Open-source News

Linux 5.5 To Enable Intel's 5-Level Paging Support By Default

Phoronix - Wed, 11/27/2019 - 02:27
For several release cycles already the Linux kernel has supported Intel's 5-level paging for increasing the virtual and physical address space available to systems while for Linux 5.5 the five-level support is being enabled by default...

Fedora 32 Might Disallow Empty Passwords For Local Users By Default

Phoronix - Wed, 11/27/2019 - 00:36
Currently Fedora Linux supports empty passwords for local users by default but that could change with next year's Fedora 32 release...

AMD's TEE Driver For Loading "Trusted Applications" On Their Secure Processor Under Linux

Phoronix - Wed, 11/27/2019 - 00:17
A few weeks back AMD published a TEE "Trusted Execution Environment" driver for APUs on Linux for utilizing the controversial AMD Secure Processor...

FreeBSD Foundation Buying Newer Laptops To Help Improve Hardware Support

Phoronix - Tue, 11/26/2019 - 23:35
The FreeBSD Q3-2019 quarterly report is now available. One of the interesting bits from this report is the FreeBSD Foundation planning to buy one or more families of new laptops to supply to their core developers in working to improve the modern hardware support...

Blender 2.81 Benchmarks On 19 NVIDIA Graphics Cards - RTX OptiX Rendering Performance Is Incredible

Phoronix - Tue, 11/26/2019 - 20:46
Last week marked the release of Blender 2.81 with one of the shiny new features being the OptiX back-end for the Cycles engine to provide hardware-accelerated ray-tracing with NVIDIA RTX graphics processors. Long story short, OptiX is much faster for Blender than using NVIDIA's CUDA back-end -- which already was much faster than the OpenCL support within Blender. For your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of 19 different graphics cards looking at the CUDA performance from Maxwell to Pascal to Turing and then for the RTX graphics cards also the OptiX performance.

Linux 5.5's Scheduler Sees A Load Balancing Rework For Better Perf But Risks Regressions

Phoronix - Tue, 11/26/2019 - 19:45
Ingo Molnar sent in the kernel's scheduler changes along with the other material he is overseeing for Linux 5.5. With this next version of the Linux kernel comes a rework to the Completely Fair Scheduler's load balancing logic. This is helping some workloads at least but with the intrusive change runs the risk of possible regressions...

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