Phoronix

The upcoming Linux 5.18 kernel cycle will bring a number of improvements for Apple keyboards -- both for the Apple Magic Keyboard and the keyboards integrated with their various MacBook computers...

AMD engineers on Sunday night sent out a patch series getting x2APIC virtualization "x2AVIC" support for the AMD SVM driver with the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)...

LLVMpipe as the software OpenGL implementation that runs atop the CPU and Lavapipe as the Vulkan equivalent have seen a recent uptick in activity...

Debuting last December was Mold 1.0 as a high performance, modern linker to compete with GNU's Gold and LLVM's LLD. That project was started by Rui Ueyama who originally worked on LLVM's LLD and has been working aggressively on performance optimizations. Sunday night marked the release of Mold 1.1 as the latest major update to this linker...

OpenBLAS as the popular open-source implementation of the BLAS and LAPACK APIs is out with a new feature release...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.17-rc5 as another weekly test version of Linux 5.17 that will debut as stable in March...

Intel's Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) driver is ready to be merged for the Linux 5.18 kernel now that it's been queued into the x86 platform driver's "for-next" branch...

Thanks to Red Hat engineer Jelle van der Waa, the hid-razer driver is set to be merged into Linux 5.18 next month for dealing with Razer hardware not complying with the HID standard...

Last month Intel posted a new set of Linux patches for shadow stack support as part of the Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) found within their latest processors. Also part of Intel's CET is Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) while Intel said they were going to first focus on shadow stack (SS) and worry about IBT later. Less than one month later, new Indirect Branch Tracking patches for the Linux kernel have been taking shape...

Mesa's Virgl code as part of the Virgil 3D GPU project allows for OpenGL/3D acceleration within QEMU virtual machines with the driver calls then being passed onto the host GPU. Mesa's Virgl code to this stage has relied upon the Gallium3D TGSI intermediate representation while they are working on moving it to the modern and superior NIR...

Following the nasty local privilege escalation vulnerability that was disclosed last month for Polkit's pkexec, Fedora developers are hoping to make pkexec optional later this year with Fedora 37...

Libinput 1.20 is out today as the first update since last September to this widely-used Linux input handling library that is relied on both within X.Org and Wayland powered desktops...

Building off last week's Radeon graphics driver updates for Linux 5.18 that included introducing AMDKFD CRIU and enabling FreeSync Video Mode by default, Friday evening brought a second batch of feature updates for this next kernel version...

While PostgreSQL has supported compression with its TOAST storage and over the past year has built-up LZ4 compression support for it along with compressing the WAL, backup compression, and other usage, PostgreSQL developers are preparing to further extend their compression capabiities with Zstd support...

Intel's forthcoming Arc Graphics "Alchemist" (DG2) graphics cards do support Resizable BAR functionality as covered when they previously published Linux patches for it. They are also now working on a DG2 feature for "small BAR" support...

It's been a while since last hearing anything of Linux block subsystem maintainer's Jens Axboe crusade on achieving the maximum possible IOPS-per-core. However, on Friday he was out with his latest insight in still declaring Intel's Core i9 12900K "Alder Lake" processor as being the king of IOPS-per-core performance at nearly 13M IOPS per CPU core...

KDE developers had a very busy Valentine's week with working on more fixes for the recently released Plasma 5.24 as well as making early progress on Plasma 5.25 and improving KDE apps and other areas of their open-source desktop environment...

AMD today pushed updated Family 19h / Zen 3 CPU microcode to the linux-firmware.git tree...

AMD's Linux graphics driver engineers have been working on the driver support for new graphics processors and now the patches are at the earliest stages of publishing. However, due to driver handling changes, it's sharply different this time around where in the past they volleyed a big set of patches under some colorful fishy codename in an effort to conceal their hardware enablement work...

While AMD EPYC processors already deliver great performance under Linux, with the Linux 5.18 kernel this spring is a scheduler improvement that can provide measurable speed-ups for various workloads on processors where there are multiple last level caches (LLCs) per node, such as with the case of EPYC...

Building off Intel graphics driver code already staged for the upcoming Linux 5.18 merge window, another round of feature changes were sent in this week to DRM-Next for adding to the queue ahead of this next kernel cycle...

While the X.Org Foundation didn't participate in Google Summer of Code last year amid GSoC project changes, with this year's GSoC design having incorporate feedback from last year's changes, X.Org is hoping to once again participate in this summer initiative that sees student developers contribute to and engage with open-source projects. So far under the X.Org umbrella there is one project idea being solicited that has willing mentors and that is for improving the unit testing coverage of the AMDGPU kernel driver...

Red Hat's David Airlie continues carrying out almost magical work on the open-source Linux graphics stack. Reviving some work he originally started a while back, patches pending for Mesa allow speeding up the software-based LLVMpipe OpenGL driver for vertex and fragment shader processing...

Google in cooperation with AOMedia this week released the AOM-AV1 v3.3 encoder for this royalty-free video codec...

In addition to the road-map update for Arc Graphics and Sapphire Rapids along with announcing Falcon Shores as a server CPU/APU/XPU pulling in Xe Graphics, Intel's 2022 Investor Meeting also made other updates and some new disclosures...

The Clutter toolkit -- as the OpenGL-based graphics library for rendering UIs that dates back more than one decade to OpenedHand that was then acquired by Intel and notably used during the Moblin/MeeGo era -- is finally being officially retired...

Thanks to Google engineers there is Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support being worked on for the open-source Coreboot...

As part of Intel's Investor Meeting today, the company provided an updated technical roadmap with some interesting bits of information...

