Phoronix

Besides the dance of getting all of the various open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver components upstreamed (i.e. the Linux kernel, Mesa, libdrm, LLVM back-end) and worked out to major Linux distributions in time for new graphics processor releases, another challenge has been on the firmware/microcode front with also needing those binary blobs made publicly available in time and also picked up by the Linux distributions. For some past Radeon graphics card launches AMD hasn't posted those necessary blobs until the day of or a few days past launch. Fortunately, ahead of their next launch, the initial firmware binaries were posted today...

Up to this point my Intel Alder Lake DDR5 memory testing on Linux has been limited to a set of DDR5-4400 modules given the very limited DDR5 availability. But with having recently received a DDR5-6000 kit, here is a look at how the Intel Core i9 12900K performs under Linux with memory speeds up to DDR5-6000 and running a memory scaling comparison from 3000 to 6000 MT/s.

Mesa's Venus driver providing VirtIO-GPU Vulkan support that was developed by Google as part of the Virgil effort for 3D acceleration within guest VMs can now run ANGLE. Google's ANGLE in turn is their OpenGL ES conformant implementation that can run atop Vulkan / Metal / OpenGL / Direct3D interfaces...

The Rust-based Cloud-Hypervisor that started out as an open-source VMM at Intel for cloud workloads and now developed under the Linux Foundation is out with a new feature release...

Following this week's release of Chrome 99, Google has now promoted Chrome 100 to beta...

Added back in 2020 with the Linux 5.10 kernel was the new EXT4 "fast commits" mode for reducing commit latency in the ordered data mode. Now for the upcoming Linux 5.18 cycle, that fast commits mode should be even faster...

SPEC today finally published an updated Linux-native build of their SPECViewPerf industry graphics benchmark for professional applications...

One year ago this week Qt 5.15.3 LTS was released with 200+ bug fixes for this toolkit but that long-term support release was made commercial-only. Today The Qt Company has made available an open-source release of the Qt 5.15.3 changes...

OpenBLAS recently added support for Russia's Elbrus E2000 processors, however, the OpenBLAS developers are now debating whether to drop support for these Russian domestically-produced CPUs given Russia's invasion into Ukraine...

Intel's big open-source Linux graphics driver engineering team has submitted their last feature pull of new material for inclusion into the upcoming Linux 5.18 kernel. Intel engineers remain very busy on the discrete GPU enablement both for the DG2/Alchemist Arc graphics cards as well as the forthcoming compute accelerators...

While much of Intel's Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" enablement has been squared away for a while now within the Linux kernel and related components, there are a few holdouts only now coming about in patch form and working their way to the mainline kernel with Sapphire Rapids production ramping up in the coming months...

Another round of drm-misc-next changes has been sent in to squeeze into DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.18 merge window opening later this month...

The AMDGPU Linux kernel driver is preparing a new interface for allowing user-space to submit work to the GPU that will be executed across multiple engines simultaneously...

VMware engineers are in the process of enabling 3D acceleration within their VMWGFX driver on AArch64 so those making use of VMware virtualization software on 64-bit Arm will be able to enjoy accelerated 3D guest virtual machines...

AMD developers had a busy day with merging into mainline LLVM for the AMDGPU shader compiler is a new Vega/CDNA "GFX940" GPU target as well as a GFX1036 RDNA GPU target...

Last month I covered the issue of Lenovo's ACPI Platform Profile support for AMD-powered laptops was busted on Linux. The platform profile controls were exposed but in reality did not work. Fortunately, fixed up support for this feature is now on the way to the Linux kernel for letting users choose between better performance or extended battery life and cooler operating device...

KDE/Qt-focused consulting firm KDAB has been developing CXX-Qt as a new project to improve integration of the Rust programming language with the Qt toolkit...

While the VKD3D-Proton downstream gets much of the spotlight these days for the Direct3D 12 API implemented atop Vulkan for use by Valve's Steam Play (Proton), Wine's VKD3D continues to be developed and is closing in on its v1.3 release...

Intel In-Field Scan is a hardware feature we have not heard the company talk about publicly until yesterday when they posted a new open-source Linux driver for this hardware failure testing feature being introduced with Sapphire Rapids processors...

OpenSUSE has begun the beta phase of openSUSE Leap 15.4...

The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) consortium was announced today for fostering an open chiplet ecosystem for future generations of hardware...

Microsoft on Tuesday posted a third iteration of their "DXGKRNL" Linux kernel driver for DirectX / Hyper-V compute support for use within Windows Subsystem for Linux / Windows Subsystem for Android...

Last month there were discussions around potentially working to upstream the Linux support for Nintendo's Wii U game console. While there are serious limitations to the support, posted today were the patch series for review providing basic Wii U enablement...

The CentOS Automotive Special Interest Group today is announcing the Automotive Stream "AutoSD" Linux distribution...

The HarfBuzz open-source text shaping library that is used by GNOME/GTK, KDE/Qt, Android, Java, Flutter, Firefox, LibreOffice, and numerous other applications and toolkits is out with HarfBuzz 4.0...

