Phoronix

NVIDIA released the 510.68.02 Linux driver today as a very minor bug-fix release...

Oracle this morning published the GraalVM Community Edition 22.1 feature release for this high-performance Java/JDK distribution that also provides runtimes for JavaScript, Python, and other languages...

While Intel launched the Arc A-Series Mobile Graphics at the end of Q1, so far at least in major US markets no laptops with these graphics are currently available. As such it's hard to assess the current Linux driver support level and with no clear communication from Intel on the matter. Intel has been working on their upstream DG2/Alchemist support for a while but it looks like with the Linux 5.19 kernel this summer is what will likely be their base version requirement for the DG2/Alchemist-based Intel GPUs...

Back in 2020 file-system driver provider Paragon Software announced they wanted to upstream their NTFS driver into the Linux kernel. This driver was previously a proprietary, commercial offering from the company but given the state of NTFS these days they wanted to upstream this driver with full read/write support and other features not found within the existing NTFS driver. Finally last year after going through many rounds of review, the new driver was merged into Linux 5.15. Sadly, less than one year later, concerns have been raised that the driver is already effectively orphaned and not being maintained...

It looks like Linux 5.19 will have all the base preparations in place for Arm Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) support...

Originally attempted with Linux 5.18 were patches so /dev/urandom and /dev/random would behave exactly the same. That was dropped though due to not enough randomness at boot for some platforms like Arm 32-bit, Motorola m68k, Microblaze, Xtensa, and others. But then the change went in to opportunistically initialize /dev/random as a best-effort approach where it at least works nicely on x86/x86_64. The good news is that original unification effort may be re-visited in the future now that the original blocker issue has been addressed...

VMware has merged support for SVGAv3 into Mesa 22.2. SVGAv3 is the latest update to their virtual graphics device for allowing 3D guest virtual machine acceleration with VMware's virtualization products...

In order to fully support Direct3D Indirect Drawing for allowing more rendering tasks to be moved from the CPU to the GPU, the open-source RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is working on experimental code for effectively hosting "a driver on the GPU."..

SDL 2.0.22 is now officially out as the newest version of this widely-used library by multi-platform games and other software for abstracting various input, graphics, and other system details...

Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard shared they have setup a GitLab instance for Wine development -- currently as an experiment but they hope it will lead to boosting their workflow for working on this open-source software moving forward...

System76 has released Pop!_OS 22.04 as the newest version of their Linux distribution downstream based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

Last week AMD began shipping the much anticipated Ryzen 7 5800X3D as their first 3D V-Cache consumer CPU and their claims to be "the world's fastest PC gaming processor" in being able to outperform even the Core i9 12900K / 12900KS for Windows gaming. We weren't seeded by AMD for this launch, leading us to anticipate that it's not too good for Linux gaming / not their target market. But after the great success I've had with AMD Milan-X performance on Linux, I was very eager to try out this consumer CPU with the 3D-stacked L3 cache and ended up purchasing a 5800X3D. Indeed the Ryzen 7 5800X3D turned out to be disappointing for Linux gaming performance but the 5800X3D was very interesting for a range of other technical workloads and making me very excited for future Ryzen CPUs with 3D V-Cache.

For two years there has been interest and unmerged patches for allowing Linux's plethora of firmware blobs to be Zstd-compressed for helping to save disk space. Finally it looks like for Linux 5.19 that optional Zstd firmware compression support will be merged...

Queued up into the input subsystem's for-next branch ahead of Linux 5.19 is a new driver for supporting the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT Joystick...

A NVIDIA engineer is working on addressing the currently "very limited" power management support available with the Linux kernel's upstream VFIO PCI driver...

Open-source friendly game studio Wolfire Games has released their Overgrowth title, which was released back in 2017 and the sequel to the Lugaru game, as open-source software...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.18-rc4 and so far the kernel is looking good at this mid-stage of the development cycle...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" LBVH support has landed for boosting the Vulkan ray-tracing potential for this open-source driver. The LBVH patch series is what I reported on earlier this month for at least one workload going from around 13 to 250 FPS boost...

In addition to Ubuntu 22.04 switching back NVIDIA to using X11 by default rather than Wayland as a launch-day change, separately, there was another rather notable last minute change affecting 3D support for virtual machines... Those with Ubuntu 22.04 hosts and launching Ubuntu 22.04 desktop VMs will find 3D acceleration disabled by default...

The widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library has merged support for the JPEG-XL image format...

AMD's open-source Linux engineers on the CPU side of the house continue being quite busy with all sorts of new feature enablement work, which given their timing and other factors is almost all definitively for upcoming Zen 4. AMD this week sent out updated patches in getting "PerfMonV2" support in order that is updated performance monitoring abilities with upcoming processors...

In addition to CUPS back to seeing new feature development for this print server now being managed by OpenPrinting, CUPS founder Michael Sweet also continues being quite busy with working on PAPPL as his modern printer application framework effort...

While back in March Ubuntu 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish" changed the default behavior for NVIDIA's driver to use Wayland inline with Intel and Radeon graphics having used the GNOME Wayland session rather than X.Org for the past few releases, this change was reverted at the last-minute. With a launch-day SRU, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is defaulting to using the GNOME X.Org session rather than Wayland when running the proprietary NVIDIA driver...

Being sent in as a fix for Linux 5.18-rc3 is supporting various marine navigation keycodes with at least Garmin's boat steering wheels and marine navigation displays running Linux...

Another week, another batch of new AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver feature work ready for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the next kernel cycle. Feature code continues building up in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.19 cycle...

