Phoronix

For those AMD Ryzen laptop users eager to see the Sensor Fusion Hub driver for supporting the different hardware sensors on these AMD Zen laptops, that driver still isn't going to be merged for the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle even after the patches were first published months ago...

While modern AMD EPYC CPUs support Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Intel more recently has been working on MKTME for similarly offering hardware-backed total memory encryption, an Intel open-source engineer has now proposed a software-based solution for protected memory support for KVM virtualization...

Ardour 6.0 is now available as the latest major release of this high-end yet open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) package that runs across all major platforms...

NVIDIA on Friday released Nsight Graphics 2020.3 as the newest version of their proprietary tool for profiling and debugging Direct3D / Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenVR software...

TUXEDO Computers has launched their first AMD-powered Linux laptop! The excitement quickly faded though when seeing it's not a Renoir design...

There is a lot of wireless (and wired) networking activity each kernel cycle but for the upcoming Linux 5.8 merge window it looks like there will be particularly a lot for MediaTek drivers...

The first beta of the forthcoming PostgreSQL 13.0 is now available for evaluation. PostgreSQL 13 is coming with many new features with this article serving as a quick look plus some very preliminary benchmarks...

Published back in February were the Linux kernel enablement patches for a new "ComboPHY" driver for supporting the company's forthcoming Gateway SoC. That code is now set to be included in the next kernel cycle, Linux 5.8...

Linux I/O expert Jens Axboe who oversees the kernel's block layer and is employed by Facebook while working on IO_uring and other storage innovations has recently been working on async buffered reads support...

This week marked the release of the dav1d 0.7 AV1 video decoder with more performance optimizations thanks to more hand-tuned Assembly and other tweaking of this leading CPU-based AV1 video decoder. Here are benchmarks compared to the prior dav1d 0.5 and 0.6 releases...

With KDE Plasma 5.19 due for its stable release in early June, development efforts are beginning to focus on Plasma 5.20 for release later this year...

With the recently minted GCC 10 compiler there was a request to see some fresh benchmarks at different compiler optimization levels and flags like LTO...

Just hours after the release of Wine 5.9, the latest staging release is now available that is re-based to the latest upstream while continuing to toss in over eight hundred extra patches...

While MIPS Release 6 is the latest version of the MIPS ISA, the MIPS Release 5 support is finally set to be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel cycle...

While still on the Solaris 11.4 series and no signs of major advancements beyond it, SRU21 was released this week by Oracle with quite a number of package updates...

Intel is extending their Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) Linux support with battery participant device support...

Wine 5.9 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release for this software allowing Windows games and applications to generally run quite gracefully on Linux...

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...