Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 21 min ago
Intel P-State Driver Shifting To "Schedutil" Governor Default With Linux 5.7
On top of all the other changes in Linux 5.7 so far, a secondary set of power management updates were sent in today for this next version of the kernel and includes now using the Schedutil governor by default for Intel P-State and Arm big.LITTLE systems...
AMD's Marek Olšák Lands Even More OpenGL Threading Improvements Into Mesa 20.1
One month ago to the day I was writing about OpenGL threading improvements for Mesa 20.1 and since then more "GLTHREAD" work has materialized and successfully landed for improving the Mesa OpenGL driver performance...
Linux 5.7 Changes So Far: New exFAT Driver, Tiger Lake Graphics By Default, Apple Fast Charge, Etc
We are now one week through the two week long Linux 5.7 kernel merge window where new/improved functionality is introduced. Here is a look at the changes so far for Linux 5.7...
C-SKY Architecture Gets Fix For Its Own Speculative Execution Bug In Linux 5.7
C-SKY is a a Chinese 32-bit CPU architecture intended for low-power devices from media boxes / DVRs to printers and other consumer electronics. C-SKY has also worked its way into a ~$6 development board. With its updates for the Linux 5.7 kernel are various additions to this maturing architecture support along with a speculative execution fix...
Initial Benchmarks With Intel oneAPI Level Zero Performance
Last week Intel released an initial set of micro-benchmarks for their oneAPI Level Zero and with L0 support being plumbed into their open-source Intel Compute Runtime, this weekend I started toying around with some Level Zero benchmarks on a variety of Intel processors.
L1d Cache Flush On Context Switch Moves Forward For Linux In Light Of Vulnerabilities
A new patch series sent out just under one month ago was providing opt-in L1 data cache flushing on context switching. That work has now been revived again and now with documentation added it's clear that this work is being done in response to a recent CVE being made public...
Linux Exec Should Be Less Deadlock Prone In Future Kernels
Ongoing work around Linux's exec() code should make it less deadlock prone in future kernel versions...
/dev/random Seeing Performance Work For Linux 5.7
The Linux 5.7 kernel will bring random performance improvements as in /dev/random...
Kaidan 0.5 Released As The KDE-Focused Jabber/XMPP Chat Client
Kaidan is the open-source project that last year joined KDE as a Jabber/XMPP chat client. After a half year of work, Kaidan 0.5 has finally been released...
Linux 5.7 Perf Changes Include Additions For AMD Zen 3, Intel Tiger Lake
The perf subsystem continues to be quite lively with improvements and for Linux 5.7 is seeing a number of low-level improvements...
Phoronix Test Suite 9.6 Milestone 2 Released For Latest Cross-Platform Benchmarking
The second development release of the Phoronix Test Suite 9.6 cross-platform benchmarking software is now available for evaluation and testing...
Looking At The LVI Mitigation Impact On Intel Cascade Lake Refresh
On Friday I posted some initial numbers looking at the LVI mitigation impact when using the LLVM Clang compiler with that open-source, multi-platform compiler having landed its mitigation this week for Intel's Load Value Injection (LVI) vulnerability that was disclosed in March. Through the weekend I have been running some additional tests of this compiler-based mitigation and in this article are some numbers off Cascade Lake Refresh, which while recently released is reported by Intel to still be vulnerable to this new disclosure.
KVM With Linux 5.7 Supporting Protected/Secure VM Guests For IBM POWER + s390
Both of IBM's s390 and POWER CPU architectures are seeing secure/protected guest virtual machine support with KVM on the in-development Linux 5.7 kernel...
XFS Working Towards Online Repair, Many Underlying Improvements
While XFS dates back to the 90's and has been in the Linux kernel for nearly two decades, this proven file-system continues aging gracefully and continuing to see more improvements. With Linux 5.7 is another step forward for XFS...
KDE Starts April With Big Performance Jump For Local I/O + 50~95% Faster Samba Transfers
KDE developers managed to squeeze some long-problematic I/O optimizations into the KDE code-base this week along with other enhancements to make for a nice first week of April...
DRM TTM Hugepage Support Lands In Linux 5.7
The work led by VMware on allowing the Direct Rendering Manager's TTM memory management code support huge page tables has been added to Linux 5.7...
Linux 5.7 To Support Spawning A Process In A Different Cgroup From Its Parent
An important infrastructure change with the Linux 5.7 kernel now allows the ability to create a process in a different cgroup from the parent process...
Loongson Improvements Land In Linux 5.7 To Improve The Chinese MIPS CPUs
The MIPS architecture improvements for Linux 5.7 are headlined by Loongson support improvements for those Chinese manufactured MIPS64 platforms...
Open-Source Unvanquished Game Aiming For A New Release Soon
One of the most promising open-source game projects of the 2010s when it comes to gameplay and visual quality is the Unvanquished project but sadly in recent years has been fairly quiet although new code continues to be contributed to their repository. It looks like in the weeks ahead could finally be a new release...
The New Microsoft exFAT File-System Driver Has Landed In Linux 5.7
As we have been expecting the new Samsung-developed file-system driver for Microsoft's exFAT has successfully landed into the Linux 5.7 kernel to replace the existing exFAT driver added in Linux 5.4 last year after Microsoft published the file-system specifications and gave their blessing to have the support mainlined in the Linux kernel...