Merged at the start of the Linux 5.16 cycle was the long in development memory "folios" code. That initial pull had the changes to the kernel page cache and memory management code while now before ending out the merge window is converting some file-system code to using folios...
Last week was the main set of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes for Linux 5.16 that introduced RISC-V hypervisor support and AMD PSF control bit support, among other changes. A second set of KVM changes were sent out on Friday that is headlined by having AMD SEV/SEV-ES intra-host migration support...
Like clockwork KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary each Saturday highlighting the accomplishments of this free software desktop project...
Valve today hosted the much anticipated Steam Deck Development Livestream where they and their partners at AMD talked more about the forthcoming Steam Deck's hardware and software...
When writing this morning about intel "Raptor Lake" Linux enablement to begin, I didn't expect that to bear fruit so quickly in just a matter of hours... As predicted, that Linux bring-up for the Alder Lake successor is beginning now -- and doing so at full-speed with the initial Raptor Lake S (RPL-S) graphics support being posted...
AMD this week quietly released Radeon Software for Linux 21.40.1 as a fundamentally big update for this packaged driver stack targeting enterprise Linux distributions...
While we are used to running AMD and Intel benchmarks between Microsoft Windows and Linux while most often finding that our favorite open-source operating systems normally lead the race from desktops through HEDT and server platforms, when it comes to the Core i9 12900K "Alder Lake" that is currently not the case. Going into this round of Windows vs. Linux testing quite curious given some Intel hybrid architecture oddities we have been seeing under Linux, indeed when hitting Windows 11 and an assortment of Linux distributions with benchmarks we were left disappointed. Not only did Windows 11 come out faster overall, but related is now Linux also had much higher run-to-run variance due to the mix of P and E cores with Thread Director not making the wisest choices under Linux.
Following Mesa's Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan translation driver finally running "glxgears" in a correct and performant manner, the newest milestone achieved by lead Zink developer Mike Blumenkrantz is managing to run Wayland's Weston compositor...
Following today's inaugural patch, over the coming weeks we are expected to see Intel Raptor Lake patches beginning to make it out onto the public kernel mailing list for review...
Red Hat's David Airlie has been working on early support for Vulkan Video API support with Mesa's Radeon "RADV" driver while the past week he spent time working on similar treatment for Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver and also resurrecting some unfinished VA-API video acceleration code he was working on for the Intel Crocus Gallium3D driver...
While the AMD Radeon "AMDGPU" Linux kernel graphics driver has supported VESA Display Stream Compression (DSC) over DisplayPort connections, until now it hasn't supported the power-savings feature for eDP panels...
While the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan code within Mesa is close to OpenGL 4.6 conformant and running many OpenGL games at good performance, it's taken until now to see good performance out of the glxgears benchmark...
Following Amazon's DAMON being merged in Linux 5.15 as a data monitoring access framework, being merged for Linux 5.16 is an addition building on top of that for memory reclamation when experiencing system RAM pressure...
Announced back in May was the Cortex-A710 as the first-generation Armv9 "big" core and successor to the Cortex-A78. The initial Cortex-A710 support is now present in the GCC 12 code compiler...
Prominent Btrfs file-system developer Josef Bacik is working through a big set of patches that will result in on-disk format changes to Btrfs but address some of "the more painful parts" to the file-system's design...
OEMs have begun releasing updated BIOS/firmware revisions to address new security vulnerabilities disclosed this week by Intel. Most pressing are potential security vulnerabilities within the BIOS reference code used by various Intel CPUs that could lead to privilege escalation by local users and ranked a "high" impact severity...
As part of Google's effort around fuzzing for improving open-source security, the company today announced ClusterFuzzLite as their new, easy-to-use solution for fuzzing open and closed-source projects with ease as part of the CI/CD process...
Last week saw the main set of ACPI and power management changes for Linux 5.16 while merged on Wednesday were a secondary set of updates. Notable on the ACPI side are some changes in preparing for allowing Linux drivers to "probe" hardware while being powered off...
