The Linux 5.16 stable kernel is slated for release tomorrow and it delivers on some grand improvements to kick off 2022. But as for great as the Linux 5.16 features are, we are already looking forward to the enhancements on deck with Linux 5.17...
It should hardly come as a surprise given Fedora's history of always shipping with the very latest GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), but with this spring's Fedora 36 the plan is to ship with the yet-to-be-released GCC 12 and other very latest open-source compiler toolchain components...
KDE developers have kicked off 2022 into full-swing with new features and other improvements now on their way to the next round of KDE software releases...
Adding to the changes for GNOME 42 this spring is the Mutter Wayland compositor now taking into account sub-surfaces when determining direct scanout capabilities...
While the Linux 5.17 merge window doesn't open up until next week following Sunday's Linux 5.16 stable debut, due to lead Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem maintainer David Airlie going on holiday next week he has sent out the feature pull early. Here is a look at the many GPU/display driver updates for this next kernel version...
Across dozens of articles over the past year I have covered a variety of different open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver optimizations from their kernel driver through their Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and the popular RADV Vulkan driver, among other interesting open-source AMD contributions. For those wondering what the cumulative gain was for 2021 from all these AMD graphics driver changes, here are some end-of-year 2020 vs. 2021 benchmarks across a number of different Linux games while testing on Vega, Navi, and Navi 2 graphics cards.
A few minutes ago a new Ubuntu blog post hit the wire entitled "The Future of Snapcraft" where immediately I wondered if it was announcing plans to move away from their own app packaging/store/update tech and shift over to a Flatpak world like the rest of the Linux ecosystem for app sandboxing, app store, and distribution. Nope, but they are going to overhaul Snapcraft's architecture...
Microsoft had a wild 2021 with Linux/open-source contributions and now days into 2022 we are already seeing more of their Mesa feature work as they look to further advance the capabilities of their Direct3D 12 back-end for running OpenGL/OpenCL atop native Windows D3D12 drivers...
We are closing in on the release of Wine 7.0 as the annual stable feature release for this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications under Linux, macOS, BSDs, and other platforms. Here is a recap of the many changes being introduced since last year's Wine 6.0 milestone...
While the Linux 5.17 merge window hasn't opened up yet, there have been a few early pull requests sent out this week ahead of this imminent next kernel cycle. One of those already sent out is the ARM64/AArch64 CPU architecture code updates for Linux 5.17...
Ahead of the Linux 5.17 merge window officially opening next week, random (RNG) subsystem maintainer Jason Donenfeld has submitted an exciting batch of updates for this next kernel cycle...
With starting a new year, it's an interesting time to take a fresh look at how the latest Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers are competing on the Linux desktop...
Helping make PipeWire suitable for the Linux desktop so quickly has been WirePlumber as a more featureful alternative to PipeWire's default session manager. Out today is WirePlumber 0.4.6 as the latest step forward on that front...
After a quiet holiday period the Linux 5.16 kernel is set to be introduced as stable this Sunday. Here is a look at the sixteen most exciting features to find with Linux 5.16...
As part of the various end-of-year Linux comparisons that I've made a habit of over the past 17 years, with the EOY 2021 benchmarking I was rather curious to see how Intel's Clear Linux distribution has evolved Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" performance since that platform launched in Q2'2021. It turns out there have been some terrific optimizations squeezed out of that latest-generation Xeon Scalable platform on Intel's Clear Linux. In this article is a look at the Ubuntu and Clear Linux performance on the flagship Xeon Platinum 8380 2P reference server back around the time Ice Lake launched and then again using the latest software packages that closed out 2021.
For those assigning VFIO devices to guest virtual machines, the initialization/start-up process may soon be much faster with a set of patches volleyed by Oracle...
In preparation for Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors, Linux 5.16 adds support for Advanced Matrix Extensions. But that AMX bring-up is more invasive than when introducing AVX as with AMX the feature needs to be "requested" for use by user-space, among other changes. As such extra handling also needed to be introduced for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) that hadn't made it for v5.16 but now it looks like the AMX KVM support may be ready for mainline...
Longtime Linux users will likely recall when it was commonplace to modify /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* files for managing your network connections. Fortunately, that's largely a thing of the past and Fedora 36 is looking to remove support for those legacy network configuration files from new Fedora installs...
It looks like EXT4 with Linux 5.17 will finally be supporting the FS_IOC_GETFSLABEL and FS_IOC_SETFSLABEL ioctls that several other prominent file-systems have been supporting the past few years...
Recently there have been reports of some AMD Ryzen powered notebooks being unable to correctly suspend from resume in s2idle mode. It appears the issue ultimately stems from a firmware setting issue and a set of Linux patches were sent out today to address the condition...
After the many years now that AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has been seeing relentless optimizations for GCN and now RDNA GPUs paired with the fact more Linux games targeting Vulkan (or going through Direct3D to Vulkan), one might think in 2022 that the OpenGL driver optimization efforts would let up... But that doesn't appear to be the case with well known AMD RadeonSI developer Marek Olšák pursuing yet more optimizations...
