Phoronix

There is plenty of PCI work that landed for the Linux 5.6 kernel merge window...

During the first month of 2020 on Phoronix were 305 original news stories and another 18 Linux hardware reviews / featured-length articles. Here is a look back at what has been exciting Linux and open-source enthusiasts so far in 2020...

Intel on Friday released Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL) version 1.2, formerly known as MKL-DNN. With this release comes both new features and better performance...

The random changes have been sent in for Linux 5.6 that yield /dev/random behavioral changes and a new random flag...

Adding to the Linux 5.6 excitement is the hardware enablement of the MIPS-based Ingenic X1000 SoC...

University of Illinois and associated developers have released HPVM 0.5, their LLVM-based compiler infrastructure for Heterogeneous Parallel Systems with CPU execution and OpenCL-based NVIDIA GPU support...

Following on from last week's story that it was looking like Linux 5.6 would drop Intel MPX support, that has now taken place...

GNU C Library 2.31 (Glibc 2.31) should be releasing in the days ahead and is now under a hard freeze for this next feature release to this important libc implementation...

When carrying out our Windows vs. Linux benchmarks we normally are doing so on interesting high-end hardware but for today's benchmarking is a look at how a $199 USD laptop powered by an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor compares between Windows 10 as it's shipped on the laptop against the forthcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux distribution.

Earlier this month when Intel disclosed CVE-2019-14615 as a security vulnerability affecting their graphics architecture, older Gen7 graphics saw a huge hit to their performance with the initial patches for addressing this vulnerability on Ivy Bridge and Haswell processors. Fortunately, a new mitigation patch series was sent out this week where they believe the performance costs are now avoided...

In addition to Linux Mint 20 coming this year that will be based off Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the Linux Mint crew is preparing LMDE 4 as their re-base of the Debian based variant...

With the V3D Gallium3D driver hitting OpenGL ES 3.1 compliance, the Raspberry Pi Foundation and their partners have turned to focusing on getting their Vulkan driver off the ground for Raspberry Pi 4 and future SBCs...

NVIDIA has sent out word that they no longer plan to issue anymore driver updates for their 340 series Linux legacy branch...

Lead UBports developer Marius Gripsgard has shared some exciting news: their Unity 8 code is now riding happily on Wayland...

Following the Xen hypervisor in mitigating against a possible Spectre Variant One and L1 Terminal Fault combination attack, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) has added its own protections with the Linux 5.6 kernel on top of all the other mitigations they've had to endure as a result of CPU vulnerabilities over the past two years...

We previously covered how CERN has moved away from Microsoft products over licensing fees and instead has begun employing various open-source alternatives. Now this European Organization for Nuclear Research is moving away from Facebook Workplace to instead make use of more open-source software packages...

The F2FS file-system compression functionality is the main feature addition for this flash-optimized file-system coming with the Linux 5.6 kernel. This native LZO/LZ4 compression support is geared for optimizing the lifespan of SSDs/flash memory thanks to reducing disk writes...

While not as exciting as the USB4 support and staging code lightening for these areas managed by Linux's second in command Greg Kroah-Hartman, he also sent out the char/misc updates this week with other hardware support improvements...

We've seen a lot of odd products pick up the Free Software Foundation's "Respect Your Freedom" endorsement like a USB microphone, various re-branded motherboards, and even last year certified a USB to parallel printer cable. The latest product they are endorsing -- and their first endorsement of 2020 -- is a USD 802.11 a/b/g/n PCIe half-mini card starting out at $59 USD but going up to $79 for this outdated wireless adapter...

Mesa 20.0 feature development is over with the code now being branched from Git master and the first of several release candidates issued...