Phoronix

AMD today is launching the "refined" AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card line-up with new 2022 models being the RX 6650 XT, RX 6750 XT, and RX 6950 XT graphics cards.

Fedora 36 is releasing this morning as what is yet another release in recent times of being a very robust and bleeding-edge yet stable and reliable Linux distribution. I've already been running Fedora Workstation 36 and Fedora Server 36 snapshots on various systems in my benchmarking lab and this release has proven to be quite solid while adding new features and polish on top of the excellent Fedora 35...

In the absence of the BUS1 in-kernel IPC mechanism that appears stalled that was started after the failed KDBUS effort, Dbus-Broker has been taking off as the high performance, reliability-enhanced Linux message broker in user-space retaining compatibility with the reference D-Bus implementation...

Last month an AMD engineer began posting Linux kernel patches so the kernel prefers the MWAIT instruction over HALT for lowering the CPU idle exit latency. Preferring MWAIT over HALT has been something Intel CPUs on Linux have preferred going back to the Core 2 days and indeed with modern AMD CPUs there is significant advantages to lowering the exit latency in doing so for the idle code. This morning the latest iteration of the work was posted...

Overnight some notable open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver code was merged into what will be the Mesa 22.2 release next quarter...

Ming Lei of Red Hat has published an early implementation of a IO_uring based user-space block driver for Linux...

Last year Intel open-sourced the ControlFlag project for using machine learning to uncover bugs within code. With today's ControlFlag 1.2 release, C++ is now a fully supported language for this AI-driven project for uncovering bugs within arbitrary code-bases...

At the end of April was the release of System76's Pop!_OS 22.04 based on Ubuntu 22.04 but with a variety of improvements from numerous graphical/desktop enhancements down to other changes like their scheduler work and more. For those currently on Pop!_OS 21.10 and wondering about the performance implications, here are some benchmarks showing the performance difference on the same hardware.

Made public last year by Microsoft was CBL-Mariner 1.0 as its internal Linux distribution used for selective purposes from Azure to WSL. This Microsoft "Common Base Linux" distribution has worked well for their internal needs while continuing to make roughly monthly public updates to its 1.0 branch. Today CBL-Mariner 2.0 marks its first production release...

For those making use of FUSE user-space file-system capabilities, developer Dharmendra Singh has posted a patch to allow for non-extending parallel direct writes. In turn for threaded write scenarios this can mean a huge boost to performance...

Merged today into Mesa 22.2 for Raspberry Pi's "V3DV" Vulkan driver is VK_KHR_pipeline_executable_properties support with this extension being used by the likes of RenderDoc for providing more insightful information when profiling Vulkan games and applications...

While the Apple M1 Linux support is off to a great start and using Asahi Linux is offering good CPU performance and most functionality working to at least some degree, the biggest blocker remaining is getting the Apple M1 3D graphics working. The latest progress on that front is the Mesa code working to begin correctly render glmark2, a basic OpenGL / GLES benchmark...

Radeon ProRender as AMD's physically-based rendering engine has added support for The Khronos Group's ANARI analytical rendering interface for 3D data visualizations...

With Plasma 5.25 now under a soft feature freeze ahead of its official release next month, KDE developers are focusing on bug fixing as well as talking more about all of the changes they managed to land this cycle...

Upcoming AMD Zen 4 processors are bringing improvements to their Instruction-Based Sampling (IBS) capabilities that can be utilized by Linux's wonderful perf utility and subsystem...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.18-rc6 as the latest weekly release candidate ahead of the Linux 5.18 stable release expected later in May...

In addition to the ASpeed AST2600 DisplayPort support sent in as part of this week's drm-misc-next updates intended for Linux 5.19, another prominent addition worthy of its own article is the Rockchip VOP2 display driver being mainlined...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver is in the unique position of supporting Vulkan ray-tracing for older AMD GPUs rather than just the latest-generation RDNA2 GPUs with dedicated ray-tracing cores. Though it's slower on these older GPUs, the code is in place for this open-source driver and the latest addition is now supporting LBVH going back to AMD GFX6 hardware -- in other words, all GCN GPUs...

Adding to the growing list of changes expected for introduction in Linux 5.19 is the thermal subsystem adding a new thermal library, daemon, and "thermometer" temperature capture tool to the kernel's source tree...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers sent in another smorgasbord of "i915" kernel graphics driver changes for the upcoming Linux 5.19 merge window...

Making for an exciting Saturday morning, Miguel Ojeda has posted the latest patch series plumbing Rust language support into the Linux kernel. The "Rust for the Linux kernel" patches are now up to their sixth version for adding the necessary infrastructure for this second, optional language to the kernel plus continuing to add more sample code / basic functionality for showing off use of this memory-safety-focused language for kernel purposes...

It's been a while since there was last a Wine-Staging update with notable new patches added for this experimental version of Wine. But with today's Wine-Staging 7.8 release based off yesterday's Wine 7.8 there is a new patch worth mentioning as well as updates to some of the existing patches...

