Phoronix

In July -- the same month as Valve announcing the Steam Deck -- the Steam on Linux marketshare hit 1.0%. That 1.0% marketshare was a +0.14% bump and the highest seen in years since Steam on Linux's debut nearly a decade ago back when it commanded around a 2% marketshare...

We've been covering Genode OS for more than a decade now as this original open-source operating system "framework" and through this time they have managed to keep up with their routine feature releases. Out this week is Genode OS Framework 21.08 as they seek to make it easier porting device driver code to their platform...

Very large IBM mainframes/servers were taking 30+ minutes to boot the Linux kernel... No, just not for POST'ing the system with memory training and the like, but for loading Linux. Fortunately, with the Linux 5.15 kernel there is a set of scalability enhancements to allow these large IBM systems to be able to boot in around five minutes...

The staging updates for Linux 5.15 continue to have a lot of code churn including some drivers being promoted while one Realtek WiFi driver has been replaced...

While Microsoft announced that Windows 11 will be formally released on 5 October, rolling out today is general availability on Windows Server 2022...

Intel's i965 classic DRI driver is still the default within Mesa for i965 through Haswell generations of Intel integrated graphics, but the new "Crocus" Gallium3D driver has been added to the default driver build list so it's now at least building by default on x86/x86_64 systems and thus trivial after that to override...

The Linux 5.15 hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem changes were sent out and now merged for this next kernel version. Particularly notable this cycle is AMD catching up on some of their sensors support...

RadeonSI Gallium3D as the official AMD OpenGL Linux driver has mirrored the unofficial RADV Vulkan driver in enabling DCC stores support for RDNA2 APUs in the name of greater performance...

Designed with VR headsets in mind, Wayland-Protocols 1.22 was released today and adds the DRM leasing protocol to its staging area...

In addition to Btrfs sporting new features with Linux 5.15, the XFS and EROFS file-systems also have some shiny new features and improvements for this next version of the Linux kernel...

The ACPI and power management changes have landed for the Linux 5.15 merge window...

The networking subsystem updates for the recently opened Linux 5.15 merge window have landed...

For being a summer month, August was much busier than usual with a slew of exciting hardware and Linux/open-source software announcements. From releasing Linux 5.14 in marking 30 years of the Linux kernel to the debut of Debian 11 to Valve Steam Deck related work to their exciting sponsorship of Zink work, August was quite an exciting month for Linux enthusiasts...

Google is shipping Chrome 93 today as the latest stable version of their web browser...

Mike Blumenkrantz in addition to addressing that big performance problem with Tesseract and other Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan improvements in recent days has now landed OpenGL ES 3.2 support...

The Btrfs file-system updates have landed now in Linux 5.15 mainline with some exciting new features and improvements...

One of the earliest pull requests sent in for the now-open Linux 5.15 cycle was proposing KSMBD land as the in-kernel SMB3 file server as an alternative on Linux systems to running Samba in user-space. At the time it wasn't clear if Linus Torvalds would pull in this file server code to the Linux kernel but now he has indeed landed it...

GNU Linux-libre 5.14-gnu was released today as the project's re-base on the recently released Linux 5.14 upstream kernel. But prior supported GNU Linux-libre releases also had to be re-spun as it turned out this "100% free software" kernel was mistakenly leaving in some non-free kernel bits...

It's been a while since last running benchmarks evaluating the performance of GCC's profile guided optimizations (PGO) for helping to optimize the performance. But stemming from the discussions around PGO'ing the Linux kernel (though that effort is stalled for now), several Phoronix readers inquired about seeing some fresh PGO figures with GCC 11. So here are such benchmarks of GCC 11 with the upcoming Ubuntu 21.10 running on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X desktop.

With the Linux 5.15 kernel is a new build-time option to further harden the kernel around side channel attacks and information leakage. Enabling this option can have some (small) performance cost and a slightly larger kernel...

Con Kolivas has worked on many patches for the Linux kernel over the past two decades and particularly focused on innovations around desktop performance/interactivity. For over a decade now he's primarily been focused on maintaining his work out-of-tree and not catering to mainline acceptance but now he is thinking of bowing out once more and ending his kernel development effort...

David Airlie submitted today the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver updates for the Linux 5.15 merge window...

Going from ~11 FPS to ~602 FPS for an open-source game marks the latest work on Zink for OpenGL atop Vulkan within Mesa...

The x86/IRQ changes for the Linux 5.15 kernel bring some unexpected improvements to old hardware...

It looks like the real-time (RT) patches for the Linux kernel are almost to the point of being fully upstream in the mainline Linux kernel. Merged for Linux 5.15 is the PREEMPT_RT locking code that represents a bulk of the outstanding RT patches...

It looks like within the coming days that the Vulkan ray-tracing support for Mesa's "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver will be upstreamed for Mesa 21.3...

