Phoronix

Back in September we wrote about Facebook's Roman Gushchin working on a new slab memory controller/allocator implementation that in turn could provide better memory utilization and less slab memory usage. This wasn't ready in time for the 5.5 kernel but a revised patch series was sent out last week...

Fedora users eager to see the Linux 5.4 stable kernel can engage by helping to test their newly-spun 5.4-based kernel image prior to it officially landing as a stable release update...

This weekend was the last-minute pull request by Google's Kees Cook to introduce the new sizeof_member() macro that had been previously rejected from Linux 5.4. Well, it was again rejected by Linus Torvalds prior to tagging the Linux 5.5-rc1 kernel...

While there are some pretty great features for Linux 5.5, one that didn't make it quite in time was the long-awaited introduction of WireGuard as the in-kernel secure VPN tunnel. While it was a bummer it didn't make 5.5, all indications are at this point is that it will be in Linux 5.6...

Linus Torvalds has just issued the first release candidate of the Linux 5.5 cycle following the traditional two week long merge window...

Linux 5.5-rc1 is on the way to mirrors and with that the Linux 5.5 merge window is now over. Here is a look at the lengthy set of changes and new features for this next Linux kernel that will debut as stable in early 2020.

After not being merged for Linux 5.4, the new sizeof_member() macro as a unified means of calculating the size of a member of a struct has been volleyed for Linux 5.5 for possible inclusion on this last day of the merge window...

One of the side projects Mozilla continues to develop is DeepSpeech, a speech-to-text engine derived from research by Baidu and built atop TensorFlow with both CPU and NVIDIA CUDA acceleration. This week marked the release of Mozilla DeepSpeech 0.6 with performance optimizations, Windows builds, lightening up the language models, and other changes...

KDE Plasma is gearing up for 2020 by introducing a built-in emoji picker... Coming with Plasma 5.18 is easier support for inserting Unicode emojis...

Decided back at the GNU Tools Cauldron was a timeline to aim converting from Subversion as their default revision control system to Git over the New Year's holiday. For that to happen, by the middle of December they wanted to decide what conversion system to use for bringing all their SVN commits to Git. As such, now it's heating up ahead of that decision...

Raptor Computing Systems, the libre hardware company behind the POWER9-based Talos II server board and Blackbird micro-ATX desktop, has been working to improve the open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver support for IBM POWER...

Back in 2017 were patches for exposing /proc/cpuinfo data via sysfs for more easily parsing selected bits of information from the CPU information output. That work never made it into the mainline kernel but now SUSE's Thomas Renninger is taking over and trying to get revised patches into the kernel...

Complementing the CentOS 8 benchmarks I did following the release of that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 rebuild in late September, here are tests going back further for showing the performance of CentOS 6, CentOS 7, and CentOS 8 all benchmarked from the same Intel Xeon Scalable server. These tests were done about a month ago albeit with all the hardware launches, new child, and other factors, only now getting to posting the data.

The Valve-backed "ACO" compiler back-end for the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver has added support now for AMD GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" graphics cards...

Outreachy recently kicked off their winter (December to March) round of internships for diversity in tech with 49 individuals tackling a range of open-source tasks...

Weston release manager Simon Ser on Friday released the Wayland's Weston 8.0 reference compositor in alpha form...

IBM's work from over a year ago in working towards secure virtual machines on POWER hardware is finally coming to fruition with Linux 5.5 due out early next year...

As part of the ongoing effort for Intel's plans to use their new Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver by default on next quarter's Mesa 20.0 for Broadwell "Gen8" graphics and newer, another step in that direction was achieved on Friday...

With NFSv4.2 is the server-side copy (SSC) functionality with the Linux 5.5 kernel's NFS client-side support for that support in allowing "inter" copy offloads between different NFS servers...

When it comes to the storage/file-system changes with the in-development Linux 5.5 kernel one of the most prominent end-user-facing changes is more robust RAID1 for Btrfs with the ability to have three or four copies of the data rather than just two copies, should data safety be of utmost importance and concerned over the possibility of two disks in an array failing...