Arm engineers have been working to speed-up the open-source Chromium web browser on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and ultimately to flow back into Google's Chrome releases. Their focus has been around Windows-on-Arm with the growing number of Windows Arm laptops coming to market, but the Chromium optimizations also benefit the browser on Linux too.
Released at the end of October to little fanfare was webOS Open Source Edition 2.0, the open-source Linux OS currently in development by LG for use on their Smart TVs and other digital products. With webOS Open Source Edition 2.0, they began setting their sights on automobiles and other potential use-cases. That was then extended by this week's release of webOS OSE 2.1.
Universal Bandwidth Compression is now enabled for the open-source "TURNIP" Mesa Vulkan driver.
Mesa 19.2.5 was just released earlier this week but now v19.2.6 has already been released due to the previous point release breaking IBM POWER builds.
Coming up this weekend with the Linux 5.4 kernel is emulation/spoofing of the SGDT/SIDT/SMSW instructions around UMIP for allowing newer 64-bit Windows games to run on Wine and Steam Play (Proton). With newer CPUs like the AMD Ryzen 3000 series that support UMIP, these instructions are not allowed to run in user-space with Wine due to UMIP. So while the first stable kernel release is about to land with this support, some Wine-based emulation not contingent on the kernel patches is also in the works.
Linux for years has supported monitoring NVMe drive temperatures when installing the nvme user-space utility and run as root, etc. But now finally with Linux 5.5 the kernel is supporting NVMe drive temperature reporting through the hardware monitoring "HWMON" infrastructure alongside other hardware sensors.
For those wondering if it's worthwhile for performance recompiling your key Linux binaries with the microarchitecture instruction set extensions and tuning for Ice Lake, here are some GCC compiler benchmarks looking at that impact for the Core i7 1065G7 on the Dell XPS 7390.
Blender 2.81 is now available as the latest minor yet significant update to this open-source 3D modeling software following the major Blender 2.80 release earlier this year.
While releasing the game on time might be more of a challenge, Valve did deliver in announcing Half-Life: Alyx as scheduled as their new flagship virtual-reality game.
The Khronos Group has officially confirmed Intel's new "Iris" Gallium3D driver as being a conformant OpenGL 4.6 implementation.
PHP 7.4 is due to be released next week as the annual major iteration to PHP7. Like we have seen through the PHP7 releases, while new features continue to be tacked on for this popular web-based programming language the performance has continued evolving. Here are the latest benchmarks of PHP 5.6 through PHP 7.4 while also looking at the PHP 8.0-dev performance that is in development on Git master.
Thanks to work done by 9elements Cyber Security for an unnamed client, there is now working open-source Intel TXT support for Coreboot with the patches under review for upstream inclusion.
While the official NVIDIA Linux driver has worked well with DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (DP MST) setups for years now for driving large displays, audio hasn't worked under Linux for NVIDIA's driver in this combination. But with the upcoming Linux 5.5 cycle that will be addressed.
The long-awaited WireGuard secure VPN tunnel functionality looks like it will land with the Linux 5.6 kernel cycle happening in early 2020. Linux 5.5 is kicking off next week but the necessary crypto subsystem changes have yet to take place as well as a final sign-off on the new WireGuard code.
With the initial Navi 14 support to be found in the Linux 5.4 kernel releasing this weekend the GPU ASIC (along with Navi 12) have been marked as experimental and thus not enabled by default unless passing a special module parameter to the kernel. But now at the last minute this support has been deemed non-experimental for Navi 14.
Wednesday marked the v1.0.2878 update to Intel's "IGC" Graphics Compiler that is used by their graphics hardware compute stack.
Mesa 19.3 had been expected for release next week per their original release calendar, but as we are used to seeing for these quarterly feature releases, at least one if not more weekly release candidates tend to be needed for ironing out bugs. As such, Mesa 19.3.0 is now solidly looking like at least an early December release while Mesa 19.3-RC4 shipped on Wednesday.