KDE Plasma 5.25 has embarked on its soft feature freeze meaning the focus is quickly turning from feature development to bug fixing and testing for this next KDE desktop update...

For better power-savings with new/forthcoming AMD powered laptops, this week AMD engineers sent out a patch series for PSR2 / PSR-SU MPO functionality for reducing display power consumption...

Those with extra time on their hands this weekend can try out the AlmaLinux 8.6 Beta as the newest version of this completely free enterprise Linux distribution built off the RHEL sources...

Wine 7.8 is out today as the newest bi-weekly release of this software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

The latest Apple M1 excitement on Linux for the mainline kernel is the NVMe driver is slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 5.19 merge window...

Recently I carried out some tests looking at the performance of Zink for OpenGL implemented atop the Vulkan API in a generic manner that works across drivers. With the state of Mesa 22.1, all of Zink's recent improvements are paying off and here is a quick look at where the performance stands against using the RadeonSI OpenGL driver.

The "AST" DRM/KMS driver for ASpeed chips in Linux 5.19 is adding support for DisplayPort outputs... Leading to the era of hopefully seeing more servers with DisplayPort outputs to eventually replace VGA that is still very common on server platforms for display purposes...

The Alliance for Open Media already has a public repository serving as the reference software implementation for "AVM" as the AOM Video Model as the next-generation codec from this alliance responsible for the excellent AV1...

Overnight a new minor revision to the OpenCL 3.0 specification was published...

GCC 12.1 is out today as the first stable release of GCC 12. It also marks 35 years already since the release of GCC 1.0...

As part of the increasing flow of AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver patches coming out ahead of the RDNA3 launch later this year, a new hardware block exposed by the latest patches is "LSDMA"...

Ahead of Intel's Vision event next week, open-source Intel engineers have released ISPC 1.18 as the newest update to their SPMD Program Compiler...

FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE was supposed to be out by the end of April but lingering bugs have yielded extra release candidates for this latest BSD operating system update...

Emma Anholt's perseverance the past year has paid off in freeing Mesa of the "glsl_to_tgsi" function with now all Mesa drivers going the route of from GLSL to the NIR intermediate representation. For Mesa drivers lacking native NIR consumption, there is then the NIR-to-TGSI path for going back to that traditional Gallium3D IR...

Just over one month after systemd 251-rc1 was released, a second release candidate to this next systemd installment is now available for testing. Systemd 251-rc2 brings yet more features to this Linux init system and service manager...

After being delayed a few weeks from their original release target, Fedora 36 is now primed for release next week Tuesday...

Rusticl as what started out as a Rust language experiment for Mesa and has now matured into a working OpenCL 3.0 implementation for Mesa drivers is still making progress and on a path towards eventually being mainlined...

Following AMD's recent AMDGPU Linux kernel patches for the "GFX11" graphics block to be found with next-gen RDNA3 GPUs, AMD has now submitted the initial Mesa-side patches for GFX11/RDNA3 with a focus on their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

For those with Intel laptop models that are quick to run hot and happen to find your laptop battery quickly being drained even when it should be in a deep sleep state, a solution is in the works for the Linux kernel that ultimately stems from S0ix failing due to the PCH overheating...

Google engineers are working on encrypted hibernation support for the Linux kernel as part of offering strong hibernation support for Google Chromebook usage...

Following the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver switching to NIR by default, the VMware SVGA Gallium3D driver has also landed NIR-to-TGSI support in mainline...

We are nearing the cut-off for new feature code to land in the DRM-Next display/graphics drivers for Linux 5.19 while this morning Intel engineers sent in a final drm-intel-gt-next feature update ahead of this next kernel...

MediaTek has not officially announced the MT8186 SoC yet but there has been references to it within Chrome OS sources for months and various speculations about this new Chromebook-focused SoC. With Linux 5.19 there is going to be a lot of MT8186 enablement code landing...

System76 has released a new version of the System76-Scheduler, it's Rust-written CPU scheduler designed to improve desktop responsiveness on their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...

Another week of fixes and backports have collected for Mesa 22.1 and now available for testing in the form of Mesa 22.1-rc4...

Microsoft has made public the source code to the original Microsoft 3D Movie Maker software...

With my Ubuntu 22.04 LTS benchmarking thus far it's been focused on shiny and exciting high-end hardware, the latest flagship desktop processors, and interesting old hardware comparisons. But what about Ubuntu 22.04 LTS performance on recent but mature hardware platforms? For this round of testing I am looking at the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS versus Ubuntu 22.04 LTS performance on AMD Ryzen and Intel Core industrial PCs from OnLogic. Especially in the case of AMD Ryzen "Renoir" there is still more performance being squeezed out of this new Ubuntu long-term support release.

Following weeks of vibrant public discussions over the change proposal to deprecate legacy BIOS support in Fedora 37, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has rejected the change and will keep around the BIOS booting support for now...