Fedora Workstation 31 when it debuts at the end of October should be another great release for the Fedora project and continuing to ship with the bleeding-edge yet stable packages and latest upstream innovations.
After last week making waves by open-sourcing their C++ standard library and opening up their new console/IDE font, this week was kicked off by releasing .NET Core 3.0.
Similar to their Deep Learning Reference Stack for delivering better AI / deep learning performance on Xeon Scalable CPUs, Intel has now released the Database Reference Stack 1.0 for optimizing performance on their DC Persistent Memory.
A majority of our benchmarking of Intel's new Gallium3D OpenGL open-source driver is done with various "Gen9" graphics hardware given its proliferation and not yet having any Icelake Gen11 graphics hardware for Linux benchmarking. But with the Iris Gallium3D going back to supporting Broadwell "Gen8" graphics, here is a fresh look at how that oldest supported Intel hardware is working for this new Linux open-source OpenGL driver compared to the current default "i965" Intel OpenGL driver too.
Red Hat's Andrea Arcangeli sent out an interesting patch series on Friday to micro-optimize the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to enhance the VMEXIT performance in wake of Spectre mitigations.
While AMD has provided open-source Radeon RX 5700 series (Navi 10) support since launch and that code since worked into the various mainline code-bases from the Linux kernel to Mesa, one kink in their support has been their binary microcode images not being available from the reference linux-firmware.git location as needed to initialize the hardware. That Navi 10 firmware/microcode issue has finally been rectified with the images landing this morning.
Jiri Kosina on Sunday sent out the HID subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.4 kernel. The HID pull once again features support for several new devices particularly on the Logitech side.
The Lima Gallium3D driver for supporting Arm Mali 400/450 graphics hardware within Arm SoCs has picked up a few performance optimizations.
Back in August I noted that Wireless USB and Ultra Wideband would be deprecated within the Linux kernel and that is indeed happening for Linux 5.4.
DragonFlyBSD's now-default HAMMER2 file-system now has initial file-system checking "fsck" support.
Following the February release of Video Codec SDK 9.0, NVIDIA recently did a quiet release of the Video Codec SDK 9.1 update that furthers along this cross-platform video encode/decode library.
While sadly this is another year not out at Oktoberfest for the once annual Phoronix reader gathering/pilgrimage, there is another Phoronix Premium sale for those interested. With Oktoberfest kicking off this weekend in Munich, here's the start of our premium sale if wishing to support our daily news and benchmarking operations while enjoying features like ad-free viewing and multi-page articles on a single page.
SilverStone recently sent over their CS381 chassis that has proven to be quite a versatile micro-ATX enclosure that can accommodate up to twelve hard drives (eight of which are hot-swappable) all while coming in at just 400 x 225 x 316mm. The SilverStone CS381 could work quite well as a Linux HTPC / DIY Steam Linux gaming living room PC or SOHO file server system with its compact size while offering immense storage potential. Here's more on the SilverStone CS381 and our build with using a Ryzen 5 3400G that is playing well under Linux with an ASUS B450 motherboard.
The "char/misc" changes for the Linux 5.4 are as eventful as ever.
While FreeBSD doesn't see much in the way of game ports besides compatibility with open-source games/engines, FreeBSD's Linux binary compatibility layer for years has allowed running Linux games on FreeBSD and there is also Wine support for FreeBSD to handle Windows software. Thanks to those efforts, it's possible to make a FreeBSD gaming box.
In addition to announcing systemd-homed for better user home directories, Lennart Poettering also used this year's All Systems Go conference to drum up support for systemd's boot efforts around SD-Boot and the Boot Loader Specification.
Following last week's Akademy 2019 developer conference in Milan, KDE developers this week not only released the Plasma 5.17 beta but they've been busy with a ton of other bug fixing and improvements.
The input driver updates for the Linux 5.4 kernel include the addition of an interesting, budget-friendly RC receiver that can be used for home-built drones and other use-cases while now the driver allows the receiver when paired with a supported RC controller to serve as a traditional Linux joystick input.
Not only is FOSDEM one of the best open-source/Linux events in the world for those who make the journey each February to Brussels, but they also for years now have done a masterful job at recording the different talks and developer room sessions. Each year gets better both for the event itself as well as the video recordings even with FOSDEM operating on a very limited budget due to the event being free to attend. For those curious about the hardware/software setup powering their video setup, here's an interesting blog post.
SHADERed is a cross-platform utility designed for creating and testing HLSL and GLSL shaders. This week marked the version 1.2 release of this Windows/Linux program for helping to test and evaluate shaders.
Added to the device mapper (DM) code with the Linux 5.4 kernel is an interesting addition that benefits those wanting to carry out some interesting use-cases around remote replication of block devices.
ReactOS, the open-source operating system still striving for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows as a drop-in replacement, has version 0.4.12 now available as its first big alpha update in six months.
Seven years after the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO-1.75 Arm-based laptop entered production or nearly one decade since development began, it's now seeing mainline kernel support.
In time for any weekend gaming is the release of DXVK 1.4 as the latest big update to this Direct3D 11 over Vulkan implementation to boost the D3D11 Windows gaming performance with the likes of Wine and Valve's Steam Play (Proton).
When looking for a heatsink with a small stature for an AMD APU mini PC build for HTPC / file storage use-cases (more on that build in the next day or two), the Noctua NH-L9a-AM4 fit the criteria and so I went with that given the success with the many Noctua heatsinks we have used over the years. For those potentially interested in the NH-L9a-AM4 for an AMD APU like the new Ryzen 5 3400G or for lower-end Ryzen CPUs, I ran some benchmarks with this cooler.
