Phoronix

The FreeBSD release engineering team has published their initial release plans for FreeBSD 14.0 as well as follow-on FreeBSD 13.2 and 12.4 releases for the current stable series of this BSD operating system...

While mostly of benefit to server administrators with large fleets of hardware, Linux 6.1 aims to make it easier to help spot problematic CPUs/cores by reporting the likely socket and core when a segmentation fault occurs, which can help in spotting any trends if routinely finding the same CPU/core is causing problems...

Async page flipping via DRM_MODE_PAGE_FLIP_ASYNC has been available with the Direct Rendering Manager's legacy API but hasn't been supported by the atomic mode-setting interface. However, a proposed patch series would add that atomic async flip support and wire it up initially for the AMDGPU DRM driver. Meanwhile Valve's Gamescope compositor in user-space would be ready to make use of it...

In addition to AMD-Xilinx working on new network driver code, a new DRM display driver, and other kernel features recently covered on Phoronix, they are also preparing upstream Linux kernel support for the "CDX" bus with their FPGA devices...

In addition to MGLRU being planned for Linux 6.1 as a big improvement to the page reclamation code and nice performance benefits, another memory management related change that has been floating on Andrew Morton's "mm-unstable" branch recently has been supporting explicit memory tiers and work around improving the Linux kernel's tiered memory support...

After being marked as obsolete in GCC 12, GNU Compiler Collection developers are now preparing to remove compiler support for the CompactRISC CR16 architecture in GCC 13...

While the Compiz compositing window manager isn't as popular as it was during its early days of adding animated "bling" to the Linux desktop or when it was in use by Ubuntu, there still are some users having fun with it and a handful of contributors making some maintenance and other progress to it...

AMD has merged video acceleration quality improvements into Mesa 22.3's Gallium3D VA front-end for benefiting open-source video acceleration on Radeon GPUs...

Intel's Arctic Sound M is being announced today as the Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series.

Intel open-source engineers have readied their first batch of "drm-intel-gt-next" changes for DRM-Next of material they are preparing for introduction with the Linux 6.1 kernel cycle later this year...

Cemu is a popular emulator for the Nintendo Wii U that can successfully run many games as well as homebrew titles. Cemu started off with just Windows support but then at the beginning of the year laid out plans to go open-source and provide Linux support. They've pulled that off and the code is now out there in a public GitHub repository...

The current Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa supports graphics hardware going back to the "Gen7" graphics found with Ivy Bridge / Haswell. However, Intel open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are preparing to separate the old Ivy Bridge / Haswell (Gen7) and Broadwell (Gen8) graphics into a separate Mesa driver so they can better focus on improving their modern Vulkan driver that would then be limited to Skylake Gen9 graphics and newer...

The X.Org project "xisxwayland" is out with a new version of this simple program that can be easily called by shell scripts and other simple uses for checking to see whether the running X.Org Server is a genuine X11 server or more commonly these days an XWayland server running within a Wayland environment...

For speeding up the actual Mesa continuous integration (CI) process itself with frequently building new revisions of Mesa3D, their CI infrastructure is beginning to make use of the Mold linker as a high performance alternative to the GNU Gold and LLVM LLD linkers. This is yielding a "substantial" performance improvement in tests for being able to turnaround CI jobs faster and in turn allowing Mesa developers to be more efficient...

Open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb last year worked on Fwupd support for FreeBSD so system firmware updates can be more easily handled on that popular BSD operating system and leveraging the Fwupd/LVFS infrastructure that's been happening for years in the Linux space. Their most recent target is now DragonFlyBSD for handling of UEFI firmware updates with Fwupd...

One of the great things about Jason Ekstrand having joined Collabora at the start of the year is that the former Intel graphics engineer, who was on the team that created their original Vulkan driver, can now work on whatever open-source driver code he wishes. Among other upstream Mesa work, he's recently been contributing to the new "NVK" NVIDIA Vulkan driver and also the RADV driver too...

Back in May there was a patch series by Google engineers working on encrypted hibernation support for Linux that would be protected by the platform hardware itself like with a TPM module as well as user authentication by a password or other means. Sent out today is a second revision to that Linux encrypted hibernation support...

As I've written about the past several weeks, AMD engineers have been preparing a Platform Management Framework (PMF) driver for Linux. The AMD Platform Management Framework for future hardware appears similar to Intel's Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) and designed to enhance the thermal/power performance of future platforms...

CodeWeavers today announced the availability of their Wine-based CrossOver 22 software for enjoying Windows applications and games atop Linux, ChromeOS, and macOS...

Webmin as a popular, open-source web-based server administration/management software package that is a popular alternative to the likes of cPanel and Plesk is out with its big "v2.0" release...

Earlier this year was the surprise announcement of Imagination publishing an open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver for Mesa. That driver has since been mainlined in Mesa and the Imagination developers continue working on improving their Vulkan API coverage. Simultaneously they have been working on a proper, upstream-friendly open-source DRM/KMS kernel driver and that code now is far enough along that it's been sent out for initial review...

Sound Open Fimware is already four years old as what started out as Intel pushing for more open firmware around audio DSPs. Since then we've seen Mediatek begin to support "SOF" as well as some AMD hardware supporting Sound Open Firmware. Out today is SOF 2.2.1 as the latest from this open-source project under the Linux Foundation umbrella...

Mozilla is ready to ship Firefox 104.0 this morning as the latest incremental improvement to this open-source, cross-platform web browser...

Last month Dell announced their new Alder Lake powered XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition laptop was certified by Canonical for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. At the time though it was still shipping to customers with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS while now Dell has moved to preloading Ubuntu 22.04 LTS directly from the factory...

