Phoronix

Besides Sapphire Rapids introducing Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX), new developer documentation has detailed AVX-512 FP16 capabilities coming with the next-generation Xeon processors. Intel has posted initial developer documentation around AVX512FP16 as well as a big set of GCC and LLVM Clang compiler patches for handling the new intrinsics...

While Clang PGO support was sent in for Linux 5.14 as part of Clang compiler handling updates for this next kernel version, the functionality was subsequently dropped out and a new pull request issued after criticism from Linus Torvalds and others...

The Direct Rendering Manager (kernel graphics/display driver) updates for Linux 5.14 are putting on the pounds with nearly 300k lines of new code added (312,187 insertions, 22,367 deletions). The big increase is driven by new AMD Radeon graphics support added, a new Microsoft driver added, and other changes...

During this past month on Phoronix were 242 original Linux/open-source/hardware related news articles written by your's truly and another 18 featured Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles. This month also marked Phoronix.com turning seventeen years old for delivering Linux hardware reviews and news...

One of the exciting initiatives taking place recently within the CentOS camp has been the CentOS Hyperscale special interest group that is backed by engineers from Twitter and Facebook along with other organizations. They've been making more progress on offering their hyperscaler-focused packages/updates and even onto publishing a CentOS Hyperscale Workstation operating system image for testing...

With the recent NVIDIA 470 series Linux driver beta this R470 branch is the point at which NVIDIA is ending its GeForce 600/700 series "Kepler" support. The 470 driver series will be maintained as a long-lived driver that will continue to see security updates and Linux kernel / X.Org Server compatibility updates for another three years. If this end-of-life status has you thinking about trying out the open-source "Nouveau" Linux driver with Kepler, here are some current benchmarks.

The latest public code patches on the mailing list today are preparing for newer AMD heterogeneous servers that will have Aldebaran GPU nodes connected via xGMI links to the CPU(s) and the GPU dies in turn having HBM2 memory...

Michel Dänzer of Red Hat is preparing the release of XWayland 21.1.2 as the newest update to this standalone XWayland package separate from a whole X.Org Server release for running X11 clients within a Wayland environment...

The HID subsystem updates for Linux 5.14 continue improving consumer device support from newer AMD Ryzen laptops to multi-touch improvements...

AMD has issued their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q2 for Linux driver update as their quarterly packaged driver update intended for use with Radeon Pro graphics cards and former FirePro line-up...

Given the dominance of Linux-based devices from embedded/mobile (Android) through data centers and Linux powering all sorts of equipment, the networking subsystem updates for new Linux kernel merge windows continues to be very lively with new hardware support and never-ending improvements and new features...

In preparing to close out the second quarter, the Intel Media Driver 2021Q2 was released today as the company's open-source stack for supporting GPU-accelerated video encode/decode on Linux...

Headlining the power management updates for the Linux 5.14 merge window is the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver now being adapted to handle hybrid processors...

The release candidates for OpenZFS 2.1 continue dragging on with Tuesday marking the eighth such test version while bringing Linux 5.13 compatibility and other fixes...

Linux PC hardware manufacturer System76 has released Pop!_OS 21.04 as the newest version of their Ubuntu downstream that also features their new GNOME-based COSMIC desktop...

The x86 platform driver updates have been submitted for the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel. This area of the kernel principally benefits x86 laptop support on Linux but also has other drivers like around the Intel Speed Select Technology and more...

AMD-specific code within Linux's KVM virtualization component previously could allow a KVM guest to breakout into the host. This bug persisted in the Linux kernel from late 2020 to March 2021 before being addressed and is the first known issue of such a guest-to-host breakout that didn't also depend upon bugs within user-space components...

After looking recently at the FreeBSD 13.0 and DragonFlyBSD 6.0 performance on AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" using a Tyan Transport CX GC68-B8036-LE server, the next round of benchmarking from this server with AMD EPYC 7543 32-core processor was looking at its support (all tested 2021 Linux distributions were running fine on this latest-generation AMD server) and performance across 11 current Linux distribution releases from Arch, CentOS, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora, Rocky Linux, Ubuntu, and openSUSE.

While Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" was talked about for launching in late 2021, that was widely expected to be delayed. Intel today proactively confirmed that Sapphire Rapids will now begin production in Q1'2022 with their ramp beginning in Q2'2022...

Quietly released last week by AMD was their Radeon Software for Linux 21.20 driver providing the latest packaged "Open" and "PRO" (Closed) driver components for use within enterprise Linux environments...

Linux 5.14 has cleared out its legacy IDE code from the kernel that means dropping more than forty thousand lines of code...

The Firewalld firewall management tool for Linux that is built around Netfilter/Nftables is preparing for its long awaited 1.0 release...

With Btrfs continuing to see new adoption by various enterprises, Linux distributions like Fedora Workstation/Cloud and SUSE/openSUSE embracing it, and there continuing to be nice upstream improvements to this file-system driver, Btrfs continues on a nice trajectory in 2021...

