Phoronix

Stemming from the recent news in Fedora 32 potentially LTO'ing packages by default for better performance and not yet having checked on the Link-Time Optimization performance of the in-development GCC 10, here is a fresh look at the possible performance gains from making use of link-time optimizations for generating faster binaries. This round of testing was done on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and is complementary to the recent Profile Guided Optimization benchmarks.

AMD has issued their first update to the open-source Radeon GPU Profiler since the v1.6 update last July that introduced initial RDNA/Navi support...

Wiring up an additional feature for Intel's IGC Linux network driver that is for their 2.5G Ethernet devices is allowing data to be sent up to 7% or so faster...

Similar to Fedora's move last year to compress RPMs with Zstd rather than XZ for much faster decompression speeds and a better compression ratio at the highest level, OpenMandriva has now enacted a similar change...

This weekend I posted some fresh benchmarks of the Liquorix kernel against upstream Linux 5.4 and found the gaming performance to be rather disappointing for that kernel flavor derived from the "Zen" patches and more. Fortunately, the Zen kernel patches now include a fix that should make their gaming performance more competitive...

Last week I reported on a possible workaround for helping AMD APUs with stability issues on recent Linux kernels. That behavior will now be the new temporary default in dealing with stability issues on Raven APUs...

Adding to the many changes on the way with Linux 5.6 is the Rockchip DRM display driver supporting the PX30 SoC...

A late change proposal for Fedora 32 would jump the shipped Mono package from version 5.20 to version 6.6...

It was just shy of a month ago in Mesa 20.0-devel code that RadeonSI enabled NIR by default to enjoy OpenGL 4.6 support and now already ahead of the Mesa 20.0 branching the previous TGSI code-path has been removed. TGSI has been the default intermediate representation of RadeonSI and other Gallium3D drivers but these days NIR has become the go-to IR for Mesa drivers...

Following AMD's keynote with announcing the Ryzen 4000 series + RX 5600 XT + Threadripper 3990X, Intel now has up their address from the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Here are all the highlights from the perspective of a Linux user...

Kicking off the Consumer Electronics Show 2020 in Las Vegas, AMD CEO Lisa Su has begun with some interesting product announcements.....

Firefox 72 is now available from Mozilla's FTP server as their first release of 2020 and ahead of their more aggressive release cycle moving forward...

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has shared his vision for Fedora over the next decade and is encouraging discussions about the direction of this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution over the next five to ten years...

This morning's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting approved more changes for this spring's release of Fedora 32...

With Python 2 having reached end-of-life at the start of 2020, Ubuntu and Debian developers continue their work on removing Python 2 at least from the base OS. Work continues on transitioning packages to Python 3 or otherwise ultimately dropping unmaintained packages...

A new work-in-progress feature for systemd is "PathImages" though there is a suggestion this option be renamed to "MountPaths", but in any case is about allowing arbitrary images / block devices to be mounted at any path by systemd...

While there still is several weeks to go until the Linux 5.5 kernel reaches stable and that marking the start of the Linux 5.6 merge window, already from the work we've been tracking in the various "next" branches, this first full kernel cycle of 2020 is going to be a big one...

Shortly before Christmas were a couple open-source Nouveau driver patches volleyed by NVIDIA. Some of that work is now queuing in the Nouveau DRM tree ahead of the Linux 5.6 merge window...

While still a draft standard, support for the RISC-V "V" Vector Extension support for the Linux kernel is currently being prepared...

Linux 5.5 development has been picking up in recent days following Christmas week and New Year's but now more upstream developers returning to their keyboards in order to get this next kernel update buttoned up for its debut around month's end...