Phoronix

Git 2.28 is now officially out this Monday and features continued work on moving off the "master" default branch naming as well as the ongoing work around ultimately transitioning from SHA1 to SHA256 for hashing to prevent possible collisions...

Firefox 79.0 isn't scheduled to be formally announced until Tuesday but the release binaries have now hit Mozilla's FTP servers...

With the Intel Core i9 10900K "Comet Lake" processor here are some fresh GCC compiler benchmarks when looking at the performance of GCC 8.4 versus 9.3 versus a 10.2 snapshot while testing with optimization flags of -O2, -O3 -march=native, and -O3 -march=native -flto.

As outlined a few months ago, Intel's future Sapphire Rapids and Alder Lake processors are set to add a SERIALIZE instruction. That SERIALIZE instruction ensures all flags/register/memory modifications are complete as well as draining all buffered writes to memory before the next instruction is executed. Linux is moving forward with preparing to make use of this new CPU instruction in its function for stopping speculative execution and prefetching of modified code...

DragonFlyBSD developer François Tigeot continues his trek of near single-handedly porting the Intel and Radeon DRM graphics driver code from the Linux kernel to this BSD...

MikroBUS is the open add-on board standard aiming for "maximum expandability with the smallest number of pins". MikroBUS already has fairly robust industry support particularly in the embedded space while finally a mikroBUS mainline kernel driver may be near for Linux to improve the status quo of driver support...

Debuting this weekend was LuxCoreRender 2.4, the newest version of this impressive open-source physically based renderer...

Linus Torvalds has performed his usual Sunday dance and released the Linux 5.8-rc7 kernel as one of the final test releases before Linux 5.8 is declared stable in August...

Even without the Samsung OSG support these days, the Enlightenment project continues making nice progress...

While the current Vulkan API is exhaustive enough to implement full-featured Wayland compositors and X11 window managers, to date there hasn't been too much adoption considering OpenGL is still more pervasive among hardware/drivers and it's obviously a significant effort writing a new compositor from scratch. One of the leading (among few) examples of a Vulkan-powered window manager / compositor is ChamferWM, which does continue to be developed. SWVKC meanwhile is one that has been seeing development this year as an alpha-stage Wayland Vulkan compositor...

Set to be formally introduced next quarter alongside Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 is the long-overdue overhaul of OpenBenchmarking.org -- the biggest upgrade to our public "cloud" platform for benchmark aggregation and result analytics since its debut nearly one decade ago. Before then, a public beta of OpenBenchmarking.org should get underway in the next few weeks while here is an early look at some of the changes...

Last month on Phoronix were 350+ benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 3 3300X vs. Intel Core i3 10100, including a number of Linux gaming performance tests. Following that I also ran some tests with the Core i5 10600K tossed in for those that may be weighing between the Ryzen 3 / Core i3 vs. Core i5 for gaming. Here are those additional data points...

Making waves just over a year ago in the GNU Compiler Collection community was the "Ranger" project for on-demand range generator that's been worked on for several years at Red Hat. While their goals for GCC 10 didn't pan out, it's looking like in the next few months more of the Ranger infrastructure will land and thus putting it in the window for GCC 11...

One of many interesting Google Summer of Code 2020 projects is working on automated benchmarking for NetBSD in order to allow for performance/regression testing of this BSD operating system known for its portability across CPU architectures...

The work on Zstd'ing the Linux kernel for using this Facebook-developed Zstandard compression algorithm to in turn speed up decompression times when booting Linux kernel images might be mainlined as soon as Linux 5.9...

Started back in 2018 during the Google Summer of Code was work for reporting system power information within the GNOME-Usage utility. While some user-interface elements were fleshed out and other engineering completed, the code isn't yet merged or ready for users as the approach for accomplishing the per-program power reporting is still being devised...

While Intel's open-source engineers have been working on Tiger Lake enablement for Linux going back roughly a year with many kernel patches spanning the different areas over numerous kernel releases, which aligns with Intel's ongoing cadence of ensuring good Linux hardware support at launch even for consumer hardware, there have been a few stragglers in the Linux bring-up for Tiger Lake...

On the mailing lists and browsing various Git "-next" repositories it's felt like "damn, there are a lot of patches about replacing HTTP links with HTTPS all of a sudden" inside the kernel sources and documentation. Indeed, for Linux 5.9 where applicable HTTP links are being replaced for HTTPS...

David Howells of Red Hat continues striving for great improvements to Linux storage...

KDE Plasma 5.20 is bringing an important feature in further closing the gap between Wayland and X11 feature parity... Finally there will be working screen recording and screencasting on Wayland for compatible applications...