Phoronix

Just over twenty years after the Linux From Scratch project was started as a guide/book to building all of the software components manually from source, Linux From Scratch 10.0 has been released...

Earlier this year Amazon announced Bottlerocket as a Linux distribution for running containers. This week Bottlerocket crossed the general availability milestone...

Intel's open-source engineers today sent out their latest patches bringing up the Dynamic Load Balancer 2.0 for the next-gen PCIe device that offers load-balanced, prioritized scheduling of core-to-core communication...

One important bit not covered in today's GeForce RTX 3070/3080/3090 announcement but now detailed via the NVIDIA website is confirmation that the RTX 30 "Ampere" GPUs do in fact have dedicated AV1 hardware decode capabilities...

As widely expected amid a constant flow of rumors and leaks in recent weeks, NVIDIA just revealed their GeForce RTX 3000 "Ampere" series...

In addition to the new OpenBenchmarking.org now out in public "alpha", a number of new and updated test profiles were published in August for users of our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software...

With the soon to be released Mesa 20.2, the RADV Vulkan driver is using the ACO back-end by default that's been developed with funding by Valve as an alternative to AMD's official "AMDGPU" LLVM back-end. For those wondering how this shader compiler back-end compares and more intricate details of its design, some extensive documentation has finally been added to the Mesa tree...

The Qt Company has announced the feature freeze for the big Qt 6.0 toolkit milestone...

Intel developers engaging with upstream LLVM have been adding AMX support and other new features for next year's Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" while as of a few days ago in LLVM 12 Git is the actual enabling of -march=sapphirerapids support...

Creative Labs last year released the high-end SoundBlaster AE-7 sound card. Sadly the company is back in their state where they do not provide official Linux support, but coming up for Linux 5.10 is the support for this sound card thanks to Connor McAdams who has worked on supporting prior SoundBlaster hardware under Linux...

August was an interesting month in terms of Linux/open-source activity though still another tough month during the coronavirus pandemic...

Going back to earlier this year has been work on an "adaptive" mode for P-State to improve GPU bound efficiency when the CPU is forced to share a power/thermal budget with other components like onboard graphics. That work is still advancing and an update was provided on it last week...

At the beginning of August we reported on Google engineers proposing the Machine Function Splitter to LLVM as a means of making binaries up to a few percent faster thanks to this code generation optimization pass for splitting code functions into hot and cold portions. That work has now been merged into LLVM 12.0 with very promising results...

As noted this weekend, Lenovo has begun offering Fedora pre-loaded on their systems beginning with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8 laptop. Red Hat's Christian Schaller who serves as the senior manager for desktop chimed in with some additional thoughts and details on this achievement...

With last week having delivered some current NVIDIA Linux gaming performance metrics ahead of the anticipated GeForce RTX 3000 "Ampere" series launch this week, here are some fresh compute metrics for those interested.

Blender 2.90 is out as a huge feature update to this widely-used, cross-platform and open-source 3D modeling solution...

Aleksa Sarai of SUSE and Christian Brauner of Canonical presented at last week's Linux Plumbers Conference with a call for more extensible system calls moving forward in aiming to enhance the Linux user-space API...

Red Hat engineers in recent weeks began working on a new project called "starved" though recently renamed to "stalld". The stalld service is for serving as a Linux thread stall detector...

In making for easier code re-use among file-systems and allowing a unified implementation to focus on a single code-base for optimizations moving forward, a generic case-folding implementation for Linux file-systems is being prepared for mainline...

Manjaro Linux developer Tobias Schramm brought to light that only single data rate mode is currently being used for micro SD cards and eMMC storage with Raspberry Pi 4 Model B SBCs. But with a two line kernel patch, the double data rate mode can be enabled...