The "Data Streaming Accelerator" (DSA) is a new block on future Intel CPUs that hasn't been talked about much publicly... Until now. Intel's open-source crew has begun detailing DSA for future Intel CPUs that will offer high-performance data movement and transformation operations. The Linux driver enablement has begun.
Mesa 19.2.5 is out today as the latest bi-weekly stable update to the current Mesa 19.2 series.
With Linux 5.4 due to be released this coming Sunday, 24 November, one of the big "winners" of this next kernel are AMD Radeon customers. Linux 5.4 brings support for new GPUs as well as better performance for existing graphics cards. Here are some fresh benchmarks of the performance wins as a result of the LRU bulk moves functionality.
Last week ago we provided a number of benchmarks looking at the performance impact from Intel's Jump Conditional Code (JCC) Erratum that required a CPU microcode update to mitigate but that comes with a performance hit. At least Intel has pending GNU Assembler patches to help offset that performance hit. In time for last week's articles I didn't have a chance to perform Skylake Xeon Scalable (1st Gen) benchmarks but now here are some metrics alongside Cascade Lake.
NVIDIA has released CUDA 10.2 for SuperComputing 19 week. CUDA 10.2 comes with some interesting changes, including to be the last release that will support Apple's macOS and the introduction of a standard C++ library for GPUs.
Intel's SVT-AV1 video encoder for AV1 is currently the fastest AV1 CPU-based encoder we have seen but it's looking like in due time Rav1e could be closing in on it if they continue with their current trajectory.
The latest enterprise push by Ubuntu maker Canonical is Charmed OSM as their own commercial flavor of Open-Source MANO.
The Intel "Gen11" Iris Plus Graphics on Ice Lake are a big upgrade over earlier Intel graphics generations but the gains are even more enticing if making use of their new Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver.
The long overdue X.Org Server 1.21 still hasn't been organized for release but at least the extra time is allowing more XWayland bits to land.
While there is no sign of Solaris 11.5 or Solaris.Next (last year was a road-map pointing to Solaris 11.Next in H2'19 or H1'20 that has since been removed), Oracle does continue putting out more updates to the Solaris 11.4 series.
It's been three weeks already since the last DXVK update but that was succeeded this evening by DXVK 1.4.5 as another notable update to this project mapping Direct3D 10/11 onto Vulkan for speeding up the Wine/Proton-based Windows gaming experience on Linux.
With the many Intel Ice Lake Linux benchmarks we began publishing over the past month since picking up a Dell XPS with Core i7-1065G7, there have been many benchmarks compared to the likes of the Core i7 Whiskey Lake and Kaby Lake processors. For those curious how the performance stacks up going further back, here are some Ubuntu 19.10 laptop benchmarks putting it up against the likes of Core i7 Haswell and Broadwell processors.
A few days ago Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman laid out the proposals for the upcoming Debian General Resolution vote concerning "init system diversity" and just how much Debian developers still care in 2019 about supporting non-systemd init systems within the Linux distribution.
The open-source vkBasalt project was started as a layer implementing Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (akin to Radeon Image Sharpening) for any Vulkan-using GPU/driver/software. The vkBasalt project then picked up FXAA support for this Vulkan post-processing layer while now a new release is out with more functionality added.
Coreboot 4.11 was released today as the tagged autumn build of Coreboot that is used as an alternative to proprietary BIOS/firmware on motherboards.
Mainlining of the WireGuard secure VPN tunnel was being held up by its use of the new "Zinc" crypto API developed in conjunction with this network tech. But with obstacles in getting Zinc merged, WireGuard was going to be resorting to targeting the existing kernel crypto interfaces. Instead, however, it turns out the upstream Linux crypto developers were interested and willing to incorporate some elements of Zinc into the existing kernel crypto implementation.
Flax Engine is the latest game engine seeing native Linux support and in the process the renderer also picked up Vulkan support.
While the patches overnight about "substantial" improvement in power usage for Intel graphics on Linux were exciting on first look, it's less so now as it turns out last week's graphics driver security fixes is what regressed the Intel graphics power-savings.
