Sent out over the weekend was a patch series for the Intel Linux kernel graphics driver entitled "Time, where did it go?" This set of 42 patches aims to provide incremental improvements to the driver to offset a performance regression in Linux 5.7 that Intel hasn't been able to track down. This this increased complication of the driver to offset the regression is now under the microscope.
LibreOffice 7.0 has been released! Making LibreOffice 7.0 so exciting is that the Cairo code was replaced with Google's Skia library and in the process gaining optional support for GPU accelerating the user-interface with Vulkan.
Google engineers have been working on the Machine Function Splitter as their means of making binaries up to a few percent faster thanks to this compiler-based approach. They are now seeking to upstream the Machine Function Splitter into LLVM.
The hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem has a new driver that is likely to excite some enthusiasts wanting greater control over thermal monitoring and fan control for their systems.
With all the recent work on Intel's open-source compute stack around the vector back-end and GPU code generation with their ISPC compiler there was another significant milestone achieved that went unnoticed until spotting the change a few days ago.
The GNU Debugger (GDB) has merged initial support for debugging of eBPF code that is traditionally consumed by the Linux kernel as part of this in-kernel special purpose virtual machine.
With the "Sienna Cichlid" and "Navy Flounder" open-source driver support as what appear to be the first "Navi 2" GPUs and the first of the "GFX10.3" generation on the graphics engine side there is the initial kernel support with Linux 5.9 and the initial Mesa support for 20.2. That Mesa support has been focused on RadeonSI as the official OpenGL driver as well as Mesa's RADV driver as the Radeon Vulkan driver in-tree but not officially supported by AMD. That RADV support is currently un-tested. Both drivers currently depend upon the "AMDGPU" back-end found in the forthcoming LLVM 11.0 with its initial GFX10.3 support. But now on the RADV driver side there is preliminary GFX10.3 bits landing for the popular "ACO" back-end.
Among the many pull requests sent in for the Linux 5.9 merge window by longtime developer Ingo Molnar are the usual assortment of scheduler improvements.
Wayfire, a Wayland compositor inspired by the likes of Compiz with different desktop effects, is out today with a new feature release.
Linux 5.9 is bringing another feature that's long been baking and of interest to a growing number of stakeholders... checkpoint/restore functionality of unprivileged processes.
Switching from the "Radeon" to "AMDGPU" kernel driver on Linux is possible for Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 era graphics cards and doing so can mean slight performance benefits, the ability to run the AMDVLK or RADV Vulkan drivers, and simply making use of this better maintained driver. But having these original GCN graphics cards default to the modern AMDGPU driver appears held up by the lack of analog video output support with that driver.
The Linux kernel work for making use of the x86_64 FSGSBASE instruction since Intel Ivy Bridge and since then AMD CPUs also is set to finally land with the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel. The FSGSBASE support has the possibility of helping Intel/AMD CPU performance especially in areas like context switching that had been hurt badly by Spectre/Meltdown and other CPU vulnerability mitigations largely on the Intel side.
The close_range() system call is intended to allow efficiently closing a range of file descriptors (or all file descriptors) of the calling task. This system call was devised in cooperation with FreeBSD developers.
Merged to GNOME's Mutter compositor is an API for Wayland to allow the launching of trusted clients.
There are many ARM changes coming to Linux 5.9, including support for Intel's Keem Bay.
Intel's Scalable Video Technology team is known for their open-source video encoder work particularly on AV1 and VP9 formats, but they also continue to maintain a high performance H.265/HEVC encoder as well. Intel SVT-HEVC 1.5 was released on Monday as their first major update of the year.
A number of x86-related changes were sent out today for the first full day of the Linux 5.9 merge window.
There didn't appear to be much usage ever out of the AMD HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) support within the GCC compiler and hadn't been maintained in a while so now has been wiped out of the GNU Compiler Collection.
With more eyes on Btrfs given the file-system is set to become the default for Fedora 33 desktop spins, there are some interesting performance optimizations coming to Btrfs with the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel.
