Phoronix

Given this week's release of Google Chrome 80, here are fresh benchmarks of Chrome 80 against Firefox 72 on Linux plus also a run with Firefox's WebRender option being enabled. This round of tests was under an Ubuntu 20.04 snapshot with AMD Ryzen processor and AMD Radeon VII graphics.

A second round of KVM virtualization updates were sent out today for the Linux 5.6 merge window that is still open through the weekend...

Mozilla developer Dzmitry Malyshau has provided an update on WGPU, their implementation of WebGPU built off GFX-RS and Rust for next-gen graphics and compute on the web...

Debian developer Mike Gabriel in cooperation with the UBports developers continuing to maintain Ubuntu Touch and Unity 8 are working to offer Unity 8 (and in turn, Mir) packages within Debian...

As another step towards tightening up the Linux kernel security, Intel's Kristen Carlson Accardi has proposed "FGKASLR" as a significant step forward for better enhancing the Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization...

Added back to Linux 5.4 was VirtIO-FS for better file/folder sharing with guest VMs that makes use of the FUSE protocol but is much faster than the likes of virtio-9p...

While the Linux 5.5 is out as stable today and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS isn't shipping until late April, it looks like they are settling on the use of the Linux 5.4 series, rather than the newer 5.5 and Linux 5.6 would be cutting too close to release anyhow for making this long-term support release...

It has been a while since there has been any new developments to report on BFQ, the Budget Fair Queueing I/O scheduler that offers both low-latency and high throughput modes, bandwidth and latency guarantees, and other functionality. With the ongoing Linux 5.6 cycle, BFQ at least has picked up some fixes...

The latest in our benchmarking fun with the $199+ Motile M141 laptop is seeing how well Intel's Clear Linux performs on it in relation to Ubuntu and Fedora.

The IOMMU changes have been sent in for the ongoing Linux 5.6 kernel merge window...

The Bareflank Linux hypervisor that is written in modern C++ and focused on security and serving as a framework/SDK for other hypervisors, finally experienced its big 2.0 release...

Systemd 245 is soon shipping as the first feature update of 2020 and it's another big one...

Oreboot is the effort that has been taking shape over the past year as an open-source focused, Rustlang-based downstream of Coreboot. Oreboot continues advancing in its own right concurrent to the wonderful Coreboot advancements...

The second test release of Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 is now available with this latest update focusing on improvements to the result viewer...

Debuginfod is the new ELFUTILS HTTP web server for providing debug information or even source code on-demand to debuggers and related development utilities...

Not yet mainlined in the Linux kernel but currently queued as part of the x86/cpu changes for next round is the ability for the kernel to detect split locks and either warn the offending applications or kill the processes...

Now promoted out of beta is the Google Chrome 80 web browser...

Fuzzing is an important means of finding unintended/invalid behavior within software and now there exists a fuzzer for providing Spectre-type vulnerabilities...

Intel firmware expert Brian Richardson was at FOSDEM 2020 to talk up UEFI Capsule Update functionality and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for allowing OEMs/ODMs to easily distribute firmware updates to Linux users for application with the Fwupd firmware updating utility...

With last month's release of the Radeon RX 5600 XT as quite a capable sub-$300 graphics card there was a new video BIOS at launch-day to significantly improve the performance even more. But that updated vBIOS was causing issues with the Linux driver. The necessary fix has now landed in linux-firmware.git as the necessary SMC firmware update for Navi...