Linux 5.6 Graphics Changes Bring Open-Source NVIDIA Turing, AMD Pollock Enablement
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver updates were sent in today for Linux 5.6 with plenty of fun features in tow...
AMD Sensor Fusion Hub Driver Revved But Not On Tap For Linux 5.6
Earlier this month AMD finally published their Sensor Fusion Hub driver for Linux to improve the Ryzen laptop support. That new "SFH" driver hasn't been queued as part of any Linux 5.6 pull request but a second version of the driver did make it out this week...
Staging Changes Lighten The Linux 5.6 Kernel By More Than Thirty Thousand Lines
With Linux 5.6 the staging area has seen new functionality but thanks to removing old code it ends up removing a fair number of lines of code from the kernel...
FreeNAS 11.3 Released With A Plethora Of Improvements
The folks at iXsystems have released FreeNAS 11.3, their latest big update to this FreeBSD-based operating system designed around the OpenZFS file-system for offering advanced network-attached storage capabilities...
RADV Re-Enables NGG Geometry Shader Support
On top of the last minute Radeon Vulkan "RADV" improvements landing on Wednesday for Mesa 20.0, another big ticket item landed... Well, re-enabled...
USB4 Support Lands In The Linux 5.6 Kernel
Ahead of USB4 devices expected to begin appearing later this year, the Linux 5.6 kernel is wired up with initial USB4 support...
Linux 5.6 Is The First Kernel For 32-Bit Systems Ready To Run Past Year 2038
On top of all the spectacular work coming with Linux 5.6, here is another big improvement that went under my radar until today: Linux 5.6 is slated to be the first mainline kernel ready for 32-bit systems to run past the Year 2038!..
AMD Zen 2 "Znver2" Optimizations With LLVM Clang 10 Bring Some Improvements
With LLVM Clang 10 having added a Zen 2 scheduler model tuned for the latest AMD CPUs over the existing "znver2" tuning that had just copied the Zen 1 scheduler, here are some benchmarks looking at the LLVM Clang 9 vs. 10 compiler performance on AMD EPYC when making use of "-march=znver2" optimizations...
Linux 5.5 Performance Overall Is Comparable To Older Kernels For Most Workloads
Since the stable release of Linux 5.5 this weekend I have been carrying out benchmarks for looking at how the performance of this newly-minted kernel compares to older releases. Here are benchmark results of Linux 5.3 vs. 5.4 vs. 5.5 with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X but the results are similar to other HEDT and lower-end systems we've tested thus far...
Linux 5.6 Kernel Adds New System Call For "openat2" - More Extensible openat()
A new system call added to the very feature rich Linux 5.6 kernel is openat2() for more extensible behavior compared to the existing openat() functionality...