Being well past the half-way point for the year, here is a look at how Intel’s performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution is performing compared to its rolling state last December. Plus there are also benchmarks looking at how the current Clear Linux is performing against other rolling-release distributions.
Source: Phoronix – Intel’s Clear Linux Still Outperforming Other Distributions For Mid-2020
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…
Source: Phoronix – Intel Workaround For Graphics Driver Regression: “The Platform Problem Going Crazy”
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…
Source: Phoronix – LibreOffice 7.0 Released As The Open-Source, Vulkan-Accelerated Office Suite
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…
Source: Phoronix – Google Engineers Propose “Machine Function Splitter” For Faster Performance
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…
Source: Phoronix – Corsair Commander Pro Driver Sent In To Linux 5.9
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…
Source: Phoronix – Intel Tiger Lake OpenCL Support On Linux Now Considered Production Ready
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…
Source: Phoronix – GNU Debugger Adding eBPF Debugging Support
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…
Source: Phoronix – RADV ACO Back-End Begins Tackling Navi 2 / GFX10.3 Support
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…
Source: Phoronix – Linux 5.9 Continues Working On A Variety 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…
Source: Phoronix – Wayfire 0.5 Wayland Compositor Brings Latency Optimizations, More Protocols
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…
Source: Phoronix – Checkpoint/Restore Of Unprivileged Processes Sent In For Linux 5.9
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…
Source: Phoronix – Defaulting Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs To Better Linux Driver Is Held Up By Analog Outputs
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…
Source: Phoronix – After 5 Years, FSGSBASE Support Finally Ready For Linux To Enhance AMD/Intel Performance
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…
Source: Phoronix – Linux 5.9 Set To Bring “Close_Range” System Call – Coordinated With FreeBSD Developers
Merged to GNOME’s Mutter compositor is an API for Wayland to allow the launching of trusted clients…
Source: Phoronix – GNOME’s Mutter Adds Support For Launching “Trusted Clients” On Wayland
There are many ARM changes coming to Linux 5.9, including support for Intel’s Keem Bay…
Source: Phoronix – Linux 5.9 Adds Intel “Keem Bay” Support, 8 Snapdragon Smartphones, AMD EthanolX BMC, Old Tegra Tablets
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…
Source: Phoronix – Intel’s Open-Source H.265/HEVC Encoder Sees First Release Of 2020
A number of x86-related changes were sent out today for the first full day of the Linux 5.9 merge window…
Source: Phoronix – Intel SERIALIZE, Dropping Of SGI UV Supercomputer, i386 Clang’ing Hit Linux 5.9
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…
Source: Phoronix – AMD HSA Offloading Support Dropped From The GCC Compiler
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…
Source: Phoronix – Btrfs Seeing Some Nice Performance Improvements For Linux 5.9