Phoronix

Besides the long-running FSGSBASE patch series that has the ability to help the performance for CPUs going back years, another engineer on Intel's open-source team has been working on a separate but enticing patch in the name of performance...

Canonical is transitioning Ubuntu's support in the Amazon AWS environment to have a rolling-release model for its kernel albeit other packages will remain under their traditional stable release update handling. At least though it's good they will be more punctually offering new kernel versions in the cloud..

Hopefully it won't be like many Fedora releases in the past that were dragged out for weeks at a time due to blocker bugs (thankfully, recent Fedora releases have been tremendously better in that regard), but Fedora 32 will not be debuting next week as planned due to bugs...

Facebook and Intel have been working on being able to enable Xeon Scalable Open Compute Project systems with an open-source FSP...

It looks like better support for Windows programs running under Wine interacting directly with USB devices could finally be on the horizon...

It turns out our recent OpenJDK 8 through OpenJDK 14 benchmarks caught some on Oracle's Java team by surprise. But they were able to replicate the outcome and as a result OpenJDK 15 will be seeing better out-of-the-box performance...

Earlier this week I published new benchmarks looking at the desktop CPU security mitigation impact with Ubuntu 20.04. Here are similar tests done in looking at the server mitigation impact with the near-final Ubuntu 20.04 LTS while testing server workloads on Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server platforms. Like the desktop tests, the mitigation impact with the out-of-the-box protections against Spectre, Meltdown, and friends is being compared to booting the same Ubuntu 20.04 release with "mitigations=off" for run-time disabling of the relevant mitigations on each platform.

Mir 1.8 is available today as the newest feature update to this display stack developed by Canonical that currently is focused on providing a pleasant Wayland compositor experience especially for kiosk-type environments and others wanting to transition from X11 to Wayland...

AMD released today their first update of the quarter for their open-source AMDVLK Vulkan Linux driver...

A big change was just merged today for the in-development GNOME 3.38 that will benefit Wayland gamers and others...

If you tried out Linux 5.7-rc1 at the start of the week you may have found your system unbootable if using EFI... Fortunately, those EFI fixes have now been merged several days later...

There are many new and exciting features of Linux 5.7 but also some material that didn't make the cut this window that we are now hoping will see mainline status for Linux 5.8 or another kernel this year...

The GCC compiler's libstdc++ library has continued receiving more last minute C++20 work...

With Linux 5.6 the flash-focused F2FS file-system added LZO and LZ4 compression support for enhancing performance and ideally extending flash storage life by reducing the amount of writes. Added meanwhile for the current Linux 5.7 cycle was F2FS Zstd compression support. Now looking ahead to Linux 5.8, it looks like LZO-RLE support is being baked...

Various patches are pending for improving the Linux support for onboard audio with motherboard sporting the AMD TRX40 chipset for 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadripper systems...

Following the surprise announcement last month that Microsoft's GitHub would be acquiring NPM Inc, the company behind the popular JavaScript package manager, that acquisition is now complete...

Longtime KDE developer and former Blue Systems engineer, Roman Gilg, has announced his forking of KDE's KWin window manager / compositor and the subsequent first release of this new KWinFT project...

Following the Proton 5.0-6 release candidate from earlier this month that brought out-of-the-box support for DOOM Eternal under Linux, Valve today promoted Proton 5.0-6 to being officially available...

After being in code review the past half-year, support for Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) within Gallium3D's "Clover" OpenCL state tracker was just merged for Mesa 20.1...

Released this month was the X-Plane 11.50 beta flight simulator that introduced a Vulkan renderer for this cross-platform, realistic flight simulator that long relied upon an OpenGL pipeline. Last week we published OpenGL vs. Vulkan X-Plane 11 benchmarks for both NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics. In this article is a look at the X-Plane 11.50 beta Vulkan performance across the different Radeon Vulkan driver options.