Phoronix

Recently I carried out some tests looking at the performance of Zink for OpenGL implemented atop the Vulkan API in a generic manner that works across drivers. With the state of Mesa 22.1, all of Zink's recent improvements are paying off and here is a quick look at where the performance stands against using the RadeonSI OpenGL driver.

The "AST" DRM/KMS driver for ASpeed chips in Linux 5.19 is adding support for DisplayPort outputs... Leading to the era of hopefully seeing more servers with DisplayPort outputs to eventually replace VGA that is still very common on server platforms for display purposes...

The Alliance for Open Media already has a public repository serving as the reference software implementation for "AVM" as the AOM Video Model as the next-generation codec from this alliance responsible for the excellent AV1...

Overnight a new minor revision to the OpenCL 3.0 specification was published...

GCC 12.1 is out today as the first stable release of GCC 12. It also marks 35 years already since the release of GCC 1.0...

As part of the increasing flow of AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver patches coming out ahead of the RDNA3 launch later this year, a new hardware block exposed by the latest patches is "LSDMA"...

Ahead of Intel's Vision event next week, open-source Intel engineers have released ISPC 1.18 as the newest update to their SPMD Program Compiler...

FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE was supposed to be out by the end of April but lingering bugs have yielded extra release candidates for this latest BSD operating system update...

Emma Anholt's perseverance the past year has paid off in freeing Mesa of the "glsl_to_tgsi" function with now all Mesa drivers going the route of from GLSL to the NIR intermediate representation. For Mesa drivers lacking native NIR consumption, there is then the NIR-to-TGSI path for going back to that traditional Gallium3D IR...

Just over one month after systemd 251-rc1 was released, a second release candidate to this next systemd installment is now available for testing. Systemd 251-rc2 brings yet more features to this Linux init system and service manager...

After being delayed a few weeks from their original release target, Fedora 36 is now primed for release next week Tuesday...

Rusticl as what started out as a Rust language experiment for Mesa and has now matured into a working OpenCL 3.0 implementation for Mesa drivers is still making progress and on a path towards eventually being mainlined...

Following AMD's recent AMDGPU Linux kernel patches for the "GFX11" graphics block to be found with next-gen RDNA3 GPUs, AMD has now submitted the initial Mesa-side patches for GFX11/RDNA3 with a focus on their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

For those with Intel laptop models that are quick to run hot and happen to find your laptop battery quickly being drained even when it should be in a deep sleep state, a solution is in the works for the Linux kernel that ultimately stems from S0ix failing due to the PCH overheating...

Google engineers are working on encrypted hibernation support for the Linux kernel as part of offering strong hibernation support for Google Chromebook usage...

Following the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver switching to NIR by default, the VMware SVGA Gallium3D driver has also landed NIR-to-TGSI support in mainline...

We are nearing the cut-off for new feature code to land in the DRM-Next display/graphics drivers for Linux 5.19 while this morning Intel engineers sent in a final drm-intel-gt-next feature update ahead of this next kernel...

MediaTek has not officially announced the MT8186 SoC yet but there has been references to it within Chrome OS sources for months and various speculations about this new Chromebook-focused SoC. With Linux 5.19 there is going to be a lot of MT8186 enablement code landing...

System76 has released a new version of the System76-Scheduler, it's Rust-written CPU scheduler designed to improve desktop responsiveness on their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...

Another week of fixes and backports have collected for Mesa 22.1 and now available for testing in the form of Mesa 22.1-rc4...

Microsoft has made public the source code to the original Microsoft 3D Movie Maker software...

With my Ubuntu 22.04 LTS benchmarking thus far it's been focused on shiny and exciting high-end hardware, the latest flagship desktop processors, and interesting old hardware comparisons. But what about Ubuntu 22.04 LTS performance on recent but mature hardware platforms? For this round of testing I am looking at the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS versus Ubuntu 22.04 LTS performance on AMD Ryzen and Intel Core industrial PCs from OnLogic. Especially in the case of AMD Ryzen "Renoir" there is still more performance being squeezed out of this new Ubuntu long-term support release.

Following weeks of vibrant public discussions over the change proposal to deprecate legacy BIOS support in Fedora 37, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has rejected the change and will keep around the BIOS booting support for now...

The latest Btrfs file-system work on its native RAID5/RAID6 mode is now supporting the file-system's sub-page functionality...

The Qualcomm "MSM" DRM/KMS driver is set to see several display improvements with the upcoming Linux 5.19 merge window...

A new Apple SoC CPUFreq driver has been posted by Asahi Linux's Hector Martin with the CPU frequency scaling driver, of course, being important for achieving optimal performance and power/thermal management...

In addition to the recent notable Linux patch series enabling GFX11 graphics and VCN4 video encode/decode for next-generation "RDNA3" GPUs, AMD this week has been posting some additional patch series enabling other intellectual property (IP) blocks for their next-generation hardware...