Flatpak 1.14 has been released as the newest feature release for this leading open-source solution for sandboxing and distribution of Linux applications...

Earlier this summer was the patch series for GNOME's Mutter to make use of the Linux DRM/KMS "max BPC" property for the drivers exposing the maximum bits per color supported. That code has now been merged in time for next month's GNOME 43 release and in turn will help deal with some scenarios where users may encounter screen flickering, brief blackouts, and other problems related to available monitor bandwidth...

Alyssa Rosenzweig who is known for her work on the Panfrost open-source, reverse-engineered Arm Mali driver and has been spending nearly two years now involved with the Asahi Linux crew working on reverse-engineered Apple M1/M2 graphics support has shared a new status update...

With this weekend having seen more Zink refactoring code land and Zink being faster than RadeonSI at least for some operations, it was time to fire up some fresh benchmarks of this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. From the newest Mesa code this weekend after the latest Zink patches were merged, here is a look at how the Zink performance is compared to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's native OpenGL support. All of the testing was done using an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card.

Last week Canonical announced official Ubuntu RISC-V images for the StarFive VisionFive board while this week they are expanding their supported RISC-V line-up to also include the Nezha single board computer powered by the Allwinner D1 SoC...

For the past decade going back to the early GTK3 days there has been the "Broadway" back-end that allows for GTK interfaces to be rendered within HTML5 web browsers. Aside from demos and other toys, there hasn't been too much widespread use reported with this GTK HTML5 back-end and some distributions like Ubuntu and Debian haven't been shipping the Broadway support with the newer GTK4. However, that is changing now for Debian and with this autumn's release of Ubuntu 22.10...

For those making use of Kexec reboots for booting to a new kernel without fully bringing down the system to reduce the server downtime from POST'ing and other hardware initialization tasks, Kexec reboots may soon be much faster on 64-bit Arm and RISC-V systems...

Following last week's release of KDE Gear 22.08, Kdenlive 22.08 is out as the newest version of this open-source, KDE/Qt-aligned non-linear video editing software...

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 6.0-rc2 as the newest weekly test candidate for this next major kernel series...

In addition to the R300g driver seeing new shader optimizations, also being merged this week to Mesa 22.3 were some fixes for the recently-introduced new NIR back-end for the Rade R600 Gallium3D driver for the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series...

The open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver "NVK" being developed for Mesa has seen a busy week of new development activity on this work-in-progress solution...

Thanks to being open-source, the Mesa R300 Gallium3D driver that is used for supporting OpenGL on the ATI Radeon 9500/9600/9700/9800 series up through the Radeon X1000 "R500" series has seen a new set of performance optimization work twenty years after the R300 GPUs first shipped...

Cloud Hypervisor 26.0 released this week as the newest version of this Rust-based hypervisor focused on cloud workloads and secure computing. The open-source Cloud Hypervisor started out as an Intel software project and continues to be led by them while now under Linux Foundation stewardship and continuing to see contributions from the likes of Arm and Microsoft...

Intel's open-source Linux bring-up for Meteor Lake continues. The latest open-source patches on the Meteor Lake front are for the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) changes for these 14th Gen CPU graphics...

The latest Mesa 22.3-devel code for Zink's OpenGL on Vulkan implementation has hit an important milestone with the latest code refactoring: it looks like this OpenGL implementation atop the Vulkan API with the RADV driver is beginning to outpace AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver providing native OpenGL support for Radeon GPUs...

KDE developers had another busy summertime week adding more features to their open-source desktop environment...

SDL 2.24 has been released as the newest update to this widely-used abstraction layer library commonly used by cross-platform games, including heavily by games on Steam...

Last week I published initial Apple M2 vs. AMD Rembrandt vs. Intel Alder Lake Linux benchmarks using Asahi Linux and Arch Linux across the board. For ending out this week, here is a follow-up article looking more closely at the Apple M2 in the MacBook Air against the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U "Rembrandt" within the Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen3. This time around are also results from performance tweaks to each laptop for the CPUFreq governor and platform profile.

AMD has put out another point release in the ROCm 5.2 series for their "Radeon Open eCosystem" GPU compute stack for Linux...

The third weekly release candidate of Mesa 22.2 is now available for testing ahead of the stable debut in the coming weeks...

Tow-Boot 2021.10-005 is now available for this open-source project that describes itself as "an opinionated distribution of U-Boot."..

Out this morning is version 12.2 of the GNU Compiler Collection...

For what used to be known as part of the KDE Software Compilation... Then most recently the straight-forward KDE Applications name to refer to the set of official KDE applications... Now KDE Gear is the current name for the official set of KDE applications. KDE Gear 22.08 is out today as the newest collection of KDE apps...

Following optional "__bf16" support being added to the x86-64 psABI as a special type for representing 16-bit Brain Floating Point Format for deep learning / machine learning applications, the GCC and LLVM compilers have now landed their __bf16 type support...

Made public back in June by Intel was the MMIO Stale Data vulnerabilities. The disclosure noted affected Intel products range from Haswell up through Rocket Lake on the client side or Xeon Scalable Ice Lake servers. However, pre-Haswell Intel CPUs might be impacted too while the Linux kernel to this point was incorrectly stating older CPUs are "not affected" by MMIO Stale Data...

With Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids expected to make more of a splash coming up, it's a good time to revisit the Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" performance to see how the Linux software performance has evolved since last year's launch. In this article are benchmarks of the dual Xeon Platinum 8380 server from May 2021 with CentOS Stream, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu compared to fresh installs now of those latest Linux distribution releases.