After the persistent work by developer Gert Wollny with a desire to improve the aging "R600g" driver that provides open-source OpenGL support for Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics cards, this Gallium3D driver in Mesa 22.3 will now use the NIR back-end by default...
Restartable Sequences "RSEQ" has been one of the nice additions to the Linux kernel in recent years and can allow for faster user-space operations on per-CPU data by providing a shared data structure ABI between each user-space thread and the kernel. RSEQ has been in the process of being extended to provide even more performance benefits...
A final batch of drm-misc-next feature changes intended for the Linux 6.1 Linux kernel has been submitted to DRM-Next. This pull consists of some core DRM code improvements as well as updates to the smaller DRM/KMS drivers...
As part of getting their Vulkan ray-tracing support into good shape, a handful of patches were merged today for Mesa 22.3 in fixing up the ANV driver's ray query code...
From two weeks back you may recall the small patches that led to increasing Intel's Vulkan driver draw throughput by ~60%+. Well, as of yesterday the refined version of that work has landed within Mesa 22.3...
Weston, the reference compositor to Wayland, is out today with a big feature update. Most exciting is preparation work for better supporting HDR monitors moving forward as well as preparing for multi-GPU and multi-back-end use-cases...
Earlier this month Blender 3.3 released and in addition to introducing an Intel oneAPI back-end, it's notable for bringing improvements to the AMD HIP back-end for Radeon GPUs. Significant on the AMD side is extending GPU support back to GFX9/Vega. Thus it's a good time for a fresh round of benchmarking for showing how the AMD Radeon HIP performance against that of NVIDIA's existing CUDA and OptiX back-ends.
Fwupd 1.8.5 is out today for continuing to improve the firmware updating experience on Linux systems in conjunction with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS)...
While Intel's Compute-Runtime stack is fully open-source and already provides OpenCL 3.0 support for recent generations of Intel graphics under Linux, it looks like the recently-merged "Rusticl" Rust OpenCL implementation in Mesa will soon be working too on Intel graphics hardware as an alternative OpenCL 3.0 implementation...
A Microsoft engineer has landed an improvement to the Mesa Gallium3D Video Acceleration "VA" state tracker that can allow for faster video processing times and greater GPU utilization...
Google engineers on Wednesday released AOM-AV1 3.5 as the newest version of their open-source AV1 video encoder. With AOM-AV1 3.5 comes yet more performance improvements as well as memory optimizations...
Back in August I wrote about AMD developers looking at OpenGL threading by default for their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. One month later that change has now landed for next quarter's Mesa 22.3 -- barring any issues coming up that would lead to it being reverted...
GNOME 43 is out today as the newest version of this popular open-source desktop environment used by Fedora Workstation, Ubuntu, and many other Linux distributions...
The Framework Laptop has proven to be very popular with enthusiasts thanks to its focus on the ability for users to make repairs and upgrades to their laptop. Google has even taken notice and they in cooperation with Framework Computer Inc have launched a Chromebook Edition laptop...
Over the summer Google announced Tau T2A as the first Google Cloud Compute Engine VM to run on Arm. The T2A series is powered by Ampere Altra processors and complement the Tau T2D series powered by AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors that launched last year. I have been trying out the Tau T2A series for the past several weeks and have some initial benchmarks to share today for showing how the Ampere Altra Arm VMs can perform against the existing T2D series.
In addition to a ~10% performance boost seen yesterday for RADV ray-tracing performance with Quake II RTX, another merge request also made it to Mesa 22.3 for much more significantly bolstering the RADV ray-tracing performance. With all of the recent RADV ray-tracing work, we are finally reaching a point where it's becoming viable for Linux gamers on this open-source driver...
This past weekend was the GNU Tools Cauldron where Siemens presented a status update on the work around GPU accelerator offloading for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and the work being done around OpenMP and OpenACC support...
Sound Open Firmware is what started as an open-source Intel effort to push towards more open sound/DSP firmware and has grown since that point into a Linux Foundation project also supported by other vendors like Mediatek, AMD, Realtek, and others. Sound Open Firmware 2.3 was released on Tuesday as the latest advancement for this open-source audio DSP firmware stack...
While Blender 3.2 introduced AMD HIP on Linux support for GPU acceleration and the recent Blender 3.3 extended the AMD GPU Cycles acceleration back to GFX9/Vega GPUs, for those wanting AMD ray-tracing support within Blender it's not expected to come until Blender 3.5...
The belated Mesa 22.2 was unexpectedly released today for providing the very latest open-source Linux graphics driver support not only for Intel and AMD Radeon graphics hardware but also the reverse-engineered Nouveau (NVIDIA) driver and the many smaller drivers like Etnaviv, Mali, Panfrost, the new PowerVR Vulkan driver, and the software drivers like LLVMpipe and Zink...
While not as exciting as this morning's GTC 2022 keynote and the introduction of the GeForce RTX 40 series, NVIDIA today released 515.76 as their latest production series Linux driver build...