2022 will hopefully be the year that PipeWire becomes commonplace on desktop Linux distributions for managing both audio/video streams. New PipeWire releases come quick in working to address remaining gaps in this Red Hat led solution and ensuring it can fulfill the use-cases previously handled by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK...
The AMD P-State driver that has been available in patch form since September and stems from AMD's collaborations with Valve around the Steam Deck will be introduced to mainline with the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel...
NVIDIA Reflex is an SDK for game developers for measuring and reducing rendering latency. But now there is an alternative, open-source implementation of those APIs that can work across drivers/vendors while still helping to reduce rendering latency: meet LatencyFleX...
The RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan drivers within Mesa 22.0 have now added an override for controlling the number of enabled compute units (CUs) for the graphics processor...
Last year Google quietly open-sourced the Graphics Flight Recorder (GFR) for sorting out GPU hangs and crashes. GFR is implemented as an implicit Vulkan layer that works on both Windows and Linux...
After taking a roughly month-long holiday, Mike Blumenkrantz -- who has been leading the work on Mesa's Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation for Valve -- is back at the game...
While most Linux gamers are making use of DXVK these days for efficiently mapping Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan when running Wine/Proton for enjoying Windows games on Linux, Wine developers still maintain WineD3D for going from Direct3D to OpenGL for cross-platform compatibility. Out today is a new patch series improving the WineD3D performance...
Intel is using CES 2022 to announce the 12th Gen Intel Core mobile processors led by the H-series processors, new 35-Watt and 65-Watt 12th Gen Core desktop CPUs, an updated Intel Evo specification, and an update on their DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics efforts.
AMD CEO Lisa Su is beginning her CES 2022 keynote right now. Lisa will be talking up the company's consumer wares for the year with a particular focus expected on the Ryzen 6000 series mobile "Rembrandt" processors and AMD CPUs with 3D V-Cache.
For software like Mozilla Firefox that relies on the cross-vendor Video Acceleration API (VA-API) for hardware GPU-based video decoding and doesn't support NVIDIA's proprietary NVDEC interface for video decoding, there is an in-development VA-API implementation that works atop NVIDIA NVDEC...
Back in 2020 Microsoft announced their "Pluton" security chip that woulld be coming to future AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm processors. The Pluton security processor is designed to improve the system security under Windows and now we find out that AMD's forthcoming Ryzen 6000 "Rembrandt" mobile processors will be the first featuring this security feature that may prove controversial to Linux/open-source fans...
Last week I called attention to the new "x86-android-tablets" driver being prepared for introduction in Linux 5.17. That driver aims to fix up the mess of various x86 Android-focused tablets failing to run off the mainline Linux kernel or having various device issues in doing so. Since that prior article, more patches have been posted to address additional tablet issues...
With more organizations such as Alibaba configuring their servers to share CPU cores/resources among applications these days rather than exclusively assigning CPU cores to individual applications/tasks, the Chinese company is proposing a new "group balancer" for the Linux kernel scheduler...
A decade old patch is set to be mainlined in the upcoming Linux 5.17 that has been carried by Google's Chrome OS kernel build for years and can help with security on Linux systems not relying upon systemd's udev...
It was nearly one year ago that Arm announced the Armv9 architecture as the successor to ARMv8 that was introduced a decade ago. Since then Arm has been working on adding Armv9 support to the open-source compilers such as GCC and LLVM/Clang. That initial Armv9 support has been in place for months now while on the LLVM/Clang today it received support for Armv9.3-A as the latest iteration...
Next month marks two years since AMD introduced the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-core / 128-thread processor. All of our testing of the 3990X on Linux over the past two years has been with the System76 Thelio Major, which continues holding up well with that US-assembled workstation with hand-crafted enclosure from Colorado. With System76 having recently released Pop!_OS 21.10 as the latest update to their Ubuntu Linux derived operating system and upcoming two year anniversary of the 3990X, it made for an interesting time to see how the performance of the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X and Radeon RX 5700 XT within that workstation has evolved.
Starting off a new year Intel's open-source compute stack developers have published the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) 1.0.9933 release that is used for their OpenCL / oneAPI Level Zero support on Linux and also used by their graphics driver on Windows...
One of the great successes for Arch Linux in 2021 was "archinstall" debuting on the Arch Linux install media as a convenient and quick installer for this enthusiast-minded Linux distribution. This year that easy Arch Linux installer is getting into even better shape...
A patch series sent out by IBM would introduce a new "LEGACY_PCI" Kconfig option for gating legacy PCI device support, including PCI devices attached to PCI-to-PCIe bridges and PCIe devices using legacy I/O spaces...
Well known KDE developer Nate Graham who publishes the weekly KDE desktop development summaries has published the 2022 road-map for what he sees as the major undertakings this year by this community-driven, open-source desktop environment...
Longtime Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar posted a massive set of patches today: 2,297 patches that have been in the works since late 2020 and completely rework the Linux kernel's header file hierarchy. The goal of this "fast kernel headers" effort is to speed up kernel build times and also clean=up a lot of things in the proces to address the "dependency hell"...
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