Phoronix

Following last month's Debian init system diversity vote where the Debian developers decided on a general resolution of focusing on systemd but support exploring alternatives, the official Debian Policy has been updated to reflect that...

One of the changes planned for Fedora 32 has been to enable EarlyOOM by default to better handle low memory situations either due to the system running with minimal RAM or under memory pressure. But the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has yet to reach a decision over this default...

Earlier this month many Phoronix readers were interested in our fresh tests of the XanMod-patched Linux kernel for boosting the desktop and workstation performance compared to Ubuntu's default Linux kernel. Among many patches, XanMod does pull in some kernel patches from Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux, so we figured it would be interesting to see how the XanMod'ed Ubuntu compares to Clear Linux performance.

One of several projects implementing the OpenGL graphics API over Vulkan has been Think Silicon's GLOVE library. GLOVE currently is focuses on OpenGL ES 2.0 + EGL 1.4 support and is a standalone project unlike Mesa's Zink Gallium3D driver working on OpenGL / GLES over Vulkan too. GLOVE 0.4 is out today as a big feature update...

Last week I eagerly reported on Ryzen CPUs on Linux finally seeing CCD temperatures and current/voltage reporting thanks to new patches to the k10temp driver by Google's Guenter Roeck who oversees the kernel's hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem. The patches seem to be working well and are tentatively queued in hwmon-next, but more testing is still needed...

While there has been the initial Microsoft exFAT file-system driver since Linux 5.4, that code is based on a vintage snapshot of prior Samsung code. Samsung engineers meanwhile have been working to upstream a much newer and better off exFAT implementation to replace that existing driver and it looks like it could be ready for Linux 5.6...

Not to be confused with Ubuntu's Mir display stack or Rustlang's MIR, the new MIR effort by Red Hat developer Vladimir Makarov is a new project focused on providing a lightweight JIT compiler...

With the upcoming Linux 5.6 kernel cycle will be the first of many patches to come surrounding AMD Zen 3 "Family 19h" support...

The seventh weekly release candidate to Linux 5.5 is now available for testing...

While a Red Hat developer is working on "Goals" to try to improve upon Make, the GNU Make project is not slowing down and is out this Sunday with a big update...

Following the recent AppArmor performance regression in Linux 5.5 (since resolved), some Phoronix readers had requested tests out of curiosity in looking at the performance impact of Fedora's decision to utilize SELinux by default. Here is how the Fedora Workstation 31 performance compares out-of-the-box with SELinux to disabling it.

In addition to NetworkManager having good WireGuard support in advance of this secure VPN tunnel tech landing with the Linux 5.6 kernel, Intel's ConnMan software is also ready with supporting WireGuard...

An area where Intel continues striking with rhythm and near perfection is on the open-source software front with their countless speedy and useful open-source innovations that often go unmatched as well as timely hardware support. Out this weekend is their OSPray 2.0 release for this damn impressive ray-tracing engine...

This past week KDE Plasma 5.18 reached beta for this next long-term support release of the modern KDE desktop. While it's approaching the finish line next month, developers have not let up on more improvements in making this one of their best and most polished releases ever...

A few days ago I reported on AMD's "k10temp" Linux kernel driver finally seeing the ability to report CCD temperatures and CPU current/voltage readings as a big improvement to this hardware monitoring driver. The work hasn't yet been queued for inclusion into the mainline kernel, but initial testing is working well and a second revision to the patches has been sent out...

Hopefully you didn't yet book your tickets to XDC2020 as the annual X.Org conference as the venue -- and host country for that matter -- may change...

GNU Binutils 2.34 has been branched off in preparing for the upcoming release of this important set of "binary utilities" to the GNU compiler toolchain. Most interesting with Binutils 2.34 is in fact an optional HTTP server support for enhancing the developer/debugging experience...

As for CVE-2019-14615 the Intel graphics vulnerability disclosed this week affecting Gen7 through Gen9 graphics architectures, it's been dubbed "iGPU Leak" by the researchers involved. Thanks to the researcher who originally discovered this vulnerability having reached out to us, we now have some more information on this issue they describe as a "dangerous vulnerability."..

As of this morning experimental support for C++20 coroutines has been merged into the GCC 10 compiler!..

We haven't heard of the Simple Firmware Interface in a number of years, but that changed this week in Linux now formally marking SFI as "obsolete" and confirmation Intel does not plan to ship any future platforms with this standard that dates back to their early days of working on Atom-powered mobile devices...