Phoronix

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has written a blog post how the KWin compositor's DRM back-end has been working to move itself off GBM surfaces (gbm_surfaces) to instead allocate buffers directly and import them into EGL. This ultimately should be a win for the KWin compositor once everything is complete...

The Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" development builds recently transitioned from Linux 5.19 as in use by Ubuntu 22.10/22.04.2 to a Linux 6.1 based kernel. This led some -- including myself -- to wonder if Canonical changed course and shifted to Linux 6.1 LTS instead of the Linux 6.2 kernel that has been out as stable since last month. Fortunately, that's not the case and Ubuntu 23.04 is preparing to soon land Linux 6.2 across all kernel flavors...

From early December to late February there was an absence of new Compute-Runtime updates for that open-source stack for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support for Intel graphics hardware on Linux. It was out of trend as they worked to move from a weekly~biweekly release rhythm to a monthly release cadence while taking extra time for making various other changes too. After that three month lull, they are back to pushing out new compute updates and damn it's looking nice. At least in my testing, the progress they've quietly made over the past few months has been very nice for the compute stack compatibility/support and performance.

The ipmitool utility on Linux systems is widely-used for controlling IPMI-enabled servers and other systems. This tool for interacting with the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is extremely common with server administrators while now its development is in a temporary state of limbo due to GitHub...

The open-source OpenGL and Vulkan support for Intel's next-generation Meteor Lake client processors is taking a step forward with next quarter's Mesa 23.1 release...

Following last night's Linux 6.3-rc2 release that brings a workaround for system stuttering on some AMD Ryzen systems, that workaround was quickly back-ported to the Linux 6.1 LTS and 6.2 stable series and spun into new releases for Monday morning...

AMD is working to enable VirtIO GPU and pass-through GPU support for the Xen virtualization hypervisor with Radeon graphics...

Intel's Linux engineers continue working on Linear Address Masking (LAM) for making use of untranslated address bits of 64-bit linear addresses so that it can be used for arbitrary metadata. The hope is that this LAM metadata can lead to more efficient address sanitizers, optimizations for JITs and VMs, and more, but it's been a lengthy journey getting the support upstreamed...

David Airlie has managed to get some early code in place for handling VP9 video decoding with Vulkan using the Mesa RADV driver. This early Vulkan Video VP9 support also is accompanied by an FFmpeg branch supporting this experimental Mesa extension...

The Linux 6.3-rc2 kernel is out today as the second weekly kernel test release since last weekend's closure of the Linux 6.3 merge window...

Since the Linux 6.1 kernel various users have reported system stuttering issues when using modern AMD Ryzen systems. This has been similar to an "intermittent system stutter" issue AMD disclosed last year for Windows 10 and Windows 11 while now for today's Linux 6.3-rc2 a workaround is finally being merged that in turn will also be back-ported to the stable kernel series...

The GNOME 44 release candidate was officially declared today as the last test version ahead of formally releasing the GNOME 44 desktop later this month...

Sent in this morning via x86/urgent for integration into Linux 6.3 and also for back-porting to stable kernel series is disabling the XSAVES instruction for AMD Zen 1 and Zen 2 processors to workaround an AMD processor erratum made public last year...

Yesterday saw emergency hot-fix releases in the Linux 6.2 and 6.1 series for addressing an easy-to-trigger kernel oops when mounting and unmounting external storage. This weekend is proving more volatile with today bringing an emergency hot-fix release for the Linux 5.15 LTS series due to a separate issue...

A set of patches are expected to be merged for the Linux 6.4 cycle in two months enable support for the MMIO-based GMUX found on dual GPU Apple T2 Macs...

Linux 6.4 is set to remove the old CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED and CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED_V2 options that are used for running newer versions of the Linux kernel with very old Linux distributions and user-space tools. Pre 2007~2008 distributions as a result would likely run into trouble trying to run on Linux 6.4+ kernels...

The open-source nvidia-vaapi-driver project is an independent effort implementing the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) atop of the NVDEC interface supported by NVIDIA's proprietary driver. This VA-API-on-NVDEC implementation allows for video acceleration within Firefox and other software only targeting this open API...

Development work on SDL3 continues at full-speed for the next version of this hardware/software abstraction library that is commonly used by cross-platform games. The newest feature merged is support for child pop-up windows...

As part of an AMD effort to enhance the performance of the AMD Linux graphics drivers when running in a virtualized environment, a set of initial patches are pending for Mesa that implement native context support for VirtIO...

A simple patch queued in "hwmon-next" this week for the Linux 6.4 cycle later this spring gets motherboard sensor monitoring working on three more ASUS motherbards for modern Intel systems...

Linux 6.2.4 and 6.1.17 kernels have been released this morning as new emergency releases...

GNU Octave 8.1 is out today as the newest feature release to this free software for scientific computing and numerical computations that remains a leading open-source alternative to MATLAB...

It was a busy March week for KDE developers as they have now got the Konsole terminal emulator working on Windows, Qt apps surviving compositor restarts, other Plasma 6.0 development work under their belt, and the continued flow of fixes...

Queued up ahead of the Linux 6.4 cycle this spring is removing all of the PCMCIA "char" drivers as part of a broader effort to remove PCMCIA socket and card driver code where there is no apparent users remaining...

AMD today published Radeon ProRender SDK 3.1 as the newest version of this cross-platform and open-source physically-based rendering engine...

