Phoronix

The KDE development community today announced the release of the Plasma 5.25 beta...

Given the recent releases of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Fedora 36 among other recent OS updates, it's time for a fresh look at how various Linux distributions are performing. This Linux benchmarking bout is looking at the Xeon Platinum 8380 2P "Ice Lake" performance across Arch Linux, Debian, openSUSE, CentOS Stream, AlmaLinux, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Intel's Clear Linux.

Last week I wrote about how well known Mesa developer Samuel Pitoiset who is employed by Valve already started working on GFX11 (RDNA3) support for RADV, the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver in Mesa that isn't officially supported by AMD but remains more popular than their own "AMDVLK" driver. More GFX11/RDNA3 preparation work remains ongoing and it's looking like if trends continue this open-source driver could be ready for RDNA3 graphics cards in time for launch...

POCL as the "Portable Computing Language" that gets OpenCL running on CPUs as well as via LLVM allowing for targeting NVIDIA GPUs, AMD HSA environments, and other cases, is now preparing to roll-out OpenCL 3.0 support...

Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) remains a very promising effort for enhancing Linux system performance and particularly about providing a superior experience when the Linux kernel is dealing with system memory pressure. MGLRU v11 was posted this week while we await to see if it will be mainlined come the v5.19 merge window...

Back in 2017 for the Linux 4.11 kernel the statx system call was added for allowing enhanced file information reporting. Since then various file-systems began adding Statx support and worked its way up into Glibc and the like in user-space for Linux finally having file creation time reporting and other attributes. Two separate statx-related additions are now working their way to the kernel...

Mesa 22.1 is out today as the newest, quarterly feature update to the open-source OpenGL/Vulkan graphics driver stack that also supports video acceleration and other GPU features on the Linux desktop...

Last week Red Hat announced at the Red Hat Summit that RHEL9 would be reach GA in the coming weeks while today it officially crossed that threshold...

Intel today published their latest update (v2022.2) to the oneAPI Toolkits, their collection of open-source software components for empowering modern workloads across the growing world of CPUs/GPUs/XPUs...

With the upcoming Linux 5.19 cycle appearing to be the point at which Intel's DG2/Alchemist Linux graphics driver support is settling down and may end up being the base version requirement for their forthcoming discrete graphics cards, we are seeing other non-core feature work happen for these Arc Graphics products. A new feature we've only seen mentioned today for the first time by Intel is "vRAM SR", short for vRAM Self-Refresh...

AMD on Tuesday released the Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kit featuring a Xilinx Kria K26 System-on-Module and tailoring it for robotics, machine vision, and industrial communication/control use-cases while running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

Security researcher Jason Donenfeld who is known for leading the development of the WireGuard open-source software has outlined a new security vulnerability affecting the Oracle VM VirtualBox software...

The Arch Linux installer "Archinstall" that makes it simple to quickly and easily get this popular distribution installed has prepared a new release candidate where they are introducing FIDO2 support...

Back in 2019 Realtek contributed the open-source "RTW88" WiFi driver to the Linux kernel for supporting their newer wireless chipsets on Linux. To date the mainline driver has just supported their PCI-based WiFi adapters while a patch series now out for review extends the driver to supporting their newer USB-specific chipsets...

It was just shy of one month ago that Intel and AOMedia released SVT-AV1 v1.0 and now Intel engineers have released SVT-AV1 v1.1 as the newest feature update to this CPU-based, open-source AV1 video encoder...

After 25 years being heavily involved in the Qt toolkit development, Lars Knoll announced today he is leaving The Qt Company where he currently serves as CTO and also largely departing from active work within the Qt community to "try out something else" moving forward...

Valve's Vulkan-powered Gamescope Wayland compositor has merged support for NVIDIA Image Scaling...

Qualcomm engineers are exploring bootloader-based hibernation in order to improve the user experience when restoring from a hibernated state...

Microsoft has made a lot of interesting developments and maneuvers over the past number of months for leveraging open-source Mesa for use by Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and supporting various Khronos APIs atop Direct3D 12 for use when native drivers are lacking on Windows. This work so far has been focused on OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan but Microsoft has now even implemented Direct3D 12 video API support within Mesa and leverages the VA-API state tracker support within Mesa...

Canonical continues investing a lot in ensuring a first-rate Ubuntu experience when using Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL/WSL2) with Windows 10 and newer. Rather than needing to wait longer to see the fruits of that work in the next Ubuntu releases, Canonical has now made "Ubuntu Preview" available from the Microsoft Store to have a daily-updated, bleeding-edge Ubuntu experience...

With the Linux 5.18 kernel reaching stable in the next week or two there is basic support for Tesla's FSD chip. That Samsung-based SoC for powering Tesla's full-self driving technology has the basic support pieces in place for this kernel while Samsung engineers are working on ironing out other portions of the SoC support for future kernel releases...

Last week AMD launched the Radeon RX 6650 XT / RX 6750 XT / RX 6950 XT models as RDNA2 refreshed for 2022 with higher clock speeds as an interim launch until RDNA3 graphics cards debut later in 2022. Up for Linux benchmarking today is a look at the Radeon RX 6750 XT open-source driver performance using an ASRock Challenger Pro Radeon RX 6750 XT 12GB.

