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The AMD Zen 2 / Zen 3 Performance Fix For Linux 5.11 Has Landed

Phoronix | Feb. 10, 2021, 3:40 p.m. | Original

Just in time for the expected Linux 5.11 stable release on Sunday, the AMD frequency invariance performance regression I've been noting and writing about since Christmas day has been resolved with the previously covered fix having been merged today.

That regression affecting Zen 2 / Zen 3 laptops and desktops through servers stems from the introduction of AMD frequency invariance that is new this kernel cycle and quickly showed itself if using the Schedutil (scheduler utilization) governor while the likes of the performance governor were unaffected. The change only affects

FreeBSD 13 BETA Benchmarks - Performance Is Much Better

Phoronix | Feb. 10, 2021, 2:53 p.m. | Original

The official release of FreeBSD 13.0 is coming up in March, while already from our preliminary tests of the newly minted FreeBSD 13.0 BETA1 , the benchmark results are extremely tantalizing compared to FreeBSD 12.2... Ultimately the performance should be much more competitive now compared to Linux (at least on Intel x86_64) and other operating systems with the big FreeBSD 13 release.

Besides an upgraded compiler toolchain (LLVM 10 to LLVM 11) and

GRUB 2.06 Should Be Released This Year, Cooperation Increasing With Distro Vendors

Phoronix | Feb. 10, 2021, 11:35 a.m. | Original

While GRUB 2.06 was aiming for release in 2020 , having to deal with the BootHole security issue among other challenges last year ended up delaying that release. Fortunately, it looks like this long awaited GRUB feature update should be out this year and there has been increased cooperation between upstream GRUB developers and distribution vendors.

GRUB 2.04 as the last feature release happened back in July 2019. Since then GRUB has seen improved Btrfs RAID support, support for LUKS2 encrypted disks

Intel's Project ACRN To Upstream More Code With Linux 5.12

Phoronix | Feb. 10, 2021, 8:43 a.m. | Original

Announced nearly three years ago by Intel was the ACRN reference hypervisor framework intended for IoT/embedded use-cases with real-time capabilities and safety-critical computing. More of the kernel bits to this "Big Little Hypervisor for IoT Development" are set to see mainline with the imminent Linux 5.12 kernel cycle.

Back in 2019 with Linux 5.3 was initial ACRN guest support . Ultimately this ACRN Hypervisor has been continuing along not only with Intel but also organizations like LG, APTIV,

Open Source LLM

Developers Continue New Push With LibreOffice In The Web Browser Via WebAssembly

Phoronix | Feb. 10, 2021, 7:31 a.m. | Original

While there has been LibreOffice Online as a collaborative, web-based version of LibreOffice making use of the HTML5 Canvas for its UI, there hasn't been much activity there recently outside of the Collabora Online commercial variant. But developers are working on a current port of LibreOffice to the web browser using WebAssembly.

Developers Thorsten Behrens and Jan-Marek Glogowski presented at last weekend's FOSDEM Online 2021 on the work being done to port LibreOffice to work gracefully with WebAssembly for running the open-source

Lenovo IdeaPad Improvements En Route To Linux 5.12

Phoronix | Feb. 10, 2021, 6:15 a.m. | Original

In addition to Linux 5.12 positioned to see Lenovo laptop "platform profile" support for controlling the power/thermal behavior of their newer ThinkPad and IdeaPad laptops, this next kernel version also has other improvements on the IdeaPad front.

The ideapad-laptop driver has been seeing a number of improvements queued in platform-drivers-x86 ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.12 merge window.

First up there is support coming for controlling the always-on USB charging behavior for various laptops. The always

Linspire 10 Released - Claims Of "Most Meticulously Designed & Engineered FOSS Desktop"

Phoronix | Feb. 10, 2021, 3 a.m. | Original

Linspire 10 is out this week as the newest version of this Linux distribution formerly known as Lindows nearly two decades ago. While Linspire went dark for several years, under its current ownership by PC/OpenSystems they have been trying to reinvigorate the desktop distribution the past few years. Linspire 10 represents the latest work for the Ubuntu-based platform.

Linspire 10 Beta released late last year with claims of Linspire being the number one distribution for new, intermediate and power users . Now with the formal Linspire 10

Zink On Mesa 21.1-devel Now Achieves OpenGL 4.3 Over Vulkan

Phoronix | Feb. 10, 2021, midnight | Original

Going back to last summer there have been patches for getting OpenGL 4.6 with the Zink GL on Vulkan implementation but were considered experimental and not for immediate upstreaming. In the months since and especially after Mike Blumenkrantz was hired by Valve, the upstreaming effort kicked into higher gear. Now with Mesa 21.1, we are up to OpenGL 4.3.

With the soon-to-be-released Mesa 21.0 there is OpenGL 4.1 for Zink as a major milestone and the first

Wine Begins Landing PPC64 Code To Eventually Help With Windows Programs On POWER

Phoronix | Feb. 9, 2021, 6:43 p.m. | Original

Going back about two years there has been work on properly supporting Wine on POWER 64-bit (PPC64) . Now past the Wine 6.0 stable release, it looks like that work that work is finally beginning to land. In conjunction with Hangover to handle the cross-architecture aspect , the hope is to eventually allow Windows x86 programs to work on libre POWER systems or at the very least with native Winelib support to help in porting open-source Windows software to IBM POWER / OpenPOWER

Proton 5.13-6 RC Continues With More Cyberpunk 2077 Fixes For Linux

Phoronix | Feb. 9, 2021, 3:43 p.m. | Original

Valve and their partners at CodeWeavers have put out a release candidate for Proton 5.13-6 as the latest version of their Wine-based software for running Windows games on Linux via Steam Play.

While Wine 6.0 stable has been out for several weeks and the Proton 5.13 branch becoming a bit stale, it's still living on for now and continuing to see new activity. Notable with the Proton 5.13-6 RC is seeing more fixes still around running the Windows

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