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Updated 2025-07-11 12:30
OpenZFS 2.1.1 Arrives As A Big Point Release
Following the big OpenZFS 2.1 release from July that brought Distributed SPARE RAID, a compatibility property for pools, and other new features, OpenZFS 2.1.1 is available today as a follow-up release for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems...
Intel Talks More About Their Open-Source Vulkan Ray-Tracing Bring-Up
Prominent Intel open-source Vulkan Linux driver developer Jason Ekstrand presented at today's X.Org Developers Conference (XDC2021) about their work on enabling Vulkan ray-tracing support...
KDE Plasma 5.23 Beta Released As The 25th Anniversary Edition
It was in October of 1996 that the KDE desktop environment was founded and as such with marking twenty-five years since its creation, the forthcoming Plasma 5.23 is being advertised as the "25th Anniversary Edition" for the desktop...
Running Linux 5.15-rc1 Causing A New Slowdown... Here's A Look
As usual when the Linux 5.15 merge window began wrapping up, I set out to dive into its performance to see what is in store for this next version of the kernel and whether there was any regressions or other performance changes worth noting. Linux 5.15 overall has been in good shape for the "-rc1" state except noticing that code compilation workloads were taking longer on multiple Linux 5.15-rc1-running systems than Linux 5.14 or prior. Seeing it across multiple systems and a very real-world regression, it was worth bisecting and looking closer so here are the details.
Linux 5.16 To Add Quirk For The Steam Deck, Other DRM-Misc-Next Changes
With the Linux 5.15 merge window out of the way, the first drm-misc-next pull request has been sent in to DRM-Next for staging until the Linux 5.16 merge window opens up about two months from now...
Mesa's LLVMpipe + Lavapipe Land FP16 Support
The latest work landing for Mesa 21.3 is supporting FP16 within the LLVM-based software driver code namely for the LLVMpipe Gallium3D OpenGL and Lavapipe Vulkan drivers...
Google Is Successfully Using The Open-Source Qualcomm GL/VLK Drivers On Chromebooks
It's been known that Google has been using the open-source "MSM" DRM/KMS driver on Qualcomm-powered devices that originally started out as a reverse-engineered driver project separate from the company. Now it's also been confirmed how Google is successfully using the open-source Mesa Freedreno OpenGL and TURNIP Vulkan drivers on Qualcomm-powered Chromebooks too...
Early Patches Bring BPF To The Linux Scheduler
The latest area where BPF is looking to expand within the Linux kernel is its CFS scheduler...
Microsoft Adds An EGL Implementation To Mesa For Windows
While Microsoft has long had WGL as an API analogous to EGL for residing between OpenGL and the Windows interfaces, Microsoft has now wired up an EGL implementation for Mesa that works on Windows...
Reverse Engineering, Open-Source Driver Writing Continues For Apple's M1 GPU
Alyssa Rosenzweig spoke today at the virtual X.Org Developers Conference about the ongoing work for bringing up Linux display and graphics support on the Apple M1 graphics processor...
Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q3 Released For Linux
AMD today released their quarterly update to the Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise graphics driver package, which includes an updated Linux build as well...
AMD Publishes Initial Firmware For Yellow Carp APUs
A small but important step forward is seeing AMD recently publishing their binary firmware files in advance of new GPU/APU launches for rounding out their Linux driver support stack...
Raspberry Pi V3DV Driver Still Working On Vulkan 1.1 Conformance, More Performance
Iago Toral of Igalia kicked off the first day of the virtual XDC2021 developer conference today by sharing a status update on V3DV as the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver most notably used for Raspberry Pi 4 and newer...
Orange Publishes An In-Kernel eBPF-Powered Cache - Can Speed Up Memcached By ~18x
French telecommunications giant Orange has published "BMC" as the (e)BPF Memory Cache providing a cache focused on memcached usage within the Linux kernel...
HP OMEN Laptops To Be Better Supported With Linux 5.16
HP's higher-end "OMEN" laptop series is set to see better support with the next kernel cycle...
New Intel Tremont Optimizations Heading To The GCC Compiler
The GNU Compiler Collection has already supported Intel's Tremont cores as used by the low-power Jasper Lake platform. Now though coming to GCC are some optimizations to further enhance the performance when targeting the Tremont micro-architecture...
RadeonSI Lands Big Batch Of Improvements To Lower CPU Overhead
Following portions of the merge request landing, the rest of the RadeonSI CPU-overhead-lowering work was just merged to Mesa 21.3...
oneAPI Level Zero Loader v1.5 Released With VPU Driver Recognition, Multi-Driver Support
Intel has released a new version of their loader for oneAPI Level Zero for loading the Level Zero software driver components...
