KDE developers had a very busy Valentine's week with working on more fixes for the recently released Plasma 5.24 as well as making early progress on Plasma 5.25 and improving KDE apps and other areas of their open-source desktop environment...
AMD's Linux graphics driver engineers have been working on the driver support for new graphics processors and now the patches are at the earliest stages of publishing. However, due to driver handling changes, it's sharply different this time around where in the past they volleyed a big set of patches under some colorful fishy codename in an effort to conceal their hardware enablement work...
While AMD EPYC processors already deliver great performance under Linux, with the Linux 5.18 kernel this spring is a scheduler improvement that can provide measurable speed-ups for various workloads on processors where there are multiple last level caches (LLCs) per node, such as with the case of EPYC...
Building off Intel graphics driver code already staged for the upcoming Linux 5.18 merge window, another round of feature changes were sent in this week to DRM-Next for adding to the queue ahead of this next kernel cycle...
While the X.Org Foundation didn't participate in Google Summer of Code last year amid GSoC project changes, with this year's GSoC design having incorporate feedback from last year's changes, X.Org is hoping to once again participate in this summer initiative that sees student developers contribute to and engage with open-source projects. So far under the X.Org umbrella there is one project idea being solicited that has willing mentors and that is for improving the unit testing coverage of the AMDGPU kernel driver...
Red Hat's David Airlie continues carrying out almost magical work on the open-source Linux graphics stack. Reviving some work he originally started a while back, patches pending for Mesa allow speeding up the software-based LLVMpipe OpenGL driver for vertex and fragment shader processing...
In addition to the road-map update for Arc Graphics and Sapphire Rapids along with announcing Falcon Shores as a server CPU/APU/XPU pulling in Xe Graphics, Intel's 2022 Investor Meeting also made other updates and some new disclosures...
The Clutter toolkit -- as the OpenGL-based graphics library for rendering UIs that dates back more than one decade to OpenedHand that was then acquired by Intel and notably used during the Moblin/MeeGo era -- is finally being officially retired...
Last year Amazon launched the EC2 M6a instances powered by AMD EPYC 7003 series while this week they have expanded their range of AMD Zen 3 offerings by launching the EC2 C6a series. The EC2 C6a instances are designed for compute-intensive workloads (hence the "C" series) and AWS is promoting it as offering up to 15% improvement in price-performance over prior-generation C5a instances and up to 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances. I've run some benchmarks of the new EC2 C6a instances looking at how they perform over the prior 2nd Gen EPYC C5a based instances, against the Intel Ice Lake competition over in the M6i stack, and also how the C6a competes with Amazon's own Graviton2-based C6g type.
Intel has released a new version of their open-source, interactive visualization software OSPray Studio that is built atop their OSPray ray-tracing rendering engine...
PipeWire continues with its rapid sequence of releases in continuing to fine-tune this audio/video stream server for the Linux desktop so it can successfully address the roles long-served by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK...
Long before the likes of VA-API and VDPAU for GPU video playback acceleration on Linux, there was X-Video and X-Video Motion Compensation (XvMC). Finally in 2022 the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library has decided to drop that XvMC hardware acceleration code...
Last week marked the release of the big AMD ROCm 5.0 update to the Radeon open-source GPU compute stack. Out already is now ROCM 5.0.1 with documentation updates as well as initiating the change around the hipcc and hipconfig commands moving forward...
With OpenBMC 2.10 never having materialized beyond a release candidate, the release of OpenBMC 2.11 today is a big one with roughly a year's worth of changes since OpenBMC 2.9. OpenBMC 2.11 brings many improvements for this Linux distribution intended for baseboard management controllers (BMCs) on servers and other management controllers...
The NVIDIA GeForce FX "NV30" graphics cards are nearly two decades old while via the open-source, community-driven Nouveau project even these old GPUs still see occasional Linux graphics driver improvements. Hitting Mesa 22.1-devel today is the most notable driver work we've seen in years for the open-source NV30 and NV40 (GeForce 6 / 7 series) graphics cards...
XWayland 22.1 is out today as the newest standalone feature release for this XWayland code issued separately from the X.Org Server. XWayland continues in very robust shape for allowing X11 clients whether it be games or applications to run atop capable Wayland compositors...
As with most modern SoCs/processors, proper CPU frequency scaling / performance state management is absolutely critical for achieving good performance out of the hardware either for ensuring the CPU is hitting its capable performance states and also to reduce power consumption / heat when not needed in order to avoid thermal throttling and prolonging battery life. Fortunately, a proper CPUFreq driver for the Apple M1 is in development for Linux and is allowing for a combination of enticing performance and good battery life for this community-driven, open-source support around the Apple Silicon...
Back in January I wrote how Valve is working on dynamic Variable Rate Shading (VRS) for the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" to dynamically control the shading performance to help with battery life. That work has now successfully been merged into Mesa 22.1 for the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack...
