Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 57 min 33 sec ago
Intel's Linux Graphics Driver Gets Patched For A Gen9 Graphics Vulnerability
On top of the Intel graphics driver patches back from November for denial of service and privilege escalation bugs, the Linux kernel received a new patch today for "CVE-2019-14615" regarding a possible data disclosure with Gen9 graphics hardware...
The Time Namespace Appears To Finally Be On-Deck For The Mainline Linux Kernel
Back in 2018 a time namespace was proposed for the Linux kernel and now in 2020 it looks like this kernel functionality will be merged for mainline, likely with the upcoming Linux 5.6 cycle...
CoreAVI VkCoreGL SC1 Hits Compliance For Ushering Vulkan Into Safety Critical Systems
Vulkan could soon be used indirectly on safety critical military and aerospace displays thanks to CoreAVI's VkCoreGL SC1...
Goals: Red Hat Developer Working On New Tool To Improve Upon Make
Longtime Red Hat developer Richard Jones has begun developing "Goals" as a new tool to improve upon Make, the common build automation tool...
LLVM/Clang 10.0 Adds AMD Zen 2 Scheduler Model For Optimized Code Generation
It's too bad that it has taken so many months after AMD Zen 2 based Ryzen and EPYC processors began shipping to see this compiler support in place, but the good news now is that for the upcoming release of LLVM 10.0 is now the Zen 2 scheduler model being added to the "znver2" target...
AMD Begins Providing PowerPC Builds Of Their "AOMP" GPU Compiler
AOMP is the AMD GPU compiler for OpenMP and HIP support on GPUs as part of Radeon Open Compute 3.0 (ROCm 3.0). Now they have begun providing PowerPC 64-bit LE builds of AOMP as part of allowing Radeon GPU compute to happen on POWER9 systems...
The MLIR-Targeting "FC" LLVM Fortran Compiler Is Now Open-Source
Last week we reported on "FC" as a new LLVM Fortran compiler targeting the new MLIR intermediate representation. That new Fortran compiler is now public and open-source...
X.Org Server 1.20.7 Released With A Handful Of Fixes For GLAMOR + Modesetting
With no sign of X.Org Server 1.21 on the horizon, the X.Org Server 1.20 point releases continue rolling on...
Unity 8 Desktop On Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Could Take A Year Before Being Usable
While Canonical no longer develops their Unity 8 stack for Ubuntu, the UBports crew continues advancing Ubuntu Touch mobile as a community project and as part of that they do work on Unity 8 for their devices and desktop support. But if you're hoping to see Unity 8 running nicely on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, that could be a while...
Wayland Adds Meson Build System Support
While Wayland's Weston reference compositor has been using the Meson build system for about the past year, only this week did Wayland itself see Meson support introduced...
Xfce 4.16 Is Making Good Progress On Utilizing GTK3 Client-Side Decorations
Several months ago we learned of the Xfce 4.16 plans to drop GTK2 support and explore client-side decoration goals among other changes for this lightweight desktop environment release expected in late 2020...
Intel Uncore Frequency Driver On Linux Is Closer To Mainline With Latest Patches
Sent out shortly before the holidays was an Intel Uncore Frequency driver for Linux servers. That driver has now been revised with the latest fixes and is looking like it could soon land in mainline for helping latency-sensitive servers...
Fedora 32 Greenlit For Enabling FSTRIM Support By Default
Back in December was the proposal to finally enable FSTRIM by default for Fedora 32 in benefiting solid-state storage. Today the formal approval was given by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee to go ahead with this long overdue change...
Git 2.25 Released As Its First Update Of 2020
Git 2.25 is out today with over 500 commits making up this latest feature release...
Looking At The Linux Performance Two Years After Spectre / Meltdown Mitigations
Last week marked the two year anniversary since the formal public disclosure of the Spectre and Meltdown disclosures. To commemorate that anniversary, I was running some fresh benchmarks of various Intel desktop and server processors with the in-development Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to look at the performance impact today with the default CPU vulnerability mitigations and then again with the mitigations disabled at run-time.
Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 Milestone 1 Released
The first development release of Phoronix Test Suite 9.4-Vestby is now available for evaluation...
GCC 10 Enters Its Fourth Stage Of Development, 20 Bugs Of Highest Priority
Following the long-awaited GCC transition from SVN to Git that took place this weekend, the GNU Compiler Collection is kicking off this week by transitioning to "stage four" development on the GCC 10 compiler...
RADV's Next-Gen Geometry Code Continues To Be Revised For Navi GPUs
The NGG (Next-Gen Geometry) support with Navi continues to be refined by the open-source AMD Linux graphics drivers with the RADV Vulkan driver seeing a fresh batch of fixes/clean-ups, inspired in part by the NGG code from the RadeonSI and AMDVLK drivers...
Intel Revs Linux Patches For Per-Client Engine Busyness - Allowing For Great GPU Insight
One of the set of patches for Intel's Linux kernel graphics driver that have been floating around for more than one year is about exposing per-client (process) statistics in how each application is making use of the GPU's render/blitter/video hardware and various insightful statistics related to that. The patches aren't queued for mainline yet but at least a new revision of the work was published...
Linux 5.5-rc6 Released With Some Notable Radeon Graphics Fixes Plus Other Random Work
Linus Torvalds has just issued Linux 5.5-rc6 as the latest test release ahead of the stable Linux 5.5 kernel due out in a few weeks...