Phoronix

For the better part of the past decade Google has been pursuing performance improvements to their Chrome/Chromium web browser as the "RenderingNG" initiative to provide faster web page performance, lower memory consumption, and better battery life. This current work is finally wrapping up in 2021 to great success...

NVIDIA today published their newest Vulkan beta driver update for Windows and Linux with some new extension support plus Vulkan Video enhancements...

FWUPD and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) continue to serve as a resounding open-source success for allowing an increasing amount of hardware to support firmware updates on Linux from system/motherboard UEFI to disk drives and various peripherals. LVFS is now serving up more than two million firmware downloads a month while FWUPD 1.7 is out today with supporting firmware updates on even more hardware...

Next month's release of Chrome 96 is a bit more exciting now thanks to the work of Jan Grulich at Red Hat...

Red Hat today made available the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 (RHEL 8.5) beta, incorporating a half-year of improvements to this flagship enterprise Linux distribution...

Canonical today announced the launch of Ubuntu Frame, its full-screen shell built atop the Wayland-embracing Mir server for embedded displays, IoT, and related use-cases...

For those wondering how AMD's latest-generation Radeon RX 6000 series is competing now between the Linux driver options of AMD's official Radeon Software for Linux 21.30 "PRO" driver stack and the latest upstream, fully open-source driver components from Mesa and the mainline Linux kernel, here is a fresh comparison.

A new batch of drm-misc-next updates were sent out today for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.16 merge window. With this week's changes there is a notable addition for the Broadcom V3D DRM kernel driver, which most notably is for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer...

At last week's Linux Foundation Open-Source Summit / Embedded Linux Conference there was a Sony presentation about their history with open-source/Linux and how since last year they have been "accelerating" their open-source contributions...

We have covered previously how Ampere Computing has been working on open-source firmware for their Ampere Altra processors and their reference server designs while now they are stepping up to the plate and committing to a monthly release cycle for their open-source firmware...

One of our favorite open-source game projects, ET: Legacy for letting the legendary game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory live on as a community project, is out with a new release...

The Asahi Linux project that has been working nearly the past year on bringing up Apple M1 support under Linux has issued their September 2021 porting and reverse engineering report...

In Linux 5.14 Intel introduced initial Alder Lake P enablement driver support including around the new "XeLPD" display block. With Linux 5.15 there was the initial enablement around DG2/Alchemist graphics. Now for Linux 5.16 is a significant amount of new driver code for actually getting the display support into shape for both DG2 and ADL-P...

Coming with the Linux 5.16 kernel cycle will be support for RISC-V virtualization with the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)...

Created this year has been the CentOS Kmods special interest group for dealing with deprecated device support and out-of-tree modules. This Kmods SIG has begun crafting their initial set of extra kernel modules for use on CentOS...

As reported on last week, an updated Zstd implementation for the Linux kernel is being re-attempted by Zstd developer Nick Terrell at Facebook. Today he sent out the latest Zstd kernel patches to provide a much newer version of the code compared to what is currently mainlined and will provide much better performance and numerous fixes...

Canonical continues advancing their Wayland-based Mir stack for embedded and IoT use-cases. Out today is Mir 2.5 with the latest features as they work to provide better support for on-screen keyboards...

Vulkan 1.2.195 is out today as the latest weekly update to this high performance, industry standard API for graphics and compute...

Not only did Microsoft release Windows 11 on Monday but they also released the latest monthly update to CBL-Mariner as the company's in-house Linux distribution...

In April 2020 there was the somewhat surprising announcement of Micron announcing their own open-source storage engine designed for SSDs and persistent memory. The Heterogeneous-Memory Storage Engine (HSE) has been redesigned and on Monday debuted in v2.0 form with some fundamental changes...

While the formal announcement has yet to hit the wire, releasing today is Firefox 93.0 as the newest monthly feature update to Mozilla's web browser...

Merged to Mesa 21.3-devel this weekend was a rework to the display list interface for the Gallium3D code and Mesa state tracker and wired up for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. This latest driver overhead reduction is another sizable win for AMD's open-source OpenGL driver on Linux...

Python 3.10 is out as the latest major update for this widely-used programming language's official implementation...

Google announced today that Android 12 is now officially available from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP)...

I've just been informed by AMD that they have now made their code public to a new project called GPUFORT. This new GPUFORT project will live under the Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) umbrella and is their latest endeavor in helping developers with large CUDA code-bases transition away from NVIDIA's closed ecosystem...