Java 17 / OpenJDK 17 Hits GA With Maturing Vector API, Removal Planned For Applet API
Java 17 has made it to general availability status today with a number of improvements...
NVIDIA RTX 30 Series Resizable BAR Support Continues Helping Performance On Linux
While NVIDIA has been supporting Resizable BAR for a while now with their GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards, for those exclusively using Linux it remains more of a challenge due to AIB partners generally not releasing any vBIOS updates for ReBAR support that can be easily applied under Linux. But if you do carry out an update -- such as under Windows -- the performance uplift can be worthwhile if using a game that can benefit from the support.
Intel Seamless Update: Intel Preparing For System Firmware Updates Without The Reboot
"Intel Seamless Update" is a forthcoming feature for Intel platforms seemingly first being exposed by their new Linux kernel patches working on the functionality... Intel is working on being able to carry out system firmware upates such as UEFI updates but doing so at run-time and being able to avoid the reboot in the process...
Libinput 1.19 Released With Hold Gestures & High Resolution Wheel Scrolling
Libinput 1.19 is now available as the newest version of this Linux input handling library commonly used these days by both X.Org and Wayland desktops...
Linux 5.15 Raises Its GCC Compiler Version Requirement
While Linux 5.15-rc1 was released on Sunday with its many changes, landing on Monday was a late change to raise the baseline GCC version requirement for building the Linux kernel...
Mesa Lands Option That Can Help XWayland-Based Gaming On The Steam Deck
Mesa 21.3 today landed a debug option that can help with the XWayland-based gaming performance around latency and for power management as well...
Intel Posts Initial Code For x86 User Interrupts On Linux - Shows Great Performance Potential
In addition to the big Advanced Matrix Extensions support still being in flux and the kernel-side AMX code not yet being merged, another feature of next year's Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" that we are only now seeing in early published form for the Linux kernel is handling of x86 user interrupts...
FUTEX2 System Call Updated To Work On ARM
While Linux 5.15 has many new features and improvements, one of the patch series we have been eager to see land is the work introducing the new FUTEX2 system call. FUTEX2 can help improve the performance of newer Windows games running on Linux via Wine / Steam Play's Proton by better matching the Windows kernel behavior, but while it didn't land for Linux 5.15, at least a new version of the patches were posted...
Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Tackling Support For More Games
After last month landing the Zink sub-allocator code for improved performance and also enabling OpenGL ES 3.2 support for Zink, lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz at Valve has been spending time this month working to get more games running on this OpenGL-over-Vulkan Mesa driver...
GNU Debugger 11.1 Released With MTE Support, Core File Debugging For 64-bit Cygwin Apps
GDB 11.1 is now available as the latest feature update to the GNU Debugger...
Linux 5.15 Delivers Many Features With New NTFS Driver, In-Kernel SMB3 Server, New Hardware
Feature development is over on the Linux 5.15 kernel with Linux 5.15-rc1 being issued. It's now on to testing and bug fixing over the next two months before the kernel is christened as stable. Here is our original Linux 5.15 feature overview about all of the big changes in this next kernel version.
Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS Special Being Prepared To Deal With Unbootable Media
While Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS shipped one year ago as the last planned point release to the "Bionic Beaver", an emergency issue is leading to Ubuntu 18.04.6 now being prepared...
Still-Pending AMD PSF Control Patch To Be Retailored For KVM
Of all the great stuff for AMD in Linux 5.15, one of the patches still not having yet been mainlined is the control support around Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) with Zen 3 processors. It's been six months since AMD published their security whitepaper around PSF while the Linux patch has yet to be mainlined while now it seems will be updated for a reduced focus on KVM usage...
Linux Developers Talk Again About An Accelerator Subsystem - Or Moving Them Into The GPU/DRM Area
On and off for years has been talk of an accelerator subsystem for the Linux kernel considering that for now most AI training/inference accelerator drivers end up lodged within the "char/misc" area of the kernel. That accelerator subsystem discussion has been restarted with talks of having such a subsystem or moving those drivers within the GPU/DRM subsystem space...
Linux 5.15-rc1 Brings New NTFS Driver, In-Kernel SMB3 Server, AMD Changes, Intel DG2
As expected this evening the Linux 5.15-rc1 kernel was released to top off the two week merge window that saw many changes to the kernel...
Linux 5.15 Is A Very Exciting Kernel For AMD
While working on my usual Linux kernel feature overview that summarizes the many articles over the past two weeks outlining all of the new features and changes merged, one area that particularly stands out for Linux 5.15 are all of AMD's upstream contributions that happened to make it in this kernel. There is a lot of new enablement on the AMD side -- both for CPUs and Radeon graphics -- but also improving existing hardware support...
