Phoronix

With LLVM 15 branched and main now open for LLVM 16, one of the early changes for this next compiler release cycle is enabling scalable vectorization by default for RISC-V with supported targets for RISC-V vector instructions...

The Mesa V3DV open-source Vulkan driver for supporting Broadcom VideoCore V/VI graphics that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and later is now exposing Vulkan 1.2 support...

The Godot open-source game engine developers announced on Thursday that next week will mark the Godot 4.0 feature freeze as they prepare to ship the Godot 4.0 Beta 1 in September. But ahead of that feature freeze, Godot 4.0 Alpha 13 was released on Thursday afternoon with yet more feature work -- including variable rate shading and other renderer improvements...

Open-source device manufacturer Raptor Computing Systems earlier this month teased their new FPGA-based open-source soft BMC product while today that "Arctic Tern" product has been formally announced...

Google and SkyWater have teamed up the past few years with an open-source design kit for allowing projects to see their open-source silicon designs manufactured. This effort started off on a 130nm process node but announced today is the rolling out of 90nm manufacturing...

Godot as one of the most successful open-source game engine projects is preparing for its Godot 4.0 Beta 1 milestone and as part of that will begin the feature freeze for this major engine update...

Intel has posted a new open-source Linux VPU driver today... Not Video Processing Unit, but it's for a Versatile Processing Unit coming with 14th Gen Core processors...

Linux 5.19 is set to be released this weekend, so here is a reminder about some of the big ticket items to find in this summer 2022 kernel release...

Since the disclosure of Retbleed earlier this month as the newest CPU security vulnerability around speculative execution, I've posted some Intel/AMD benchmarks looking at the mitigation cost for the affected older generations of processors. Last week I also looked at the accumulated CPU mitigation cost on AMD Zen 1. Today is a similar comparison over on the Intel Xeon E3 v5 "Skylake" side with looking at the cost of just the Retbleed mitigations and then the overall CPU mitigation cost when toggling all of the various vulnerabilities with the "mitigations=off" flag.

With Intel DG2/Alchemist getting settled, the DRM-Next cutoff for v5.20 kernel material having passed, and Raptor Lake enablement also appearing to be in good shape given the little change over Alder Lake, Intel open-source engineers have begun working more on Meteor Lake driver support that will succeed Raptor Lake next year...

The newest AMD Linux optimization patch for the kernel aims to introduce a cool down period for the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP) after each I2C transaction between the x86 CPU and the PSP...

Canonical engineers continue working on their Steam Snap for making that confined version of Valve's Linux game client viable and useful to Ubuntu gamers...

Following this month's approval by the steering committee of GCC Rust as a compiler front-end for the Rust programming language, the first formal series has been sent out for review...

Intel today confirmed they are moving their 6th to 10th Gen Intel Processor Graphics (basically all the "Gen9" graphics hardware going back to the Skylake days) to their legacy support model. This primarily impacts Windows but longer-term may have some implications for Linux users...

QEMU 7.1 is working its way toward release as the next major version of this open-source processor emulator that plays an important role in the open-source virtualization stack...

AMD's GPUOpen group today announced the availability of the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer as their latest offering in the Radeon Developer Tool Suite...

While the cutoff of new feature work to queue in DRM-Next for the next kernel cycle usually ends around the "-rc6" time of the current cycle, AMD has submitted a few last minute items for Linux 5.20 ahead of its merge window opening next week...

Mesa 22.2 is about to be branched and enter its feature freeze while fortunately expanded Intel Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist support has made it in time! Remaining DG2/Alchemist PCI IDs are now enabled for Mesa 22.2 and intended to function with Linux 5.20+ for Intel's forthcoming desktop graphics cards...

Increase use of Windows BitLocker for full-disk encryption on Windows 10 and Windows 11 is causing more challenges by Linux distributions for supporting convenient dual boot functionality for those wishing to keep both Windows and Linux on the same systems...

In addition to new kernel code and updated firmware fixing a power management issue for Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" where C1 and C1E power states were mutually exclusive, another important Sapphire Rapids power management improvement is on the way with the upcoming Linux 5.20 kernel cycle...

While AMD and Intel are busy with big graphics driver changes for each new version of the Linux kernel, the open-source NVIDIA "Novueau" kernel driver that is largely just worked on by Red Hat employees is just stumbling along. NVIDIA in May announced they are transitioning to an open-source kernel driver approach, but that current kernel driver is not in shape for upstreaming and due to the heavy use of the GPU System Processor (GSP) that source release hasn't been a huge help yet for the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. With the upcoming Linux 5.20, Nouveau has some display patches...

LLVM 15.0 and its sub-projects like the Clang compiler are now under a feature freeze and branched from the main code-base ahead of the stable 15.0 release in September...

The OpenMandriva crew behind this long ago Mandriva/Mandrake-derived distribution announced their Lx ROME technical preview release as their rolling release version of the operating system...

Last month KDE Plasma 5.25 released as the newest feature release to this Qt-based open-source desktop environment. Unfortunately for FreeBSD desktop users, those using KDE will be stuck for a while longer on Plasma 5.24 due to missing security infrastructure...

There are a few Fedora Spins/Labs versions at risk of being removed with Fedora 37 this autumn unless new maintainers step up...

Oracle has issued its newest quarterly release of GraalVM as its high performance Java JVM/JDK that also supports additional execution models and programming languages. GraalVM 22.2 is this newest version and contains a number of different optimizations for its growing number of components...

Mesa's Turnip driver that provides open-source Vulkan support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics processors continues maturing nicely and is approaching Vulkan 1.3 conformance...

Mozilla's Firefox 103 web browser is now available from mirrors as the latest monthly update to this open-source, cross-platform browser...