In addition to driver-core-next having queued up the long-awaited Zstd compressed firmware support ahead of the Linux 5.19 kernel, another change readied is allowing support for initiating firmware updates for supported drivers via sysfs...

Merged today into mainline LLVM 15.0 for the Clang compiler is Ampere Computing's support for "Ampere1", their next-generation server processor featuring their in-house "Ampere Cores" core design...

Following AMD completing its Xilinx acquisition back in February, AMD is now preparing to ramp up their investment into embedded Linux. AMD is hiring for the "creation and maintenance" of a Yocto-based Embedded Linux platform for running on Xilinx SoCs...

Intel's Thunderbolt "Light Ridge" controller was introduced all the way back in 2010 for Apple Macs and the updated Intel Thunderbolt 2 "Falcon Ridge" controller is from 2013. Now in 2022 under Linux the Thunderbolt driver will be better matching the Apple macOS behavior when daisy chaining multiple Thunderbolt displays...

The Lenovo ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II is a standalone keyboard that mimics the traditional ThinkPad notebook's keyboard that comes complete with an integrated TrackPoint. With the Linux 5.19 kernel will be better support for this standalone ThinkPad keyboard...

Mozilla has joined Google Chrome in the three digit version world with Firefox 100 being available this morning...

Already within the Linux kernel there is initial support for tiered memory servers for dealing with platforms like those with Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory for being able to promote/demote pages to slower classes of memory when the speedy system RAM is under pressure. But with more tiered memory servers coming about especially with HBM classes of memory, Google and other vendors are discussing better handling of Linux's tiered memory interface...

Valve just published the updated Steam Hardware/Software Survey results for April 2022 providing a look at the Linux marketshare for April among other interesting metrics...

A new open-source tool made public by Intel engineers last month aims to help migrate codebases from using OpenACC to OpenMP. In turn the OpenMP-based offloading is preferred for Intel's XPU offloading strategy...

After last week AMD began posting the "GFX11" patches for RDNA3, today AMD published a set of patches enabling the VCN 4.0 IP block for next-generation video encode/decode capabilities...

When it comes to Intel's "i915" DRM kernel driver much of the work lately by the company's open-source engineers have been focused on DG2/Alchemist for Arc Graphics products. There has been some occasional DRM kernel driver patches mentioning their HPC work and Ponte Vecchio "PVC" preparations while sent out today was the first set of patches actually introducing Ponte Vecchio to this kernel driver...

As a follow-up to last week's AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D Linux review, here are some additional Linux benchmarks of this first AMD Ryzen CPU with 3D V-Cache.

VESA this morning announced an open standard and certification program around variable refresh rate (VRR) performance for AdaptiveSync displays for gaming and also around MediaSync for media playback performance...

Merged in Linux 5.18 is the AMD HSMP driver for enabling the "Host System Management Port" usage under Linux as an interface for enabling additional system management functionality on AMD EPYC 7003 servers. For Linux 5.19 this AMD HSMP driver is set to be extended with additional features coming with next-generation AMD EPYC servers...

The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) on Sunday released version 14.0.12 as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform desktop that started out as a fork of KDE 3.5 from a decade ago and continues seeing advancements from its small but dedicated developer crew...

Intel's latest high profile hire is recruiting Brendan Gregg from Netflix...

Microsoft has joined the Open 3D Foundation that was started by the Linux Foundation when Amazon's Lumberyard game engine went on to form the Open 3D Engine. Microsoft is now backing the Open 3D Foundation and the Open 3D Engine for promoting open-source 3D game and simulation development...

Released on Sunday was GDB 12.1 as the newest version of the GNU Debugger...

While Linux 5.18 had been trending on the lighter/calmer side, Linux 5.18-rc5 was just released and it comes in "a very tiny bit larger" than usual...

Being added to the Linux kernel's driver core code is sysfs support for reporting a physical location of a device on the connected system/server. In particular for large systems and servers with many connected devices and where there may be multiple devices of the same type/model, this physical relative location reporting to user-space should make it easier to distinguish...

It was an exciting April in the open-source world from AMD continuing work on bringing up next-gen GPU and Zen 4 CPU support under Linux, some portions of NVIDIA kernel driver code being published on the Tegra side, Intel continuing DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics preparations, Mesa 22.1 nearing release, the release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and much more...

The Google Hangouts Meet Speakermic is a device manufactured by ASUS that allows for 360 degree sound input/output designed for Google Hangout usage and allows daisy-chaining up to five of these speakermics together for use in large conference rooms. A Linux driver is on the way for the device just to address a mute button issue...

With GCC 12.1 due for release in roughly the next week or so, Red Hat's Marek Polacek penned a new blog post this week outlining many of the C++ language improvements to be found in this major GNU Compiler Collection update...