Open-source News

Following new Intel Ice Lake CPU microcode being published on Friday without any change-log and not updating prior Intel CPU family microcodes, I've begun looking at the performance as this first Intel CPU microcode update for Linux users since November. From my initial weekend testing there does seem to be some small but measurable and consistent performance impairments for Ice Lake from this microcode upgrade.

Linus Torvalds did his usual Sunday release dance and shipped Linux 5.7-rc5 as the latest kernel test release...

It Will Take 3-10 Years for Linux to Replace Windows in China  Gizchina.com

While our benchmarks of Clang 10.0 have generally been favorable or at least no big regressions compared to LLVM/Clang 9.0, it seems the same can't be said for Rust when shifting their compiler base to LLVM 10.0...

EndeavourOS 2020.05.08 has been released as the latest monthly install media for this Arch-based Linux distribution born out of the ashes of the former Antergos Linux...

Arch-Based EndeavourOS Sees New Release With Faster Installation, i3 Improvements  Phoronix

The FSGSBASE patches for the Linux kernel have been sent out for their 11th time over the past few years to make use of this CPU instruction supported going back to Ivy Bridge hardware...

FSGSBASE Patches Sent Out An 11th Time For Boosting CPU Performance Back To Ivy Bridge  Phoronix

FSGSBASE Patches Sent Out An 11th Time For Boosting CPU Performance Back To Ivy Bridge  Phoronix

Intel on Friday quietly released new Intel CPU microcode files for Linux...

Intel Updates Microcode Binaries For Ice Lake On Linux  Phoronix

Patches are pending that can sharply speed-up mount times of large EXT4 file-systems...

EXT4 Seeing Work To Speed Up Mount Times For Large File-Systems  Phoronix

The tech sector is quietly having a boom during the COVID-19 pandemic. Open source developers are getting involved with many aspects of the fight against the coronavirus, using Python to visualize its spread and helping to repurpose data acquisition systems to perform contact tracing.

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AMDGPU Patches Under Discussion For Better External GPU Hot Unplug Handling  Phoronix

While Radeon graphics cards can work with various external GPU (eGPU) solutions, currently on Linux if trying to hot unplug such a setup can lead to various problems. An experimental patch series out this weekend is seeking to address that problem...

Pop!_OS 20.04 vs. Ubuntu 20.04 Linux Performance  Phoronix

A Phoronix Premium reader recently asked about whether Pop!_OS 20.04 performance differs from Ubuntu 20.04 given some underlying changes made by System76 to their distribution, besides the plethora of higher-level desktop improvements. Well, here are some benchmarks.

You may recall towards the end of last year when the Pango layout engine library dropped support for bitmap fonts, causing frustrations among some users. There now appears to be another Linux font debacle brewing...

The Latest Pango + HarfBuzz Is Leading To A Messy Font Rendering Situation For Some  Phoronix