Phoronix

Going back to over a year ago were discussions by Oracle engineers and others about a secure launch boot protocol for the Linux kernel to in turn tie into the Trenchboot open-source project working on various system integrity features. We are now finally seeing new patches out of Oracle for wiring more Trenchboot support into the Linux kernel...

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has sent out a reminder to Fedora contributors to "be excellent to each other" while announcing the project has a new vision statement...

Following last week's benchmarks of OpenJDK 8 through the newly-released OpenJDK 14 JVM benchmarks, some Phoronix readers expressed interest in seeing Java benchmarks with Oracle's GraalVM as well as Amazon's Corretto JVM implementations. Here are some benchmarks of those benchmarks up against OpenJDK both for Java 8 and Java 11 releases.

Cloudflare employs Linux disk encryption on their servers and with some optimizations have made it at least two times faster throughput while also lowering the latency...

It's long overdue but AMD engineers are now looking at refactoring the GNU C Library (Glibc) platform support to enhance the performance for AMD Zen processors...

Released at the end of February was the long overdue stable release of Android-x86 9.0 that re-based this Intel/AMD focused Android spin atop the 9.0 "Pie" Android Open-Source Project state plus with various additions/improvements for running on x86_64 laptop/desktop hardware. Out today is the second stable update to the Android-x86 9.0 series...

Longtime open-source Linux graphics developer Thomas Hellström of VMware has sent out a patch series aiming for Linux 5.7 or 5.8 to introduce support for huge and giant page-table entries for the TTM memory management code and TTM-enabled graphics drivers...

Intel open-source developers have released IWD v1.6 as their open-source, embedded-friendly wireless daemon for Linux systems as an alternative to WPA_Supplicant...

Disclosed back in mid-November was the Intel JCC Erratum that required a CPU microcode update to mitigate and that in turn had broad performance hits. But via toolchain updates, some of that overhead can be offset. The GNU Assembler patches were quickly merged and new options exposed for helping to decrease that performance hit but on the LLVM side the developers are still working on their mitigation with some design decisions still to be made...

Introduced into the Linux 4.18 kernel back in June 2018 was the new RSEQ system call for "Restartable Sequences" to provide faster user-space operations on per-CPU data by avoiding atomic operations updates. Sadly, seeing user-space make use of RSEQ has been a slow process...

Doom Eternal was released this week by id Software as their first game atop the Vulkan-focused id Tech 7 engine. While it's another id Software game not seeing a native Linux port, with some tweaking the game can run under Steam Play / Proton. And now Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver has landed a fix for AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 era GPUs with a fix allowing those older graphics cards to handle this latest Doom title...

The Oracle Linux team has released Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 Update 3 as the newest version of their optimized downstream Linux kernel catering to cloud workloads...

Microsoft and Collabora are today announcing a partnership for building OpenCL and OpenGL mapping layers over DirectX (D3D12)...

The release cycle was dragged out an extra month due to bugs and there ended up even being a last minute sixth release candidate yesterday, but LLVM 10.0 and its sub-projects like Clang 10.0 and LLDB 10.0 were just tagged...

We are used to seeing tier-one Linux distributions outperforming Microsoft Windows on hardware ranging from $199 laptops to HEDT and server processors and everything in between. Thus it came as a large surprise to us when finding Windows 10 outperforming multiple Linux distributions on a new Intel laptop. Not only was Windows 10 leading, but the performance paradigm shifted that Ubuntu was even outperforming Clear Linux, which normally is the fastest of Linux distributions out-of-the-box.

It has been just under one month since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 while available this morning is the first development snapshot/milestone on the road to next quarter's Phoronix Test Suite 9.6-Nittedal feature release...

Habana Labs, the AI accelerator start-up being acquired by Intel, has more driver improvements on tap for Linux 5.7...

Intel is working to enable OpenGL 4.x functionality for their OpenSWR software rasterizer within Mesa...

The latest LLVM 11 development code has enabled support for NVIDIA CUDA GPU device offloading from 64-bit ARM...

One of the interesting innovations for the eBPF in-kernel virtual machine in recent times is the work by Google on supporting MAC and audit policy handling by it. This stems from currently custom real-time security data collection and analysis of Google servers internally for real-time threat protection and this patch-set is part of their work on allowing similar functionality in the upstream Linux kernel...