Way back in 2019 Intel, Mozilla, and Red Hat started the Bytecode Alliance as an initiative to promote running WebAssembly "everywhere" and expand the scope of WASM outside of the web browser. After being in development now for three years, Wasmtime 1.0 was released for this production-ready WebAssembly runtime...
Alongside the GeForce RTX 40 series debut and many other announcements today during the NVIDIA GTC 2022 keynote by Jensen Huang, CV-CUDA was announced as NVIDIA's newest open-source project...
Jensen Huang's GTC keynote is exciting as always and he just announced the GeForce RTX 40 series along with a host of other announcements for marking this week's NVIDIA event...
Four years ago System76 launched their Thelio line of Linux desktop computers that are built from scratch and wonderfully by them in their Colorado facility. Today the Linux-focused vendor is announcing their most significant overhaul of the Thelio desktop chassis design to date...
Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen has landed a set of micro-optimizations to the open-source driver for benefiting Vulkan ray-tracing performance...
While a number of recent Firefox releases have been rather "boring" on the Linux front with not many notable changes, Firefox 105.0 is out this morning and this time around is a bit more significant...
Ampere Computing has provided a 160-core Ampere Altra server with 128GB of RAM to the OpenMandriva project to help in speeding up their AArch64 Linux packaging and development efforts...
AMD engineers today released AOMP 16.0-0 as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang downstream compiler where they stage their latest development patches focused on Radeon GPU OpenMP offloading...
It's been two weeks since the release of LLVM 15.0 and its sub-projects like Clang 15.0 so per their rapid release rhythm, out today is LLVM 15.0.1 with the initial batch of fixes...
In addition to Intel having closed out last week by submitting their last batch of feature updates to DRM-Next for kernel graphics driver changes slated for Linux 6.1, AMD engineers also did the same with their likely last major set of AMDGPU driver changes intended for this next kernel cycle...
NVIDIA is working on their own address space isolation (ASI) implementation for the Linux kernel that they hope will make the kernel safer for use within automobiles, robotics, and other areas where NVIDIA Tegra embedded hardware has a growing Linux-powered presence...
Intel has become the first corporate "gold" patron to the Krita Foundation for their development fund to advance this open-source digital painting program...
Along with the last drm-intel-gt-next pull for Linux 6.1, a final drm-intel-next pull request of new feature code was submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.1 merge window...
Earlier this month I wrote about AMD working on s2idle fixes for some AMD Ryzen 6000 series "Rembrandt" laptops. At the time it was just for select ASUS laptops known to have a bug in the firmware resulting in suspend-to-idle issues while now additional models not only from ASUS but also Lenovo have been uncovered...
Chinese hardware vendor Loongson Technology continues working on the LoongArch code for the Linux kernel for their in-house CPU ISA derived from MIPS64. Now that the initial code has been mainlined since 5.19 and some of the necessary other critical bits of code are getting squared away, recently they have been working on other missing functionality for supporting their initial LoongArch-based Loongson 3A5000 series SoCs...
Adding to the growing examples and early drivers being worked on for the Linux kernel to showcase the possibilities of using the Rust programming language within the kernel, an early port of Intel's e1000 wired networking driver has started...
Back in 2019 is when Intel first detailed the Data Streaming Accelerator "DSA" and began working on the Linux enablement patches. The Intel DSA is designed to help accelerate streaming and transformation operations for storage, networking, and persistent memory. Finally the DSA is coming to market by way of being found within forthcoming Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors while the DSA 2.0 accelerator is already in the works for future processors...
Over the summer Jason Donenfeld of WireGuard fame proposed adding getrandom() to the vDSO for better performance to enjoy by user-space developers. This past week he sent out the latest version of this proposed kernel patch where he's seeing around a ~15x speed-up with this change...
Google engineer Yu Zhao this morning published MGLRU v15, the latest revision to this patch series dealing with improving the Linux kernel's page reclamation code. Multi-Gen LRU "MGLRU" has proven to offer performance benefits and particularly improve the Linux experience when dealing with low-memory situations...
A decade ago there used to be an annual Phoronix pilgrimage (and closest thing in many years to taking a vacation/holiday/day-off for me) to Oktoberfest and a meet-up of Phoronix readers. While Oktoberfest kicked off this weekend in Munich after a two year hiatus due to the pandemic, unfortunately, there is no Phoronix event. But will be in spirit and making use of the occasion by running the annual "Oktoberfest sale" if wishing to show your support for all the Linux hardware reviews, benchmarking, and open-source news carried out each and every day. Additionally, Stripe is now accepted for Phoronix Premium subscriptions as an alternative to PayPal. Phoronix Premium corporate subscriptions are also now being offered...
Along with the Linux kernel preparing for its initial Rust integration, Rusticl landing in Mesa this week as the first major Rust usage within Mesa, and Cloudflare announcing an Nginx HTTP proxy replacement written in Rust, some additional Rust adoption news for the week is that the GStreamer project is now ready to ship Rust-written plug-ins as part of their official binary releases...
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