a huge improvement thanks to a new set of patches...

The systemd service and system manager had another busy year with the merging of "homed" for modernizing and reinventing home directory capabilities to "oomd" being merged for improving the Linux memory pressure / out-of-memory handling, among other new features coming to light...

Libmicrohttpd as the GNU project's embedded HTTP web server library is out with a final release of 2020...

Each of the past several years it has been interesting to monitor Microsoft's engagement in the open-source and Linux communities. Over 2020 there were interesting strides from Samsung upstreaming their improved exFAT file-system driver after having Microsoft's blessing to Microsoft contributing more and more to Mesa in leveraging the OpenGL/OpenCL code in various Windows components to new WSL2 capabilities...

Git 2.30 is out today as the latest stable release update of this wildly-popular, distributed revision control system...

It didn't land for Linux 5.11 but it looks like Linux 5.12 could end up supporting Intel's "HDR Backlight Interface" for helping newer Intel laptops with their backlight controls where they don't comply with VESA specifications but rather catering to Intel's proprietary interface...

While Linux 5.11-rc1 was just released yesterday, we have already been closely monitoring the new features of Linux 5.11 as well as carrying out early benchmarks. One area looking quite good so far are the Intel graphics performance and features with Linux 5.11, or more specifically Gen9 and newer while the latest Xe Graphics are obviously the most interesting from a benchmarking perspective.

With the Linux 5.12 kernel next spring it looks like the Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA 2" overclocking support will be in order...

Bootlin working under contract for an unnamed NAS vendor has been working to update the Large Page Support for 32-bit ARM and ultimately coming up with an upstream-friendly way to be able to support more than 16TB of storage on 32-bit ARM devices...

Of all the new Linux 5.11 features and all the enablement work Intel has already completed for Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" hardware, one big feature not yet mainlined is the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) support...

Linus Torvalds as expected released Linux 5.11-rc1 this evening, which marks the end of the two week merge window that went through Christmas...

The Linux 5.11 merge window has been open the past two weeks following the debut of Linux 5.10 but is set to close today. A lot of new features and exciting improvements were merged for Linux 5.11 although it is somewhat of a bumpy ride at the moment but should be buttoned up and ready for its stable release come February.

Intel's open-source oneAPI Data Parallel C++ compiler saw a Christmas Day update with the 2020-12 monthly update...

Linux 5.11-rc1 is due for release later today and at least one regression has seen a quick resolution...

Back in 2010 was a change to disable run-time power management of PCI devices by default and leaving it up to user-space to in turn override it if desired. Now as we gear up for 2021, some upstream kernel developers are wondering about that original decision and possibly changing the default behavior to yield better out-of-the-box power savings with modern systems...