Phoronix

When it comes to the support for AMD Ryzen 4000 "Renoir" laptop support under Linux, as outlined in my testing so far this month the main caveat is needing Linux 5.6~5.7 for good graphics support but on the likes of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with Linux 5.4 you will not have GPU acceleration. At least in the case of the Lenovo IdeaPad 5 I have been using to test, you also need Linux 5.7 Git for battery sensor support. Another item that in turn is coming with Linux 5.8 is CPU temperature reporting for the Renoir processors...

Last week Amazon AWS promoted their Graviton2 instances to general availability status with a variety of different sized EC2 instances as well as a bare metal instance for tapping the full potential of their new SoC that features 64 Arm Neoverse N1 cores. Last week we ran through many benchmarks looking at Graviton2 on EC2 and bare metal performance while here is a follow-up article with more benchmarks and looking at how the sixty-four core Arm Graviton2 compares to AMD's EPYC 7742 64-core CPU with and without SMT.

The Linux kernel patches that have been spearheaded by Amazon AWS engineers to optionally flush the L1 data cache on each context switch have now been queued in the x86/mm branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel cycle...

There hasn't been too much to report on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" kernel driver in some time since the enabling of Turing and no apparent progress on re-clocking to allow the graphics cards to hit their rated clock frequencies (the longstanding, number one limitation for this open-source driver), but some changes were sent in today for the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel merge window...

Allwinner Tech has prepared their initial Linux kernel patches for bringing up the A100 SoC. The A100 SoC is one of their newest tablet-focused SoCs moving forward...

Facebook's compression experts responsible for Zstandard have today released Zstd 1.4.5 with more performance improvements...

Beyond the usual excitement of numerous x86 and Arm hardware advancements each cycle, Linux 5.8 is bringing new IBM POWER enablement work...

Adding to Microsoft's wild ride this week after announcing Linux GUI apps for WSL2 and in turn writing their own Wayland compositor, Direct3D sort of for WSL2/Linux, and other announcements out of BUILD 2020, the company has announced the open-sourcing of their original BASIC implementation...

Last month we reported on Wine's Direct3D Vulkan back-end seeing new activity as an alternative to the project's mature Direct3D-to-OpenGL path. Over the course of May work on this Vulkan back-end has edged only even higher...

TPAUSE is the new instruction supported by Intel's Tremont microarchitecture and beyond. TPAUSE allows for an optimized state that can provide low wake-up latency compared to existing delay mechanisms. With Linux 5.8, the kernel will begin making use of TPAUSE where supported...

The VideoLAN team responsible for the dav1d AV1 video decoder have just released dav1d 0.7 as the newest feature release and it comes with more performance optimizations...

While most of you are well aware how Linux often slaughters Microsoft Windows performance on high-end desktop and platform servers with large core counts, on smaller systems it can be a different story and often comes down to the particular workloads and any peculiarities of the hardware under test. With recently buying the Lenovo IdeaPad 5 (14) for our AMD Ryzen 7 4700U Linux benchmarking, here are some benchmarks for how that Zen 2 laptop is comparing with different workloads between Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux deprecated Btrfs and no longer supports it on RHEL8, Oracle does continue supporting this Linux file-system on their RHEL-based Oracle Linux when using the company's "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" alternative to their Red Hat Compatible Kernel. An Oracle engineer put out a lengthy post outlining the highlights of Btrfs in their new Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6...

For reasons currently unknown, Intel released new CPU microcode on Wednesday for their Sandy Bridge processors...

In addition to working on easy ZFS encryption for Ubuntu 20.10, the Ubiquity installer in its latest code for this next Ubuntu Linux release is now enabling TRIM by default for all Zpools...

As a result of increased bug reports where Linux users are reporting Intel graphics hangs but not including the most pertinent details like the Mesa version, the Intel Mesa drivers are now embedding the driver name and Mesa version as part of their error state...

For months now Intel's open-source driver developers have been working on the "Gen12" graphics support needed most notably for Tiger Lake and more recently is also confirmed for Rocket Lake. But Gen12 is also needed for the highly anticipated Xe Graphics with the discrete graphics offerings to come in the months ahead by Intel. Building off the existing Gen12 graphics driver code, Intel today published the first DG1 patches for enabling their first discrete graphics card under Linux...

A patch slated to be merged for the Linux 5.8 kernel cycle next month that simply deletes ten lines of code (well, six lines of code and four lines of comments) will for some systems yield "significant power savings" due to an oversight in the kernel code that has lasted for about twelve years...

The fourth weekly release candidate is available of Mesa 20.1, the Q2'2020 feature update to the open-source OpenGL / Vulkan driver stack predominantly used by Linux systems. This is the last scheduled release candidate with Mesa 20.1 stable potentially coming out next week if testing goes well and the remaining blocker bugs are addressed...

Adding to the amount of surprising news this week, Electronic Arts just announced they will be open-sourcing portions of Command and Conquer Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert in order to help the mod community around this franchise...