Apache Software Foundation Saw $3M In Revenue, ~134M Changed Lines Of Code Last Year
The Apache Software Foundation recently published their FY2021 report for their year-ended 30 April. Even with the ongoing pandemic, the Apache Software Foundation managed to raise more than $3M USD and enjoyed a host of software successes...
It's Looking Like Folios / Pagesets Might Miss Making It Into Linux 5.15
We are now down to the last day of the Linux 5.15 merge window and one of the patch series we have been waiting to see if it would land during this two week period was the "folios" code -- or that also was recently renamed to "pagesets" to address some concerns over the name...
RISC-V Gets Expanded Stack Randomization With Linux 5.15
In addition to the RISC-V changes merged last week for the Linux 5.15 kernel, a second batch of patches was merged this weekend...
Linux Preparing To Slightly Loosen Its Spectre Defaults
A change first proposed last year to the Linux kernel's Spectre mitigation defaults looks like it will soon be sent in for the mainline kernel...
The Latest Progress On Rust For The Linux Kernel
While the Rust programming language support for usage within the kernel isn't landing for the Linux 5.15 merge window ending this weekend, that effort remains ongoing. A status update on the effort was shared this week about Rust usage for the Linux kernel...
Another Batch Of RadeonSI Optimizations Land In Mesa 21.3
Another batch of minor optimizations were merged to Mesa 21.3 for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...
Alder Lake Support Added To Intel's TCC Driver In Linux 5.15
While much of Intel's next-gen Alder Lake processor support appears to be in good shape for Linux 5.14, some remaining items are landing for the current Linux 5.15 cycle. The latest Alder Lake support hitting the kernel is for Intel's TCC cooling driver...
CoreCtrl 1.2 Brings Support For More Sensors, Voltage Offsets
CoreCtrl 1.2 was released this week as the open-source, independently-developed application for exposing more sensor support on Linux and offering various controls aroudnd over/under-clocking and other tuning. At the moment CoreCtrl is primarily focused on making the most use of AMD Radeon GPUs under Linux with some options not otherwise readily available on the platform...
OpenShot 2.6.1 Released For This Open-Source Video Editor
Released in August was the big OpenShot 2.6 video editor update while this weekend has been succeeded by its first point release...
KDE Sees More Plasma Wayland Fixes As Plasma 5.23 Hits Its Soft Feature Freeze
It's been a busy start to September for the KDE project and is now under its soft feature freeze for Plasma 5.23...
Wine 6.17 Released With Better HiDPI Support For Built-In Apps
Wine 6.17 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release as we move closer towards the Wine 7.0 release around the start of the new year...
Habana Labs AI Driver Updates Submitted For Linux 5.15
While last week was the main "char/misc" pull request for the Linux 5.15 merge window, the Habana Labs driver changes were previously reverted from there due to opposition from the upstream kernel developers in the Direct Rendering Manager space. The concerning patches around DMA-BUF have now been removed and a new pull request submitted with updates to this AI driver for Linux 5.15...
Ubuntu 21.10 Performance Still Pushing Ahead Of Windows 10, Latest Windows 11 Build
With less than one month out from the official release of Microsoft Windows 11, I was curious to run some fresh benchmarks of the latest Windows 11 Insider Preview build against Windows 10 21H1 to see how the performance is looking. Of course, also to see how Windows 11 is shaping up against Ubuntu 21.10 also due for release in October.
Habana Labs Opens Up The Code To Their AI Compiler, SynapseAI Core
Intel-owned Habana Labs now has the most open software stack among AI accelerators! While Habana Labs has long provided an open-source, upstream kernel driver for their Gaudi AI training and Goya AI inference accelerators, the user-space portions including their code compiler and run-time library have been closed-source. This has been a thorn for upstream kernel developers and their standards, but now Habana Labs has open-sourced their user-space components too...
Linux 5.15 Readies More Code For Compile & Run-Time Detection Of Buffer Overflows
Last week a number of patches were merged in the quest to provide the kernel with comprehensive compile-time and run-time detection of buffer overflows. Another patch series was sent out today while still for this cycle they are expected to enable the compiler warnings around array-bounds and zero-length-bounds...
AMD Just Squeezed More Workstation Performance Out Of Its RadeonSI Driver
While Vulkan is quickly taking over as the dominant graphics API for Linux gamers especially with the likes of DXVK and VKD3D-Proton mapping Direct3D atop Vulkan, OpenGL remains widely used by workstation software. It's also for workstation software where AMD's "PRO" closed-source OpenGL Linux driver has traditionally competed well (and outperformed) the open-source Mesa driver. But with all the recent changes, that's either a matter of the past or close to not being relevant with the latest Mesa enhancements...
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