Phoronix

It was another week of seeing lots of Plasma Wayland session fixes and improvements...

A feature of Thunderbolt seemingly not widely leveraged is allowing two distinct hosts/systems to be connected over a Thunderbolt cable that can then be used for tunneling arbitrary data packets using high-speed DMA rings. Should you find yourself using such a setup, starting with Linux 5.19+ it should open the door for being much faster when running on latest-generation Intel hardware for USB4/Thunderbolt...

Following the groundwork laid in Linux 5.18, Intel VT-x's IPI Virtualization support is set to be introduced with the Linux 5.19 kernel for supporting this new hardware capability found with Xeon Scalable 4th Gen "Sapphire Rapids" server processors...

It was just last week that GCC 12.1 was released and already it's being used by the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution as of today's build...

Those using the Chromium web browser on Ubuntu by way of the Snap package, the latest build has now enabled (optional) Wayland support...

Building off last month's Ubuntu 22.04 Long-Term Support release, Canonical today has published the beta builds of the upcoming Ubuntu Core 22...

Back in early March Intel engineers posted a Linux driver for new functionality called In-Field Scan used for silicon failure testing. Barring any last minute issues, that Intel IFS driver should be merged for the upcoming Linux 5.19 cycle...

Prominent Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver contributor Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source driver team has begun working on GFX11 support for this driver ahead of AMD RDNA3 graphics cards launching later this year...

The widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library this morning merged AVIF muxing support for this image format based on the AV1 royalty-free video codec technology...

NetworkManager 1.38 is now available for this widely-used software on the Linux desktop (and elsewhere) for managing wired and wireless network interfaces...

Earlier this week Arch Linux set the WirePlumber package to replace PipeWire-Media-Session. WirePlumber is the modern, feature-rich session manager for PipeWire and much better off than the reference PipeWire-Media-Session manager that is effectively unmaintained. But Arch Linux developers are now calling this premature and have reverted the change...

As outlined in yesterday's extensive article about NVIDIA's new open-source Linux kernel GPU driver, currently for consumer GeForce RTX GPUs the driver is considered of "alpha quality" while NVIDIA's initial focus has been on data center GPU support. In any event with having lots of Turing/Ampere GPUs around, I've been trying out this new open-source Linux kernel driver on the consumer GPUs. In particular, I've been curious about the performance of using this open-source kernel driver relative to the default, existing closed-source kernel driver. Here are some early benchmarks.

In addition to a new development release of Godot 4.0 out today, the other high profile open-source 3D game engine is Open 3D Engine (O3DE) that started last year from Amazon's Lumberyard Engine and now under the Linux Foundation's Open 3D Foundation. Out today is O3DE 22.05 for this high profile free software 3D game engine...

The AMD-owned Xilinx posted a new patch series today implementing a new DRM display driver for supporting their soft MIPI DSI Tx subsystem IP...

Given the NVIDIA open-source kernel driver code announcement from yesterday and also the Linux 5.19 merge window coming up soon with a host of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver improvements and starting to prepare support for RDNA3, it's time for some fun with numbers around driver sizes...

Godot 4.0 continues working its way towards release as the most acclaimed open-source game engine. Godot 4.0 brings Vulkan rendering, OpenXR support, and a ton of other features covered in the past few years for making it more competitive with commercial game engines. Out this morning is Godot 4.0 Alpha 8 with a few more improvements worth noting...

While open-source fans this morning are celebrating NVIDIA finally publishing open-source kernel driver code as a step to opening up their driver, open-source AMD Radeon driver developers are proceeding as normal and undeterred by NVIDIA's open kernel-only approach. Another batch of AMD graphics code was sent in this morning to DRM-Next and then over in user-space Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver has landed more task shader code...

While this week Microsoft issued a production release of CBL-Mariner 2.0 as its in-house Linux distribution, they are continuing to maintain CBL-Mariner 1.0 for the time being and have overnight issued its newest monthly release...

Released on Wednesday alongside the R515 NVIDIA Linux driver beta and the open-source NVIDIA GPU kernel driver announcement was the launch of CUDA 11.7...

The day has finally come: NVIDIA IS PUBLISHING THEIR LINUX GPU KERNEL MODULES AS OPEN-SOURCE! To much excitement and a sign of the times, the embargo has just expired on this super-exciting milestone that many of us have been hoping to see for many years. Over the past two decades NVIDIA has offered great Linux driver support with their proprietary driver stack, but with the success of AMD's open-source driver effort going on for more than a decade, many have been calling for NVIDIA to open up their drivers. Their user-space software is remaining closed-source but as of today they have formally opened up their Linux GPU kernel modules and will be maintaining it moving forward. Here's the scoop on this landmark open-source decision at NVIDIA.

AMD's graphics driver engineers continue being very active in volleying new open-source driver patches for GFX11 and other blocks making up their next-generation RDNA3 graphics processors...

Following yesterday's Intel Vision 2022 announcements there is a bit more news today. In particular, Intel is announcing Project Amber...

Back in March marked the release of Qt 5.15.3 as open-source, one year after it was released to commercial customers of The Qt Company. Today a similar Qt 5.15.4 open-source release is now available, one year after its commercial release...

Back in December 2020 Intel's programming reference manual was updated to cover Linear Address Masking (LAM) as a future CPU feature and there was some GNU toolchain activity around LAM while not much to report on the effort since then -- until today. A revised "request for comments" has been posted on the Intel Linear Address Masking enabling for the Linux kernel that allows for using untranslated address bits of 64-bit linear addresses to be used for storing arbitrary software metadata...

