Phoronix

The GNU Debugger (GDB) has merged initial support for debugging of eBPF code that is traditionally consumed by the Linux kernel as part of this in-kernel special purpose virtual machine...

With the "Sienna Cichlid" and "Navy Flounder" open-source driver support as what appear to be the first "Navi 2" GPUs and the first of the "GFX10.3" generation on the graphics engine side there is the initial kernel support with Linux 5.9 and the initial Mesa support for 20.2. That Mesa support has been focused on RadeonSI as the official OpenGL driver as well as Mesa's RADV driver as the Radeon Vulkan driver in-tree but not officially supported by AMD. That RADV support is currently un-tested. Both drivers currently depend upon the "AMDGPU" back-end found in the forthcoming LLVM 11.0 with its initial GFX10.3 support. But now on the RADV driver side there is preliminary GFX10.3 bits landing for the popular "ACO" back-end...

Among the many pull requests sent in for the Linux 5.9 merge window by longtime developer Ingo Molnar are the usual assortment of scheduler improvements...

Wayfire, a Wayland compositor inspired by the likes of Compiz with different desktop effects, is out today with a new feature release...

Linux 5.9 is bringing another feature that's long been baking and of interest to a growing number of stakeholders... checkpoint/restore functionality of unprivileged processes...

Switching from the "Radeon" to "AMDGPU" kernel driver on Linux is possible for Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 era graphics cards and doing so can mean slight performance benefits, the ability to run the AMDVLK or RADV Vulkan drivers, and simply making use of this better maintained driver. But having these original GCN graphics cards default to the modern AMDGPU driver appears held up by the lack of analog video output support with that driver...

The Linux kernel work for making use of the x86_64 FSGSBASE instruction since Intel Ivy Bridge and since then AMD CPUs also is set to finally land with the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel. The FSGSBASE support has the possibility of helping Intel/AMD CPU performance especially in areas like context switching that had been hurt badly by Spectre/Meltdown and other CPU vulnerability mitigations largely on the Intel side...

The close_range() system call is intended to allow efficiently closing a range of file descriptors (or all file descriptors) of the calling task. This system call was devised in cooperation with FreeBSD developers...

Merged to GNOME's Mutter compositor is an API for Wayland to allow the launching of trusted clients...

There are many ARM changes coming to Linux 5.9, including support for Intel's Keem Bay...

Intel's Scalable Video Technology team is known for their open-source video encoder work particularly on AV1 and VP9 formats, but they also continue to maintain a high performance H.265/HEVC encoder as well. Intel SVT-HEVC 1.5 was released on Monday as their first major update of the year...

A number of x86-related changes were sent out today for the first full day of the Linux 5.9 merge window...

There didn't appear to be much usage ever out of the AMD HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) support within the GCC compiler and hadn't been maintained in a while so now has been wiped out of the GNU Compiler Collection...

With more eyes on Btrfs given the file-system is set to become the default for Fedora 33 desktop spins, there are some interesting performance optimizations coming to Btrfs with the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel...

Linux kernel developers are working on tightening up the access around GPL-only kernel symbols and kernel shims that interface with proprietary kernel modules. This latest work is being driven by code recently put out for improving the Linux networking code where NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver would be the initial consumer...

The Linux Foundation in cooperation with many hardware and software vendors have announced the Open-Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) for improving open-source security...

Vulkan 1.2.149 is out today and its lone new extension is yet another addition to the Vulkan API for helping translation layers like DXVK map other graphics APIs on top...

Linux 5.8 is one of the biggest releases in a while but that newly-stable kernel also means a lot of the new drivers need to be stripped out or otherwise modified over being reliant on binary-only firmware/microcode or contingent upon other dependencies deemed not free to the Free Software Foundation standards...

After being worked on a number of months, the FSCRYPT file-system encryption framework for the Linux kernel is enabling inline encryption support with the 5.9 kernel...

GNOME could soon be playing nicely with deep color displays that aim to offer more realistic color reproduction thanks to the greater bit depth for each color component...