Phoronix

The V3D Gallium3D driver that most notably offers the open-source graphics support for the Raspberry Pi 4 is now an official OpenGL ES 3.1 implementation...

Following the recent Linux kernel tests of Liquorix and other scheduler discussions (and more), some requests from premium supporters rolled in for seeing the performance of Arch Linux's Zen kernel package against the generic kernel. Here are those benchmark results...

Xiph.org's Rustlang-written "Rav1e" AV1 video encoder is back on track with delivering weekly pre-releases after missing them over the past month due to the holidays. With Rav1e p20200115 are not only performance improvements but also binary side and build speed enhancements...

It's been another day testing and investigating CVE-2019-14615, a.k.a. the Intel graphics hardware issue where for Gen9 all turned out to be okay but for Gen7 graphics leads to some big performance hits. Besides the Core i7 tests published yesterday in the aforelinked article, tests on relevant Core i3 and i5 CPUs are currently being carried out for seeing the impact there (so far, it's looking to be equally brutal)...

Mir 1.7 was released today as the newest feature release for this Ubuntu-focused display stack that for the past two years now has focused on serving viable Wayland support...

One of the few frustrations with the AMD Ryzen CPU support on Linux to date has been besides the often delayed support for CPU temperature reporting has been the mainline kernel not supporting voltage readings and other extra sensors. But that is finally changing with the "k10temp" driver being extended to include current and voltage reporting plus CCD temperature reporting on Zen 2 processors...

The release of CentOS 8 came several months after RHEL 8.0 and this week's release of CentOS updated against RHEL 8.1 took over two months of work. But moving forward to RHEL 8.2 and beyond, that turnaround time will hopefully be less...

Out this morning is the first beta of KDE Plasma 5.18, which is also the project's first long-term support (LTS) release since Plasma 5.12...

GNU Guile 3.0 has been released, the GNU's implementation of the Scheme programming language with various extra features. The big news with Guile 3.0 is better performance...

Disclosed back in November was the Intel Jump Conditional Code Erratum that necessitated updated CPU microcode to mitigate and with that came with a nearly across the board performance impact. But Intel developers had been working on assembler patches for helping to reduce that performance hit. The GNU Assembler patches were merged back in December while now ahead of LLVM 10.0 that alternative toolchain has an option for helping to recover some of the lost performance...

Now that lead WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld has managed to get this secure VPN tunnel technology queued for introduction in Linux 5.6 mainline, he's begun optimizing other areas of the kernel for optimal WireGuard performance...

When it comes to the Zhaoxin x86-compatible processors coming out of VIA's joint venture in Shanghai, their forthcoming 7-series (KX-7000) has hardware mitigations in place for some CPU vulnerabilities...

Introduced last month was Zonefs as a new Linux file-system developed by Western Digital. It's looking like that new file-system could be ready for introduction with the upcoming Linux 5.6 cycle...

LLVM project founder Chris Lattner has proposed a new decision making process for the LLVM compiler stack around new sub-project proposals, new social policies, changes to core infrastructure, and other key changes...

Yesterday we noted that the Linux kernel picked up a patch mitigating an Intel Gen9 graphics vulnerability. It didn't sound too bad at first but then seeing Ivy Bridge Gen7 and Haswell Gen7.5 graphics are also affected raised eyebrows especially with that requiring a much larger mitigation. Now in testing the performance impact, the current mitigation patches completely wreck the performance of Ivybridge/Haswell graphics performance.

As we mentioned back in December, a Kubuntu-powered laptop is launching with the blessing of Canonical and the Kubuntu Community Council. That laptop, the Kubuntu Focus, will begin shipping at the beginning of February while the pre-orders opened today as well as the embargo lift. We've been testing out the Kubuntu Focus the last several weeks and it's quite a polished KDE laptop experience for those wanting to enjoy KDE Plasma for a portable computing experience without having to tweak the laptop for optimal efficiency or other constraints.

CentOS 8 1911 has been released today as the community rebuild rebased to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 that debuted back in November...

This morning's release of Vulkan 1.2 is off to a great start...

Coming up next month already will mark four years since the release of Vulkan 1.0 but for today is an early surprise... Vulkan 1.2! The Khronos Group has prepared Vulkan 1.2 for release as the newest major update to this graphics and compute API. Several vendors also have Vulkan 1.2 support in tow.

Here is another big feature coming for Linux 5.6: the Nouveau driver will have initial accelerated support for NVIDIA "Turing" GPUs! This is coming at long-last with NVIDIA set to release publicly the Turing firmware images needed for hardware initialization...