The Mesa 21.3 development cycle continues dragging on due to blocker bugs affecting the Intel code, so instead it's another week with a new release candidate...
Coreboot 4.15 was tagged today as the latest advertised version of this open-source firmware implementation for systems. With this new version are 21 additional laptops and motherboards supported...
While many Linux users were excited years ago around EOMA68 and in part the possibility of an open, upgradeable laptop design, it has yet to ship and looking like it never will -- not to mention being very outdated specifications by today's standards. Entirely unrelated to that prior upgradeable hardware effort but continuing in similar goals is The Framework Laptop. The Framework Laptop is a thin, upgradeable notebook that is Linux-friendly and allows the user to easily upgrade their own components. I was testing The Framework Laptop for a while and from the hardware perspective is a very nice device and running well under Linux.
Over the past nearly two decades Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has been known as an initiative for getting students involved with open-source software development over the course of a summer while receiving a stipend/grant from Google. Beginning next year, GSoC will no longer be limited to students but open to all adults. Additionally, other changes are also coming...
While since the end of October there has been NVIDIA 495.44 as the stable 495 series driver beta for Linux users, out today is their v470.86 release for those using that older long-term support branch...
Seagate engineers yesterday used the Open Compute Project Global Summit for the first public demonstration of a native NVMe hard drive. The hope is moving forward both HDDs and SSDs in the data center will consolidate to using the NVMe interface...
Posted last year for introduction in the GCC 11 stable compiler released earlier this year was the initial Alder Lake "alderlake" target. Now that Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors are officially out, Intel engineers have updated their Alder Lake tuning for the GNU Compiler Collection to yield more efficient performance with GCC 12 due out in Q2'2022...
Running the past two days was the annual OpenZFS Developer Summit. One of the most interesting presentations from this virtual event was on the status of DirectIO (O_DIRECT) support for the OpenZFS file-system and the performance boost it can offer in relevant areas...
While there is already LLVMpipe Gallium3D for software acceleration of OpenGL on CPUs within Mesa, if wanting to increase the layers of abstraction you could also use Zink for OpenGL over Vulkan and by way of Lavapipe have that software accelerated on the CPU. With Mesa 22.0-devel, that route of Zink on CPUs is now faster...
Recently I ran benchmarks showing how Ubuntu 21.10 performance has improved for AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" even compared to just six months ago with Ubuntu 21.04. In this article is a broader look at AMD EPYC Milan on the autumn 2021 Linux distributions with firing up not only Ubuntu 21.10 but Fedora Server 35, Clear Linux 35150, CentOS Stream, and AlmaLinux 8.4 as other common alternatives in the Linux server space.
Intel's open-source Linux engineers continue to be quite busy bringing up CXL interconnect support within the mainline kernel. For the in-development Linux 5.16 is another batch of code landing...
A new version of the Ncurses text-based user interface library is now available and most notable is a new but experimental driver for supporting the Windows Terminal...
Being worked on for more than a year by Intel and other kernel developers has been FGKASLR to enhance kernel security. While the Linux kernel has long supported Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) to make memory addresses less predictable, FGKASLR ups the security much more by placing that randomization at the function level. It's looking like FGKASLR could be mainlined soon...
NVIDIA used their virtual GTC event to announce Jetson AGX Orin as the latest addition to their Jetson family. With Jetson AGX Orin they are advertising it as "the world's smallest, most powerful and energy-efficient AI supercomputer" for small form factor and low-power environments like robotics and edge computing applications...
AMD this morning hosted their Accelerated Data Center Premiere virtual event where they introduced Milan-X as well as the Instinct MI200. With Milan-X there is now 3D V-Cache introduced for the current generation and still-very-impressive EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors. I can personally attest to Milan-X being very exciting for HPC workloads and beyond with impressive gains to performance.
In addition to announcing Milan-X processors at the virtual Accelerated Data Center Premiere event, AMD just provided some new public details concerning next-generation Zen 4 processors...
While just a point release, XWayland 21.1.3 that is out this morning is exciting in that it adds support for using NVIDIA's new proprietary driver that supports the GBM API for enhancing its Wayland support...
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