In addition to the block subsystem changes submitted for the Linux 5.15 merge window, Jens Axboe also sent in a separate pull request for this new kernel cycle to provide support for bio recycling. In turn this can enhance the Linux I/O limits by around 10%...

Pyston began many years ago as an open-source JIT-based Python implementation developed by Dropbox. But after Dropbox dropped Pyston development, it went dormant for several years before the developers decided to create their own start-up around it and released Pyston 2.0. The Pyston developers are now joining well known Python organization Anaconda...

Linux block subsystem maintainer and I/O expert Jens Axboe sent in his set of feature pull requests today for the Linux 5.15 kernel cycle...

Ingo Molnar began sending in his pull requests bright and early as usual for the just-opened Linux 5.15 merge window. With the scheduler changes for this next kernel version there are some improvements worth mentioning but also worth mentioning is what hasn't found its way to the kernel yet: any software optimizations around Intel Thread Director for upcoming Alder Lake processors...

Worked on for more than one year is the patches out of Amazon for allowing opt-in L1 data cache flushing on context switching. This L1d flushing is done in the name of greater security given the various CPU speculative execution hardware vulnerabilities these days and protecting against other possible future vulnerabilities. After trying to get the code merged last summer, Linus Torvalds called it "beyond stupid" and reverted the code but now for Linux 5.15 a revised form of it was submitted...

For those after an easy-to-use desktop distribution built off Arch Linux, Endeavour OS continues filling the void left by the former Antergos project. Endeavour OS is closing out August by releasing new ISOs that include a number of updates to its installer...

One of the very first pull requests for Linux 5.15 now that its merge window is open following the Linux 5.14 release is to merge KSMBD, the in-kernel SMB3 protocol file server...

Vulkan 1.2.190 resolves several issues with the specification, but most exciting with this routine Vulkan API update is the introduction of two new extensions...

As expected Linus Torvalds promoted Linux 5.14 to stable in providing the latest features, hardware support, and other improvements ahead of the autumn 2021 Linux distribution releases...

The Linux hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem for the 5.15 cycle is already seeing the AMD SB-RMI driver and AMD Cezanne Zen 3 APU temperature monitoring while there was also some last-minute additions around AMD next-gen "Yellow Carp" temperature reporting and separately support for another water cooling pump...

While the Linux 5.15 merge window opening is imminent, merged today to net-next were the latest batch of wireless driver updates for this next kernel version. Notable to this batch of WiFi driver updates was the new Intel material...

Near the beginning of the year was some rare work on Linux's floppy disk driver and -- a half-year later -- it was found out that not only do people with systems using floppy disks still move to newer kernels, but that work earlier in the year had regressed the Linux kernel's floppy disk handling. Now coming for Linux 5.15 is a fix...

If all goes according to plan the Linux 5.14 kernel will be released as stable today. Linux 5.14 has many new features but there is also a lot of work slated for the next cycle, Linux 5.15. Here's a look...

The Chrome/Chromium web browser now has fully-enabled the Ozone/X11 platform support across both beta and stable channels...

Here should hopefully be a great indication about AMD's Linux efforts moving forward with one of their recent and exciting hires at the company...

In preparation for the support within their Vulkan driver, the Intel-led effort for preparing mesh shader support within Mesa's NIR and SPIR-V code has now been merged...

It's been a relatively quiet summer in the Wine-Staging world with not many new patches surfacing for testing/experimental purposes for this more bleeding edge version of Wine. However, with Wine-Staging 6.16 there are at least some new patches now to talk about...

The Plasma 5.23 desktop release is looking like it will be quite an eventful milestone while KDE developers are finishing August strong with many improvements and fixes across their desktop stack...

ROCm 4.3 released at the start of August with support for HMM memory allocations, support for indirect function calls and C++ virtual functions with the ROCm compiler, improved data center tool integration, better rocBLAS performance, and a range of other improvements. In approaching the end of August, ROCm 4.3.1 is now available...

Wine 6.16 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release of this widely-used software for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other systems...

Current Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe started out in the late 90's taking over maintainership of the Linux kernel's CD-ROM driver code. However, as he's busy these days with IO_uring and other prominent I/O activities for Linux, he's hoping someone interested and capable would want to take over the Linux kernel's CD-ROM code...

A number of Phoronix readers have been asking about some fresh file-system comparisons on recent kernels. With not having the time to conduct the usual kernel version vs. file-system comparison, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS file-system benchmarks on a speedy WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe solid-state drive...

The Linux kernel has already sported SM4 cipher algorithm implementation optimized for AES-NI and AVX while now an Alibaba engineer has contributed an AVX2 optimized variant for even greater performance...

For nearly the past decade there has been calls for deprecating the Liux kernel's frame-buffer "FBDEV" device code though the code remains within the kernel. While these days most display drivers are DRM-based even in the embedded world, a lot of FBDEV code still ends up in kernel builds even when just wanting to use DRM's FBDEV emulation layer. But a patch proposal out of Red Hat would further split-up the FBDEV core support to allow less of it to be built...