Phoronix

The first release candidate of the forthcoming OpenZFS 2.0 is now available for testing on both Linux and BSD systems...

Covered back in February was work for Nouveau's NVC0 Gallium3D driver to finalle make use of the Mesa on-disk shader cache functionality for speeding up game load times by allowing previously compiled GLSL shaders to be cached to disk. That work by Red Hat has finally been mainlined in Mesa 20.3...

As we frequently cover, making use of compiler PGO (Profile Guided Optimizations) can mean some sizable performance wins, assuming the generated usage profile is accurate. With the imminent Chrome 85 availability, Google is now making use of PGO with their default LLVM Clang compiler toolchain for squeezing out around 10% better performance...

A single patch coming in at nearly three thousand lines was merged on Monday for the Linux 5.9 kernel that make the use of the "fallthrough" macro more widespread throughout the kernel...

Not even one month passed since the previous libX11 security vulnerabilities were made public while today a new security advisory was issued along with releasing version 1.6.12 of this key X11 library...

Now that the default graphics driver stack of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is a few months old, here is a look at the AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance of Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS out-of-the-box compared to upgrading against Linux 5.9 Git and Mesa 20.3-devel for seeing if the performance advantages are worthwhile in making the leap to the newer RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers paired with the very latest kernel.

Vladimir Makarov of Red Hat spoke at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference during the GNU Tools Track on lightweight JIT compilers and the effectiveness (or not) of GCC's JIT implementation as well as LLVM's JIT in the context of just-in-time support for Ruby. But following those shortcomings with GCC/LLVM JIT, he's been working on MIR as a lightweight JIT compiler...

Last month the German Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers launched the PULSE 15 with AMD Ryzen "Renoir" processors. Today they launched a new model also featuring the very popular AMD Renoir parts...

Following ongoing work for over a year on moving to OpenZFS for FreeBSD's ZFS file-system support, FreeBSD HEAD overnight has imported the OpenZFS code-base...

Queued now in the "x86/cpu" development branch ahead of the Linux 5.10 kernel later this year is the change to make use of Intel's new "SERIALIZE" instruction within the kernel's "sync_core" code that is used for stopping the speculative execution and prefetching of modified code...

Firefox 80.0 is now available. There isn't too much to get excited about with Firefox 80, but at least some changes on the developer front...

With vulnerabilities like L1TF and Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) prominently showing the insecurities of Intel Hyper Threading, DigitalOcean and other organizations continue spearheading a core scheduling implementation for Linux that could allow HT to remain enabled but with reducing the security risk...

When the Zink Gallium3D driver running OpenGL over Vulkan was first introduced in 2018 and since one of the main blockers besides the performance overhead has been the limited OpenGL 2/3 support. The GL3/GL4 support has been improving with time for Zink and when making use of the latest out-of-tree patches is even possible to get OpenGL 4.6 running over Vulkan with Zink!..

As part of the virtual SIGGRAPH20, Intel is using the opportunity to talk up their ray-tracing efforts...

Proposed last summer by Valve and Collabora developers were extending the Linux kernel's futex system call to allow for more optimal thread pool synchronization and paired with Wine/Proton work to better match the semantics of Windows. That then spun into creating a new system call, futex2. With the recently closed Linux 5.9 merge window the new futex2 system call didn't land, but the work is still being pursued...

For a number of years the GNU Compiler Collection has shipped experimental support for the DWARF 5 debugging data format while finally for next year's GCC 11 release it might be deemed stable and used by default...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has seen an initial trap handler implementation for helping to more easily catch and diagnose various issues stemming from Vulkan shaders...

The hipSYCL effort has been about supporting the Khronos SYCL single-source language built on C++ across any CPU with OpenMP as well as AMD Radeon GPUs via ROCm and NVIDIA GPUs via CUDA. The hipSYCL effort has a new "Lite" experimental runtime under development...

One of many performance optimization projects being pursued by Canonical's Daniel van Vugt in the GNOME space has been working to lower the latency when using NVIDIA's proprietary driver to address high latency spikes in certain situations as well as stuttering on the desktop. The Ubuntu developer has had patches under testing for months while this past week a latest revision was made available...

The "first real user" of the BPF user mode driver facility is on the way for Linux 5.10...