Phoronix

Last year a SUSE developer sent out a set of patches adding authentication support to the Btrfs file-system. Btrfs already has checksums on meta-data blocks and data blocks while the original implementation of these authentication patches was performing HMAC on a SHA256 checksum as a keyed hash. A proper key in turn is then needed to mount a verified file-system...

One of the areas being worked on upstream recently for the RISC-V architecture's Linux kernel support is EFI handling. The preliminary work for supporting EFI on RISC-V is set to land for the Linux 5.8 kernel...

With the somewhat surprising announcement this week that Intel's Clear Linux platform would be divesting from the desktop and focusing on server and cloud workloads, the first visible changes on the desktop side are expected next week...

With JEDEC's Universal Flash Storage (UFS) v3.1 specification from January one of the new features is the Host Performance Booster mode for faster and cheaper UFS capabilities. Micron and others have been working on this UFS Host Performance Booster support for Linux...

As I noted earlier this month, AMD has been amassing many graphics driver improvements for Linux 5.8. On Friday marked their first pull request to DRM-Next of the Radeon graphics driver improvements for this next kernel cycle...

Thanks to a FreeBSD Foundation Community Grant, FreeBSD 13 will be bringing up to a 5x performance improvement for if_bridge, the kernel code for network bridge device support...

Built off yesterday's exciting Wine 5.7 release that brought more WineD3D Vulkan bits and the start of a USB driver, Wine-Staging 5.7 is out with a number of its patches upstreamed into yesterday's release plus a bit of new functionality...

Friday marked the release of LXQt 0.15, the first big update to this lightweight Qt5-based desktop environment since January 2019. There comes a fair number of improvements with this desktop that was born out of the LXDE and Razor-qt initiatives...

In addition to this week seeing the slew of KDE Apps updates, developers working on the applications, Plasma, and other areas of the KDE ecosystem have remained as busy as ever during the COVID-19 crisis for continuing to improve this open-source desktop...

Adding to the growing list of changes building up for Linux 5.8 this summer is now having Tiger Lake Thunderbolt/USB4 support...

One of the lesser known Mozilla software efforts is DeepSpeech as a speech-to-text engine built atop TensorFlow with CPU and GPU (CUDA) acceleration. Friday marked a new release of this DeepSpeech software that is yielding great results for converting spoken audio streams to text...

Earlier this week I highlighted the Dell XPS 7390 "Ice Lake" ultrabook seeing a big performance drop on recent versions of the Linux kernel. Intel engineers seem to have sorted it out and now have a solution in place, which affects those running Linux 5.4 or newer...

Wine 5.7 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release and it's a fun one with multiple interesting advancements...

While there has been the CPU-based "Kazan" Vulkan driver (formerly Vulkan-CPU as a Google Summer of Code project) and Google's SwiftShader has been implementing CPU-based Vulkan support, it turns out Red Hat's David Airlie has been working on a Mesa/Gallium3D-inspired Vulkan software renderer...

NVIDIA has released their latest weekly-ish beta update to their Vulkan Linux driver...

Earlier this month I reported that Linux developers were reviving work on the Intel FSGSBASE patches as a performance helper going back to Ivy Bridge CPUs but for which past patch series never got over the finish line for mainlining. On Thursday a new version of the FSGSBASE patches were sent out...

With last week's release of Radeon Software for Linux 20.10 as AMD's first packaged graphics driver update for Linux of 2020, here are some benchmarks showing how the performance compares to what is shipped by Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS as well as when using the newer Mesa and Linux kernel releases for the very latest open-source performance, including switching over to RADV+ACO for Vulkan gaming.

When it comes to finding laptops with Linux pre-loaded by the OEM, it's mostly Ubuntu or its derivatives found most often on these devices. But Lenovo and Red Hat are announcing today that Fedora Workstation 32 will begin appearing soon on select ThinkPad laptops...

Either a ploy by Ubuntu developers / Canonical staffers or it's looking like Ubuntu 20.10 could be known as the Groovy Gorilla...

Intel's ISPC compiler (Implicit SPMD Program Compiler) for targeting its C-based single-program, multiple data language is out now with a new feature release...