Phoronix

One of the features that has come together nicely for Linux on laptops in recent months has been the platform profile support around the ACPI specification with support from multiple laptop vendors for allowing users to control their power/performance preference based on various system profile configurations. A patch is pending for newer ASUS laptops to enjoy this platform profile control under Linux...

In addition to Debian GNU/Linux 11 set for release today, Debian GNU/Hurd 2021 has been released as the unofficial port of Debian to the GNU Hurd micro-kernel...

Debian 11.0 "Bullseye" is due for release today and the Debian developers involved are indeed putting the final touches on this next major Debian GNU/Linux distribution release...

KDE developers had another busy summertime week with a variety of UI improvements and other polishing to this open-source desktop environment...

Ardour as one of the leading open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) solutions is out with another new release...

Given this week's launch of the Radeon RX 6600 XT and that also bringing the new Radeon Software for Linux 21.30 driver, I was curious to see how the Vulkan ray-tracing performance compares now against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series on Linux.

Wine 6.15 has been uncorked as the newest bi-weekly development release of this software that powers Steam Play and more for running Windows games/applications on Linux...

NVIDIA's Tegra DRM driver that is part of the mainline kernel will be introducing a new user-space API/ABI with Linux 5.15 that is designed for future hardware while also working for existing Tegra SoCs...

Cirrus Logic has contributed a number of improvements to their CS8409 HDA audio driver for the Linux kernel that includes support for new "Dolphin" audio hardware...

For hobbyists that enjoy tinkering around with Linux running on the Nintendo Wii or Wii U game consoles, a new driver coming for Linux 5.15 allows accessing the specialized OTP read-only memory area that contains the encryption/decryption keys and other data...

With LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler front-end squaring away its OpenCL C 3.0 language support, Arm engineers are now working on the C++ equivalent support...

The MSM DRM kernel updates to this open-source Qualcomm Adreno driver have been sent in to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.15 merge window...

With AMD RDNA2 GPUs such as the Radeon RX 6000 series there is hardware support for AV1 decoding while the Linux support has been slow to materialize. Fortunately, that's now changing...

With LLVM/Clang 13 feature development having ended last week and the 13.0 release candidate being tagged, in starting off the benchmarking cycle first up I was looking at how well this new compiler is performing compared to LLVM Clang 12 stable on an AMD EPYC 7543 (Zen 3) Linux server.

One of the most exciting Linux kernel innovations in recent years has been eBPF for an in-kernel virtual machine allowing sandboxed programs running within the Linux kernel. The Linux Foundation along with Microsoft and other partners are now forming the eBPF Foundation...

As I have covered in many Phoronix articles over the past number of months, it's been a lengthy road bringing up the DG1 graphics support on Linux with the Intel open-source engineers having to re-architect their "i915" kernel graphics driver to support device local memory, getting the GuC support into good shape, scheduler changes, beginning to make use of TTM for memory management, user-space API changes, and a ton of other changes in expanding the driver's scope from just catering to integrated graphics. But now it looks like the DG1 Linux support is about to be officially advertised...

AMD has upstreamed the Van Gogh binary-only firmware files necessary for the RDNA2 graphics to be initialized by the open-source driver on this forthcoming APU.'..

Introduced to the Linux kernel earlier this year with Linux 5.12 was IDMAPPED mounts that allow for different mounts to expose the same file or directory with different ownership. IDMAPPED mounts was designed with use-cases ranging from containers to systemd-homed and more as outlined in the earlier article. Btrfs is now ready to begin supporting IDMAPPED mounts...

With this week's release of Firefox 91, like clockwork the beta for Firefox 92 is now available to facilitate wider testing of this next browser release to debut in September...

Qt Creator as the Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment from The Qt Company is preparing to release version 5.0 as it prepares to switch to semantic versioning...

The number of hardware platforms providing accelerated AV1 coding is still quite limited for now but with more hardware coming to market supporting encode/decode of this royalty-free video codec, the Linux kernel's media subsystem is getting ready...

Thunderbird 91 is now available as the first major update in a year for this Mozilla mail client that is succeeding the Thunderbird 78 series...

With yesterday's launch day Radeon RX 6600 XT Linux review the benchmarks were conducted using the popular Mesa RADV open-source driver used by many Linux gamers considering it's the driver Valve has been relentlessly optimizing and is the default on most (or all) Linux distributions. For those wondering how the performance of RADV is comparing to that of AMD's closed-source "PRO" Vulkan driver distributed as part of the "Radeon Software for Linux" package, here are some benchmarks exploring that difference.

DXVK has proven to be a huge success for improving the experience of running Windows Direct3D 9/10/11 games on Linux by translating those D3D calls to Vulkan. DXVK-Native meanwhile is the newer spin-off effort around providing a DXVK-based build native for Linux to help in game ports that still can then rely on their Direct3D renderer path...

The open-source V3DV driver living within Mesa for providing Vulkan API support for modern Broadcom VideoCore graphics -- most notably found in the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer -- is nearing Vulkan 1.1 compliance...

