While NetBSD 9.0 has been out since mid-February, for those still on the NetBSD 8 series the NetBSD 8.2 milestone is now available with various fixes. As a result of the coronavirus, the NetBSD 7 series is also being extended.
Andy Shevchenko submitted on Tuesday the x86 platform driver updates targeting the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window.
For the past two months we have been testing the System76 Thelio Major and it's been working out extremely well with performance and reliability. The Thelio Major offering with options for Intel Core X-Series or AMD Ryzen Threadripper and resides between their standard Thelio desktop with Ryzen/Core CPUs and the Thelio Massive that sports dual Intel Xeon CPUs.
For years we have been looking forward to X-Plane with a new Vulkan renderer to replace its aging OpenGL renderer. Finally today the X-Plane 11.50 Beta has been made public for this realistic flight simulator that supports Metal on Apple platforms and Vulkan everywhere else.
Following last month's release of GNOME 3.36 with its many new features and performance improvements, GNOME 3.36.1 is out today with the first batch of updates/fixes to this H1'2020 open-source desktop.
Well known open-source AMD OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has enabled more Linux games to run with Mesa's GLTHREAD functionality enabled for helping with the performance.
Ahead of the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release later this month, the Canonical folks working on LXD for Linux containers and VMs have released LXD 4.0 LTS.
SUSE's David Sterba sent in the Btrfs file-system updates this week for the Linux 5.7 kernel.
Yesterday we noted Intel's programming reference manual being updated with new Golden Cove instructions for Sapphire Rapids and Alder Lake and with that Intel's open-source developers have begun pushing their changes to the compilers. The latest updates add TSXLDTRK, a new HYBRID bit for Core+Atom hybrd CPUs, and a new SERIALIZE instruction. After GCC was receiving the patch attention yesterday, LLVM is getting its attention today.
Basically a half-week after Linux 5.6 shipped as stable, we are up to the second point release of it.
Days after AMD announced their full Ryzen 4000 series mobile CPU line-up, Intel has now introduced their 10th Gen Core H-series processors.
The month of April usually sees the new annual GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) feature releases and for GCC 10 in the form of GCC 10.1 as the first stable release in the series does stand chances of releasing this month.
A few months back when we last looked at the performance impact of having SELinux enabled there was a hit but not too bad for most workloads. But we'll need to take another look soon as with the Linux 5.7 kernel are some performance improvements and more for SELinux.
While many of you are users of Mesa Git for experiencing the bleeding-edge graphics drivers especially if you are a gamer wanting peak performance, for those on the Mesa stable series the Mesa 20.0.3 update has now shipped.
Seemingly at first thinking it was just an April Fools' Day joke, but it turns out the GNU Guix developers responsible for their package manager and operating system are actually working to replace their Linux (GNU Linux-libre to be exact) kernel with GNU Hurd.
GTK 3.98.2 is out as the latest development snapshot in the road to the overdue but much anticipated GTK 4.0.
Upstreaming of LLVM's Fortran front-end developed as "f18" and being upstreamed with the Flang name was supposed to happen back in January. Three months later, the developers still are struggling to get the code into shape for integration.
The Linux 5.7 crypto subsystem updates include new drivers.
While GCC 10 isn't even out for a few more weeks, looking ahead to next year's GCC 11 release is already one interesting planned change.
The networking changes for the Linux 5.7 kernel have already been merged and as usual there is a lot of new wired and wireless networking driver activity.
Intel has seemingly just updated their public programming reference manual as well as sending out some new patches to the GCC compiler for supporting new instructions on yet-to-be-released CPUs.
The Linux 5.7 Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates have been submitted as the kernel graphics driver changes for this next kernel feature release. As usual, there is a lot of work especially on the Intel and AMD Radeon side while nothing was queued for the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver.
If you are looking for a new desktop-friendly BSD with TrueOS being phased out, GhostBSD 20.03 is out as the promising desktop-focused OS based on FreeBSD and using the MATE desktop environment as a decent out-of-the-box experience.
QEMU 5.0-rc1 was released on Tuesday as the latest development release in the path to QEMU 5.0.0 expected to be achieved later this month.
Ingo Molnar on Monday sent in the scheduler updates for the Linux 5.7 kernel that saw its merge window open at the start of this week. For the Linux 5.7 cycle are a number of prominent scheduler additions.
During the month of March on Phoronix were 277 original news articles written by your's truly along with another 20 featured benchmark articles / Linux hardware reviews. Here is a look back at what is exciting Linux/open-source enthusiasts with so many hardware and software happenings.
Oracle has announced their newest major release of their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" that they continue spinning as an option for users of Oracle Linux and being the default within the Oracle Cloud.
The media subsystem updates have landed for the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window.
The 64-bit ARM architecture code will support several new features with the in-development Linux 5.7 kernel.
Linux Mint is joining the ranks of most other major desktop Linux distributions in abandoning their 32-bit support.
With last week's release of LLVM/Clang 10.0, here are our first benchmarks looking at the stable release of the Clang 10.0 C/C++ compiler compared to its previous (v9.0.1) release on various Intel and AMD processors under Ubuntu Linux.