Even amid all the April software releases, KDE developers remain very busy working on their open-source desktop stack...

Wine 7.7 is out as the latest bi-weekly release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux...

Mesa's Rusticl is a yet-to-be-merged OpenCL implementation for Mesa Gallium3D drivers written in the Rust programming language. The latest code now can pass the Khronos OpenCL 3.0 Conformance Test Suite!..

With Mesa 22.1 having been branched and working its way towards release in early to mid May, it's a good time to deliver some fresh Linux gaming benchmarks on the latest GPU drivers. In this article are some reference benchmark results of various AMD Radeon graphics cards on Mesa 22.1-rc1 as of branching paired with Linux 5.17 and then benchmarked against NVIDIA's latest driver and various GeForce RTX GPUs.

Last year open-source developers called on Intel to open-source their "PSE" firmware. The Programmable Services Engine (PSE) introduced with Elkhart Lake is an Arm Cortex-M7 companion core responsible for various tasks and is programmed by a binary-only firmware module. While it started out as a proprietary, binary blob, the PSE firmware has now been open-sourced!..

Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media has done on a terrific job on the development of SVT-AV1 for open-source, high performance CPU-based AV1 video encoding. This morning marks the release of SVT-AV1 1.0...

While to date no major hardware vendors are focusing on their open-source Mesa-based drivers for running on Windows (though there has been independent work like building RADV on Windows), other Mesa code is seeing interest and usage under Windows...

Laid out earlier this month was a change proposal for removing legacy X.Org drivers with the Fedora 37 release later this year...

Back in February was the interesting work laid out by Red Hat engineers for their looking at using eBPF within the kernel's HID subsystem. A new patch series attempting this innovative use of the in-kernel JIT virtual machine has been published...

While the Mesa 22.1 feature release will hopefully be out in about two weeks, out today is Mesa 22.0.2 as the newest point release for the current Mesa stable series. With this release slipping an extra week, there are even more bug-fixes than usual back-ported into this version...

NVIDIA by way of their GPU compute / CUDA Fortran interests and having acquired the PGI compiler company nearly a decade ago has been active contributors to the LLVM Fortran scene. NVIDIA spearheaded the work on the modern LLVM Fortran compiler support and worked with other vendors and the open-source ecosystem on the since-upstreamed FLANG compiler. NVIDIA had been maintaining a "fir-dev" downstream for their latest Fortran compiler patches while now moving forward they will be focused on upstream LLVM contributions...

Proton 7.0-2 is out today as the newest version of this Wine downstream that powers Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux / SteamOS...

One of the less talked about features with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" is Canonical offering up a "beta" of a real-time Linux kernel image for use with this long-term support release. In doing so, Canonical is expanding their aim for Ubuntu Linux within industrial and other use-cases demanding real-time needs...

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" is now available for download...

OpenBSD 7.1 is out this morning as the newest version of this popular, security-minded BSD operating system...

Longtime Linux users especially those that frequented Linux conferences/events in pre-COVID times are likely familiar with Dirk Hohndel. Dirk has a well known track record with Linux going back to the 90's, good friend and diving buddy with Linus Torvalds, and now somewhat surprisingly has moved on to promoting a blockchain effort...

At the end of last year you may recall the talked about Linux kernel patches for booting systems faster by allowing the parallel bring-up of secondary CPU cores. It's been a while since hearing much about that effort but seems to have hit a snag in that the code is running into problems on early Zen CPUs and older...

Along with the Raptor Lake P Linux kernel graphics driver support that should work its way to mainline for the v5.19 cycle, merged to Mesa 22.2 today is the Raptor Lake P bits for the Intel OpenGL / Vulkan drivers...

Chris Lord at Igalia has recently been looking at the WebKit browser engine performance as it concerns embedded devices. From this work he found that WebKit with its WPE port for embedded devices was found to be performing rather poorly on Wayland. Patches are now pending to address two uncovered issues...

While GCC 12 (GCC 12.1 stable) will be out in the coming weeks, GCC 11.3 is out today as the latest stable release in the current GCC 11 series...

Mesa 22.1-rc2 is now available as the second weekly release candidate for this quarter's Mesa3D feature release of this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan graphics drivers...

There is some exciting progress around Zink as the OpenGL 4.6 implementation built atop Vulkan APIs for generally quite performant OpenGL-on-Vulkan acceleration... Zink with the recently-merged Kopper code is even beginning to work on Windows and Laminar Research is hoping to use Zink for the next major X-Plane release!..

Merged as part of Linux 5.18 is Intel's Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) support as part of CET (Control Flow Enforcement) technology. Indirect Branch Tracking is intended to help protect against JUMP/CALL oriented attacks as part of CET's control-flow integrity protections. Meanwhile still being worked on is "FineIBT" as a more compiler-hardened version built atop Intel CET/IBT...

For those making use of the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel such as Ubuntu 22.04 with using this long-term support kernel by default, Linux 5.15.35 is out today and is a notable point release for back-porting an Intel P-State driver fix for Intel Alder Lake systems that leads to much better performance in properly deciding between P and E core selection. Here are some benchmarks on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with Linux 5.15.35 against other kernel options.

A project more than one year in the making by Emma Anholt is about to mark its completion with GLSL-to-TGSI set to be removed from Mesa whereby Gallium3D will always go through the NIR intermediate representation while older drivers still dependent upon TGSI will make use of the NIR-To-TGSI pass. Using NIR means better performance and getting rid of the GLSL-to-TGSI code path means freeing up more than twenty thousand lines of code...