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Updated 2025-07-07 04:15
AMD Aims For 30x Energy Efficiency Improvement For AI Training + HPC By 2025
AMD this morning announced a goal of increasing the energy efficiency of EPYC processors running AI training and high performance workloads by 30x... Within the next four years...
LibreOffice Lands Initial Code For Qt6 Toolkit Support
Merged this morning into the LibreOffice code-base is the initial Qt6 VCL plug-in...
Updated Zstd Implementation For The Linux Kernel Coming Soon
While the Linux kernel is increasingly supporting the use of Zstd for various compression purposes, the current Zstd code within the kernel is out-of-date and efforts so far to re-base it against the closer to upstream Zstd state have been stalled. Fortunately, a new attempt at getting the Zstd code updated for the Linux kernel will be published soon...
Steam Beta Improves Its Vulkan Pre-Caching System, PipeWire Capture Now Opt-In
With the initial Steam Deck release quickly approaching, Valve continues to be quite busy on a variety of improvements to enhance their Steam Linux builds...
RadeonSI Driver Merges NGG Improvements, Other Optimizations For Mesa 21.3
AMD open-source driver developers today merged another big set of patches providing various micro-optimizations and other enhancements to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...
Linux 5.16 To Expose AMD PSF Disable Bit To KVM Guests
While the Linux kernel still hasn't added any formal control yet for AMD Predictive Store Forwarding to disable it short of also toggling Spectre V4 / SSBD, with the Linux 5.16 kernel the AMD PSF bit will now be exposed to KVM guest virtual machines so that they -- either with a patched/future kernel or for other operating systems -- may choose to toggle explicitly disable this AMD CPU feature...
Fedora 35 Beta Released With Many New Features, Countless Package Updates
After seeing some initial release challenges, Fedora 35 Beta was released today across the Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, and Fedora IoT flavors as well as their other versions...
Ampere Altra Max M128-30 Linux Performance Preview
The past month we have started our testing of Ampere's Altra Max M128-30, the company's new 128 core server processor, and in this article today are our initial benchmarks of this promising chip for high core count servers in both 1P and 2P configurations tested.
Vulkan 1.2.194 Brings New Extension For Google's Fuchsia OS
Vulkan 1.2.194 is out as the latest spec revision to this high performance graphics and compute API...
Picolibc Continues Maturing As Very Lightweight C Library For The Embedded World
While Keith Packard is known for his work on X11/X.Org, the past few years he has also been developing Picolibc as a C library intended for embedded systems. He also recently jumped from SiFive to Amazon and appears at the ecommerce giant to be working on Picolibc in an official capacity, presumably for use on Amazon's growing hardware devices...
OmniOS Adds VirtFS File Sharing For Bhyve, Better System Console Performance
The open-source Solaris/Illumos ecosystem certainly isn't vibrant these days like back during the Sun Microsystems times with OpenSolaris, but OmniOS continues progressing as one of the few still-active and useful Solaris/Illumos-powered platforms...
Fedora's Java Packages Have Fallen Into Rough Shape
While many years ago Fedora's Java support was in great shape with quickly integrating OpenJDK going back to IcedTea, these days Fedora's Java packages are barely maintained and largely fallen into disrepair...
AMD Posts Code Enabling "Cyan Skillfish" Display Support Due To Different DCN2 Variant
Since July we've seen AMD open-source driver engineers posting code for "Cyan Skillfish" as an APU with Navi 1x graphics. While initial support for Cyan Skillfish was merged for Linux 5.15, it turns out the display code isn't yet wired up due to being a different DCN2 variant for its display block...
Linux 5.16 To Bring Initial DisplayPort 2.0 Support For AMD Radeon Driver (AMDGPU)
A batch of feature updates was submitted today for DRM-Next of early feature work slated to come to the next version of the Linux kernel...
"Intel Software Defined Silicon" Coming To Linux For Activating Extra Licensed Hardware Features
There has been talk of Intel moving to offer more license-able/opt-in features for hardware capabilities found within a given processor as an upgrade. We are now seeing the Linux signs of that support coming with a driver for "Intel Software Defined Silicon" to allow for the secure activation of such features baked into the processor's silicon but only available as an up-charge option...
Testing The New ASUS Platform Profile Support In Linux 5.15
With the in-development Linux 5.15 kernel there is now support for ACPI Platform Profiles on supported ASUS laptops. This ASUS laptop platform profile support joins the likes of HP, Dell, and Lenovo laptops already having this support exposed under Linux that allows users to control their power/performance preference. Here are some tests with the ASUS ROG Strix G15 AMD Advantage laptop with the platform profile options under Linux 5.15.