There was hope that Mesa 22.1 would have been released this week but instead it's been diveted to at least next week due to more than 90 patches flowing in the past week. As such, today we have Mesa 22.1-rc5 for another week of testing...

Last month was the surprising news of open-source Coreboot working on a readily available Intel Alder Lake motherboard. That work for the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4 motherboard is being carried out by independent firmware consulting firm 3mdeb and using the Dasharo open-source firmware distribution with Coreboot...

Another Intel (open-source) software update coinciding with the company's Vision 2022 conference is a new oneAPI Level Zero Loader release...

Today at the Red Hat Summit is word of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 reaching general availability status in the coming weeks...

In addition to all the product announcements made for Intel Vision 2022 in Texas, today marks patch Tuesday with a new round of security disclosures from Intel. This month there are 16 new advisories for addressing 41 vulnerabilities affecting their software and hardware. 76% of these vulnerabilities were found by Intel engineers...

Vulkan 1.3.213 is out today that on top of the usual specification clarifications/corrections are also four new extensions, including VK_KHR_ray_tracing_maintenance1...

MIPS Tech is no longer working on their MIPS CPU instruction set architecture but has been taking on RISC-V based designs. Today the company made the bold announcement for their new eVocore P8700 and I8500 multiprocessor IP cores that they offer "Best-In-Class Performance and Scalability."..

Intel is kicking off their inaugural "Intel Vision" event today in Texas by making several prominent hardware and software announcements.

AMD today is launching the "refined" AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card line-up with new 2022 models being the RX 6650 XT, RX 6750 XT, and RX 6950 XT graphics cards.

Fedora 36 is releasing this morning as what is yet another release in recent times of being a very robust and bleeding-edge yet stable and reliable Linux distribution. I've already been running Fedora Workstation 36 and Fedora Server 36 snapshots on various systems in my benchmarking lab and this release has proven to be quite solid while adding new features and polish on top of the excellent Fedora 35...

In the absence of the BUS1 in-kernel IPC mechanism that appears stalled that was started after the failed KDBUS effort, Dbus-Broker has been taking off as the high performance, reliability-enhanced Linux message broker in user-space retaining compatibility with the reference D-Bus implementation...

Last month an AMD engineer began posting Linux kernel patches so the kernel prefers the MWAIT instruction over HALT for lowering the CPU idle exit latency. Preferring MWAIT over HALT has been something Intel CPUs on Linux have preferred going back to the Core 2 days and indeed with modern AMD CPUs there is significant advantages to lowering the exit latency in doing so for the idle code. This morning the latest iteration of the work was posted...

Overnight some notable open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver code was merged into what will be the Mesa 22.2 release next quarter...

Ming Lei of Red Hat has published an early implementation of a IO_uring based user-space block driver for Linux...

Last year Intel open-sourced the ControlFlag project for using machine learning to uncover bugs within code. With today's ControlFlag 1.2 release, C++ is now a fully supported language for this AI-driven project for uncovering bugs within arbitrary code-bases...

At the end of April was the release of System76's Pop!_OS 22.04 based on Ubuntu 22.04 but with a variety of improvements from numerous graphical/desktop enhancements down to other changes like their scheduler work and more. For those currently on Pop!_OS 21.10 and wondering about the performance implications, here are some benchmarks showing the performance difference on the same hardware.

Made public last year by Microsoft was CBL-Mariner 1.0 as its internal Linux distribution used for selective purposes from Azure to WSL. This Microsoft "Common Base Linux" distribution has worked well for their internal needs while continuing to make roughly monthly public updates to its 1.0 branch. Today CBL-Mariner 2.0 marks its first production release...

For those making use of FUSE user-space file-system capabilities, developer Dharmendra Singh has posted a patch to allow for non-extending parallel direct writes. In turn for threaded write scenarios this can mean a huge boost to performance...

Merged today into Mesa 22.2 for Raspberry Pi's "V3DV" Vulkan driver is VK_KHR_pipeline_executable_properties support with this extension being used by the likes of RenderDoc for providing more insightful information when profiling Vulkan games and applications...

While the Apple M1 Linux support is off to a great start and using Asahi Linux is offering good CPU performance and most functionality working to at least some degree, the biggest blocker remaining is getting the Apple M1 3D graphics working. The latest progress on that front is the Mesa code working to begin correctly render glmark2, a basic OpenGL / GLES benchmark...

Radeon ProRender as AMD's physically-based rendering engine has added support for The Khronos Group's ANARI analytical rendering interface for 3D data visualizations...

With Plasma 5.25 now under a soft feature freeze ahead of its official release next month, KDE developers are focusing on bug fixing as well as talking more about all of the changes they managed to land this cycle...

Upcoming AMD Zen 4 processors are bringing improvements to their Instruction-Based Sampling (IBS) capabilities that can be utilized by Linux's wonderful perf utility and subsystem...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.18-rc6 as the latest weekly release candidate ahead of the Linux 5.18 stable release expected later in May...

In addition to the ASpeed AST2600 DisplayPort support sent in as part of this week's drm-misc-next updates intended for Linux 5.19, another prominent addition worthy of its own article is the Rockchip VOP2 display driver being mainlined...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver is in the unique position of supporting Vulkan ray-tracing for older AMD GPUs rather than just the latest-generation RDNA2 GPUs with dedicated ray-tracing cores. Though it's slower on these older GPUs, the code is in place for this open-source driver and the latest addition is now supporting LBVH going back to AMD GFX6 hardware -- in other words, all GCN GPUs...