Given the recent advancements of the EXT4 file-system with its native file-system encryption support provided by the fscrypt framework, here are benchmarks comparing the performance of an EXT4 file-system with no encryption, fscrypt-based encryption, eCryptfs-based encryption, and a LUKS dm-crypt encrypted volume.
You have likely heard by now about Ubuntu maker Canonical planning to do an initial public offering (IPO) at some point in the not too distant future to become a publicly-traded company. The latest sign of that is Canonical has now shifted its corporate calendar.
Remember the Zapcc compiler that focused on lightning fast compiler times? It's now been open-sourced.
There are many changes and new features for Linux 4.18 with the merge window having just closed on this next kernel version, but still there are some prominent features that have yet to work their way to the mainline tree.
Canonical's Engineering Tech Lead, Gavin Guo, has passed along a big slide deck on a presentation he is preparing about the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities.
Sculpt OS is striving to become a general purpose operating system built off the Genode OS framework. The second release of Sculpt OS is now available and it's much easier now to try out.
As another step towards the long-awaited Xfce 4.14 desktop environment release, Xfdesktop 4.13.2 is now available as the latest development release for this important piece of the Xfce desktop stack.
With the early release of Linux 4.18-rc1, feature development on Linux 4.18 is over and it's onto roughly eight weeks worth of testing and bug fixes. For those that are behind in their Phoronix reading with our extensive and original reporting on the Linux 4.18 merge window happenings, here is our recap of the big changes that made it into Linux 4.18. We are also in the process of firing off the start of our Linux 4.18 kernel benchmarks.
Coming out one day ahead of schedule is the Linux 4.18-rc1 kernel.
Sent out earlier this week were the AppArmor feature updates for the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window.
The newest weekly release candidate of the upcoming FreeBSD 11.2 is now available for testing.
With the recent stable debut of the Linux 4.17 kernel, one of the most common performance test requests coming in has been for checking out the Radeon WattMan-like support that was introduced with the Linux 4.17 AMDGPU code for recent generations of Radeon graphics card. Here are some benchmarks of that and on a somewhat related note also some Linux gaming benchmark results when carrying out some power capping tests to restrict the graphics card to a given Wattage.
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved on Friday more of the proposed features for this fall's release of Fedora 29, including two of the more controversial proposals.
Oracle Solaris 11.4 is still being prepared for release but in the meantime there is now the thirty-third stable release update for Solaris 11.3.
Two weeks back we shared the news that one of Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver veterans decided to change roles and is now focused on improving FreeBSD for Intel hardware. Ben Widawsky is working on FreeBSD improvements that can at least relate to Intel and it turns out the company has a new team of developers on the task.
GNOME's Mutter Wayland compositor support is among the few Wayland implementations offering support for EGLStreams so it can play along with the approach used by the NVIDIA proprietary driver as an alternative to the GBM API used by the open-source graphics drivers. One of the NVIDIA engineers has just furthered along Mutter's EGLStreams support.
Initial RISC-V architecture support was added to the Linux 4.15 kernel and in succeeding kernel releases have been mostly modest updates. With Linux 4.18 the RISC-V changes are on the small side still, but with a few notable additions for this open-source, royalty-free processor ISA.
New Mesa release manager Dylan Baker has issued the second point release of the Mesa 18.1 series.
Patches exist for taking the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to yet another processor.
Canonical's developers working on the Mir display server are putting the finishing touches on the Mir 0.32 release.
If you are more the artistic type than a software developer, Debian is looking for your help. They are soliciting proposals for the artwork/theme for next year's Debian 10 "Buster" release.
While Intel Icelake hardware is quite a ways out from making its debut, the open-source Intel Linux developers working on the hardware enablement for its "Gen 11" graphics continue working dilligently on this hardware enablement.
Purism's PureOS downstream of Debian that is shipped on their Librem laptops and is also planned as part of the software stack making up their in-development Librem 5 smart-phone is planning for more changes.
NetworkManager has finally landed support for dealing with Wake On Wireless LAN (WoWLAN) as the WoL-like functionality for wireless adapters.
Mesa has been plumbed in to support the ARB_sample_locations OpenGL extension and is now exposed with the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver.
It was just days ago that the VirGL driver stack -- which is used for supporting OpenGL hardware acceleration within guest VMs that is passed onto the host's driver -- picked up FP64 support while now its latest addition is ARB_tessellation_shader support.
Adding to the growing list of features for Fedora 29 is a plan to fully support the FreeDesktop.org Boot Loader Specification and making use of their defined fragment files to populate boot-loader boot menu entries, including the kernel entries.
