Phoronix

Currently Fedora Linux supports empty passwords for local users by default but that could change with next year's Fedora 32 release...

A few weeks back AMD published a TEE "Trusted Execution Environment" driver for APUs on Linux for utilizing the controversial AMD Secure Processor...

The FreeBSD Q3-2019 quarterly report is now available. One of the interesting bits from this report is the FreeBSD Foundation planning to buy one or more families of new laptops to supply to their core developers in working to improve the modern hardware support...

Last week marked the release of Blender 2.81 with one of the shiny new features being the OptiX back-end for the Cycles engine to provide hardware-accelerated ray-tracing with NVIDIA RTX graphics processors. Long story short, OptiX is much faster for Blender than using NVIDIA's CUDA back-end -- which already was much faster than the OpenCL support within Blender. For your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of 19 different graphics cards looking at the CUDA performance from Maxwell to Pascal to Turing and then for the RTX graphics cards also the OptiX performance.

Ingo Molnar sent in the kernel's scheduler changes along with the other material he is overseeing for Linux 5.5. With this next version of the Linux kernel comes a rework to the Completely Fair Scheduler's load balancing logic. This is helping some workloads at least but with the intrusive change runs the risk of possible regressions...

While the Radeon "ACO" compiler back-end performance is already looking very good in the speed department over the AMDGPU LLVM back-end for the Vulkan driver as shown in recent benchmarks, it's getting even better...

Since 2016 the Linux kernel on ARM has invoked the EFI random number generator (RNG) protocol for serving as an additional source of entropy during early boot. With Linux 5.5 in early 2020 that code is finally happening for x86/x86_64...

Intel's crew maintaining the Scalable Video Technology open-source video encoders on Monday issued a new pre-release of SVT-AV1 in an effort to further speed-up AV1 video encoding on CPUs...

The cryptography subsystem changes for the Linux 5.5 kernel are notable...

The Fedora Workstation working group has been weighing the matter of the GNOME Software "app store" recommending/promoting proprietary software. But this isn't something that is done out-of-the-box but rather when activating Flathub where Flatpaks can be installed for both open and closed-source software...

Devuan 2.1 is available as the latest release of this spin of Debian GNU/Linux that works without a dependence on systemd. Devuan 2.1 remains focused on "init freedom" though this new release is still tracking the older Debian 9 "Stretch" branch...

The in-development Linux 5.5 kernel will begin sanity checking the RdRand instruction output for randomness on CPU boot/resume due to the recent spat of AMD CPUs that have yielded non-random RdRand output...

Adding to the list of changes on deck for the Linux 5.5 kernel is a new "sanitizer" for spotting data race conditions...

After the embargo on the Intel Core i9 10980XE expired a few hours ago, now we are allowed to share the performance numbers on the new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X processors. These new Zen 2 HEDT CPUs pack a real performance punch, but do come in as more expensive than the i9-10980XE and there is one boot-stopping Linux bug to mention with a workaround... But besides that lone Linux support caveat, the Threadripper 3960X and Threadripper 3970X absolutely dominate in performance.

As outlined in our AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X / 3970X Linux review, these new Zen 2 Threadripper processors are phenomenal processors that offer significant uplift over earlier Threadripper CPUs and easily dominate over Intel's Core i9 HEDT competition. But there is one big issue right now with the Linux support: on Ubuntu and the like, it doesn't boot without a workaround. Here's that workaround for easy future reference...

Vulkan 1.1.129 is out this morning as another weekly update to this graphics API specification and in tow comes one new extension...

Months ago we reported on vendors and cloud providers being interested in restoring parallel CPU microcode updates on Linux for helping large core count servers. With Linux 5.5 that change is coming...

Just hours after Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.4, the GNU folks maintaining "GNU Linux-libre" released their v5.4 kernel that continues "deblobbing" the kernel for ensuring no proprietary firmware/microcode can be loaded by the drivers nor support for loading closed-source kernel modules...

Last month Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver developers introduced a "secure compile" feature to the Radeon Vulkan driver to do just as the name implies and making use of SECCOMP filters for enforcing the security aspect. They have now revised this implementation in order to provide faster shader compile times...

Intel today is rolling out the Core i9 10980XE as their new Cascade Lake X-Series processor that features 18 cores / 36 threads with a maximum turbo frequency of 4.6GHz and TBM 3.0 frequency of 4.8GHz. Following a last minute change, Intel moved up the embargo lift time of the Core i9 10980XE so here are the results we can share with you right now.