Phoronix

AMD has just alerted us that they have released a BIOS fix to their motherboard partners that takes care of the issue around booting newer Linux distributions on the new Zen 2 processors...

It's been (and still is) a particularly busy few weeks for benchmarking. For those curious about the Raspberry Pi 4 performance that was announced at the end of June along with Raspbian 10, here are our initial performance benchmarks of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B in 2GB and 4GB variants compared to various other ARM SBCs.

Collabora's Pekka Paalanen landed another optimization this week into GNOME's Mutter for further enhancing the performance of using DisplayLink hardware and similar secondary GPUs under this Linux desktop...

F2FS is already very fast compared to the long-standing Linux file-systems when benchmarking on solid-state drives while for Linux 5.3 this file-system is getting in even better shape...

With the growing number of devices requiring loadable firmware/microcode at run-time and Linux continuing to simply support a lot more hardware, the size of /lib/firmware has ballooned in recent years while now for the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel release is the ability to compress these firmware files for fairly significant space savings...

An Intel open-source developer contributed support to Wayland's reference Weston compositor for enabling HDCP support on a per-output basis using a new allow_hdcp option...

Weeks ahead of SIGGRAPH and days ahead of the LLVM 9.0 code branching, a number of big "GFX908" commits have been landing in the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end over the past day...

Kernel Address Space Isolation is an experimental feature in development by Oracle in aiming to prevent leaking sensitive data from Intel Hyper Threading due to speculative execution attacks like L1TF...

Valve's Steam Labs is the new centralized place for their different experiments around the Steam marketplace...

It's on a daily basis we are seeing improvements to the newly-added Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" support with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack. Today brings geometry shader support for the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver...

While just being a few days into the two-week long merge window for Linux 5.3, it's certainly another busy cycle even when considering the summer months tend to be a bit slower for developers...

One of the areas that I always have "fun" benchmarking for new CPU launches is looking at the compiler performance. Following the recent Ryzen 3000 series launch I carried out some initial benchmarks looking at the current Zen 2 performance using the newest GCC 9 stable series with its "znver2" optimizations. Here is a look at how the Znver2 optimizations work out when running some benchmarks on the optimized binaries with a Ryzen 9 3900X running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

AMD's GPUOpen group has released a new version of their GPU Performance API (GPA) with Navi support...

While currently Ubuntu makes use of GNOME Software as their "software center" (or "app store") with Snap integration, as we wrote about recently Canonical has begun writing their own Snap Store. Given this and that they don't plan to use GNOME Software in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and thus have taken their developers away from working on the upstream support, GNOME developers are planning to disable the Snap plug-in for GNOME Software...

The recent work on enabling "-Wimplicit-fallthrough" behavior for the Linux kernel has culminated in Linux 5.3 with actually being able to universally enable this compiler feature...

Separate from the Linux boot issue affecting AMD Ryzen 3000 (Zen 2) processors that has been attributed to RdRand, DragonFlyBSD is the first BSD at least we've seen getting a separate fix to be able to boot these new AMD processors...

The EXT4 file-system updates have already landed for the Linux 5.3 kernel merge window that opened this week...

Snow Ridge is the SoC Intel announced last December as a 10nm product intended for 5G products. With the in-development Linux 5.3 kernel is initial "perf" subsystem support for Snow Ridge...

AMD Zen 2 CPUs support ACPI's Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) for tuning the system to energy and/or performance requirements. AMD has now published a new CPUfreq driver for handling their CPPC implementation and the new controls found with their new processors...

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai sent in the big set of audio driver changes for Linux 5.3...