Phoronix

With the newly-minted Linux 5.6 kernel is initial support for USB4 based on Intel's Thunderbolt code while for Linux 5.7 is a wide variety of other USB changes...

Red Hat's David Howells has sent in pull requests introducing the new fsinfo() system call and mount/superblock notifications and as part of that a general notification mechanism for the kernel...

In the past using the Wayland-based GNOME Shell session and other Wayland compositors has generally resulted in a performance hit in going through (X)Wayland but that is much less so these days. Here are some initial benchmarks of Ubuntu 20.04 running various Steam Linux gaming benchmarks both under the default X.Org-based session and then again when using the Wayland session and its (X)Wayland support.

The previously reported work on split lock detection due to its big performance hit is now queued up for Linux 5.7...

Nearly one year after announcing OpenTelemetry as the merger of the OpenCensus and OpenTracing projects, Google has announced today OpenTelemetry has advanced to its beta phase...

Greg Kroah-Hartman began sending in his pull requests this morning for the areas of the Linux kernel he oversees. With the staging area changes for Linux 5.7 there is some nice spring cleaning...

For those that are normally spinning their own kernels and punctually upgrading to new releases, you will want to hold off on the new Linux 5.6 kernel for the moment if you use the Intel "IWLWIFI" WiFi driver...

In-step with the Linux 5.6 release that mainlined the WireGuard kernel module for this secure VPN tunnel, WireGuard 1.0.0 has now been declared...

Following last night's release of Linux 5.6, the GNU FSFLA folks have put out the Linux-libre 5.6-gnu kernel as their fully-free-software kernel that disallows loading binary kernel modules, disables functionality requiring closed-source firmware/microcode, and other aspects to ensure only free software code is running on the system...

Back in December was a developer discussion over dropping or forking non-Gallium3D drivers. Since then the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver has successfully become the default OpenGL driver for Broadwell/Gen8 and newer while the non-Gallium3D drivers continue to just face bit rot. The discussion over dropping/forking non-Gallium3D Mesa drivers has been reignited...

X.Org Server 1.20.8 was released as the newest point release for this current stable branch. X.Org Server 1.20.8 brings a number of fixes with there still being no sign of X.Org Server 1.21 gearing up for release...

Within minutes of Linux 5.6 being released on Sunday evening, Jens Axboe was already with sending in the start of the various storage areas to the kernel that he oversees with their feature updates for Linux 5.7...

Lutris 0.5.5 is out today as the newest version of this Linux game manager to assist in installing both native and emulated games on Linux. Lutris continues to expand the scope of its "runners" for improving the Linux gaming experience...

Linus Torvalds just announced the release of the Linux 5.6 stable kernel a few minutes ago. This also means the Linux 5.7 merge window is now open for business...

There is less than one month to go until the official release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" but we've already begun experimenting with it for weeks across a variety of platforms. For the most part we have found Ubuntu 20.04 slated to offer some nice performance improvements, especially if upgrading from the existing LTS series, Ubuntu 18.04. In this article are our initial benchmarks looking at the Intel Xeon Scalable from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to the current 20.04 near-final state.

Earlier this month there was the proposal by a Linux kernel engineer for Amazon to flush the L1 data cache on context switches as another safeguard against the ever increasing CPU vulnerabilities...

Lead Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver developer Jason Ekstrand has ported an optimization from the Valve-backed AMD "ACO" compiler over to the NIR code-base for delivering some sizable performance improvements...

This week in KDE land there weren't too many new features introduced but a lot of low-level work to foster future features...

While we were hoping to see the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub driver introduced in Linux 5.7 for improving the AMD Ryzen Linux laptop experience, that now looks quite unlikely...

For the very common Intel "Gen9" graphics found on pretty much all current pre-Icelake hardware that is available through retail channels, high dynamic range (HDR) display support could soon be enabled under Linux for a subset of devices...