The "THP_SWAP" option for the Linux kernel allows swapping transparent huge-pages in one piece without splitting. With Linux 5.20 the 64-bit Arm kernel (ARM64 / AArch64) will now support this option as a performance optimization...

For the past several years Latte Dock has been a popular macOS-like "dock" for the KDE Plasma desktop but development has now ceased...

Back in 2020 Intel announced OSPRay Studio as an interactive, ray-traced visualizer that was added to their oneAPI software suite and powered by their OSPRay engine. Released on Monday was the latest update to this open-source program...

Earlier this year I wrote about the Intel Idle driver support being prepared for Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" CPUs but a limitation with these forthcoming Xeon Scalable processors was that C1 and C1E c-states handling are now mutually exclusive. Unlike earlier Xeon processors, C1 and C1E states couldn't be enabled at the same time. Fortunately, via new Intel firmware they have managed to overcome this limitation...

After years in the works, the "PREEMPT_RT" support for building a real-time Linux kernel might finally be mainlined for the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle if the last few remaining bits are reviewed/signed-off on in time for next week's merge window...

NsCDE 2.2 has been released as the newest feature version of the "Not so Common Desktop Environment" that takes its inspiration from the CDE desktop once common with Unix workstations...

Last week when posting my initial Linux benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U performance (and also looking at the AMD Rembrandt Windows vs. Linux speed), there were two main areas to get excited about with these AMD Zen 3+ SoCs: nice power efficiency improvements across many real-world workloads and the graphics upgrade with the integrated Radeon 680M. In this article are more tests of the Radoen 680M graphics looking at the integrated graphics speed-up with RDNA2 finally replacing Vega as a big upgrade and also how this compares to the Intel Alder Lake P Xe Graphics performance for Linux laptops.

ByteDance as the Chinese company behind TikTok has been working on a number of Linux kernel optimizations the past few years and their most recent work is for faster Kexec rebooting of the kernel. With their massive fleet of servers powering TikTok and other apps, they will do whatever they can to shave milliseconds off the boot/reboot time of their servers and that is what most of their Linux optimizations have been about -- including this newest patch series for faster Kexec reboots...

Samsung has posted a set of Linux kernel patches for enabling their Trinity neural processing unit (NPU) hardware as accelerators found within some of their embedded systems. Samsung Trinity NPUs have been in use since 2018 and their newer Trinity "TRIV2" accelerator is found within the latest Samsung TVs for AI purposes. Samsung hopes to upstream this new Linux driver simply named "trinity" into the mainline kernel...

Intel and MediaTek have just announced a strategic partnership where some future chips for MediaTek will be manufactured by Intel Foundry Services (IFS)...

The VKMS driver within the Linux kernel allows for virtual kernel mode-setting as a software-only KMS/DRM driver that can be used for virtual testing purposes and other uses around headless systems. New patches out of Google are working on ConfigFS support for this virtual display driver and from there making it easy to build out your own virtual graphics device configuration with VKMS...

With the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle the RISC-V CPU architecture's default kernel configuration "defconfig" is being tweaked so it's capable of running Docker out-of-the-box...

As was expected given all the recent kernel activity, Linux 5.19-rc8 was released today rather than going straight to the Linux 5.19 stable release, which has been diverted now to next Sunday. Linux 5.19-rc8 ships with many last minute fixes for this summer 2022 kernel update...

Fedora is one of the Linux distributions that ships with a plethora of debug options during its "Rawhide" development phase to ease in diagnosing issues that turn up during testing rather than building everything in a release mode during the development cycle. While these debug options are good for debugging, the performance impact continues adding up and reaching a point that the Fedora Rawhide debug kernel is too slow for some tasks...

While normally big CPU security mitigation work done behind closed-doors is in good shape for the vulnerability embargo date, Retbleed has been an exception. Nearly two weeks since Retbleed was made public, the Linux kernel patches around it continue with more now sent in today ahead of Linux 5.19-rc8 to address fallout from the mitigation handling...

While much of Intel's Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist enablement appears to be in decent shape for Linux 5.20 with the small BAR support expected to land, the compute support being exposed to user-space in 5.19, etc, one of the few remaining pieces is the GSC support. The Intel GSC is their new Graphics System Controller found with their discrete GPU and used for security-related operations...

While the Btrfs file-system has many advanced features like transparent file-system compression and built-in RAID, at the moment it lacks native file-system encryption. Fortunately, there are patches that continue to be worked on that aim to provide such functionality...

While relevant Intel and AMD processors have been mitigated for the recent Retbleed security vulnerability affecting older generations of processors, those mitigations currently just work for x86_64 kernels and will not work if running an x86 (32-bit) kernel on affected hardware. But it's unlikely to get fixed unless some passionate individual steps up as the upstream developers and vendors have long since moved on to just caring about x86_64...

HarfBuzz is the open-source text shaping engine that is widely used by many different libraries and applications. The HarfBuzz code is critical to the Linux desktop and many open-source applications while this weekend is celebrating its big "5.0" release. With HarfBuzz 5.0 the developers have been working on the "Boring Expansion" font spec support...

With the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle is support for AMD's Sensor Fusion Hub v1.1 revision being found in newer Ryzen laptops...

Sent in on Friday night were this week's batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver fixes for Linux 5.19-rc8 due out on Sunday. While usually the late-stage changes tend to be not too eventful, this pull does carry some extra interest since it does fix the Intel GuC firmware breakage I wrote about last week that ended up breaking Alder Lake P graphics on Linux 5.19 unless also upgrading the firmware version...

Linux 5.20 is adding Qualcomm Adreno 619 GPU support to the MSM DRM/KMS driver and now the Freedreno Gallium3D driver is also enabling that A619 GPU support which in turn enables open-source OpenGL acceleration on devices like the Fairphone 4...