Phoronix

In addition to Intel IGC network driver performance-boosting TSO support, also queued within Intel's next-queue tree of networking changes is a new software bus called Virtual Bus...

Apple AirScan is akin to their AirPrint technology for supporting various printers from Apple devices without the need for specialized drivers. Multi-function printers compliant with AirPrint also need to implement AirScan for scanner functionality, thus opening up most of today's multi-function printers to supporting this scanning standard. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS could end up supporting AirScan nicely thanks to new SANE back-ends...

Quietly released over the holidays was Intel's quarterly update to the Intel Media Driver that serves as their modern open-source GPU-accelerated video encode/decode solution for Linux systems...

Given the recent discussions over the default performance of the Linux scheduler, the Liquorix patches to the Linux kernel, and other recent forum discussions over different kernel configurations and flavors, here are some reference benchmarks looking at the performance of some of the kernel options available to Clear Linux users...

While more Linux distributions have begun packaging (and in the case of Fedora, potentially deploying by default) EarlyOOM as the out-of-memory monitoring daemon for trying to improve the Linux desktop's handling of low memory situations, systemd ultimately should be picking up its own out-of-memory daemon in the months ahead...

The recent work by longtime kernel developer Andy Lutomirski on improving Linux's random APIs and introducing a new "GRND_INSECURE" option is now queued into the random dev queue ahead of the Linux 5.6 cycle...

At the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas there isn't too often "pure" Linux being showcased aside from the likes of Ubuntu occasionally running on demo machines or servers, the year Canonical was there with Ubuntu TV, and a number of other select mostly small instances where Linux is prominently featured. That's in part why I stopped regularly attending CES (as well as budgetary constraints due to ad-blockers...) but this year at CES there is a large floor showcase of the Linux Foundation's Automotive Grade Linux...

Following Fedora's plans to begin using EarlyOOM by default and other recent upstream discussions about Linux's relatively poor performance when it comes to the Linux desktop not handling memory pressure / low RAM situations well, Intel's Clear Linux looks like it will soon offer EarlyOOM as an option...

For those plagued by OpenGL corruption issues with the RadeonSI driver on Polaris GPUs like the Radeon RX 580, System DMA (SDMA) support is now being disabled as a workaround...

The NIR intermediate representation is already faster than GLSL IR and TGSI but could be seeing even quicker linking speeds moving forward...

For fans of the easy-to-use Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution, 19.0 preview images as the first test builds have begun to surface...

As reported last month, Flang is expected to land in the LLVM 10.0 source tree ahead of the feature freeze for the v10.0 release due out in February. That landing is now scheduled to take place next week...

Stemming from the recent news in Fedora 32 potentially LTO'ing packages by default for better performance and not yet having checked on the Link-Time Optimization performance of the in-development GCC 10, here is a fresh look at the possible performance gains from making use of link-time optimizations for generating faster binaries. This round of testing was done on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and is complementary to the recent Profile Guided Optimization benchmarks.

AMD has issued their first update to the open-source Radeon GPU Profiler since the v1.6 update last July that introduced initial RDNA/Navi support...

Wiring up an additional feature for Intel's IGC Linux network driver that is for their 2.5G Ethernet devices is allowing data to be sent up to 7% or so faster...

Similar to Fedora's move last year to compress RPMs with Zstd rather than XZ for much faster decompression speeds and a better compression ratio at the highest level, OpenMandriva has now enacted a similar change...

This weekend I posted some fresh benchmarks of the Liquorix kernel against upstream Linux 5.4 and found the gaming performance to be rather disappointing for that kernel flavor derived from the "Zen" patches and more. Fortunately, the Zen kernel patches now include a fix that should make their gaming performance more competitive...

Last week I reported on a possible workaround for helping AMD APUs with stability issues on recent Linux kernels. That behavior will now be the new temporary default in dealing with stability issues on Raven APUs...

Adding to the many changes on the way with Linux 5.6 is the Rockchip DRM display driver supporting the PX30 SoC...

A late change proposal for Fedora 32 would jump the shipped Mono package from version 5.20 to version 6.6...