Bcachefs Merges Support For Btrfs-Like Snapshots
It's been a while since having any news to report on Bcachefs as the promising open-source file-system born out of the Linux kernel's block cache code. However, Kent Overstreet continues working tirelessly on it and has now merged Bcachefs' snapshot support...
Nintendo Crypto Driver Being Worked On For Linux, Yields Much Better AES Performance
The Linux kernel support around the Nintendo Wii and Wii U game console hardware continues to improve and now a new Nintendo crypto driver is being tackled based on reverse-engineered documentation...
Lavapipe Mesa Software Driver Enables Vulkan 1.2 Support
Adding to the growing list of Mesa 21.3 features for next quarter's feature release is Lavapipe now supporting Vulkan 1.2...
MediaTek Hoping To Bring nanoMIPS Support Upstream Into GCC
The nanoMIPS architecture that was announced by MIPS in 2018 for embedded devices to lower power consumption and yield smaller code footprints was announced for the MIPS I7200 but since then there hasn't been much of nanoMIPS. However, MediaTek is now looking to contribute upstream the compiler support for this processor ISA into GCC...
Linux 5.15-rc3 Released - Looking "Pretty Normal" Plus Performance Fix
Linus Torvalds has now issued the third weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 5.15 kernel...
Firefox 92 vs. Chrome 94 Browser Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux
Given last week's release of Chrome 94, here are some fresh browser benchmarks looking at Firefox 92 stable against Chrome 94 running on Ubuntu Linux...
GNU Wget2 2.0 Released With HTTP2 & SSL Improvements
GNU Wget2 2.0 has been released for this successor to GNU Wget. There are many improvements to this GPLv3+ licensed program. Over the original GNU Wget, Wget2 is faster, supports more protocols especially around HTTP/2 and compression, supports multi-threading / parallel connections, and other improvements...
Updated AMD P-State Driver Published For Linux
Earlier this month AMD published their "amd-pstate" Linux driver that leverages ACPI CPPC data to make more informed CPU frequency scaling decisions with an aim to boost the performance-per-Watt for Zen 3 (and eventually Zen 2) processors on Linux. The second spin of that "amd-pstate" Linux kernel driver is now available for testing...
Linux IO_uring Can Now Achieve Up To ~3.8M IOPS Per-Core
It was just last month when ~3.5M IOPS per-core was impressive with the code for Linux 5.15 to further push Linux's I/O limits. Now for code likely to be included in Linux 5.16 it's currently at 3.8M IOPS with a single tread...
KDE Plasma 5.24 On Wayland To Support DRM Leasing For VR Headsets
With the KDE Plasma 5.23 release quickly approaching, feature development is already heating up for Plasma 5.24 while concurrently driving many fixes into the v5.23 codebase...
Facebook Has Been Working On BOLT'ing The Linux Kernel For Greater Performance
For several years now Facebook engineers have been working on BOLT as a way to speed-up Linux/ELF binaries. This "Binary Optimization and Layout Tool" is able to re-arrange executables once profiled to generate even faster performance than what can be achieved by a compiler's LTO and PGO optimizations. One of the latest BOLT efforts has been on optimizing the Linux kernel image...
Intel's User Interrupts With Sapphire Rapids Looking Quite Great For Faster IPC
Earlier this month Intel engineers posted their initial Linux kernel enablement around x86 User Interrupts with this feature premiering with Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" CPUs. As implied by the name, the User Interrupt functionality allows for interrupts to bypass the kernel for more efficient, low-latency, low-utilization interrupts being received by other user-space tasks. Intel talked more about User Interrupts this week at LPC2021...
OpenZFS 2.0.6 Released With Support For Newer Kernels
While the OpenZFS 2.1 feature release has been available since July, for those still using the OpenZFS 2.0.x series and not yet prepared to make the jump to that big new release with dRAID and other changes, OpenZFS 2.0.6 was released this week...
Wine-Staging 6.18 Released With 616 Patches Atop Upstream
Building off yesterday's Wine 6.18 development release is now the next Wine-Staging installment that has more than six hundred extra patches on top...
XWayland GLX Path Enables sRGB Support
Another item is now crossed off the XWayland TODO list with OpenGL sRGB support wired up...
Wine 6.18 Released With HID Joystick Enabled By Default
Wine 6.18 has been popped as the newest bi-weekly development release of this software that allows Windows applications and games to run under Linux and in turn what also powers Steam Play's Proton...
BattlEye To Support Valve's Steam Deck / Proton
Yesterday it was Epic Games confirming Easy Anti-Cheat for Linux and Wine/Proton ahead of the Steam Deck launch and today it's BattlEye confirming Proton / Steam Deck support...