In addition to AMD's SC19 announcements yesterday, their embargo just lifted on the Radeon Pro W5700 as their first 7nm workstation graphics card build on their new RDNA architecture.
Announced earlier this month, the Athlon 3000G is shipping today a week ahead of the Ryzen Threadripper 3000 series. The Athlon 3000G is AMD's new sub-$50 processor for lightweight desktop purposes.
In recent weeks AMD driver developers have been working on EXT_direct_state_access improvements within Mesa and following their latest code push today now support the D.S.A. extension for OpenGL compatibility profile contexts.
VIA-owned Centaur Technology has finally announced their newest project past the decade old VIA Nano... Centaur Tech is rolling out an eight-core x86 SoC that features an integrated AI coprocessor.
Longtime open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developer Chris Wilson has sent out a set of 19 patches for what he calls fast soft-RC6 support and is a "substantial" improvement over the current driver code for Intel graphics power-savings.
For those that are fans of the 7 Days to Die open-world shooter / horror game, the performance on Linux is now as much as 30% higher as a result of Mesa GL threading.
One and a half years late, the "DANOS" (known formerly as "dNOS") network operating system is now open-source under the Linux Foundation.
Over the years there have been many interesting Wayland projects to take flight focused on new and interesting use-cases. One of these interesting (and experimental) Wayland compositors was NEMO-UX focused on providing a shell for computing environments that span large surfaces like virtual chalkboards or tabletops.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced from SC19 today in Denver that they are releasing a "reference design" of hardware and software to help in deployments of their graphics processors within Arm-based servers focused on HPC and AI.
Valve has confirmed recent rumors around one of their new virtual reality games in development being Half-Life: Alyx.
With yesterday's much anticipated Intel oneAPI beta being built around open-source standards like SYCL, the "cross-device" support can at least in theory extend beyond just Intel platforms. Codeplay is already showing that's possible with a to-be-open-source layer that will allow oneAPI and SYCL / Data Parallel C++ to run atop NVIDIA GPUs via CUDA.
A patch series was merged today for the in-development Mesa 20.0 to further lower the CPU overhead of Intel's open-source Vulkan driver.
Making waves today is that Intel will be removing very old BIOS and driver downloads from their site on or after 22 November. Though these software downloads for the products in question are around ~20 years old so the real-world impact should be small plus with Linux drivers being in the mainline kernel, all you'd really be losing out on are BIOS updates that themselves haven't seen updates in years.
Fedora will be adding the Nano text editor to their default Fedora Workstation installs as complementary to Vi but their stakeholders intend to submit a system-wide proposal that would change the default installed editor from Vi to Nano.
Beginning at the start of the year it looks like Google will be requiring hardware vendors to support firmware updating on Linux via Fwupd with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) if they wish to carry the "Designed For Chromebook" label.
CodeWeavers' Jeremy White has announced that CrossOver 19 is now in beta for existing customers of this Wine-based software for running Windows programs on Linux and macOS.
AMD just sent out their press release for SuperComputing 19 week in Denver. It turns out being released for SC19 is the latest major iteration of Radeon Open Compute, ROCm 3.0.
Earlier this month Feral Interactive released the Linux port of Shadow of the Tomb Raider. For those wondering about the AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce performance for this Vulkan-powered Linux game port, here are benchmark results on 23 different graphics cards.
Vulkan 1.1.128 is out with various corrections and clarifications to this graphics/compute API specification but it also comes with one exciting new extension.
GCC 10 has moved to its next stage of development that shifts away from feature work to instead general bug fixing with hopes of shipping the GNU Compiler Collection 10 release in the months ahead.
SUSE developer Giovanni Gherdovich has sent out the latest patches on supporting frequency invariance within the kernel's scheduler code and ultimately making use of it for select Intel CPUs to yield not only better raw performance but also power efficiency.
The GNU Compiler Collection continues picking up new features aligned for the upcoming C++20 standard. The latest are patches pending on the mailing list for implementing coroutines in C++.
For those using Zswap as a compressed RAM cache for swapping on Linux systems, the performance could soon see a measurable improvement.