Last month I reported on activity around Straight Line Speculation "SLS" mitigation for x86_64 CPUs, similar to the work carried out by Arm last year on their SLS vulnerability. That work on the x86 (x86_64 inclusive) side has now been merged to GCC 12 Git and a kernel patch is expected to come shortly that will flip it on as the latest CPU security protection...
The recently-ended Linux 5.16 merge window saw significant I/O improvements driven primarily by maintainer Jens Axboe's recent focus on relentlessly optimizing the block and IO_uring code for record-setting per-core IOPS. As good as those improvements are, Linux 5.17 should be even better...
Intel passed along news today of their development efforts around Universal Scalable Firmware, a new initiative they are pursuing to simplify and scale firmware development for hardware from edge computing devices to the cloud...
Back in the day Ubuntu's Wiki was a great resource for Linux documentation but less so these days while the Arch Linux Wiki is often viewed as a gold standard for open-source documentation. Canonical though is now hoping to radically improve the documentation for Ubuntu and its other software offerings...
Following the news from last week of experimental Zink code running Wayland's Weston compositor over this Mesa-based OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation, developer Mike Blumenkrantz has opened up about some of the ongoing work to improve the efficiency of Zink and making such advancements a reality...
Back in 2018 Intel founded Sound Open Firmware as their effort to provide an open-source audio DSP firmware and software development kit. AMD has begun supporting Sound Open Firmware too now, initially for the Renoir audio co-processor (ACP)...
Last week Google engineers uncovered a reference count underflow issue affecting all Linux kernels going back to v4.14 in 2017. This issue led to memory leaking from one process to another and only uncovered by accident. To address this class of memory corruption issues moving forward, Google is proposing a new "Page Table Check" feature moving forward...
Following last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5, CentOS Linux 8 version 2111 has been released as its RHEL 8.5 rebuild. This comes ahead of CentOS 8 becoming end-of-life at year's end...
While the Linux 5.16 merge window just ended and that kernel won't be out until the tail end of the calendar year, already for Linux 5.17 new material is beginning to accumulate in the respective subsystem development trees... One set of changes merged this morning from Google can provide a sizable performance win around TCP performance in the datacenter...
AMD released AOMP 14.0 during SC21 week as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang-based compiler providing OpenMP GPU offload support for Radeon graphics processors...
For over four years now Red Hat has been working on Stratis as their new Linux storage solution. As an alternative to shifting to newer file-systems like Btrfs or the controversial OpenZFS, Stratis has been about offering similar advanced Linux storage features while building atop LVM, DeviceMapper and XFS all while using the modern Rust programming language. Stratis Storage 3.0 is now available as the latest work on this front...
Currently when running Linux distributions within Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), systemd isn't used but that could soon be changing at least for Ubuntu...
Besides the efforts out there for implementing the likes of Direct3D, OpenCL, and OpenGL on top of Vulkan, there does still exist the hobbyist project for implementing AMD's Mantle API atop Vulkan for which the Khronos API was originally based. A new Vulkan extension is now being proposed to help in that Mantle-on-Vulkan effort...
As expected GCC 12 has now entered its "stage 3" development phase where the free software developers involved will focus on bug fixing rather than landing shiny new features...
The Lightweight Java Game Library "LWJGL" has seen its first release in more than two years for this library that provides bindings for a number of different native APIs. With not seeing a release since before the pandemic, there is a lot in store with today's LWJGL 3.3 release...
A new Family 19h microcode binary was merged today into the linux-firmware.git repository that serves as the central source for all of the binary firmware/microcode files for Linux systems...
Now that the Linux 5.16 merge window has ended with yesterday's Linux 5.16-rc1 release, here is my lengthy original overview of what I find most interesting out of this new kernel version. Linux 5.16 won't be out as stable until around the end of the calendar year or early next year, but it will sure make one nice Christmas gift with all of the shiny new features in tow.
With the big Blender 3.0 release due out near year's end there was the Cycles X rewrite that landed and unfortunately removed OpenCL support in the process. While that left AMD Radeon graphics without Blender GPU-accelerated support, in time for the v3.0 release there is now AMD HIP support in place...
Following a lot of improvements the past few years to the Intel Linux kernel graphics "i915" driver it looks like it's ready to enable run-time power management auto-suspend support by default...
The open-source Vulkan driver support for the video decode (and presumably after that, encode) extensions continues moving along for the Radeon "RADV" and Intel "ANV" Mesa drivers...
Linux 5.16-rc1 is coming out later today and already I'm seeing some fallout in the new kernel's performance... In particular, bad news for Alder Lake that is already seeing the Linux performance trailing Windows 11 seemingly due to the lack of Thread Director integration right now in the kernel and any other missing optimizations around Intel's hybrid architecture. A new feature of Linux 5.16 is unfortunately having unintended regressions for Alder Lake with at least the flagship Core i9 12900K. Here are the results from the latest kernel bisecting that uncovered this latest upstream slowdown.
Intel, Amazon AWS, IBM, Qualcomm, and UIUC researchers have been collaborating over a proposed "Tensor LLVM Extensions" (TLX) to make this open-source compiler infrastructure more suitable for targeting AI accelerators and other emerging classes of hardware...
While not coming as part of the new 5.16 cycle, one of the exciting patch series to come about this year has been Google's work on the Multigenerational LRU (MGLRU) Framework for improving performance around the kernel's page reclaim handling...
This week marked the release of QEMU 6.2-rc0 as the first test candidate for this upcoming update that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack...
Mesa's open-source "Turnip" driver that provides Vulkan support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware and complementary to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver can now handle Vulkan 1.2...
While Zstd is used in various areas of the Linux kernel for data compression from transparent file-system compression with the likes of Btrfs to allowing kernel modules be compressed with this Zstandard algorithm, the in-kernel code had fallen years outdated. Finally with Linux 5.16 that Zstd in-kernel implementation is now being brought up to modern standards and delivering better performance too...
Another batch of SMB3/CIFS client changes were submitted and merged today for the Linux 5.16 merge window. Plus the KSMBD changes were also merged today for that in-kernel SMB3 file server...
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...
Phoronix