IBM Engineer Has Been Exploring Possible Rust Modules For GRUB
IBM engineer Daniel Axtens presented at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference on the prospects of using the Rust programming language for creating modules for the GRUB2 boot-loader...
GNU Coreutils 9.0: cp Now Enables CoW By Default + Copy Offload, wc Now Uses AVX2
Coreutils 9.0 is now available and it's a significant update to this collection of common open-source utilities found on effectively all Linux systems...
SiFive HiFive Unmatched Hands-On, Initial RISC-V Performance Benchmarks
A few weeks ago I finally received the HiFive Unmatched from SiFive as their flagship RISC-V development board. As a reminder this is their mini-ITX development board that is powered by their U740 SoC and features 16GB of DDR4 system memory, one PCI Express x16 slot that can work with AMD Radeon graphics cards on Linux, and other features. It's been a delight playing with this developer platform and enclosed are some early benchmarks as well showing off the U740 performance as well as how the Linux software support/performance has been evolving.
MidnightBSD 2.1 Released For This Desktop-Minded BSD
MidnightBSD 2.1 debuted this week as the latest version of one of the few desktop-focused BSD open-source operating system projects...
Ubuntu 21.10 Beta Released
Canonical has released the final beta of next month's Ubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri" release...
Chrome 95 Beta Completely Removes Deprecated FTP Support, Reduced User Agent Info Trial
With Chrome 94 having shipped this week, Google has now promoted Chrome 95 to beta...
Linux 5.15 Lands Memcg Performance Regression Fix
As a follow-up to A Fix Is Pending For That Linux 5.15 Performance Regression, Linus Torvalds decided to pull the fix directly into Linux 5.15 Git today for addressing this real-world, measurable performance regression...
Epic Games Announces Easy Anti-Cheat For Linux - Including Wine/Proton
Not too surprising given the Steam Deck is inching closer towards release and we've known Valve has been working to improve the anti-cheat situation for games on Linux, but today EAC owner Epic Games officially announced Easy Anti-Cheat for both Linux and macOS...
Updated "FUTEX2" futex_waitv Patches Posted To Address Latest Feedback
The promising FUTEX2 work focused on improving the Linux performance for running Windows games via Wine/Proton by extending futex to wait on multiple locks is still moving forward...
A Fix Is Pending For That Linux 5.15 Performance Regression
Last week was the article on noticing various workloads performing slower on the Linux 5.15 development kernel. There is now a patch pending that in testing so far does indeed correct the performance drop on this forthcoming kernel.
Microsoft's "CLOn12" Mesa Code Adds SPIR/SPIR-V Support
Microsoft's "CLOn12" effort to allow OpenCL over DirectX 12 by leveraging Mesa now has landed a major rework to its code within Mesa...
GCC 12 Adds Stack Variable Auto-Initialization, Other Security Improvements Forthcoming
Qing Zhao of Oracle presented yesterday during the LPC2021 GNU Tools Track around the work they and others have been engaged in for improving the security of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...
Lennart: Linux Comes Up Short Around Disk Encryption, Authenticated Boot Security
Most Linux distributions are currently coming up short from offering adequate security around full disk encryption and authenticated boot. Prominent Linux developer Lennart Poettering even argues that your data is "probably more secure if stored on current ChromeOS, Android, Windows or macOS devices."..
"panel-edp" Driver On Its Way To Linux 5.16 To Make For Less Hard-Coded eDP Panel Configs
The latest batch of miscellaneous Direct Rendering Manager changes are on their way to DRM-Next for Linux 5.16. Notable from this new drm-misc-next batch is the new "panel-edp" driver...
systemd OOMD Maturing Nicely, Adds Support For User Services
Systemd-oomd as the out-of-memory daemon originally developed by Facebook has been maturing nicely since being merged last year and then its most notable deployment to date has been with Fedora 34's debut earlier this year. Anita Zhang of Facebook provided an update today on the systemd-oomd effort...
Valve Publishes New Steam Deck FAQ With A Few New Details Shared
Valve today published a "Steam Deck FAQ" page sharing some additional information on this forthcoming Arch Linux powered handheld game system that will begin shipping at the end of Q4...
Google Finally Shifting To "Upstream First" Linux Kernel Approach For Android Features
Google's Android had been notorious for all of its downstream patches carried by the mobile operating system as well as various vendor/device kernel trees while in recent years more of that code has been upstreamed. Google has also been shifting to the Android Generic Kernel Image (GKI) as the basis for all their product kernels to further reduce the fragmentation. Looking ahead, Google is now talking of an "upstream first" approach for pushing new kernel features...
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