While most of the other Linux file-systems are seeing mostly mundane changes for the Linux 5.4 feature work, the F2FS activity is fairly notable.
Little is publicly known about stealth networking startup Pensando Systems, which is founded by former Cisco executives. They've been ramping up efforts since early 2018 but to date their web-site hasn't launched nor formally introduced any products, but they now have a networking driver in the mainline Linux kernel.
Going back to December 2017 we've been tracking the Red Hat led effort on improving Nouveau's OpenCL compute support that involves adding NIR/SPIR-V support and improvements to the Clover Gallium3D state tracker. To much surprise, this morning the SPIR-V support for this open-source NVIDIA driver was merged for Mesa 19.3.
FreeBSD 12.0 is already approaching one year old while FreeBSD 12.1 is now on the way as the next installment with various bug/security fixes and other alterations to this BSD operating system.
Canonical's Mir developers since re-shifting focus to serving as a Wayland compositor have been working with the likes of the GNOME2-forked MATE desktop environment to implement Wayland support using Mir. For helping those interested in porting MATE applications from X11 to Wayland, one of the Mir developers has now issued a porting guide.
Google on Friday released the Chrome 78 web-browser beta following last week's release of Chrome 77.
NVIDIA this week released Nsight Graphics 2019.5 as the newest feature update to their proprietary developer tool for graphics profiling and debugging across multiple APIs.
The PowerPC/POWER architecture changes were sent in today for the ongoing Linux 5.4 merge window. This time around are some interesting POWER changes with work on their means of secure virtual machines.
While the Ryzen 9 3950X and 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadripper processors were reportedly on track for launching in October with updates as of a few weeks ago, today AMD announced a slight delay in launching these new processors.
Kicking off today in Berlin is the annual All Systems Go conference focused on systemd and other user-space components. Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering presented on systemd-homed as a new component to systemd that is focused on improving home directory handling.
Since the AMD EPYC 7002 series "Rome" launch at the beginning of August, it's been known how AMD's top-end (aside from the newly-announced EPYC 7H12) EPYC 7742 easily outperforms the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 in most real-world benchmarks. The EPYC 7742 not only outperforms the Xeon Platinum 8280 in raw performance but also at a significantly lower cost and it gets even better with the EPYC 7642. We have been testing the EPYC 7642 48-core processors and even there the performance is generally ahead of a Xeon Platinum 8280 while being about half the cost of that flagship non-AP Intel Xeon Scalable Cascadelake processor.
NetworkManager has shifted its threshold for a weak WiFi signal for when to begin searching for other WLAN networks. Up to now NetworkManager used a -80dBm threshold for when to roam for other network signals while now that has changed to find hopefully stronger network signals sooner.
Often when doing cross-distribution benchmarks, readers often comment on the performance of Clear Linux particularly for video encoding use-cases as surprisingly different from other distributions. Some argue that it's just over the default CPU frequency scaling governor or compiler flag defaults, so here is a look at that with Ubuntu 19.10 daily benchmarked against Clear Linux.
While just yesterday the big DRM feature pull was sent in for Linux 5.4, AMD has also volleyed out their initial batch of fixes for this next version of the kernel.
For those anxious to make use of GNOME 3.34 with its many own performance improvements atop Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux rolling-release distribution, it looks like the wait is still going on for a few more days but is coming "soon-ish" to the platform.
The OpenZFS file-system could soon be seeing better data deduplication support.
Like the mostly mundane Btrfs and XFS changes with the Linux 5.4 merge window, the EXT4 file-system activity is mostly focused on fixes too but also new debugging ioctls.
Haiku as the open-source operating system that still maintains BeOS compatibility continues tacking on modern features and support for software well past the days of BeOS.
While we've known about the many features for a while if you are a faithful Phoronix reader, today the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics driver changes were sent in for the Linux 5.4 kernel.
It's coming almost one month behind schedule, but LLVM 9.0 is out today along with the Clang 9.0 C/C++ compiler and associated sub-projects for this open-source compiler infrastructure.
The beta release is out today for KDE Plasma 5.17.
Creative Assembly revealed Total War Saga: TROY on Wednesday for release next year. Feral Interactive has announced they are porting this latest Total War game to macOS and Linux.
Last week AMD's AGESA "ABBA" update began shipping with a fix to how the boost clock frequencies are handled in hopes of better achieving the rated boost frequencies for Ryzen 3000 series processors. I've been running some tests of an updated ASUS BIOS with this adjusted boost clock behavior to see how it performs under Linux with a Ryzen 9 3900X processor.
It was just two days ago that Valve's performance-focused "ACO" shader compiler was submitted for review to be included in Mesa for the "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver. Just minutes ago that new shader compiler back-end was merged for Mesa 19.3.
Most Linux gamers these days should be running at least quad-core systems so Mesa 19.3 has been updated to reflect that reality with the number of CPU threads used by their disk cache.
This week Microsoft not only open-sourced their C++ standard library (STL) but they have also now shipped Cascadia Code.
The Linux 5.4 block subsystem changes brings the new blk-iocost model.
Back in July of last year the RADV Vulkan driver enabled primitive binning and DFSM for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver. Well, it thought it enabled DFSM support and paired with the binning did yield a minor performance benefit at the time for Raven Ridge APUs. But now it turns out the DFSM support wasn't properly wired up and is now addressed but is currently introducing a performance regression.
The mature XFS and Btrfs file-systems continue seeing more fixes and cleaning with the now in-development Linux 5.4 kernel.