Open-source News

Linux 5.5 Seeing Some Wild Swings In Performance - Improvements But Also Regressions  Phoronix

TRENDnet TUC-ET2G USB-C to 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet adapter for Windows, Mac, and Linux [Review]  BetaNews

Week in review: The data skills gap, new Kali Linux release, Apache Solr RCEs with public PoCs  Help Net Security

A month ago at the Open-Source Summit Europe 2019 in Lyon, France, Intel's Kelly Hammond who serves as the company's Senior Director of System Platform Software talked up their open-source contributions with a particular emphasis on performance. The video from that keynote was recently published for those curious about Intel's open-source work in the name of performance, including Clear Linux...

Video: 100+ Daily Performance Tests For Clear Linux + Intel's Other Full-Stack Optimizations  Phoronix

It's not often there are features to report on with regard to GNU Debugger (GDB) performance, but a new feature in place is multi-threaded symbol loading...

Linux 5.5 Block Changes Include NVMe Temperature Monitoring, Optimizations  Phoronix

The Linux 5.5 block changes landed earlier this week with a wide variety of driver and core improvements. There are some I/O optimizations to make the pull exciting as well as the NVMe HWMON drive temperature reporting integration...

It seems like the feature would have been wired up long ago, but with the Linux 5.5 kernel guest virtual machines running on Microsoft Hyper-V should be able to successfully hibernate...

VMs Can Finally Hibernate Under Microsoft Hyper-V With Linux 5.5  Phoronix

There is an exciting improvement to the GTK client side decoration handling ahead of the KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS release due out in February...

HW News - More Intel GPU News, Intel & Apple Lawsuit vs. SoftBank, Linux Laptops, & AMD RDNA2 for GPUs  GamersNexus

It's been nearly a decade now that we have been tracking Genode as an interesting open-source operating system framework...

Looking back on November there was the exciting release of new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X processors, Intel Core i9 10980XE Cascadelake-X also released, various new CPU vulnerabilities were disclosed, Linux gaming performance continued getting better with Mesa, the Linux 5.4 got buttoned up and released with its many new features, and other open-source milestones achieved. And there's a new Phoronix worker in-training...

Ice Lake, Threadripper, New CPU Vulnerabilities + Linux 5.4 Release Dominated November  Phoronix

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) improvements were sent in earlier this week for the Linux 5.5 kernel and they appear to be busier than usual on the x86 (Intel / AMD) side for the open-source virtualization stack...

KVM Virtualization Updates For Linux 5.5 Are Particularly Busy On The AMD/Intel Side  Phoronix

When the Raspberry Pi 4 launched earlier this year it was quickly realized active cooling was almost required if wanting to run the quad-core Cortex-A72 SoC at full performance without thermal throttling. Fortunately, the latest Raspberry Pi 4 firmware has improved the thermal/power behavior to lessen the need for extra cooling although it's still recommended for achieving peak performance potential out of this popular low-cost ARM SBC...

With the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X benchmarks on Windows 10 and Linux, Ubuntu 19.10 and other common distributions were just ~2% faster than the Microsoft OS and Clear Linux was just ~10% faster, based on 80+ benchmarks carried out. Those margins are much closer than we have seen with past iterations of Threadripper, but is that due to the Zen 2 microarchitecture and the improved topology of the new Threadripper CPUs or due to Microsoft's scheduler changes and other software improvements made in Windows 10 November 2019 Update? Here are some benchmarks...

Threadripper 3970X Performing Better On Windows Relative To Linux - Thanks To Microsoft Or Zen 2?  Phoronix