Compiling the Linux kernel with LLVM's Clang code compiler continues to be more featureful with plumbing now being added to handle profile-guided optimizations (PGO) to help in achieving greater performance for optimizing kernel builds for targeted workloads...

The GNU C Library (Glibc) has landed its _Fork function implementation as an async-signal-safe fork replacement that is also expected to be made part of the next POSIX standards revision...

PipeWire 0.3.31 is out today as the newest version of this audio and video streams server for the Linux desktop that is becoming a viable replacement to the likes of JACK and PulseAudio...

Earlier this year Google announced the Lyra voice codec that could work with AV1 video for video chats over 56kbps modems. Google is today shipping its newest Lyra version...

Intel is going to be disabling Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) by default for various Skylake through Coffee Lake processors with forthcoming microcode updates. Yes, this does mean performance implications for workloads benefiting from TSX. This change has seemingly not been talked about much at all publicly and I just happened to become aware of it when looking through new kernel patches...

Following yesterday's release of the Linux 5.13 kernel, the GNU folks have released GNU Linux-libre 5.13-gnu as their downstream that strips out support for loading binary-only firmware/microcode, blocks the ability to load binary-only kernel modules, and other sanitization work in the name of software freedom...

Among the early pull requests for the just-opened Linux 5.14 merge window are the scheduler updates that includes the introduction of Core Scheduling. The Core Scheduling functionality has been in the works for the past few years by multiple vendors for better securing SMT systems following various vulnerabilities coming to light around Hyper Threading...

The Hantro media driver within the Linux kernel for supporting the Hantro IP-based VPU found in Rockchip and NXP i.MX8M SoCs is seeing improvements with the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has said "yes" to using Yescrypt for hashing shadow passwords with this distribution's next release. Using Yescrypt in place of SHA256/SHA512 should lead to greater security for new user accounts...

The KVM changes were submitted early ahead of the now-open Linux 5.14 merge window...

Linus Torvalds has just released the Linux 5.13 kernel as stable...

Of the many new features in Linux 5.13 one of the prominent security features is the ability to randomize the kernel stack offset at each system call. With Linux 5.13 stable imminent, here are some performance benchmarks of the impact from enabling this security feature...

With the half-way point for the year upon us, here is a look back at the most exciting Mesa open-source graphics driver news so far in 2021 with exciting contributions from Microsoft, AMD and Intel continuing to be the most open-source friendly graphics vendors, Zink making remarkable progress for OpenGL over Vulkan, performance optimizations galore, more embedded Vulkan drivers coming about, and other milestones for open-source Linux graphics...

Microsoft and systemd developers are proposing a global counter for block device changes for the Linux kernel to better track changes and having a unique system-wide number for disk and other block device changes rather than on a per-disk basis...

The hid-input kernel driver with Linux 5.14 is set to see support for "Programmable Buttons" as outlined by the USB HID specification...

Back in April was the last time we saw much XeHP specificc ode land in the open-source Mesa driver code while this week there was a fresh batch of code merged...

With this autumn's Fedora 35 release there should be better performance out-of-the-box for those employing LUKS/dm-crypt encryption while using 4K sector size based storage...

Linux 5.13 will debut tomorrow if Linus Torvalds is comfortable with the state of the code-base, which in turn will mark the opening of the Linux 5.14 merge window. Here is a look at what is on the table for this next follow-on version of the Linux kernel...

A proposal by NVIDIA engineers for the mainline Linux kernel would introduce the Hardware Timestamping Engine (HTE) subsystem...

Software running on DragonFlyBSD and making use of pthreads is set to see better performance around low-level locks when heavily contested...

While some Huawei engineers are currently facing criticism for submitting superfluous kernel patches in an effort to boost their own or the company's standing in the kernel community, other engineers at Huawei are working on more substantive kernel patches. Here's a rather peculiar new patch series out on Friday where a Huawei engineer is effectively proposing an in-kernel transactional database...

Even with Akademy 2021 this week as the annual KDE developer conference, thanks in part to it being a virtual event the KDE developers still managed to remain quite productive on new code changes...

Coreboot making progress on its temporary RAM initialization code (cache as RAM) means that its usage of the FSP-T binary blob is increasingly unnecessary...

Valve and their partners have issued a new version of Proton for powering Steam Play to enjoy Windows games on Linux...

Earlier this month were benchmarks looking at GCC 11 performance with varying optimization levels and features like link-time optimizations. Stemming from reader requests, here are now similar reference benchmarks off LLVM Clang 12.0 on the same system with going from -O0 to -Ofast and toggling -march=native and LTO usage.

Earlier this month systemd 249-rc1 arrived with a variety of new features and improvements. Now for closing out the month is a second release candidate...

If all is looking well on Sunday, Linus Torvalds will be releasing Linux 5.13 as stable rather than going with a 5.13-rc8 test release and pushing the final version back by an additional release. In either case, Linux 5.13 is coming out soon and with many new features in tow...