Just one week after Vulkan 1.3.213 released with its four new extensions, which included an update to the ray-tracing support, Vulkan 1.3.214 is out today with various fixes while introducing just one new extension...

AMD's Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver developers remain very busy preparing for next-generation RDNA3 GPU support...

For over the past year we've seen various patches posted by AMD engineers with a state effort around preparations for the Frontier supercomputer. Most of these patches have involved memory handling under Linux and the special purpose memory handling between the CPU/GPUs. Published on Monday was their latest work on coherent device memory mappings for the Linux kernel...

Microsoft has another open-source driver they are working to get upstreamed into the Linux kernel...

OpenSUSE Leap 15.4 betas began rolling out in March and now this distribution with shared sources to SUSE Linux Enterprise has advanced to the release candidate period...

Last week AMD quietly released a new Radeon Software for Linux driver package focused on providing their fully open-source "Open" and "PRO" (featuring some proprietary components, OpenGL / Vulkan) for enterprise Linux distributions...

It's been nearly one year since the release of Inkscape 1.1 while today it has been succeeded by Inkscape 1.2 as a major feature update...

After taking a few extra weeks to bake, FreeBSD 13.1 is out today as the newest stable release of this leading BSD operating system...

PNY recently sent over their new XLR8 Gaming REV 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3600MHz memory that only lists compatibility with Microsoft Windows 11 and older, but fear not, it does work fine for Linux gamers and others looking for DDR4-3600 memory with RGB lighting and running well with the latest Intel and AMD processors.

While not as exciting as last week's NVIDIA 515 series Linux driver that kicks off their open-source Linux kernel driver effort, but today they issued a minor point release for the current stable 510 series as well as updating their prior legacy driver branches...

Last week marked the first update to the jemalloc memory allocation library since August of 2019. This malloc() implementation focused concurrency and memory fragmentation avoidance has seen more speed optimizations and other improvements in this new jemalloc 5.3 release...

In addition to Linux 5.19 set to add NVMe support for the Apple M1 systems, the Apple eFuse driver also from the open-source community is geared up for landing in this next version of the Linux kernel...

Consulting firm Igalia that has been working on the Mesa V3DV open-source Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer has published a summary of recent accomplishments for this Mesa solution...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" continues working on maturing its ray-tracing implementation after the initial code was merged last year. RADV ray-tracing is still treated as experimental and not as reliable as the proprietary NVIDIA Vulkan driver's ray-tracing support that has been around much longer, but it's getting there and at least is open-source -- unlike AMD's official AMDVLK driver that continues to not support Vulkan RT unlike their proprietary driver alternative...

Google engineer Sami Tolvanen has posted the second "request for comments" patch series on KCFI as a Control-Flow Integrity implementation better geared for Linux kernel usage than the existing CFI support...

Mesa developer Timothy Arceri of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has added a NIR varying linker for GLSL...

Linus Torvalds has released what is likely the last release candidate before officially declaring Linux 5.18 next weekend if all goes according to plan...

PAPPL as the free software project started by CUPS founder Michael Sweet after departing Apple more than two years ago, this C-based framework/library for creating CUPS Printer Applications is out with a major feature release...

An interesting Linux kernel patch series was posted this week to address inconsistent NUMA imbalancing behavior for at least some workloads. In such cases these patches address performance differences seen over the past number of Linux kernel releases going on for a while...

In addition to Linux 5.19 being the kernel set to have DG2/Alchemist graphics support in better shape with the IDs now (finally) being added and compute support being ready, this next kernel should boast improved power management handling for these "Alchemist" Arc Graphics GPUs...

The Solarflare "SFC" network driver within the Linux kernel for their high performance network adapters, owned by Xilinx and now owned by AMD, is seeing some restructuring with the next version of the Linux kernel. The intention is on shifting older network hardware to a separate kernel module/driver so improvements and new hardware support can be the focus with this main Solarflare Linux network driver...

MSM DRM driver and Freedreno creator Rob Clark continues leading the charge on open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics/display support for Linux in this effort that started out as a reverse-engineering project years ago. This past week Rob sent in the last batch of MSM Direct Rendering Manager driver updates intended for the Linux 5.19 kernel...

With the tenth iteration of the LoongArch CPU architecture patches published on Saturday, it's looking like work is settling down and this Chinese MIPS-derived, RISC-V-inspired architecture could soon be going mainline...

For those using Keychron keyboards for being wireless, mechanical keyboards they will be better supported with the Linux 5.19 kernel...

Merged this week were some minor changes to AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL open-source driver around the shader selector code. One of the changes in particular though is noteworthy...

Released on Friday was OpenJPEG 2.5 as the newest update to this open-source JPEG 2000 image library. Notable with this new release for this BSD 2-clause library is now supporting high-throughput "HTJ2K" decoding...

Released on Friday was systemd 251-rc3 as what should be the last planned release candidate for this first major feature update since last December...

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