Phoronix

While since the end of October there has been NVIDIA 495.44 as the stable 495 series driver beta for Linux users, out today is their v470.86 release for those using that older long-term support branch...

The annual OpenZFS Developer Summit wrapped up yesterday with interesting talks on this open-source, cross-platform ZFS file-system implementation...

For fans of Jolla's Linux-based smartphone platform, Sailfish OS 4.3 "Suomenlinna" is out today...

Seagate engineers yesterday used the Open Compute Project Global Summit for the first public demonstration of a native NVMe hard drive. The hope is moving forward both HDDs and SSDs in the data center will consolidate to using the NVMe interface...

Posted last year for introduction in the GCC 11 stable compiler released earlier this year was the initial Alder Lake "alderlake" target. Now that Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors are officially out, Intel engineers have updated their Alder Lake tuning for the GNU Compiler Collection to yield more efficient performance with GCC 12 due out in Q2'2022...

Running the past two days was the annual OpenZFS Developer Summit. One of the most interesting presentations from this virtual event was on the status of DirectIO (O_DIRECT) support for the OpenZFS file-system and the performance boost it can offer in relevant areas...

While there is already LLVMpipe Gallium3D for software acceleration of OpenGL on CPUs within Mesa, if wanting to increase the layers of abstraction you could also use Zink for OpenGL over Vulkan and by way of Lavapipe have that software accelerated on the CPU. With Mesa 22.0-devel, that route of Zink on CPUs is now faster...

Merged last week into the Linux 5.16 kernel is improved Retpoline "return trampoline" code...

HP announced today that select upcoming HP workstations will begin seeing Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) pre-installed...

Recently I ran benchmarks showing how Ubuntu 21.10 performance has improved for AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" even compared to just six months ago with Ubuntu 21.04. In this article is a broader look at AMD EPYC Milan on the autumn 2021 Linux distributions with firing up not only Ubuntu 21.10 but Fedora Server 35, Clear Linux 35150, CentOS Stream, and AlmaLinux 8.4 as other common alternatives in the Linux server space.

Xen para-virtualized guests booting on the Linux 5.16 kernel should see noticeably quicker boot times...

Intel's open-source Linux engineers continue to be quite busy bringing up CXL interconnect support within the mainline kernel. For the in-development Linux 5.16 is another batch of code landing...

As of this morning the GCC 12 compiler has landed support for -march=armv9-a for targeting the forthcoming Armv9-A ISA...

A new version of the Ncurses text-based user interface library is now available and most notable is a new but experimental driver for supporting the Windows Terminal...

Being worked on for more than a year by Intel and other kernel developers has been FGKASLR to enhance kernel security. While the Linux kernel has long supported Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) to make memory addresses less predictable, FGKASLR ups the security much more by placing that randomization at the function level. It's looking like FGKASLR could be mainlined soon...

NVIDIA used their GTC event today to announce OptiX 7.4 as the latest version of their ray-tracing engine/framework for use with their GPUs...

NVIDIA used their virtual GTC event to announce Jetson AGX Orin as the latest addition to their Jetson family. With Jetson AGX Orin they are advertising it as "the world's smallest, most powerful and energy-efficient AI supercomputer" for small form factor and low-power environments like robotics and edge computing applications...

The platform-drivers-x86 pull is exciting as usual for the in-development Linux 5.16 kernel...

AMD this morning hosted their Accelerated Data Center Premiere virtual event where they introduced Milan-X as well as the Instinct MI200. With Milan-X there is now 3D V-Cache introduced for the current generation and still-very-impressive EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors. I can personally attest to Milan-X being very exciting for HPC workloads and beyond with impressive gains to performance.

In addition to announcing Milan-X processors at the virtual Accelerated Data Center Premiere event, AMD just provided some new public details concerning next-generation Zen 4 processors...

Raspberry Pi OS as the official operating system for the Raspberry Pi single board computers has been updated against Debian 11 "Bullseye"...

While just a point release, XWayland 21.1.3 that is out this morning is exciting in that it adds support for using NVIDIA's new proprietary driver that supports the GBM API for enhancing its Wayland support...

Last week the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) feature patches were sent out and subsequently merged for Linux 5.16...

It's been a while since last having any major progress to report on Etnaviv, the open-source Mesa Gallium3D driver supporting Vivante graphics IP. But a rather fundamental change was made this past week in that Etnaviv is now (finally) using NIR by default...

Linux 5.16 is an action-packed kernel with a ton of exciting additions and improvements. Adding to the growing list of changes to look forward to with v5.16 is mainline support for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4...

While it was initially communicated by Intel that Alder Lake's Golden Cove P-Cores has AVX-512 "fused off", that has turned out not to be the case at least with the initial batch of processors and current BIOS/firmware configurations. If disabling the power-efficient Gracemont E-Cores, it's possible to enable AVX-512 and make use of it. Here are some initial AVX-512 benchmarks in such a configuration under Linux with the Core i9 12900K.