The latest patch series from Intel engineers worth noting for the Linux kernel is around implementing support for on-demand "unaccepted memory". Unaccepted memory is supported by the latest-generation AMD EPYC processors but not yet supported under Linux for on-demand/as-needed handling while Intel is preparing the kernel support for their next-gen Xeon CPUs having this capability...

It's been less than one week since the AMDVLK 2021.Q3.3 update for this official open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver while today AMD has issued its latest update...

Polychromatic as the long-running, third-party, open-source project to allow Razer's gaming peripherals like mice and keyboard to be configured under Linux is out with a major update...

While Libre-SoC began as "Libre RISC-V" envisioned as a low-power graphics/Vulkan accelerator, it has morphed into a hybrid CPU/GPU design built on OpenPOWER and in very early form seeing test fabrication on a TSMC 180nm process. The latest funding received is now working on adding cryptographic improvements to it and/or the upstream OpenPOWER ISA...

Intel has another big batch of open-source kernel graphics driver updates it sent out to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.15 cycle. The DG2 graphics card is getting wired up while this pull request does also finally remove the Cannon Lake "Gen 10" graphics that never materialized in commercial products...

Last year major VPN provider ExpressVPN announced "Lightway" as their new virtual private network protocol designed for speed, stability, and reliability. ExpressVPN announced today they are now making the protocol open-source...

The Elementary OS Linux distribution known for its very polished and well crafted desktop experience is out with its big 6.0 "Odin" update...

With the Radeon RX 6600 XT review embargo lifted and the cards set to hit retail channels this week, the Radeon Software for Linux 21.30 driver has been released in now officially supporting the RX 6600 series...

SDL 2.0.16 is officially out today as the latest update to this widely-used cross-platform library for serving as an abstraction layer around graphics, controllers / input, and more that makes it widely used by cross-platform games as well as the likes of the Steam Runtime...

NVIDIA today released their latest stable driver update in the 470 series for Linux users...

The Radeon RX 6600 XT was announced at the end of July as AMD's newest RDNA2 graphics card and is optimized for a performant 1080p gaming experience. For those wondering about its performance, this morning the embargo lifts to be able to talk about its performance. Here are the first Linux gaming benchmarks of the Radeon RX 6600 XT against a wide assortment of other AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Firefox 91.0 is out this morning as the latest monthly update to Mozilla's cross-platform web browser...

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has been working on a number of improvements in recent days to the RADV Vulkan driver's handling around delta color compression (DCC) fast clears...

Future AMD CPUs -- potentially AMD EPYC 7004 "Genoa" -- will be supporting 5-level paging...

Intel's Graphics Compiler "IGC" that is used by their Windows driver as well as the Intel Compute Runtime for OpenCL / Level Zero support (and potentially the Mesa drivers in the future) has now landed Alder Lake P enablement...

It looks like X.Org Server 21.1 (long in development the past few years as X.Org Server 1.21) will see a stable release in the coming weeks...

Intel's next-generation C/C++ compilers are fully leveraging the LLVM compiler stack in place of their former proprietary compiler code-base. Intel has "complete[d] adoption" of LLVM moving forward for their C/C++ compiler needs...

The latest AMD SEV work happening to the Linux kernel for benefiting EPYC servers with virtualization is the new "sev_secret" module for allowing guests to access confidential computing secret areas...

For more than one year now Oracle engineers have been working on Trenchboot support for securely booting the Linux kernel. Sent out today is the third revision of this work for establishing a dynamic root of trust for measurement...

Last month after Microsoft began publishing their Windows Insider Preview builds of Windows 11, I ran some early Windows 11 benchmarks against Linux using an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. Linux led in those benchmarks on the AMD Zen 3 desktop while for those wondering if that still holds true for Intel hardware, here are benchmarks of a Core i9 11900K "Rocket Lake" desktop with Windows 10 21H1, Windows 11 in its latest preview build as of testing, and then compared to Arch Linux / Clear Linux / Ubuntu.

Audio/video encoders and decoders are one of the areas where usage of the Rust programming language has increasing interest for speed and safety. One of the most promising Rust-written encoders at the moment is Rav1e for AV1 video encoding and it's now working towards its v0.5 release...

Merged one month ago was RadeonSI enabling by default its optimization to replace uniforms with literals inside shaders. This uniform inlining helped with SPECViewPerf and other workloads but it turns out in the process sharply drove up CPU usage when running some games...

Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS is expected later this month as the next point release to the "Focal Fossa" long-term support cycle. With this update comes the hardware enablement stack from Ubuntu 21.04 which in turn means Linux 5.11 and Mesa 21.0 graphics support is available as package updates now...

Synopsys is looking to phase out support for the oldest ARC processors found within the mainline Linux kernel...

Linus Torvalds just released the fifth weekly release candidate of Linux 5.14 and he's happy with how it's shaping up a few weeks before release...