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Chrome 85 Is Clang PGO'ing Binaries For Better Performance But Linux Left Out

Phoronix | Aug. 25, 2020, 1 p.m. | Original

As we frequently cover, making use of compiler PGO (Profile Guided Optimizations) can mean some sizable performance wins, assuming the generated usage profile is accurate. With the imminent Chrome 85 availability, Google is now making use of PGO with their default LLVM Clang compiler toolchain for squeezing out around 10% better performance.

Going back four years ago is when Google engineers began experimenting with compiler PGO'ing for better browser performance. Back then they were enabling PGO on Windows builds carried out by the Microsoft MSVC compiler.

Linux 5.9 Lands Patch Adding Fallthrough Macro In 2,484 More Spots

Phoronix | Aug. 25, 2020, 12:09 p.m. | Original

A single patch coming in at nearly three thousand lines was merged on Monday for the Linux 5.9 kernel that make the use of the "fallthrough" macro more widespread throughout the kernel.

The single patch at large went through and added nearly twenty-five hundred "fallthrough;" lines of code to the kernel to replace existing areas just using a "fall through" code comment or the like. Previously there were just 1,167 references in the kernel using this macro while now it's at

LibX11 1.6.12 Released Due To Latest Security Advisory

Phoronix | Aug. 25, 2020, 11:40 a.m. | Original

Not even one month passed since the previous libX11 security vulnerabilities were made public while today a new security advisory was issued along with releasing version 1.6.12 of this key X11 library.

The X.Org code-base is known for being riddled with security issues in its aging and massive code-base. Security researchers have found many bugs in recent years while fortunately today's disclosure isn't too bad.

CVE-2020-14363 is

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS vs. Linux 5.9 + Mesa 20.3-devel Radeon Graphics Performance

Phoronix | Aug. 25, 2020, 10:45 a.m. | Original

Now that the default graphics driver stack of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is a few months old, here is a look at the AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance of Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS out-of-the-box compared to upgrading against Linux 5.9 Git and Mesa 20.3-devel for seeing if the performance advantages are worthwhile in making the leap to the newer RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers paired with the very latest kernel.

Ubuntu 20.04

MIR JIT Aiming For First Release Later This Year By Red Hat Developer

Phoronix | Aug. 25, 2020, 7:29 a.m. | Original

Vladimir Makarov of Red Hat spoke at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference during the GNU Tools Track on lightweight JIT compilers and the effectiveness (or not) of GCC's JIT implementation as well as LLVM's JIT in the context of just-in-time support for Ruby. But following those shortcomings with GCC/LLVM JIT, he's been working on MIR as a lightweight JIT compiler .

We first covered MIR at the start of the year as the Medium Internal Representation and aims to be a lightweight

TUXEDO Introduces New Linux Laptop With Ryzen 7 4800H / Ryzen 5 4600H

Phoronix | Aug. 25, 2020, 7:05 a.m. | Original

Last month the German Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers launched the PULSE 15 with AMD Ryzen "Renoir" processors . Today they launched a new model also featuring the very popular AMD Renoir parts.

Last month's Renoir introduction from TUXEDO Computers was with the Pulse 15 while today the Bavarian company is introducing a new Pulse 14 for those wanting something a bit smaller and lightweight.

OpenZFS Support Merged Into Mainline FreeBSD

Phoronix | Aug. 25, 2020, 6:38 a.m. | Original

Following ongoing work for over a year on moving to OpenZFS for FreeBSD's ZFS file-system support , FreeBSD HEAD overnight has imported the OpenZFS code-base.

Earlier this year OpenZFS saw the FreeBSD support added . In the months since OpenZFS has continued seeing BSD improvements as well as other improvements on its own like Zstd compression for OpenZFS .

The milestone now being crossed is the OpenZFS file-system code is imported into FreeBSD HEAD.

The import spells out, " The primary benefit is maintaining a completely shared code base

Linux 5.10 Slated To Use New Intel SERIALIZE In Fending Off Speculative Execution Bugs

Phoronix | Aug. 25, 2020, 12:06 a.m. | Original

Queued now in the "x86/cpu" development branch ahead of the Linux 5.10 kernel later this year is the change to make use of Intel's new "SERIALIZE" instruction within the kernel's " sync_core " code that is used for stopping the speculative execution and prefetching of modified code.

Earlier this year Intel's programming reference manual documented the new SERIALIZE instruction set to come next year with Sapphire Rapids and Alder Lake. SERIALIZE is used for ensuring all flags/register

Firefox 80 Available With VA-API On X11, WebGL Parallel Shader Compile Support

Phoronix | Aug. 24, 2020, 8:36 p.m. | Original

Firefox 80.0 is now available. There isn't too much to get excited about with Firefox 80, but at least some changes on the developer front.

One major Linux change with Firefox 80 is Firefox on Linux now supporting VA-API acceleration on X11 . The Video Acceleration API spearheaded by Intel and also used by other Mesa drivers with the Gallium3D video acceleration state tracker is now working properly on X11 rather than just Wayland previously. But besides that big video acceleration

DigitalOcean & Others Still Working On Core Scheduling To Make Hyper Threading Safer

Phoronix | Aug. 24, 2020, 5:30 p.m. | Original

With vulnerabilities like L1TF and Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) prominently showing the insecurities of Intel Hyper Threading, DigitalOcean and other organizations continue spearheading a core scheduling implementation for Linux that could allow HT to remain enabled but with reducing the security risk.

DigitalOcean has been working on Linux core scheduling for more than one year as a means of ensuring only trusted applications get scheduled to run on siblings of a core . At the same time, the scheduler aims to try to avoid using SMT/HT in areas where it could

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