Last year Amazon launched the EC2 M6a instances powered by AMD EPYC 7003 series while this week they have expanded their range of AMD Zen 3 offerings by launching the EC2 C6a series. The EC2 C6a instances are designed for compute-intensive workloads (hence the "C" series) and AWS is promoting it as offering up to 15% improvement in price-performance over prior-generation C5a instances and up to 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances. I've run some benchmarks of the new EC2 C6a instances looking at how they perform over the prior 2nd Gen EPYC C5a based instances, against the Intel Ice Lake competition over in the M6i stack, and also how the C6a competes with Amazon's own Graviton2-based C6g type.

Intel has released a new version of their open-source, interactive visualization software OSPray Studio that is built atop their OSPray ray-tracing rendering engine...

PipeWire continues with its rapid sequence of releases in continuing to fine-tune this audio/video stream server for the Linux desktop so it can successfully address the roles long-served by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK...

Long before the likes of VA-API and VDPAU for GPU video playback acceleration on Linux, there was X-Video and X-Video Motion Compensation (XvMC). Finally in 2022 the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library has decided to drop that XvMC hardware acceleration code...

Last week marked the release of the big AMD ROCm 5.0 update to the Radeon open-source GPU compute stack. Out already is now ROCM 5.0.1 with documentation updates as well as initiating the change around the hipcc and hipconfig commands moving forward...

With OpenBMC 2.10 never having materialized beyond a release candidate, the release of OpenBMC 2.11 today is a big one with roughly a year's worth of changes since OpenBMC 2.9. OpenBMC 2.11 brings many improvements for this Linux distribution intended for baseboard management controllers (BMCs) on servers and other management controllers...

The NVIDIA GeForce FX "NV30" graphics cards are nearly two decades old while via the open-source, community-driven Nouveau project even these old GPUs still see occasional Linux graphics driver improvements. Hitting Mesa 22.1-devel today is the most notable driver work we've seen in years for the open-source NV30 and NV40 (GeForce 6 / 7 series) graphics cards...

XWayland 22.1 is out today as the newest standalone feature release for this XWayland code issued separately from the X.Org Server. XWayland continues in very robust shape for allowing X11 clients whether it be games or applications to run atop capable Wayland compositors...

As with most modern SoCs/processors, proper CPU frequency scaling / performance state management is absolutely critical for achieving good performance out of the hardware either for ensuring the CPU is hitting its capable performance states and also to reduce power consumption / heat when not needed in order to avoid thermal throttling and prolonging battery life. Fortunately, a proper CPUFreq driver for the Apple M1 is in development for Linux and is allowing for a combination of enticing performance and good battery life for this community-driven, open-source support around the Apple Silicon...

Back in January I wrote how Valve is working on dynamic Variable Rate Shading (VRS) for the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" to dynamically control the shading performance to help with battery life. That work has now successfully been merged into Mesa 22.1 for the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack...

The Bcachefs file-system that was born out of the Linux kernel's block cache code has over the past few years matured greatly. Now in 2022 the core fundamentals of the file-system are "pretty close to done" and will hopefully be mainlined this calendar year into the Linux kernel...

With the forthcoming Linux 5.17 kernel there is the new AMD P-State driver aiming to provide better power efficiency than the ACPI CPUFreq driver that has long been used on AMD platforms. For complementing that AMD P-State driver, AMD has also been working on adding their CPU P-State support to Linux's cpupower tool...

Ahead of the Steam Deck beginning to ship at month's end, Valve overnight released Proton 7.0-1 as the newest version of their software that allows many Windows games to run on Linux with great success. Proton 7.0 is rebased against the new upstream Wine 7.0 while also having many other changes in tow...

Gigabyte and Canonical today announced that they will be working together to certify Gigabyte server hardware moving forward for use under Ubuntu Server...

Last June the Linux kernel disabled support for Intel's ENQCMD instructions as the kernel support was found to be "broken beyond repair" for this feature that's part of the Data Streaming Accelerator with upcoming Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors. Fortunately, now in time for Sapphire Rapids ramping up, Intel engineers have fixed up the ENQCMD code and looks like the next Linux kernel cycle will re-enable the functionality...

Back in November NVIDIA announced their open-source Image Scaling SDK with cross-platform GPU support to better position their DLSS technology given the ground that AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) has been gaining. The Image Scaling SDK is complementary to DLSS but still requires integration on the behalf of the game/engine developer. Today marks a new update to the NVIDIA Image Scaling SDK...

Finally released earlier this month was the first official 64-bit build of Raspberry Pi OS, the official Debian-based operating system of the low-cost Raspberry Pi single board computers. Following that I posted some Raspberry Pi 32-bit vs. 64-bit benchmarks. Given that generated a fair amount of interest and also some open questions, here is round two of looking at the Raspberry Pi 32-bit vs. 64-bit performance including its impact on memory usage and thermals.

Up to now the Intel DG2/Alchemist graphics driver code for Linux has enabled driving up to four displays, but it turns out these forthcoming Intel Arc graphics cards will be capable of powering up to five display ports...

The Linux and Coreboot support for the AMD "Sabrina" SoC continues to be worked on while recently Google has merged a new motherboard target for a Sabrina-powered Chromebook...

Linaro is proposing a thermal library that interfaces with the Linux kernel's thermal framework. As part of this is also a thermometer utility for user-space that would live within the Linux kernel source tree for monitoring the thermal data...

One day after AMD completed its acquisition of Xilinx, Intel has announced this morning they plan to acquire Tower Semiconductor...

GNOME Shell and Mutter have issued their "42.beta" releases ahead of next month's GNOME 42.0 stable release...