Phoronix

Following last week's Radeon RX 6600 XT launch, here are benchmarks of the Radeon RX 6600 XT / RX 6700 XT / RX 6800 XT graphics cards across all of the Vulkan driver options available to Linux users.

The change led by AMD engineers for adding AV1 VA-API acceleration support to the Gallium3D "VA" state tracker front-end has landed in Mesa 21.3...

The LLVMpipe driver providing a generic OpenGL implementation that's CPU-accelerated for Mesa - and more performant than alternatives thanks to LLVM - can now support OpenGL 4.5 compatibility profile contexts...

While getting late in the cycle, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee approved some additional changes for Fedora 35 due out this fall...

Ubuntu developers acknowledge "delaying this for a long time" but for Ubuntu 21.10 they are planning to ship its systemd package with the unified cgroup hierarchy (Cgroups v2) by default...

The latest feature display work to happen for the AMDGPU kernel driver since the debut of FreeSync HDMI in Linux 5.13 is around DisplayPort 2.0 support and specifically the SST UHBR10 handling...

Git 2.33 is out this evening as the latest stable update to this immensely successful open-source distributed revision control system...

Last month Intel began posting the developer documentation around AVX-512 FP16 support coming with Sapphire Rapids and initially accompanied by GCC compiler patches along with LLVM/Clang. While that GNU Compiler Collection support around AVX-512 FP16 has yet to be merged, the LLVM Clang support for this next iteration of AVX-512 has begun landing...

Tesseract as the leading open-source optical character recognition (OCR) engine that employs neural networks for converting images/scans of text into actual recognized text is nearing its 5.0 release...

Intel just announced the new brand they will use for their forthcoming high performance discrete graphics solutions...

While Fedora currently allows restarting of system services automatically when upgrading the packages for those services, there hasn't been that capability for user services to automatically restart as part of RPM package upgrades. But now approved for Fedora 35 is that change...

The Mediatek Direct Rendering Manager driver updates slated for Linux 5.15 were sent out this weekend...

Not only did Debian 11 make it out this weekend, but Slackware 15 is finally up to its release candidate phase as the next major installment of this long-running Linux distribution...

The Maui open-source user interface framework and Maui Apps are out with a new release for those interested in this framework and applications that are designed to work well cross-device as well as largely working cross-platform too...

Kdenlive 21.08 is now available as the newest feature upgrade to KDE's non-linear video editor...

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 5.14-rc6 as the latest weekly test release of Linux 5.14 that should go gold around the end of August...

With proper heatsinks becoming all the more important with speedy PCI Express 4.0 NVMe SSDs to avoid thermal throttling, SilverStone has been among the vendors offering after-market aluminum heatsinks designed for M.2 2280 drives. The SilverStone TP04 is a simple but effective aluminum alloy SSD cooling kit for about $17 USD.

While Linux 5.12 saw initial support merged for the Apple M1, it was quite the basic support with more robust support still to come. Besides the graphics support being a large work-in-progress, one of the areas now coming about is the new PCI Express driver that is necessary for supporting more functionality of this driver...

If you have noticed grep regressing performance-wise in recent releases, you may want to upgrade to GNU Grep 3.7 released this weekend as it fixes a nasty performance regression...

OpenRazer 3.1 is now available as the newest version of this open-source, third-party solution for enabling Razer devices under Linux...

Merged to the mainline Linux kernel six years ago was the LightNVM subsystem as part of Linux 4.4 LTS around "Open-Channel SSDs". That LightNVM code is now slated for removal with the upcoming Linux 5.15 cycle...

Debian 11 "Bullseye" has been officially released now after just over two years in development...

Besides the very successful Godot game engine and the up and coming O3DE, Ogre continues progressing as another useful open-source game engine. Out this weekend is Ogre 13.0 as the project switches up its versioning scheme...

A new status report has been published by the developers of "Asahi Linux" that are continuing to work on providing Linux support for the Apple Silicon initially with the M1 SoC...

One of the features that has come together nicely for Linux on laptops in recent months has been the platform profile support around the ACPI specification with support from multiple laptop vendors for allowing users to control their power/performance preference based on various system profile configurations. A patch is pending for newer ASUS laptops to enjoy this platform profile control under Linux...

In addition to Debian GNU/Linux 11 set for release today, Debian GNU/Hurd 2021 has been released as the unofficial port of Debian to the GNU Hurd micro-kernel...

Debian 11.0 "Bullseye" is due for release today and the Debian developers involved are indeed putting the final touches on this next major Debian GNU/Linux distribution release...

KDE developers had another busy summertime week with a variety of UI improvements and other polishing to this open-source desktop environment...