Linux kernel developers are working on tightening up the access around GPL-only kernel symbols and kernel shims that interface with proprietary kernel modules. This latest work is being driven by code recently put out for improving the Linux networking code where NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver would be the initial consumer.
The Linux Foundation in cooperation with many hardware and software vendors have announced the Open-Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) for improving open-source security.
Vulkan 1.2.149 is out today and its lone new extension is yet another addition to the Vulkan API for helping translation layers like DXVK map other graphics APIs on top.
Linux 5.8 is one of the biggest releases in a while but that newly-stable kernel also means a lot of the new drivers need to be stripped out or otherwise modified over being reliant on binary-only firmware/microcode or contingent upon other dependencies deemed not free to the Free Software Foundation standards.
After being worked on a number of months, the FSCRYPT file-system encryption framework for the Linux kernel is enabling inline encryption support with the 5.9 kernel.
GNOME could soon be playing nicely with deep color displays that aim to offer more realistic color reproduction thanks to the greater bit depth for each color component.
It's arguably long overdue but with the just-opened Linux 5.9 kernel cycle the Unicore32 CPU architecture is being removed.
Libinput 1.16 is out this morning as the newest feature update to this input handling library used by the Linux desktop on both X11 and Wayland.
In addition to the many outlined changes expected for Linux 5.9, here's another big one: lots of IO_uring work for enhancing this modern Linux I/O interface.
Linus Torvalds was debating up to the last minutes today of whether to opt for Linux 5.8-rc8 or go ahead and release Linux 5.8 as stable... He opted for Linux 5.8 splashing down on this historic day.
DragonFlyBSD has been generally working out well for AMD Zen systems sans a few motherboard specific woes, but now is getting even better thanks to importing some new drivers from FreeBSD.
Facebook engineer Song Liu has sent out a set of patches for "BPF_PROG_TYPE_USER" as a new BPF type for the Linux kernel focused on better supporting user programs.
The Linux 5.9 kernel merge window will open up immediately upon the release of Linux 5.8, which is expected to happen this evening unless Linus Torvalds decides to stave it off for one week to allow for additional testing. In any case, once Linux 5.9 kicks off there are a lot of changes expected.
Incredibly it has taken until now with Wine-Staging 5.14 to implement more than just a stub to Wine's FINDSTR program implementation. Yes, the long-standing command to search for strings.
A few days back we wrote of Intel's ISPC compiler landing GPU code generation support for their UHD/Iris/Xe Graphics from Gen9 Skylake and beyond. Following that code being merged, ISPC 1.14.0 was quickly tagged.
Even with the coronavirus pandemic, the distributed open-source and Linux communities continue advancing with great new features and improvements. During the course of July on Phoronix were 266 original news articles and another 15 featured Linux hardware reviews / benchmark featured articles.
While some platforms like Netmarketshare have reported increases month-over-month for Linux desktop usage, that doesn't appear to be translating similarly to the Linux gaming market-share, or at least not at the rate Steam is growing on Windows and macOS. Valve has just published their July 2020 numbers that are part of the Steam Survey.
Primarily driven currently by Arm big.LITTLE use-cases like high-end smartphones where you may be running on battery and not want to boost the CPU performance too high for real-time (RT) tasks, Linux 5.9 is adding new capabilities around setting the default boost value.
Linux game porter Ethan Lee who also develops FNA-XNA today released FAudio 20.08 as the open-source XAudio re-implementation.
Debian 10.5 is out today as the latest point releasr to "Buster" in shipping the latest security and bug fixes.
Even with everything going on in the world around the coronavirus and warm summer temperatures, KDE developers continue making improvements on their desktop stack, including around Wayland support.
Wine 5.14 debuted late on Friday night as the newest bi-weekly development release with being less than a half-year to go now until the debut of Wine 6.0 stable.
In addition to the Weston 9.0 Alpha compositor, this week also brought Wayland-Utils 1.0 as the inaugural release for this collection of Wayland utilities/tools.
The Unigine Engine appears to be having great success in the engineering and simulation space more so than for the competitive game engine space, but in any case Unigine 2.12 is now out with this visually stunning engine delivering even more life-like visuals while continuing to be Linux-friendly.