Phoronix

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...

AMD is expected to announce their Radeon RX 7000 "RDNA 3" graphics cards on 3 November...

Out today is OpenJDK Java 19 in its general availability form while adding a number of new features...

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...

Merged today for Mesa 22.3 is support with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's Video Core Next (VCN) code to support video encoding with LTR mode...

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...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.0-rc6 and it's artificially tiny due to many of the kernel developers being preoccupied for the week...

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...

DDraceNetwork "DDNet" as an open-source cross-platform game building off the DDRace and Teeworlds games recently introduced a Vulkan renderer...

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...

Proposed a few years ago was Kernel Address Space Isolation (KASI / ASI) for limiting data leaks with the growing number of speculative execution attacks on CPUs. Several organizations have been involved with Address Space Isolation efforts for the Linux kernel including IBM, Oracle, and Google with various approaches. Google engineers earlier this year posted a newer iteration of ASI focused on KVM use for the cloud / VMs. ASI still hasn't made it to the mainline kernel but Google engineers this week at LPC argued that it should be the path forward for mainline in better dealing with these CPU security vulnerabilities...

Over the past year since launching Intel Alder Lake processors, Intel engineers have made a number of improvements to the Linux kernel for better dealing with the hybrid processor approach mixing P and E cores. While Alder Lake is running great with recent kernels and the P vs. E core selection for tasks on Linux is better than it was at launch, there still are areas for improvement as raised by Intel engineers this week...

Longtime Linux kernel engineer Peter Zijlstra with Intel has sent out his latest "Call Depth Tracking" patches as a mitigation for Retbleed that aims to be less costly on system performance than the current mitigation approach. With this latest patch series, he indicates he hopes to soon get this code mainlined...

Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been involved with many great Linux desktop/laptop hardware improvements over the years for work that would have otherwise likely gone unaddressed. One of the initiatives he has been focusing on recently that has long been a sore point for Linux laptops has been the user-space backlight/brightness interface. This week at Linux Plumbers Conference was a presentation on this effort that has long been ripe for improvement...

HarfBuzz is the text shaping library used by many open-source projects from UI toolkits to directly by desktops like GNOME and KDE and then over to other notable software like Java, Android, Firefox, Chrome, and many others. Out this weekend is HarfBuzz 5.2 and most notably adds support for Unicode 15...

While Plasma 5.26 beta released this week, KDE developers didn't kick back and relax but have pressed on with continuing to make improvements to this open-source desktop environment...

Well known NVIDIA AIB partner EVGA made a rather surprising and unfortunate announcement this Friday afternoon,..

You may recall a few days ago how Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz boosted the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver draw throughput by +55%. Well, he now had a go at optimizing the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver and has squeezed out a 60% improvement to the draw throughput. Even more interesting is that it was just a few lines of code...

Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem maintainer has shared some notes following this week's Linux Plumbers Conference in Dublin. In particular, the matter of whether the growing number of accelerators / AI devices belong within the DRM subsystem or elsewhere and separately there is renewed talks of user-space consoles to potentially push Linux distributions towards moving away from the in-kernel VT...

Intel announced today that beginning with 2023 notebooks, the Intel Pentium and Intel Celeron brands will be replaced by... Intel Processor...

Along with the fresh look at the Intel Core i9 12900K vs. AMD Ryzen 9 5950X on Linux using the latest development kernel and other bleeding-edge software packages, today's article is a fresh look at how the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with 3D V-Cache is performing relative to the Ryzen 7 5800X.

Intel submitted their final set of "drm-intel-gt-next" feature changes intended for merging in the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel merge window that opens in early October...

Canonical announced this morning that they have partnered with ASUS IoT, the division of ASUS focused on providing "Internet of Things" hardware, to certify Ubuntu Linux for their devices...

Qt 6.4 is continuing to run on-schedule and out today is the release candidate ahead of the stable release expected around the end of the month...

Merged last year for the Linux 5.16 cycle was FUTEX2's futex_waitv() system call for waiting on multiple futexes in order to better match the behavior of Microsoft Windows. This FUTEX2 initiative was driven as an effort to further enhance Linux gaming performance/efficiency particularly for Valve's Steam Play. Originally there were other goals with FUTEX2 and now we are seeing another one of those being worked on: NUMA awareness...

The Khronos Group has published OpenCL 3.0.12 as the newest version of this API for compute across heterogeneous platforms, but mostly known for GPU compute...

Cloudflare has long relied upon Nginx as part of its HTTP proxy stack but now has replaced it with their in-house, Rust-written Pingora software that is said to be serving over one trillion requests per day and delivering better performance while only using about a third of the CPU and memory resources...

The Khronos Group's Vulkan Working Group today released Vulkan API 1.3.228. Aside from the usual assortment of fixes/clarifications to the Vulkan spec, this spec update promotes one of Valve's existing extensions aimed at enhancing Direct3D 12 emulation with Vulkan into being a formal "EXT" extension...

It was just a few days ago that Godot 4.0 Alpha 17 was released while also announcing that W4 Games as the start-up created by Godot Engine developers has raised $8.5M USD to advance the open-source Godot ecosystem. They are now celebrating by releasing the long-awaited Godot 4.0 beta release...

In addition to Microsoft continuing to work on OpenGL and OpenCL atop Direct3D 12 by leveraging Mesa in order to benefit Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) and related use-cases, Microsoft engineers have also been working on exposing video acceleration to Linux software backed by Direct3D 12 Video Acceleration...

The KDE community has today released the beta of the upcoming Plasma 5.26 desktop...

While we are used to seeing Intel engineers dominating the speaker lists at various Linux events around the world, it's been a number of years since AMD engineers held multiple presentations like they did this week for the Linux Plumbers Conference and now the Open-Source Summit EU taking place in Dublin, Ireland...