Phoronix

Embedded Linux consulting firm Bootlin has been working on improving the security of OpenWrt, the Linux distribution popular for running on routers / networking equipment and other embedded Linux networking use-cases...

For those of you running EXT4 with Direct I/O on the likes of Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory or PMEM simulated via a virtual machine, better write performance is coming when overwriting already allocated blocks...

While we have found recent Linux kernels paired with latest motherboard BIOS releases to work out generally well for recent AMD APUs, not everyone has been having a trouble-free experience on recent kernels. But an affected user has discovered a possible workaround if hitting stability issues...

Just under one month since the libinput 1.15 test release, this input handling library is now out with its official update...

Fedora Linux has long been well known for always shipping with bleeding-edge GCC compiler releases even if it means a near-final pre-release, thanks in part to Red Hat's significant engineering resources to GCC and the GNU toolchain in general. With Fedora 32 it's expected to be no different with having the upcoming GCC 10 compiler...

Building on earlier GCC commits for Arm's BFloat16 (BF16) support and other new extensions, a late change landing for GCC 10 is the command line options for targeting the ARMv8.6-A architecture and optionally toggling i8mm and BF16 extensions...

Mesa3D as principally the collection of Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers is up to 2,996,270 lines of code (and documentation / associated scripts) within its Git tree! That should put it over the three million mark very soon while the Git activity was up by about 20% in 2019...

Fedora 32 is likely to make use of systemd's sysusers.d functionality for packages declaring new system users as part of the package installation process. This change proposal is being led by Red Hat's Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek of their systemd team...

Up to now the most recent Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop with Ubuntu Linux has been using Comet Lake processors while now the 10th Generation XPS 13 Developer Edition has been announced with Ice Lake processors...

Building upon Coreboot Icelake support that has been coming together recently is now the initial Intel support for Jasperlake and Tigerlake. Additionally, when it comes to the Icelake support, there is experimental/work-in-progress support for the Icelake-powered Razer Blade Stealth laptop...

The first batch for 2020 of DRM-Misc updates have been sent to DRM-Next of the smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers and other core / user-space API changes to our favorite subsystem...

As of New Year's morning, systemd's Git tree was at 1,273,896 lines spread across 3,522 commits built up over 42,700+ commits from around 1,500 different authors...

With last month's release of KDE's Kate 19.12 text editor there was an initial plug-in for Language Server Protocol (LSP) support to better allow language-agnostic support for code syntax highlighting and other features. There were some issues in that initial implementation but with Kate 19.12.1 and beyond will be better support...

Christian Hergert of Red Hat who is known for his work on the GNOME Builder IDE has recently been hacking on a new project called Bonsai that is designed as a GNOME-focused multi-device synchronization service akin to a personal cloud...

Among the issues that game developers have been facing in bringing their games to Linux for Google's Stadia cloud gaming service apparently stem from kernel scheduler issues. We've known the Linux kernel scheduler could use some improvements and independent developers like Con Kolivas with BFS / MuQSS have pushed for such, but hopefully in 2020 we'll see some real action...

In addition to Clear Linux seeing more performance optimizations in 2019 (more so than Fedora and Ubuntu during the year), it also benefited from a new desktop installer, new help forums, and more of Intel's partners talking about their current or planned usage of Clear Linux...

There hasn't been a new GNU Hurd release since the microkernel's 0.9 release back in 2016, but at least other areas of the stack continue inching further. Glibc as an important piece to the GNU toolchain saw some improvements for Hurd during December...

As of this morning in the Linux kernel Git source tree, the kernel weighs in at 27.8 million lines!..

For those interested in benchmarks of the $99+ PineBook ARM Linux laptop, more results continue to be uploaded on OpenBenchmarking.org...

Drew DeVault released Sway 1.3 RC1 on New Year's Eve as the latest test release for this increasingly popular i3-inspired Wayland compositor built off his WLROOTS library...