Phoronix

Vulkan 1.2.137 Specification Brings Many Clarifications + Fixes, Faster HTML Doc Loading

Wed, 04/08/2020 - 01:26

Less than one month ago came the big Vulkan 1.2.135 update with official ray-tracing capabilities and other extension promotions. Out today is Vulkan 1.2.137 with a whole lot of clarifications and fixes...

NVIDIA 440.82 Linux Driver Brings DOOM Eternal Performance Fix, Linux 5.6 Compatibility

Tue, 04/07/2020 - 23:59

NVIDIA today released the 440.82 Linux binary display driver as their newest stable update in the current 440 driver series...

Linux 5.6 I/O Scheduler Benchmarks: None, Kyber, BFQ, MQ-Deadline

Tue, 04/07/2020 - 21:56

While some Linux distributions are still using MQ-Deadline or Kyber by default for NVMe SSD storage, using no I/O scheduler still tends to perform the best overall for this speedy storage medium.

Firefox 75 Released With Flatpak Support, Wayland Improvements

Tue, 04/07/2020 - 21:30

Mozilla has released Firefox 75.0 as what is a big update for Linux users...

AMD ACO Begins Using Navi NGG For Tessellation + Vertex Shaders

Tue, 04/07/2020 - 20:22

The AMD "ACO" compiler backed by Valve for offering a faster shader compiler back-end than AMDGPU LLVM for the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver has begun making use of Navi's NGG "Next-Gen Geometry" hardware...

GNU MediaGoblin Announces They Are Still Alive

Tue, 04/07/2020 - 19:24

One of several GNU projects that have been silent in recent years is MediaGoblin, the effort to provide a free and decentralized web platform for sharing of digital media...

F2FS Introduces Zstd Compression Support With The Linux 5.7 Kernel

Tue, 04/07/2020 - 18:33

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates have been sent in for the very active Linux 5.7 kernel...

LLVM's Flang/F18 Fortran Compiler Might Be Back On Track For Merging Soon

Tue, 04/07/2020 - 07:43

Since the "f18" open-source Fortran compiler front-end was approved last year for merging as the newest LLVM sub-project and using the Flang name, there have been a number of false starts in getting the code merged. This year alone Flang had multiple delays and cancelled merge plans as the developers worked to get the code ready for upstream. Now though it looks like it could be ready to cross that long sought after milestone for having an in-tree Fortran front-end...

Canonical Contributing Upstream Improvements To Plymouth Ahead Of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Tue, 04/07/2020 - 04:38

One of the immediate differences Ubuntu 20.04 desktop/laptop users will notice when booting in UEFI mode is the boot splash screen improvements thanks to leveraging Red Hat's work on providing a flicker-free boot experience and pulling in the UEFI BGRT system/motherboard logo during the boot process to provide a more transitive experience. Canonical in turn is working on pushing some of their improvements back into upstream Plymouth...

Intel P-State Driver Shifting To "Schedutil" Governor Default With Linux 5.7

Tue, 04/07/2020 - 01:40

On top of all the other changes in Linux 5.7 so far, a secondary set of power management updates were sent in today for this next version of the kernel and includes now using the Schedutil governor by default for Intel P-State and Arm big.LITTLE systems...

AMD's Marek Olšák Lands Even More OpenGL Threading Improvements Into Mesa 20.1

Tue, 04/07/2020 - 00:08

One month ago to the day I was writing about OpenGL threading improvements for Mesa 20.1 and since then more "GLTHREAD" work has materialized and successfully landed for improving the Mesa OpenGL driver performance...

Linux 5.7 Changes So Far: New exFAT Driver, Tiger Lake Graphics By Default, Apple Fast Charge, Etc

Mon, 04/06/2020 - 23:00

We are now one week through the two week long Linux 5.7 kernel merge window where new/improved functionality is introduced. Here is a look at the changes so far for Linux 5.7...

C-SKY Architecture Gets Fix For Its Own Speculative Execution Bug In Linux 5.7

Mon, 04/06/2020 - 21:47

C-SKY is a a Chinese 32-bit CPU architecture intended for low-power devices from media boxes / DVRs to printers and other consumer electronics. C-SKY has also worked its way into a ~$6 development board. With its updates for the Linux 5.7 kernel are various additions to this maturing architecture support along with a speculative execution fix...

Initial Benchmarks With Intel oneAPI Level Zero Performance

Mon, 04/06/2020 - 20:38

Last week Intel released an initial set of micro-benchmarks for their oneAPI Level Zero and with L0 support being plumbed into their open-source Intel Compute Runtime, this weekend I started toying around with some Level Zero benchmarks on a variety of Intel processors.

L1d Cache Flush On Context Switch Moves Forward For Linux In Light Of Vulnerabilities

Mon, 04/06/2020 - 20:00

A new patch series sent out just under one month ago was providing opt-in L1 data cache flushing on context switching. That work has now been revived again and now with documentation added it's clear that this work is being done in response to a recent CVE being made public...