Phoronix

Since the release of Linux 5.6-rc1 that is coming in as a very feature-packed kernel, here are benchmarks of Linux 5.5 stable up against Linux 5.6-rc1 on a few of the systems tested so far while more results are in-progress...

While Linux 5.5 is out in the wild now as the latest stable version of the Linux kernel, it turns out some Intel kernel graphics driver patches were overlooked and this can spell trouble for some users...

One of the letdowns of the forthcoming Linux 5.6 kernel is that AMD's long-awaited Sensor Fusion Hub "SFH" open-source driver wasn't ready in time for merging this cycle, but it continues moving forward with hopes of seeing it in Linux 5.7...

RISC-V's Supervisor Binary Interface "SBI" is the interface between the platform-specific firmware and the running operating system or hypervisor for interacting with the supervisor execution environment in the higher privileged mode. The Linux kernel has been working to support a newer version of the SBI that is more extensible moving forward...

With the big Linux 5.6 kernel on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver side there is finally accelerated support for the GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" graphics cards (when paired with binary-only microcode). With that initial cut support is no GeForce 16 series Turing support, but that is now on-deck for Linux 5.7...

There is experimental work pending that plumbs support into MEMFD for creating "secret" memory areas. This secret memory support would then be exposed to user-space for different use-cases...

Wayland 1.18 is out today as the first update to the core Wayland code in nearly one year...

One of the interesting takeaways from my pre-launch briefing with AMD on the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X was AMD representatives actually recommending Clear Linux for use on this 64-core / 128-thread HEDT processor and the platform to which they've found the best performance. Yet, Clear Linux is an Intel open-source project. In any case, here are benchmarks of how Clear Linux performs against other Linux distributions on the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X within the System76 Thelio Major. And, holy crap, with the Threadripper 3990X on Clear Linux I managed to build the x86_64 default Linux kernel in under 20 seconds!

While the Godot 4.0 release is still months away from seeing its stable debut with the new Vulkan renderer, the Vulkan renderer branch was today merged to mainline...

While since 2016~2017 AMD has been posting Linux kernel patches for Secure Memory Encryption (SME) and Secure Encrypted Virtualization, coming out this morning is finally the first public patch series wiring up the Linux kernel for SEV-ES as further enhancing virtualization encryption...

The KDE community has released Plasma 5.18 as the newest version of their desktop and a release that is also a long-term support release, succeeding the aging Plasma 5.12 LTS...

Just as scheduled, earlier this month the feature freeze went into effect for Qt 5.15 as the last major step for Qt5 before seeing Qt 6.0 hopefully arrive towards the end of the year...

Mozilla Firefox 73 is available this morning as the latest update to this open-source cross-platform web browser...

Red Hat's Stratis storage project for offering enterprise storage capabilities on Linux to compete with the likes of ZFS and Btrfs while being built atop LVM and XFS saw the first update to its daemon of 2020...

Following this weekend's GNOME 3.36 beta, WebKitGTK 2.27.90 is available as a snapshot of this GTK-catered version of the WebKit layout engine on its path towards version 2.28...

With the recently released Linux 5.5 and its new features, one of the prominent changes on the storage front was the Btrfs file-system picking up new "RAID1C3" and "RAID1C4" modes for allowing either three or four copies of RAID1 data across more drives to potentially allow up to three of four drives to fail in a RAID1 array while still being able to recover that data for this file-system with its native RAID capabilities...

Now that the merge window is over for Linux 5.6, where the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver managed GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" series accelerated support, a new feature addition landed Monday in the Nouveau kernel development tree for the next cycle...

While not yet suitable for gamers or serious end usage, the Radeon "R600" Gallium3D driver that supports the Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 (pre-GCN) graphics cards now has an experimental NIR back-end...

For those still fond of the GNOME 2 desktop environment, the MATE Desktop Environment that's been living on as a continuation fork of GNOME2 is out with its version 1.24 update...

For those that may be looking to run an air-cooled AMD Ryzen 9 3950X especially in a rack-mount 4U chassis, here are some recent results I did from some testing using a Noctua NH-U9S with two 92mm fan configuration. Additionally, these results contain performance metrics from both CPUFreq Ondemand vs. Performance governors as an additional point of interest...