Added to the Arch Linux ISOs earlier this year was Archinstall as an easy-to-use installer for Arch. In the months since its introduction the code continues to be improved upon and is preparing for its next feature release...

Released this week was Rav1e 0.5 as the newest feature release for this Rust-written AV1 video encoder backed by Xiph.Org and self-proclaimed to be the world's "fastest and safest" AV1 encoder...

The USB and Thunderbolt updates for the Linux 5.16 kernel have arrived. This time around the changes are on the smaller side but there are two additions worth mentioning...

The "char/misc" changes have landed in Linux 5.16 as the catch-all area for code not fitting more appropriately within another subsystem or being a portion of the kernel that's too small for submitting pull requests directly to Linus Torvalds. For Linux 5.16, the IIO code has moved from being part of the staging area also maintained by Greg Kroah-Hartman to now being under the char/misc umbrella. Additionally, another big item is the Intel Habana Labs driver updates...

While we eagerly await the release of Godot 4 as a massive update to this leading open-source game engine, out this weekend is Godot 3.4 as a rather significant update to Godot 3.x with a number of new features and improvements...

Proposed Linux kernel patches by a Google engineer -- based on existing functionality found within Android and Chrome OS kernel builds -- would allow Linux's DRM display/GPU drivers to more easily know when system input events occur...

There isn't any shiny new drivers part of the kernel's staging area for Linux 5.16 but exciting from a maintenance perspective is a rather healthy clean-up affecting multiple areas of this "proving grounds" area of the kernel...

Sent in on Friday by Bjorn Helgaas were all of the PCI subsystem updates for the Linux 5.16 merge window...

KDE developers began November working on yet more Plasma Wayland session fixes and other enhancements to their open-source desktop environment...

Today marks nine years already since Valve began rolling out their Steam Linux beta client after a very exciting summer. While the initial Steam on Linux excitement phased out a bit after Steam Machines didn't materialize, as we approach a decade with Steam on Linux it's easily as exciting as ever thanks to Steam Play / Proton for allowing massive amounts of Windows games to run on Linux and the imminent release of the Steam Deck that has fueled renewed interest around Linux gaming...

Back in September it was announced that the BattlEye anti-cheat technology would support Proton with an emphasis on the forthcoming Steam Deck. Now as a nice present for Steam's 9th birthday on Linux, that BattlEye support is coming together...

Wine 6.21 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux...

Kent Overstreet who has been working relentlessly on Bcachefs for over a half-decade now issued his latest status update on this Linux file-system born out of the kernel's block cache code...

Published yesterday was the Core i5 12600K / Core i9 12900K Linux review looking at the exciting performance uplift provided by Alder Lake. One of the areas only talked about briefly in yesterday's article were the UHD Graphics 770 found with these new desktop processors, due to time constraints with only having a few days so far for carrying out tests. Today the initial batch of UHD Graphics 770 / ADL-S GT1 Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks have wrapped up to show how the Intel graphics performance compares to prior generation Rocket Lake as well as AMD's Ryzen 7 5700G.

The HID subsystem updates have been sent in for the ongoing Linux 5.16 merge window with some notable improvements for Linux gamers...

After eight years in development, the LXQt desktop that was created by the merging of the LXDE and Razor-qt open-source desktop projects is celebrating its v1.0 release...

As another "first on RADV" for this Mesa Radeon Vulkan open-source driver compared to AMD's official Vulkan Linux driver options, there is an early branch providing primitive, experimental support for Vulkan Video acceleration...

The Linux 5.16 kernel is doing away with hardware support for the MIPS-based Netlogic Microsystems SoCs, the network processors developed prior to being acquired by Broadcom a decade ago...

AMD traditionally has been updating its AMDVLK official open-source Vulkan driver sources publicly on a (bi)weekly basis, but that went off the wagon recently with not seeing any updates since the end of September. That changed this morning with the publishing of AMDVLK 2021.Q4.1...

With the plans to release Wayland 1.20 before Christmas, Wayland 1.20 Alpha was released on Thursday to kick off the start of the release process...

While Intel Alder Lake is dominating today's news cycle, Intel and Microsoft also announced today that they have brought oneAPI Level Zero and Intel OpenCL support to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) while employing Intel graphics hardware acceleration...

With the embargo lifted following this morning's Intel Core i5 12600K + Core i9 12900K Linux review, I've begun uploading more public test data to OpenBenchmarking.org and making my earlier test results public. With that and initial data flowing in from others in the community, here is some more data to poke through if interested in Alder Lake on Linux...

Microsoft's latest surprise is adding native Linux support to their Endpoint Manager software...

With the Intel 12th Gen Core processors shipping today along with the new line-up of Z690 motherboards, the review embargo lifts for talking about these Intel "Alder Lake" processors. While by now you've likely heard a lot about Intel Alder Lake on Windows and various leaked benchmarks with Windows 11, how does these processors with the new hybrid architecture work and perform on Linux? Here are the initial benchmarks and support information for Intel's Core i5 12600K and Core i9 12900K processors under Ubuntu Linux.