Phoronix

There is an interesting change with the TTY/serial changes for the in-development Linux 5.12 kernel...

NVIDIA is launching the CMP - the Cryptocurrency Mining Processor -- that will be a line of hardware focused on professional mining with an emphasis on Ethereum...

Released yesterday was the Linux 5.10.17 LTS kernel and what makes this point release a bit more notable than usual is that it backports the CPUFreq patches from 5.11 that were used for addressing the earlier AMD performance regression on Linux 5.11 and often leading to net improvements as well over prior kernel series. The CPUFreq patches were back-ported while the AMD frequency invariance support was not, so what does the performance look like for the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel? Here are some benchmarks...

David Miller sent in the big batch of networking improvements today for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window...

Independent kernel hacker Con Kolivas is out with his latest "ck" patch-set against the newly-minted Linux 5.11 stable kernel and re-basing the MuQSS scheduler against the latest code-base...

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the big set of USB/Thunderbolt updates already for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window...

Consulting firm 3mdeb that specializes in embedded systems with an emphasis on open-source firmware solutions like Coreboot is hosting an interesting virtual event later today...

Oracle today released their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 Update 5 intended for use on their RHEL-based Oracle Linux. Oracle's "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" tends to be a newer Linux LTS kernel with extra features compared to what is found in the current RHEL / Red Hat Compatible Kernel builds...

David Sterba on Tuesday submitted the Btrfs file-system updates for the Linux 5.12 kernel, which once again include more performance optimizations and notable new features...

For those either needing a well-built, fanless computer that can run fine as a Linux desktop or are looking for an industrial-rated edge computing system, the Helix 500 is an interesting product from OnLogic (formerly, Logic Supply) that fills the space for a dependable, petite PC and ships with Windows, Linux, or even no OS at all if just preferring to load your own operating system of choice.

XWayland 21.1 is moving forward as a standalone XWayland release separated from the X.Org Server. Given that X.Org Server 1.21 isn't moving toward release with no one stepping up to oversee that long overdue update, Red Hat engineers have devised the plan for standalone XWayland releases that are separated from the rest of the xorg-server code-base to at least get the updated X11 client on Wayland support out to users...

Ingo Molnar sent in the scheduler updates for Linux 5.12 today and it includes some notable additions, including PREEMPT_DYNAMIC, which allows changing the kernel's preemption mode at boot/run-time...

The open-source, cross-platform Phoronix Test Suite 10.2.2 is out today as the newest version of our automated, production-ready benchmarking software framework...

Intel on Tuesday night released the "microcode-20210216" package as the latest update to their collection of CPU microcode binaries. This time around the only changes to the Intel CPU microcode binaries are for Skylake server CPUs and Cascade Lake B-0/B-1 processors in order to address two vulnerabilities that came to light last year...

LLVM 11.1.0 has been tagged as a special release to deal with ABI breakage on LLVM 11.0...

The pull request is pending that would allow Clang Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) to be enabled when building the Linux 5.12 kernel with this alternative compiler. The initial pull request has the compiler optimization work ready for the core infrastructure and 64-bit ARM (AArch64) while the x86_64 support isn't expected until the Linux 5.13 cycle...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved plans for "Fedora Kinoite" as the newest spin to debut this autumn alongside Fedora 35...

Last year was the interesting remarks by Microsoft that they want to "create a complete virtualization stack with Linux." The latest fruits of that are set to land with the Linux 5.12 kernel...

Out today is a new release of Intel's open-source oneDNN library used as a deep neural network library for assembling deep learning applications. With the new oneDNN 2.1 release there is now initial support for NVIDIA GPU acceleration as well as a host of improvements for running on forthcoming Intel CPUs...

Last week when conducting preliminary benchmarks of the new FreeBSD 13 operating system beta we found broad and significant performance improvements on Intel hardware but how is this popular BSD operating system performing for AMD EPYC? Here are some initial performance tests looking at FreeBSD 12.2 stable to FreeBSD 13 beta on an AMD EPYC 7F52 server.