The newest patch series by AMD open-source Linux graphics driver engineers worth mentioning is around USB4 DisplayPort tunneling support for next-generation AMD hardware supporting USB4 connectivity...

It's been one year now since Intel launched Tiger Lake mobile processors and since then we've been running routine benchmarks of the Core i7 1165G7 on Linux. Tiger Lake at launch was performing well under Linux but its performance has continued evolving nicely since on Linux, especially as it pertains to the Xe Graphics with the open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers. With Ubuntu 21.10 due out later this month, there is another performance boost to enjoy.

Mesa 21.3 recently landed RADV ray-tracing support for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver with RDNA2 graphics processors. Now the software-based/emulated Vulkan ray-tracing support has been merged for handling pre-RDNA2 GPUs...

The Lumina Desktop Environment as the BSD-3 licensed desktop originally spearheaded for TrueOS/PC-BSD but found supported as well by other BSDs and Linux distributions is out with a rare new release...

In recent weeks the AVX-512 FP16 support has been landing within the GNU Compiler Collection codebase for next year's GCC 12 release...

Since the launch of AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors earlier this year there has been support for SEV-SNP as the latest evolution of Secure Encrypted Virtualization. The mainline Linux kernel still isn't yet supporting SEV Secure Nested Paging from the upstream kernel, but the out-of-tree patches continue to be available for those interested and development work continues in getting that code ready for mainline as well as ironing out other features...

Linus Torvalds has declared Linux 5.15-rc4 as the latest weekly release candidate of the maturing Linux 5.15 codebase...

The Linux kernel is trying again to enhance the low-latency playback mode of its USB audio driver...

While Intel Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" processors with Advanced Matrix Extensions are set for a Q2'22 ramp in production, one of the key new features that has yet to be properly plumbed in the mainline Linux kernel is for supporting AMX...

Announced this week was the Fairphone 4 as the latest iteration of this smartphone focused on being "sustainable and ethical" and now the initial patches have been sent out for providing mainline Linux kernel support...

Intel's newest weekly Compute-Runtime update providing open-source OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support for their graphics hardware is now reader with broader support for upcoming Alder Lake S processors...

OpenBLAS 0.3.18 is out today as the latest feature update to this widely-used, open-source BLAS implementation...

Intel on Friday formally released their oneAPI Toolkits 2021.4 release as the latest collection of their various software components for a multi-vendor, multi-architecture software platform across CPUs and XPUs (GPUs / accelerators)...

Version 0.6 of helloSystem is now available as the FreeBSD-based open-source operating system project taking design cues from Apple's macOS...

Facebook this week announced the open-sourcing of CompilerGym as their effort to improve compiler performance by leveraging machine learning to tackle optimization work...

While earlier this year AMD shifted their Radeon Software driver focus to only supporting Polaris / GCN 1.4 and newer, when it comes to the open-source driver support on Linux there still is occasional activity going back to the ATI Radeon R300 days from nearly two decades ago...

PipeWire from the start was designed around handling the needs of both audio and video streams on Linux. While PipeWire is already in use for screencasting/recording under Wayland and working with Flatpak'ed applications, recently much of PipeWire's focus has been on addressing the use-cases of JACK and PulseAudio on the sound side. Now that the audio support is in quite good shape, Red Hat engineers are back to focusing on improvements to the video support...

Given this week's release of Fedora 35 Beta I have begun my benchmarking to look at how this next installment of Fedora Linux is shaping up given that it tends to be at the forefront of open-source innovations given Red Hat's investments. For our initial F35 benchmarking is looking at the Fedora Server 35 Beta performance compared to Fedora 34 on a dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 server.

LLVM 13.0 was tagged overnight as the latest half-year update to this widely-used, very powerful open-source compiler stack...

The first release candidate of the forthcoming PoCL 1.8 "Portable Computing Language" implementation is now available for testing...

Arm engineers have begun landing their Armv9 enablement work in the GNU compiler toolchain...

Valve published new versions of Proton and Proton Experimental last night...

That's a wrap for September with 229 original news articles and another 13 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles, all written by your's truly. It was another eventful month with Linux 5.15 moving forward, a lot of driver activity by AMD and Intel, and other open-source milestones like the release of GNOME 41 and the shipping of the Ubuntu 21.10 and Fedora 35 beta releases...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are evaluating possible improvements to the Linux kernel for accommodating CPU and GPU synchronized priority scheduling...

In addition to Linux 5.15 adding a new AMD audio driver for "Van Gogh" APUs such as found in the forthcoming Steam Deck, AMD's open-source Linux driver engineers have also been working on other audio improvements -- this time on the Chromebook front...