Phoronix

We've seen a lot of odd products pick up the Free Software Foundation's "Respect Your Freedom" endorsement like a USB microphone, various re-branded motherboards, and even last year certified a USB to parallel printer cable. The latest product they are endorsing -- and their first endorsement of 2020 -- is a USD 802.11 a/b/g/n PCIe half-mini card starting out at $59 USD but going up to $79 for this outdated wireless adapter...

Mesa 20.0 feature development is over with the code now being branched from Git master and the first of several release candidates issued...

Among many other Valve ACO back-end improvements for Mesa 20.0, one of the notable additions is this AMDGPU LLVM alternative now working for Radeon "Southern Islands" / GCN 1.0 graphics cards. With this, these original AMD GCN graphics cards may have some extra life out of Linux gaming boxes thanks to slightly higher performance some eight years after these graphics cards first launched in the Radeon HD 7000 series.

While WireGuard was merged into Linux 5.6, the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release is currently tracking Linux 5.4 and for the April release is likely to be shipping with Linux 5.5 as the 5.6 release will be cutting it too close. But Ubuntu 20.04's kernel has now back-ported WireGuard...

Google today announced OpenSK as an open-source Rust-based security key implementation supporting FIDO U2F and FIDO2 standards...

File-system / storage activity is as busy as always during the Linux kernel merge windows...

Succeeding last week's DXVK 1.5.2 is now a version 1.5.3 release with various fixes...

In addition to the new openat2() system call in Linux 5.6, pidfd_getfd() has landed with growing interest from many different parties for what will be an increasingly used syscall moving forward...

Systemd-homed has been merged as the latest (optional) fundamental change to Linux distributions in how home directories are handled...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver updates were sent in today for Linux 5.6 with plenty of fun features in tow...

Earlier this month AMD finally published their Sensor Fusion Hub driver for Linux to improve the Ryzen laptop support. That new "SFH" driver hasn't been queued as part of any Linux 5.6 pull request but a second version of the driver did make it out this week...

With Linux 5.6 the staging area has seen new functionality but thanks to removing old code it ends up removing a fair number of lines of code from the kernel...

The folks at iXsystems have released FreeNAS 11.3, their latest big update to this FreeBSD-based operating system designed around the OpenZFS file-system for offering advanced network-attached storage capabilities...

On top of the last minute Radeon Vulkan "RADV" improvements landing on Wednesday for Mesa 20.0, another big ticket item landed... Well, re-enabled...

Ahead of USB4 devices expected to begin appearing later this year, the Linux 5.6 kernel is wired up with initial USB4 support...

On top of all the spectacular work coming with Linux 5.6, here is another big improvement that went under my radar until today: Linux 5.6 is slated to be the first mainline kernel ready for 32-bit systems to run past the Year 2038!..

With LLVM Clang 10 having added a Zen 2 scheduler model tuned for the latest AMD CPUs over the existing "znver2" tuning that had just copied the Zen 1 scheduler, here are some benchmarks looking at the LLVM Clang 9 vs. 10 compiler performance on AMD EPYC when making use of "-march=znver2" optimizations...

Since the stable release of Linux 5.5 this weekend I have been carrying out benchmarks for looking at how the performance of this newly-minted kernel compares to older releases. Here are benchmark results of Linux 5.3 vs. 5.4 vs. 5.5 with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X but the results are similar to other HEDT and lower-end systems we've tested thus far...

A new system call added to the very feature rich Linux 5.6 kernel is openat2() for more extensible behavior compared to the existing openat() functionality...

The Wine project's VKD3D initiative for translating Direct3D 12 support to Vulkan took another step forward today with patches for handling DXIL (Shader Model 6.0+) shaders with VKD3D, but the work in the current form may need to be re-worked...