Phoronix

TPAUSE is the new instruction supported by Intel's Tremont microarchitecture and beyond. TPAUSE allows for an optimized state that can provide low wake-up latency compared to existing delay mechanisms. With Linux 5.8, the kernel will begin making use of TPAUSE where supported...

The VideoLAN team responsible for the dav1d AV1 video decoder have just released dav1d 0.7 as the newest feature release and it comes with more performance optimizations...

While most of you are well aware how Linux often slaughters Microsoft Windows performance on high-end desktop and platform servers with large core counts, on smaller systems it can be a different story and often comes down to the particular workloads and any peculiarities of the hardware under test. With recently buying the Lenovo IdeaPad 5 (14) for our AMD Ryzen 7 4700U Linux benchmarking, here are some benchmarks for how that Zen 2 laptop is comparing with different workloads between Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux deprecated Btrfs and no longer supports it on RHEL8, Oracle does continue supporting this Linux file-system on their RHEL-based Oracle Linux when using the company's "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" alternative to their Red Hat Compatible Kernel. An Oracle engineer put out a lengthy post outlining the highlights of Btrfs in their new Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6...

For reasons currently unknown, Intel released new CPU microcode on Wednesday for their Sandy Bridge processors...

In addition to working on easy ZFS encryption for Ubuntu 20.10, the Ubiquity installer in its latest code for this next Ubuntu Linux release is now enabling TRIM by default for all Zpools...

As a result of increased bug reports where Linux users are reporting Intel graphics hangs but not including the most pertinent details like the Mesa version, the Intel Mesa drivers are now embedding the driver name and Mesa version as part of their error state...

For months now Intel's open-source driver developers have been working on the "Gen12" graphics support needed most notably for Tiger Lake and more recently is also confirmed for Rocket Lake. But Gen12 is also needed for the highly anticipated Xe Graphics with the discrete graphics offerings to come in the months ahead by Intel. Building off the existing Gen12 graphics driver code, Intel today published the first DG1 patches for enabling their first discrete graphics card under Linux...

A patch slated to be merged for the Linux 5.8 kernel cycle next month that simply deletes ten lines of code (well, six lines of code and four lines of comments) will for some systems yield "significant power savings" due to an oversight in the kernel code that has lasted for about twelve years...

The fourth weekly release candidate is available of Mesa 20.1, the Q2'2020 feature update to the open-source OpenGL / Vulkan driver stack predominantly used by Linux systems. This is the last scheduled release candidate with Mesa 20.1 stable potentially coming out next week if testing goes well and the remaining blocker bugs are addressed...

Adding to the amount of surprising news this week, Electronic Arts just announced they will be open-sourcing portions of Command and Conquer Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert in order to help the mod community around this franchise...

Compute Express Link is the interconnect standard backed by Intel, AMD, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Dell, and others for building off PCI Express with new CPU-to-device and CPU-to-memory capabilities. Intel's stellar open-source team has been working on plumbing the Linux kernel support for this next generation of devices...

RenderDoc 1.8 is out as the newest feature release for this cross-platform, open-source graphics debugging and profiling utility for Vulkan, Direct3D 11/12, OpenGL, and OpenGL ES APIs...

Intel announced at the end of April the 10th Gen Core "Comet Lake" S-Series CPUs with the Core i9 10900K being their new top-end processor with a 10 core / 20 thread processor that can clock up to 5.3GHz. The Comet Lake S-Series desktop CPUs are now shipping and this morning the embargo lifts in being able to publish the benchmarks. Here is how the Intel Core i5 10500K and Core i9 10900K processors are performing on Linux from Steam on Linux gaming to various interesting real-world workloads.

Microsoft is working on its own Wayland compositor derived from the Weston code-base...

FUSE for file-systems in user-space while being criticized by developers in the past and known for being slower than kernel native file-systems is seeing another write optimization come Linux 5.8...

AMD on Tuesday sent in another batch of feature updates for Linux 5.8 with the cut-off for new material upon us with this next kernel cycle expected to begin in early June...

AI startup Habana Labs, which was recently acquired by Intel, will see its Gaudi accelerator supported by the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel...

On Tuesday was the big announcement of Microsoft bringing Direct3D 12 to Linux/WSL2 in the context of allowing GUI applications and GPU compute within Windows Subsystem for Linux. This also means OpenCL/OpenGL/Vulkan support by ultimately converting it into D3D12 consumption by the host Windows system. While Microsoft was quick to post patches for their "dxgkrnl" kernel driver for this Direct3D implementation, it's already facing resistance and will be an uphill battle for it to be mainlined...

A few years ago it was GNOME developers frustrated with Microsoft over naming a project GVFS (later renamed to Virtual File System for Git) as it collided with their GVFS (GNOME Virtual File-System) while now there is a similar situation brewing between Microsoft and KDE camps...