This week in particular saw a lot of fixes in the KDE space for a wide variety of bugs…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Saw Many Bug Fixes This Week From KWin Crashes To Plasma Wayland Improvements

FSCRYPT as the file-system encryption framework for the Linux kernel and is currently wired up for EXT4, F2FS, and UBIFS to offer native encryption capabilities is currently seeing improvements so the separate casefolding (case-insensitive) file/folder support can work on encrypted directories…

Source: Phoronix – Linux’s FSCRYPT Working On Encryption + Case-Insensitive Support

AMD’s Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 20.Q1.1 Linux driver release was made available this week as their newest quarterly driver installment intended for use with Radeon Pro graphics hardware…

Source: Phoronix – Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 20.Q1.1 for Linux Released

PipeWire is the Red Hat engineered project aiming to offer better audio/video stream handling on Linux that integrates well with Flatpak and can optimally handle use-cases currently covered by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK. This week marked the release of PipeWire 0.3 as another big step forward for the effort…

Source: Phoronix – PipeWire 0.3 Released With Redesigned Scheduling Code To Offer JACK2-Like Performance

Going back to the start of 2020 we’ve been seeing a few patches here and there around AMD Family 19h, almost certainly Zen 3. That patch work has continued with a few more bits out this week while hopefully more bring-up is on the horizon ahead of the Linux 5.7 merge window opening in just over one month’s time…

Source: Phoronix – A Few More Linux Kernel Patches Floated This Week For AMD Family 19h (Zen 3)

Big “open-source” achievements aren’t too common for NVIDIA or Microsoft much less together, but thanks to their open-source work on the DXC DirectXCompiler it’s possible to easily convert HLSL DXR shaders to SPIR-V for Vulkan…

Source: Phoronix – NVIDIA Demonstrates Porting Of DirectX Ray-Tracing To Vulkan

Google’s Summer of Code initiative for getting students involved with open-source development during the summer months is now into its sixteenth year. This week Google announced the 200 open-source projects participating in GSoC 2020…

Source: Phoronix – Google Announces The 200 Open-Source Projects For GSoC 2020

AMDVLK 2020.Q1.2 is out as the first official AMD open-source Vulkan Linux driver code drop in one month…

Source: Phoronix – AMDVLK 2020.Q1.2 Released With Vulkan 1.2 Support

CodeWeavers working under contract for Valve on their Wine downstream Proton is out with a new update to their Proton 5.0 series…

Source: Phoronix – Steam Play’s Proton 5.0-3 Released With Support For Metro Exodus Direct3D 12 Mode

While Clear Linux is well known as being the performance-optimized Linux distribution out of Intel and catered towards performing the best on their hardware (though as we continue to show, Clear Linux does also perform incredibly well on AMD hardware too and generally faster than other distributions), when it comes to AMD-optimized distributions the primary example remains OpenMandriva. Since 2018 OpenMandriva has been providing an AMD Zen optimized build where their operating system and entire package archive is built with the “znver1” compiler optimizations. As it’s been almost a year since last looking at OpenMandriva’s Zen optimized build, here are some fresh benchmarks using the newly-released OpenMandriva 4.1.

Source: Phoronix – Benchmarking OpenMandriva’s AMD Ryzen Optimized Linux Distribution On The Threadripper 3970X

To date the Mesa “RADV” Radeon Vulkan driver hasn’t supported AMD’s GPUOpen Radeon GPU Profiler but that is changing…

Source: Phoronix – Mesa’s RADV Vulkan Driver Adding Compatibility For Use With The AMD Radeon GPU Profiler

Version 20.07.15711 of the Intel Compute Runtime was released this morning…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Compute Runtime Adds OCLOC Multi-Device Compilation

Intel’s ICE driver for the Ethernet E800 series is seeing a new member of the family come Linux 5.7…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Ethernet E823 Support Coming To The ICE Driver In Linux 5.7

The Linux EFI boot code is going through some “spring cleaning” ahead of the RISC-V EFI support landing that still could make it for the Linux 5.7 kernel cycle this spring…

Source: Phoronix – Linux EFI Going Through Spring Cleaning Before RISC-V Support Lands

The first batch of DRM-Misc changes following the recent Linux 5.6 merge window have been merged into DRM-Next in forming the early material that will ultimately come to the Linux 5.7 cycle in April…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 5.7 DRM Bringing New “TIDSS” Driver

Broadcom developers have been recently volleying open-source Linux driver patches for enabling their “VK Accelerators” on the platform…

Source: Phoronix – Broadcom Bringing Up Linux Support For VK Accelerators

New to Mesa 20.1-devel is a new option for the Radeon Vulkan “RADV” driver to enable zering out video memory allocations…

Source: Phoronix – RADV Vulkan Driver Adds Option For Zeroing Out Video Memory

A set of patches that continue to be worked on for the Linux kernek is reconciling NUMA balancing decisions with the load balancer. Ultimately this series is about reducing unnecessary task and page migrations and other NUMA balancing overhead…

Source: Phoronix – Linux NUMA Patches Aim To Reduce Overhead, Avoid Unnecessary Migrations

Last week I looked at the Windows vs. Linux scaling performance on the Threadripper 3990X at varying core/thread counts followed by looking at the Windows 10 performance against eight Linux distributions for this $3990 USD processor running within the System76 Thelio Major workstation. Now the tables have turned for our first look at this 64-core / 128-thread processor running on the BSDs, FreeBSD 12.1 in particular. With this article is looking at the FreeBSD 12.1 performance and seeing how the performance scales compared to Ubuntu 20.04 Linux and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 based CentOS Stream.

Source: Phoronix – FreeBSD vs. Linux Scaling Up To 128 Threads With The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X

GNOME Shell and Mutter saw a set of patches land today for GNOME 3.36 that have been around for a few months and deal with the tracking of software rendering and VNC usage where GNOME Shell should in turn disable animations to ease the rendering workload…

Source: Phoronix – GNOME Shell + Mutter See Changes For Tracking Software Rendering, VNC To Toggle Animations