Canonical Contributing Upstream Improvements To Plymouth Ahead Of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS One of the immediate differences Ubuntu 20.04 desktop/laptop users will notice when booting in UEFI mode is the boot splash screen improvements thanks to leveraging Red Hat's work on providing a flicker-free boot experience and pulling in the UEFI BGRT system/motherboard logo during the boot process to provide a more transitive experience. Canonical in turn is working on pushing some of their improvements back into upstream Plymouth... |
Intel P-State Driver Shifting To "Schedutil" Governor Default With Linux 5.7 On top of all the other changes in Linux 5.7 so far, a secondary set of power management updates were sent in today for this next version of the kernel and includes now using the Schedutil governor by default for Intel P-State and Arm big.LITTLE systems... |
AMD's Marek Olšk Lands Even More OpenGL Threading Improvements Into Mesa 20.1 One month ago to the day I was writing about OpenGL threading improvements for Mesa 20.1 and since then more "GLTHREAD" work has materialized and successfully landed for improving the Mesa OpenGL driver performance... |
Linux 5.7 Changes So Far: New exFAT Driver, Tiger Lake Graphics By Default, Apple Fast Charge, Etc We are now one week through the two week long Linux 5.7 kernel merge window where new/improved functionality is introduced. Here is a look at the changes so far for Linux 5.7... |
C-SKY Architecture Gets Fix For Its Own Speculative Execution Bug In Linux 5.7 C-SKY is a Chinese 32-bit CPU architecture intended for low-power devices from media boxes / DVRs to printers and other consumer electronics. C-SKY has also worked its way into a ~$6 development board. With its updates for the Linux 5.7 kernel are various additions to this maturing architecture support along with a speculative execution fix... |
Initial Benchmarks With Intel oneAPI Level Zero Performance Last week Intel released an initial set of micro-benchmarks for their oneAPI Level Zero and with L0 support being plumbed into their open-source Intel Compute Runtime, this weekend I started toying around with some Level Zero benchmarks on a variety of Intel processors. |
L1d Cache Flush On Context Switch Moves Forward For Linux In Light Of Vulnerabilities A new patch series sent out just under one month ago was providing opt-in L1 data cache flushing on context switching. That work has now been revived again and now with documentation added it's clear that this work is being done in response to a recent CVE being made public... |
Linux Exec Should Be Less Deadlock Prone In Future Kernels Ongoing work around Linux's exec() code should make it less deadlock prone in future kernel versions... |
/dev/random Seeing Performance Work For Linux 5.7 The Linux 5.7 kernel will bring random performance improvements as in /dev/random... |
Kaidan 0.5 Released As The KDE-Focused Jabber/XMPP Chat Client Kaidan is the open-source project that last year joined KDE as a Jabber/XMPP chat client. After a half year of work, Kaidan 0.5 has finally been released... |
Linux 5.7 Perf Changes Include Additions For AMD Zen 3, Intel Tiger Lake The perf subsystem continues to be quite lively with improvements and for Linux 5.7 is seeing a number of low-level improvements... |
Phoronix Test Suite 9.6 Milestone 2 Released For Latest Cross-Platform Benchmarking The second development release of the Phoronix Test Suite 9.6 cross-platform benchmarking software is now available for evaluation and testing... |
Looking At The LVI Mitigation Impact On Intel Cascade Lake Refresh On Friday I posted some initial numbers looking at the LVI mitigation impact when using the LLVM Clang compiler with that open-source, multi-platform compiler having landed its mitigation this week for Intel's Load Value Injection (LVI) vulnerability that was disclosed in March. Through the weekend I have been running some additional tests of this compiler-based mitigation and in this article are some numbers off Cascade Lake Refresh, which while recently released is reported by Intel to still be vulnerable to this new disclosure. |
KVM With Linux 5.7 Supporting Protected/Secure VM Guests For IBM POWER + s390 Both of IBM's s390 and POWER CPU architectures are seeing secure/protected guest virtual machine support with KVM on the in-development Linux 5.7 kernel... |
XFS Working Towards Online Repair, Many Underlying Improvements While XFS dates back to the 90's and has been in the Linux kernel for nearly two decades, this proven file-system continues aging gracefully and continuing to see more improvements. With Linux 5.7 is another step forward for XFS... |