Phoronix

Up to now the most recent Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop with Ubuntu Linux has been using Comet Lake processors while now the 10th Generation XPS 13 Developer Edition has been announced with Ice Lake processors...

Building upon Coreboot Icelake support that has been coming together recently is now the initial Intel support for Jasperlake and Tigerlake. Additionally, when it comes to the Icelake support, there is experimental/work-in-progress support for the Icelake-powered Razer Blade Stealth laptop...

The first batch for 2020 of DRM-Misc updates have been sent to DRM-Next of the smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers and other core / user-space API changes to our favorite subsystem...

As of New Year's morning, systemd's Git tree was at 1,273,896 lines spread across 3,522 commits built up over 42,700+ commits from around 1,500 different authors...

With last month's release of KDE's Kate 19.12 text editor there was an initial plug-in for Language Server Protocol (LSP) support to better allow language-agnostic support for code syntax highlighting and other features. There were some issues in that initial implementation but with Kate 19.12.1 and beyond will be better support...

Christian Hergert of Red Hat who is known for his work on the GNOME Builder IDE has recently been hacking on a new project called Bonsai that is designed as a GNOME-focused multi-device synchronization service akin to a personal cloud...

Among the issues that game developers have been facing in bringing their games to Linux for Google's Stadia cloud gaming service apparently stem from kernel scheduler issues. We've known the Linux kernel scheduler could use some improvements and independent developers like Con Kolivas with BFS / MuQSS have pushed for such, but hopefully in 2020 we'll see some real action...

In addition to Clear Linux seeing more performance optimizations in 2019 (more so than Fedora and Ubuntu during the year), it also benefited from a new desktop installer, new help forums, and more of Intel's partners talking about their current or planned usage of Clear Linux...

There hasn't been a new GNU Hurd release since the microkernel's 0.9 release back in 2016, but at least other areas of the stack continue inching further. Glibc as an important piece to the GNU toolchain saw some improvements for Hurd during December...

As of this morning in the Linux kernel Git source tree, the kernel weighs in at 27.8 million lines!..

For those interested in benchmarks of the $99+ PineBook ARM Linux laptop, more results continue to be uploaded on OpenBenchmarking.org...

Drew DeVault released Sway 1.3 RC1 on New Year's Eve as the latest test release for this increasingly popular i3-inspired Wayland compositor built off his WLROOTS library...

KDE developer Nate Graham who is well known for his weekly development summaries in the KDE space has shared his opinions on the desktop's features he expects to see materialize this year as well as some of the less likely bits...

Godot lead developer Juan Linietsky provided a New Year's Eve look at the origins of this wildly successful open-source game engine from their beginnings, the technical advancements of this open-source game engine, the big step forward with Godot 3.0, and what's on the horizon with Godot 4.0...

Happy New Year to all Phoronix readers...

Greg Kroah-Hartman took time out of his New Year's Eve festivities to release Linux 5.4.7, 4.19.92, and 4.14.161 as the newest supported stable releases of the Linux kernel...

Back in September was an initial "request for comments" by Google on some kernel work they are doing with Kernel Runtime Security Instrumentation (KRSI) for providing eBPF-powered security helpers, ultimately for creating dynamic MAC and audit policies. Just before Christmas the first official version of this new eBPF-based instrumentation was sent out and is being prepared for deployment within Google...

One of the interesting milestones this year in the compiler world was the ability with LLVM Clang 9.0 to compile Linux 5.3+ for x86_64 without needing any extra patches to either the kernel or the LLVM/Clang compiler. That initial support in Linux 5.3 was not without a few issues, but on Linux 5.5 the experience is in great shape with the stable Clang compiler.

Well, this is a hell of a way to surprisingly end the 2010s... Reiser5. Reiser5 brings a new format to the Reiser file-system and brings some new innovations to this file-system while keeping to its controversial name...

With bisecting one of the big regressions in Linux 5.5 and finding the culprit to be an AppArmor change while using Hackbench as one of the most affected tests, I was curious to see what other workloads are impacted big by AppArmor on the current Linux 5.5 Git code. Here are 72 tests with the Threadripper 3970X on Linux 5.5 Git when toggling AppArmor...