Phoronix

Canonical's server team is working on a new means of carrying out automated installations of Ubuntu Server in time for their 20.04 LTS release...

In-step with more RISC-V hardware becoming available over time, the Linux kernel architecture support for RISC-V has continued maturing and with Linux 5.3 is in better shape...

While the Linux 5.3 kernel merge window isn't even over until this weekend when it will kick off with 5.3-rc1 and headlining new features like Radeon RX 5700 series support, AMD has already sent in a batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD fixes. Making these fixes notable are some early fixes around the new open-source Radeon RX "Navi" support...

Following EXT4 getting initial (and opt-in) support for case-insensitive directories/files, the Flash-Friendly File-System has a set of patches pending that extend the case-folding support to this F2FS file-system that is becoming increasingly used by Android smartphones and other devices...

In addition to Linux 5.3 bringing a VirtIO-IOMMU driver, this next kernel version is bringing another new VirtIO virtual device implementation: PMEM for para-virtualized persistent memory support for the likes of Intel Optane DC persistent memory...

In early May right before the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 we saw the public beta of Oracle Linux 8 while today Oracle Linux 8.0 has been promoted to stable and production ready...

Feature work is over on LLVM 9.0 as the next release for this widely-used compiler stack ranging from the AMDGPU shader compiler back-end to the many CPU targets and other innovative use-cases for this open-source compiler infrastructure...

One of the first PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs to market has been the Corsair Force MP600. AMD included the Corsair MP600 2TB NVMe PCIe4 SSD with their Ryzen 3000 reviewer's kit and for those interested in this speedy solid-state storage here are some benchmarks compared to various other storage devices on Ubuntu Linux.

Looking ahead to Ubuntu 19.10 as the cycle before Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, one of the areas exciting us with the work being done by Canonical is (besides the great upstream GNOME performance work) easily comes down to the work they are pursuing on better ZFS On Linux integration with even aiming to offer ZFS as a file-system option from their desktop installer. A big role in their ZoL play is also the new "Zsys" component they have been developing...

For those making use of the Ceph fault-tolerant storage platform, a number of updated kernel bits are landing in Linux 5.3...

While the Linux 4.4 kernel is quite old (January 2016), DragonFlyBSD has now re-based its AMD Radeon kernel graphics driver against that release. It is at least a big improvement compared to its Radeon code having been derived previously from Linux 3.19...

It's been over one year since the release of Latte Dock 0.8 as this KDE-aligned desktop dock while now the v0.9 release isn't too far away...

At the start of the month we reported on out-of-tree kernel work to support Linux on the newer Macs. Those patches were focused on supporting Apple's NVMe drive behavior by the Linux kernel driver. That work has been evolving nicely and is now under review on the kernel mailing list...

Those running ZFS On Linux (ZoL) on post-5.0 (and pre-5.0 supported LTS releases) have seen big performance hits to the ZFS encryption performance in particular. That came due to upstream breaking an interface used by ZFS On Linux and admittedly not caring about ZoL due to it being an out-of-tree user. But now several kernel releases later, a workaround has been devised...

Three years ago we checked out the CompuLab Airtop as a high-performance fanless PC. Back then it was exciting to passively cool an Intel Core i7 5775C, 16GB of RAM, SATA 3.0 SSD, and a GeForce GTX 950 graphics card. But now in 2019 thanks to the continued design improvements by CompuLab and ever advancing tech, their newly-launched CompuLab 3 can accommodate an eight-core / sixteen-thread Xeon CPU, 64GB of RAM, NVMe SSD storage, and a NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics card without any fans!

For several generations now of Intel graphics there have been the GuC/HuC firmware binaries while beginning with Icelake "Gen 11" graphics those binary blobs will be loaded by default...

Later this month marks two years since the release of OpenGL 4.6 and just ahead of that date it looks like Mesa could finally land its complete GL 4.6 implementation, at least as far as the Intel open-source graphics driver support is concerned...

While it would have been nice seeing this next systemd release sooner due to the Zen 2 + RdRand issue with systemd yielding an unbootable system (that is now also being worked around with a BIOS upgrade), the systemd 243 release looks like it will take place in the near future...

The past few months openSUSE developers have been working on enabling LTO by default for its packages while now finally with the newest release of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed this goal has been accomplished...

OPNsense, the FreeBSD-based pfSense-forked firewall offering that has continued experiencing increased adoption following the closure of m0n0wall, is out with version 19.7 as its newest feature update...