We are now one release away from Chrome 100 but prior to that now available is Chrome 99 that brings a number of prominent developer additions...

As part of AMD's new approach for quietly bringing up new graphics hardware support within their open-source Linux graphics driver, today AMD landed new graphics chip support within their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Valve's newest game is... Aperture Desk Job. This is a mini game set within the Portal universe and used for showing off the Steam Deck controls while also working with other game controllers too...

After announcing Amazon Luna back in 2020 as their cloud gaming service, today Amazon officially rolled it out to all US users. With this launch also comes a limited, rotating selection of games free to Amazon Prime members...

The Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) has been an invaluable resource over the years for web developers with a plethora of open, detailed documentation on a wide variety of HTMl, CSS, and JavaScript features along with extensive Web API references. While MDN has suffered setbacks from recent Mozilla layoffs, today the organization is launching their new MDN and reaffirming that MDN Plus will be announced soon...

After not seeing a new release for nearly three years, MPlayer 1.5 was released this past weekend for this open-source media player...

Genode OS continues to be developed as an innovative open-source operating system framework. Genode developers closed out February by issuing the Genode OS Framework 22.02 release with many new features and improvements...

While Intel's DG2/Alchemist Arc graphics card support with the open-source Linux driver stack appears to be getting into shape with the latest upstream code ahead of the graphics cards expected to ship next quarter, the Xe HP compute accelerator support remains very much a work-in-progress for the open-source Intel Linux kernel driver...

During the course of February on Phoronix were 236 original news articles covering the state of open-source affairs and Linux performance. While the pandemic seems to be lightening up, sadly the ad industry is still in a downward state, but in any event here is a look at the most popular Phoronix content for the past month...

Smartmontools 7.3 was released as the first update to this open-source package in more than one year for providing a utility (smartctl) and daemon (smartd) for monitoring the SMART capabilities built into modern (S)ATA / NVMe / SCSI / SAS disk drives...

Wasmer 2.2 was released on Monday for this WebAssembly (WASM) run-time that aims to "run any code on any client" with this open-source stack working across operating systems / platforms and supporting a variety of programming languages...

Dav1d as the leading CPU-based, open-source AV1 video decoder developed by the VideoLAN project is nearing its v1.0 release...

Hitting the linux-firmware.git tree were updated AMD firmware images for Picasso, Raven, and Raven2 hardware with a rather important fix...

Vodafone in collaboration with Canonical is showing a prototype "Cloud Smartphone" as Mobile World Congress happening this week in Barcelona...

Earlier this month I noted a Linux scheduler change queued into sched/core ahead of the Linux 5.18 cycle that is expected to help AMD EPYC processors and other select Zen processors in various workloads. The change has been in the works for several months and is about adjusting the allowed NUMA imbalance when spanning multiple LLCs. I've now carried out some of my own benchmarks on EPYC hardware and indeed is further ratcheting up the Linux kernel performance.

It's been four years since the release of Dbus 1.12 (and even 20 months since the last point release [v1.12.20] up until this week when v1.12.22 was tagged) while today Dbus 1.14.0 is being introduced for this user-space IPC solution for Linux systems...

It looks like for the Linux 5.18 kernel cycle coming up it could begin allowing modern C11 code to be accepted rather than the current Linux kernel codebase being limited to the C89 standard...

Linux Mint Debian Edition "LMDE" continues to be developed in the event that Linux Mint itself which is based on Ubuntu would have to shift its base over to upstream Debian. Out today is LMDE 5 Beta...

Last week a new version of Intel's IWD open-source wireless daemon was published with a few improvements and new features for this increasingly used alternative to WPA_Supplicant on Linux systems...

Intel's Linux enablement work around Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) continues for better securing virtual machines on future Intel hardware platforms...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.17-rc6 to cap off the week that he describes as "nobody can claim that last week was *normal*, but whatever crazy things are going on in the world (and I personally had "Zombieapocalypse" on my bingo card, not "Putin has a mental breakdown"), it doesn't seem to have affected the kernel much."..

As noted last week there were Linux developers discussing the idea of removing the ReiserFS file-system given that it hasn't been really relevant in more than a decade and is very unlikely to be used still in production use-cases with modern kernels. It looks like the deprecation will move forward but the actual removal from the mainline kernel won't happen until 2025...

While free software developer Con Kolivas is known for his work on the Linux kernel to improve desktop responsiveness and efforts like BFS and MuQSS, there is also user-space software he has developed. One of those user-space programs under is belt is LRZIP, the Long Range ZIP format, that is focused on providing speedy compression of large files and to do so with lower amounts of memory...

Coreboot 4.16 is out this weekend as the newest quarterly release for this project striving for open-source system firmware / BIOS replacements...

The Cairo graphics library that is used by GNOME/GTK, Mozilla Gecko, and many other projects for vector-based 2D graphics drawing has decided to remove a number of its old drawing back-ends...