Intel's Rafael Wysocki who oversees the kernel's power management area has sent in his relevant pull requests for the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window.
Sway's Wayland compositor recently added Variable Refresh Rate / Adaptive-Sync support to help avoid tearing and stuttering while now GNOME's Mutter is working on similar VRR support on the desktop.
Following the release of Linux 5.6 and WireGuard 1.0 declared, Google has now enabled WireGuard within their Android open-source Linux kernel build.
Last year Intel outlined the Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) as a feature on future Intel CPUs for high-performance data movement and transformation operations for networking and storage / persistent memory. We are now seeing more of the Intel DSA work beginning to take shape for the Linux kernel.
To date Fedora has defaulted to Java 1.8 / OpenJDK 8 as the default system JDK version but for Fedora 33 later this year they plan to transition to OpenJDK 11.
Ingo Molnar on Monday began sending in his feature pull requests for the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window. Of the pull requests worth noting are the EFI changes.
With the newly-minted Linux 5.6 kernel is initial support for USB4 based on Intel's Thunderbolt code while for Linux 5.7 is a wide variety of other USB changes.
Red Hat's David Howells has sent in pull requests introducing the new fsinfo() system call and mount/superblock notifications and as part of that a general notification mechanism for the kernel.
In the past using the Wayland-based GNOME Shell session and other Wayland compositors has generally resulted in a performance hit in going through (X)Wayland but that is much less so these days. Here are some initial benchmarks of Ubuntu 20.04 running various Steam Linux gaming benchmarks both under the default X.Org-based session and then again when using the Wayland session and its (X)Wayland support.
The previously reported work on split lock detection due to its big performance hit is now queued up for Linux 5.7.
Nearly one year after announcing OpenTelemetry as the merger of the OpenCensus and OpenTracing projects, Google has announced today OpenTelemetry has advanced to its beta phase.
Greg Kroah-Hartman began sending in his pull requests this morning for the areas of the Linux kernel he oversees. With the staging area changes for Linux 5.7 there is some nice spring cleaning.
For those that are normally spinning their own kernels and punctually upgrading to new releases, you will want to hold off on the new Linux 5.6 kernel for the moment if you use the Intel "IWLWIFI" WiFi driver.
In-step with the Linux 5.6 release that mainlined the WireGuard kernel module for this secure VPN tunnel, WireGuard 1.0.0 has now been declared.
Following last night's release of Linux 5.6, the GNU FSFLA folks have put out the Linux-libre 5.6-gnu kernel as their fully-free-software kernel that disallows loading binary kernel modules, disables functionality requiring closed-source firmware/microcode, and other aspects to ensure only free software code is running on the system.
Back in December was a developer discussion over dropping or forking non-Gallium3D drivers. Since then the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver has successfully become the default OpenGL driver for Broadwell/Gen8 and newer while the non-Gallium3D drivers continue to just face bit rot. The discussion over dropping/forking non-Gallium3D Mesa drivers has been reignited.
X.Org Server 1.20.8 was released as the newest point release for this current stable branch. X.Org Server 1.20.8 brings a number of fixes with there still being no sign of X.Org Server 1.21 gearing up for release.
Within minutes of Linux 5.6 being released on Sunday evening, Jens Axboe was already with sending in the start of the various storage areas to the kernel that he oversees with their feature updates for Linux 5.7.
Lutris 0.5.5 is out today as the newest version of this Linux game manager to assist in installing both native and emulated games on Linux. Lutris continues to expand the scope of its "runners" for improving the Linux gaming experience.
Linus Torvalds just announced the release of the Linux 5.6 stable kernel a few minutes ago. This also means the Linux 5.7 merge window is now open for business.
There is less than one month to go until the official release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" but we've already begun experimenting with it for weeks across a variety of platforms. For the most part we have found Ubuntu 20.04 slated to offer some nice performance improvements, especially if upgrading from the existing LTS series, Ubuntu 18.04. In this article are our initial benchmarks looking at the Intel Xeon Scalable from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to the current 20.04 near-final state.
Earlier this month there was the proposal by a Linux kernel engineer for Amazon to flush the L1 data cache on context switches as another safeguard against the ever increasing CPU vulnerabilities.
Lead Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver developer Jason Ekstrand has ported an optimization from the Valve-backed AMD "ACO" compiler over to the NIR code-base for delivering some sizable performance improvements.
This week in KDE land there weren't too many new features introduced but a lot of low-level work to foster future features.
While we were hoping to see the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub driver introduced in Linux 5.7 for improving the AMD Ryzen Linux laptop experience, that now looks quite unlikely.
For the very common Intel "Gen9" graphics found on pretty much all current pre-Icelake hardware that is available through retail channels, high dynamic range (HDR) display support could soon be enabled under Linux for a subset of devices.
Following Friday's release of Wine 5.5, Wine-Staging 5.5 is now available as the experimental blend of Wine with some 850+ patches atop the upstream code-base with various features in testing.