The Bcachefs file-system that was born out of the Linux kernel's block cache code has over the past few years matured greatly. Now in 2022 the core fundamentals of the file-system are "pretty close to done" and will hopefully be mainlined this calendar year into the Linux kernel...
With the forthcoming Linux 5.17 kernel there is the new AMD P-State driver aiming to provide better power efficiency than the ACPI CPUFreq driver that has long been used on AMD platforms. For complementing that AMD P-State driver, AMD has also been working on adding their CPU P-State support to Linux's cpupower tool...
Ahead of the Steam Deck beginning to ship at month's end, Valve overnight released Proton 7.0-1 as the newest version of their software that allows many Windows games to run on Linux with great success. Proton 7.0 is rebased against the new upstream Wine 7.0 while also having many other changes in tow...
Gigabyte and Canonical today announced that they will be working together to certify Gigabyte server hardware moving forward for use under Ubuntu Server...
Last June the Linux kernel disabled support for Intel's ENQCMD instructions as the kernel support was found to be "broken beyond repair" for this feature that's part of the Data Streaming Accelerator with upcoming Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors. Fortunately, now in time for Sapphire Rapids ramping up, Intel engineers have fixed up the ENQCMD code and looks like the next Linux kernel cycle will re-enable the functionality...
Back in November NVIDIA announced their open-source Image Scaling SDK with cross-platform GPU support to better position their DLSS technology given the ground that AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) has been gaining. The Image Scaling SDK is complementary to DLSS but still requires integration on the behalf of the game/engine developer. Today marks a new update to the NVIDIA Image Scaling SDK...
Finally released earlier this month was the first official 64-bit build of Raspberry Pi OS, the official Debian-based operating system of the low-cost Raspberry Pi single board computers. Following that I posted some Raspberry Pi 32-bit vs. 64-bit benchmarks. Given that generated a fair amount of interest and also some open questions, here is round two of looking at the Raspberry Pi 32-bit vs. 64-bit performance including its impact on memory usage and thermals.
Up to now the Intel DG2/Alchemist graphics driver code for Linux has enabled driving up to four displays, but it turns out these forthcoming Intel Arc graphics cards will be capable of powering up to five display ports...
The Linux and Coreboot support for the AMD "Sabrina" SoC continues to be worked on while recently Google has merged a new motherboard target for a Sabrina-powered Chromebook...
Linaro is proposing a thermal library that interfaces with the Linux kernel's thermal framework. As part of this is also a thermometer utility for user-space that would live within the Linux kernel source tree for monitoring the thermal data...
OBS Studio as the wonderful, cross-platform open-source software for screen recording and screencasting purposes is out with a shiny new feature release...
Earlier this month I posted some Ubuntu 22.04 Linux gaming benchmarks with X.Org vs. (X)Wayland performance for NVIDIA GeForce graphics now that the NVIDIA 510 driver has the GBM support in good shape. NVIDIA's (X)Wayland gaming performance is largely in good shape now while for those wondering how it compares to AMD Radeon on Ubuntu 22.04 daily, here are some benchmarks...
Two weeks ago NVIDIA released the 510.47.03 Linux driver as their first stable driver in the 510 series. Today that has been succeded by the NVIDIA 510.54 stable update...
V3DV as the open-source Vulkan driver within Mesa for Broadcom VideoCore hardware is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer. This Vulkan driver continues improving with likely this year to bring more performance optimizations and possibly work on Vulkan 1.2 conformance...
Intel's open-source Compute-Runtime stack for providing OpenCL and Level Zero support for Skylake/Gen9 graphics and newer up through their latest discrete graphics offerings is out with a new release...
For Intel's Raptor Lake as the successor to Alder Lake that is due out later this year, Linux 5.17 begins bringing up support for it while with Linux 5.18 more enablement work is landing...
On Friday AMD submitted their first big batch of feature changes to their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the Linux 5.18 merge window. Most notable with this big batch of AMDGPU feature changes is the FreeSync video mode being enabled by default...
Linux 5.12 introduced support for IDMAPPED mounts with a variety of use-cases from containers to systemd-homed usage. The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is now the latest Linux file-system preparing to support the feature...
As part of AMD Rembrandt APUs having USB4 support with that specification based on the Thunderbolt 3 protocol, AMD in recent months has been making a number of Linux driver improvements to enhance the USB4/Thunderbolt support for their platforms...
Mesa's NIR bandwagon continues moving around with the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver now being the latest to outright remove its Gallium3D TGSI back-end in favor of going purely with NIR for its driver intermediate representation...
Following Friday's release of Wine 7.2 that christened work on a WMA decoder and other changes, Wine-Staging 7.2 is out today with nearly 600 patches atop that upstream code-base for running Windows games and applications atop Linux...
GNOME Shell 42 has landed redesigned on-screen display (OSD) elements for notifications around volume, Bluetooth/WiFi status, workspace switching, and more...
Miguel Ojeda just sent out the fourth revision of the Rust programming language support for use within the Linux kernel. This optional Rust programming support for Linux kernel drivers and the likes continues maturing and this year will hopefully see mainline status...
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