Ardour as one of the leading open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) solutions is out with another new release...

Given this week's launch of the Radeon RX 6600 XT and that also bringing the new Radeon Software for Linux 21.30 driver, I was curious to see how the Vulkan ray-tracing performance compares now against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series on Linux.

Wine 6.15 has been uncorked as the newest bi-weekly development release of this software that powers Steam Play and more for running Windows games/applications on Linux...

NVIDIA's Tegra DRM driver that is part of the mainline kernel will be introducing a new user-space API/ABI with Linux 5.15 that is designed for future hardware while also working for existing Tegra SoCs...

Cirrus Logic has contributed a number of improvements to their CS8409 HDA audio driver for the Linux kernel that includes support for new "Dolphin" audio hardware...

For hobbyists that enjoy tinkering around with Linux running on the Nintendo Wii or Wii U game consoles, a new driver coming for Linux 5.15 allows accessing the specialized OTP read-only memory area that contains the encryption/decryption keys and other data...

With LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler front-end squaring away its OpenCL C 3.0 language support, Arm engineers are now working on the C++ equivalent support...

The MSM DRM kernel updates to this open-source Qualcomm Adreno driver have been sent in to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.15 merge window...

With AMD RDNA2 GPUs such as the Radeon RX 6000 series there is hardware support for AV1 decoding while the Linux support has been slow to materialize. Fortunately, that's now changing...

With LLVM/Clang 13 feature development having ended last week and the 13.0 release candidate being tagged, in starting off the benchmarking cycle first up I was looking at how well this new compiler is performing compared to LLVM Clang 12 stable on an AMD EPYC 7543 (Zen 3) Linux server.

One of the most exciting Linux kernel innovations in recent years has been eBPF for an in-kernel virtual machine allowing sandboxed programs running within the Linux kernel. The Linux Foundation along with Microsoft and other partners are now forming the eBPF Foundation...

As I have covered in many Phoronix articles over the past number of months, it's been a lengthy road bringing up the DG1 graphics support on Linux with the Intel open-source engineers having to re-architect their "i915" kernel graphics driver to support device local memory, getting the GuC support into good shape, scheduler changes, beginning to make use of TTM for memory management, user-space API changes, and a ton of other changes in expanding the driver's scope from just catering to integrated graphics. But now it looks like the DG1 Linux support is about to be officially advertised...

AMD has upstreamed the Van Gogh binary-only firmware files necessary for the RDNA2 graphics to be initialized by the open-source driver on this forthcoming APU.'..

Introduced to the Linux kernel earlier this year with Linux 5.12 was IDMAPPED mounts that allow for different mounts to expose the same file or directory with different ownership. IDMAPPED mounts was designed with use-cases ranging from containers to systemd-homed and more as outlined in the earlier article. Btrfs is now ready to begin supporting IDMAPPED mounts...

With this week's release of Firefox 91, like clockwork the beta for Firefox 92 is now available to facilitate wider testing of this next browser release to debut in September...

Qt Creator as the Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment from The Qt Company is preparing to release version 5.0 as it prepares to switch to semantic versioning...

The number of hardware platforms providing accelerated AV1 coding is still quite limited for now but with more hardware coming to market supporting encode/decode of this royalty-free video codec, the Linux kernel's media subsystem is getting ready...

Thunderbird 91 is now available as the first major update in a year for this Mozilla mail client that is succeeding the Thunderbird 78 series...

With yesterday's launch day Radeon RX 6600 XT Linux review the benchmarks were conducted using the popular Mesa RADV open-source driver used by many Linux gamers considering it's the driver Valve has been relentlessly optimizing and is the default on most (or all) Linux distributions. For those wondering how the performance of RADV is comparing to that of AMD's closed-source "PRO" Vulkan driver distributed as part of the "Radeon Software for Linux" package, here are some benchmarks exploring that difference.

DXVK has proven to be a huge success for improving the experience of running Windows Direct3D 9/10/11 games on Linux by translating those D3D calls to Vulkan. DXVK-Native meanwhile is the newer spin-off effort around providing a DXVK-based build native for Linux to help in game ports that still can then rely on their Direct3D renderer path...

The open-source V3DV driver living within Mesa for providing Vulkan API support for modern Broadcom VideoCore graphics -- most notably found in the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer -- is nearing Vulkan 1.1 compliance...

The latest patch series from Intel engineers worth noting for the Linux kernel is around implementing support for on-demand "unaccepted memory". Unaccepted memory is supported by the latest-generation AMD EPYC processors but not yet supported under Linux for on-demand/as-needed handling while Intel is preparing the kernel support for their next-gen Xeon CPUs having this capability...