Phoronix

The long awaited release of OpenWrt 19.07 took place this week for this Linux distribution popular for embedded, primarily networking devices...

It's been four years since last testing out the XanMod kernel as a spin of the Linux kernel with various patches and extra tuning designed to offer better desktop/workstation performance, similar to the Liquorix kernel. But given the recent Liquorix kernel testing and discussions over kernel schedulers and more, here are some fresh benchmarks of the latest XanMod kernel. Long story short, I am quite impressed by these latest XanMod results.

AMD "Pollock" is a new chip similar to Dali and looking like it may be used for some Ryzen embedded purposes. AMD Pollock was plumbed into the Linux driver yesterday and was the first time we've heard this codename...

Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds doesn't recommend using ZFS On Linux at least until Oracle were to re-license the code to make it friendly for mainline inclusion. But even then he doesn't seem turned on by the ZFS features or general performance...

DXVK 1.5.1 is out today as the latest feature update for this project implementing Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan for faster Wine/Proton Linux gaming performance. This is the first update since the big DXVK 1.5 release that integrated D9VK for D3D9 support...

There hasn't been a new Mesa stable release in a number of weeks due to the Christmas and New Year's holidays but that changed today with Mesa 19.3.2 as the first significant point release of Mesa 19.3...

GNOME has continued its recent trend of offering more point releases to existing stable series for filling the void between the six-month feature releases. Out today is GNOME 3.34.3 with all of the latest fixes, many of which were back-ported from the currently under development GNOME 3.36...

The long in development process of converting GCC's SVN repository to Git for using this modern distributed revision control system for developing the GNU Compiler Collection in the 2020s may finally be complete in the days ahead...

A few days ago I wrote about a big improvement to write performance for EXT4's Direct I/O code path but that is not the only DIO optimization coming for Linux 5.6. Thanks to IBM, another big EXT4 DIO boost can be found for database workloads...

Oracle has released a developer preview of their forthcoming Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 to Oracle Linux users, the company's spin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With Oracle UEK 6, Linux 5.4 serves as the new base...

While the Allwinner VPU "Cedrus" video decode driver is a wonderful success of open-source third-party work expanding Linux's multimedia hardware acceleration capabilities, consulting firm Bootlin who spearheaded this driver is for now at least is ending feature development on this driver...

Separate from the whole Python 2 removal effort with the Python 2.7 that is EOL'ed since the start of the year, Fedora 33 due out later this year is looking to be their first release dropping the even older Python 2.6 series...

While on the back-half of the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle, sent in on Wednesday were an interesting batch of AMDGPU driver fixes that are quite notable...

While no major performance improvements were noted as part of the release notes, given this week's Firefox 72 release here are some fresh benchmarks of Firefox 70/71/72 on Ubuntu Linux benchmarked with and without WebRender being enabled. As well, these numbers show how Firefox on Linux is currently stacking up against Google Chrome 79 as its latest stable release.

While Intel has offered good Ice Lake support since before the CPUs were shipping (sans taking a bit longer for the Thunderbolt support as a key lone exception, since resolved), a feature that's been publicly known since 2017 is the Fast Short REP MOV behavior and finally with Linux 5.6 that is being made use of for faster memory movements...

In addition to Intel IGC network driver performance-boosting TSO support, also queued within Intel's next-queue tree of networking changes is a new software bus called Virtual Bus...

Apple AirScan is akin to their AirPrint technology for supporting various printers from Apple devices without the need for specialized drivers. Multi-function printers compliant with AirPrint also need to implement AirScan for scanner functionality, thus opening up most of today's multi-function printers to supporting this scanning standard. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS could end up supporting AirScan nicely thanks to new SANE back-ends...

Quietly released over the holidays was Intel's quarterly update to the Intel Media Driver that serves as their modern open-source GPU-accelerated video encode/decode solution for Linux systems...

Given the recent discussions over the default performance of the Linux scheduler, the Liquorix patches to the Linux kernel, and other recent forum discussions over different kernel configurations and flavors, here are some reference benchmarks looking at the performance of some of the kernel options available to Clear Linux users...

While more Linux distributions have begun packaging (and in the case of Fedora, potentially deploying by default) EarlyOOM as the out-of-memory monitoring daemon for trying to improve the Linux desktop's handling of low memory situations, systemd ultimately should be picking up its own out-of-memory daemon in the months ahead...