In addition to this week seeing new releases of FEX-Emu and Hangover for open-source projects aiming to run x86/x86_64 binaries on 64-bit Arm, the Box86 and related Box64 projects are out today with their own feature updates for helping to enable x86 and x86_64 Linux binaries on Arm systems...

Full disk encryption is quite important in today's computing environment while some operating systems still sadly don't provide an easy and streamlined manner of setting up an encrypted disk at install-time. Thankfully with the next release of OpenBSD, they are introducing a guided disk encryption option to their installer...

This week TikTok-owner ByteDance hosted the CloudFW Open System Firmware Symposium to talk up their open-source firmware work, showcase their industry partnerships, and more. One interesting takeaway is that thanks to the weight of ByteDance, Lenovo is now supporting LinuxBoot in some capacity...

Embree 4.0.1 is out with a few changes to note for this open-source high performance ray-tracing library for CPUs and GPUs...

Chrome 112 beta is now available for testing as the next step forward for Google's web browser...

On Thursday AMD engineers released AOMP 17.0-0 as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang downstream compiler that carries their latest development patches around Radeon/Instinct OpenMP GPU/accelerator offloading support...

While the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D are promoted as great "gaming processors", these new Zen 4 desktop CPUs with 3D V-Cache also have great capabilities for various technical computing workloads thanks to the hefty cache size. In prior articles I've looked at the Ryzen 9 7900X3D/7950X3D in around 400 workloads on Linux while in this article I am looking more closely at these technical computing areas where these AMD Zen 4 3D V-Cache processors show the most strength and value outside of gaming.

Hangover 0.8.3 is now available as the newest version for this open-source project started by several Wine developers to ease the pathway for running Windows x86/x86_64 games and applications on Linux under AArch64 (64-bit Arm) as well as other possible architectures like POWER9 and RISC-V...

TikTok owner Bytedance this week hosted their CloudFW Open System Firmware Symposium in Beijing where they celebrated the launch of CloudFW 2.0 as they implement Coreboot to replace UEFI...

PipeWire 0.3.67 is now available as the latest version of this now widely used server by the Linux desktop for managing audio and video streams as an alternative to PulseAudio and JACK on the audio side...

While less than one week since the Linux 6.3-rc1 release, already the first batch of Intel (i915) kernel graphics driver updates has been sent to DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 6.4 merge window kicks off in two months...

Last year I wrote about a Google engineer working on rumble support for the latest Microsoft controllers in conjunction with Microsoft's Xbox team. That patch seemed to have fallen through the woodwork but has been updated and sent out in "v2" form this week for allowing Linux gamers to enjoy rumble functionality with these latest Microsoft controllers...

Back in 2021 Ruby merged the YJIT just-in-time compiler that last year with Ruby 3.2 was deemed production grade. There's also been the MJIT compiler that relies upon an external C compiler. And now landing this week in Ruby is RJIT as the newest just-in-time effort...

Since late 2020 there had been work by AMD Linux engineers on adding Smart Access Memory (Resizable BAR) support to RadeonSI as the Gallium3D OpenGL driver and improved since that point in the name of performance. However, for this OpenGL driver now they've come to realize the benefits haven't necessarily panned out and the developers went ahead and disabled this SAM/ReBAR support followed by removing the support from this driver...

Back in December initial AMD Zen 4 "znver4" support was merged for the LLVM/Clang 16 compiler. While the "-march=znver4" targeting at least flips on the newly-added AVX-512 instructions with these AMD processors, it was re-using the existing scheduler model from Zen 3. Finally today a tuned Zen 4 scheduler model has landed for what will be found in the LLVM 17 compiler later this year...

Mesa 22.3.7 has been released as the last planned point release for that driver Q4'2022 driver series...

Micron recently sent over their latest Crucial 2 x 16GB DDR5-5200 and DDR5-5600 memory kits for testing with these low cost options for running with the latest Intel Alder Lake / Raptor Lake and AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors. Here's a look at how these affordable DDR5 memory options are performing and a look at the Linux workloads that can benefit from higher frequency memory.

Following work bringing Ubuntu Linux to the RISC-V boards like the StarFive VisionFive 2, LicheeRV, Nezha, and others, Canonical today announced they have published an optimized RISC-V image for the Microchip PolarFire SoC FPGA powered "Icicle Kit" development board...

Samba 4.18 is out today as the popular open-source implementation of the SMB networking protocol that allows for file and print service interoperability with Microsoft Windows systems in an Active Directory (AD) environment...

A change merged to Qt this week can allow for Wayland clients to survive compositor restarts, such as when the compositor crashes...

In wanting to avoid waiting for pipes via the IOCB_NOWAIT option in order to further enhance IO_uring performance, Jens Axboe has implemented said functionality and in a simple test is seeing 10x to 23x performance improvements...

If you are an AMD Radeon RX 7900 series "RDNA3" GPU owner and don't mind running bleeding-edge open-source graphics driver code, you'll want to pull down today's Mesa 23.1-devel Git snapshot...

One of the newer Linux distributions that has been making waves is Vanilla OS as an immutable and atomic version of Ubuntu Linux that aims to provide a pleasant Linux desktop experience, close to upstream, and is augmented by the growing selection of Flatpak packages. Now though the project has decided to move from Ubuntu Linux as its base over to Debian Sid...

Python 3.12 Alpha 6 was released on Tuesday as the newest development release toward this next major Python release...

Last month you may recall the news of Intel having an extremely fast AVX-512 sorting library they published as open-source and found adoption already by the popular Numpy Python library. In the case of Numpy it could deliver some 10~17x speed-ups. That header-only library has now reached version 1.0...