Intel open-source developers today posted the set of patches for adding support for upcoming Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake processors for the Linux kernel's Direct Rendering Manager driver.
Since the release of Linux 4.17 almost two weeks ago, I haven't heard of any horror stories, Linux 4.17 continues running excellent on all of my test systems, the 4.17.1 point release was quite small, and more distributions are gearing up to ship this latest kernel release.
Improvements are underway for Wine benchmarking to help ensure this open-source program for running Windows apps/games on Linux and other operating systems continues without introducing performance regressions and for being able to quantitatively verify expected performance improvements around its Direct3D/OpenGL/Vulkan code-paths, among other areas of Wine.
To little surprise given that Fedora Linux always strives to ship with a bleeding-edge GNU toolchain, for the Fedora 29 release this fall they are planning to make use of the yet-to-be-released Binutils 2.31.
It has been some months since last delivering any benchmarks of Nouveau, the open-source, community-driven for NVIDIA GPUs. The reason for not having any Nouveau benchmarks recently has largely been due to lack of major progress, at least on the GeForce desktop GPU side, while NVIDIA has continued to contribute on the Tegra side. For those wondering how the current performance is of this driver that started out more than a decade ago via reverse-engineering, here are some benchmarks of the latest open-source Nouveau and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers on Ubuntu.
The performance of the Intel Core i7-8809G "Kabylake G" processor with onboard Radeon "Vega M" graphics are looking quite good under Linux now that the support has been squared away.
While it's now becoming possible to run real Linux apps on Chrome OS, for those that have been dreaming of a real and pleasant GNU/Linux desktop experience on an ARM-powered laptop without much hackery, that soon may finally be a reality.
The Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons) developers working on the Cedrus open-source, reverse-engineered Allwinner video decode driver have posted their patches for enabling H.264 video decoding.
Earlier this month AMD's Marek Olšák posted RadeonSI patches for a scissor workaround affecting GFX9/Vega GPUs including Raven Ridge, which were based upon a RADV driver workaround already merged that helped affected games by up to ~11%. A revised version of that patch is now in Mesa 18.2 Git.
In addition to the secondary power management updates sent in on Wednesday for the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window, a set of ACPI updates were also submitted.
The second release candidate of the revamped Qt 3D Studio 2.0 is now available for testing.
If you are using the Nouveau Gallium3D driver there is now the possibility of having much better performance with the Dolphin emulator.
The latest speculative execution vulnerability affecting modern CPUs has now been made public: Lazy State Save/Restore, a.k.a. CVE-2018-3665.
KVM maintainer for the Linux kernel, Paolo Bonzini, on Tuesday submitted the feature updates for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine in Linux 4.18.
Purism has published their latest progress report on the Librem 5 privacy-minded Linux-powered smartphone that they still hope to begin shipping next January.
When Ubuntu 18.04 LTS shipped in April, it shipped with a near-final release candidate of Mesa 18.0. Coming down the pipe now to "Bionic Beaver" desktop users is Mesa 18.0.5.
Python 3.7.0 RC1 is available today as the last step prior to issuing this next feature release of Python 3 at month's end.
Since last year there has been more talk and early planning around the eventual Qt 6.0 milestone. It's looking now like Qt 6.0 might happen after Qt 5.14, or likely in 2020.
Intel Skylake Xeon Scalable servers may see greater performance when upgrading to the in-development Linux 4.18 kernel.
For FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT in development there is now kernel support for pNFS while the user-space components are landing soon for this Parallel NFS support.
The past few months The Qt Company has been overhauled PySide2 as Qt For Python, a big improvement to the Python bindings to the Qt tool-kit. Out today is Qt For Python 5.11 as the first official release under the new branding.
With Intel's DRM kernel driver now supporting HDCP for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection with work done by Intel and Google developers, there is now work underway for allowing HDCP to work in a Wayland-based environment.
Following the recent discussions of moving Wayland's Weston compositor to a 4-month release schedule and possibly doing away with time-based Wayland releases itself, Weston 5.0 will now be coming out in August.
There is at least one interesting feature with the just-merged Device Mapper (DM) changes for the Linux 4.18 kernel.
Built off the Wine 3.10 bi-weekly development release from earlier this week, Wine-Staging 3.10 is now available as the more experimental version of Wine that carries over 900 patches atop the upstream code-base.
The VFIO framework that allows exposing direct device access to user-space in a secure, IOMMU-protected fashion is gaining some new sample drivers in Linux 4.18.
Last week was the main XFS file-system pull request for Linux 4.18 while submitted on Tuesday was a secondary batch of updates targeted for this next kernel version.