Phoronix

With the beginning of a new month comes updated Steam Survey results from Valve for the month prior. The Steam on Linux marketshare continues increasing albeit ever so slightly...

While Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) functionality has been present in CPUs going back to Skylake, it took until last year with Linux 5.11 for SGX support to finally be mainlined and required more than 40 rounds of review/revisions. Finally today Intel posted patches for bringing up SGX2 as the next iteration of Software Guard Extensions and already found in shipping processors...

Wasmer as "the universal WebAssembly runtime" that focuses on being able to run WASM code on any platform is out with its next major release...

A set of two patches under review on the kernel mailing list for tweaking some kernel scheduler behavior can provide noticeable performance benefits to those using AMD EPYC and Ryzen processors on various workloads...

With the accelerating growth of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for serving up system and component firmware files to Linux users for flashing via the fwupd utility, today it crossed the milestone of having served up more than 40 million firmware files...

The first beta of LibreOffice 7.3 is now available for testing as the next installment of this leading open-source, cross-platform office suite...

An early batch of Intel kernel graphics driver feature updates intended for Linux 5.17 was sent out yesterday to DRM-Next for queuing until that next merge window opens around the start of the new year. Notable with this pull is Icelake "Gen11" graphics finally seeing variable rate refresh enabled!..

The long-awaited Tesseract 5.0 is now available as a big update to this leading open-source, optical character recognition (OCR) engine that via neural networks offers great accuracy and supports more than 100 languages for turning images of text into actual text...

NixOS is an original Linux distribution built atop its own unique Nix package manager that is focused on being functional, reliable, and reproducible. The Nix package manager concept is great but somewhat ironic is the new NixOS 21.11 release not even shipping with the latest Nix package manager version due to known regressions...

Version 1.7 of the Julia programming language implementation is now available, the open-source high-performance language that is general purpose but especially popular for computational science and numerical analysis...

With another month of the pandemic in the books, here is a look back at the exciting Linux and open-source highlights that came about during the course of November. This month was particularly exciting for new Linux kernel developments, never-ending work on open-source graphics drivers, the much anticipated launch of Intel 12th Gen "Alder Lake", gamers continuing to clamor for the Steam Deck, and much more...

Early patches providing for IO_uring zero-copy send support for the Linux kernel's networking subsystem is looking extremely promising for greater throughput...

Amazon Web Services today shared that C7g instances are coming powered by Graviton3, their next-gen in-house AArch64 processors...

Following all the work carried out by Mike Blumenkrantz (Valve) and others, the Mesa Zink code is ending the year in terrific and very capable shape for OpenGL running atop the Vulkan API. Here is a look at where things currently stand with mainline Mesa for Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan compared to the native RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver.

With the graphics driver support for Alder Lake S-series in good shape with Linux 5.16 and the Alder Lake P-series support also coming together for upcoming ADL-based laptops, next up is the Alder Lake N enablement happening for Linux...

Sent out today was the fifth revision to AMD's new "amd-pstate" kernel driver focused on providing enhanced CPU frequency controls for Linux systems...

Last month we reported on progress for porting the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver to Haiku, the BeOS-inspired open-source operating system. Now in ending out November they not only have RADV running but also working with Gallium3D's Zink for offering OpenGL acceleration over Vulkan...

KDE developer Nate Graham is known for his weekly (excellent) development summaries and driving many usability improvements and other refinements to the KDE desktop in recent years. Nate has written a new opinion piece arguing for more simplicity by default to broaden the desktop's appeal to more novice computer users with limited skills...

While there was the Libre RISC-V GPU effort aiming to provide an open-source GPU accelerator based on RISC-V, it ultimately turned into Libre-SOC with a focus now on the POWER ISA. Meanwhile Vortex is continuing to mature as an open-source, FPGA-based RISC-V GPGPU processor...

Valve has provided an updated developer-focused "frequently asked questions" area stemming from community questions during the recent Steam Deck developer event...

With a few weeks having passed since the Fedora 35 debut, more feature work and planning around next spring's Fedora 36 are underway...

As part of David Howells of Red Hat long-term work on improving the caching code used by network file-systems, he today posted a big patch series rewriting the fscache and cachefiles code as the latest significant step on that adventure...

CodeWeavers is kicking off the new week by releasing CrossOver 21.1 for Linux, macOS, and Chrome OS users wanting to enjoy Windows games and applications...

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and FWUPD on their great upward trajectory has in recent times been expanding beyond their initial focus of desktop/laptop hardware to supporting more server platforms for firmware updating. The latest feature driven by their growing server interests is "best known configuration" handling for where there are multiple independently-versioned firmware packages for a given system and may be support recommendations or potential version conflicts between the the different firmware packages...

Last week Amazon Web Services released Amazon Linux 2022 in preview form and since then I've been trying out their new cloud-optimized Linux distribution. It's been working out well on AWS (to no surprise) but also great was the level of performance provided by this now-Fedora-based distribution.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.16-rc3 with plenty of fixes included. With it being US Thanksgiving week, he's also having fun with this kernel by having adjusted the codename to "Gobble Gobble" in reference to turkeys...

PHP 8.1 released on Thursday as the latest major feature release for this programming language. In this article are some benchmarks of PHP 8.1.0 on an AMD EPYC powered Linux server compared to prior releases going as far back as PHP 5.6.

Net-next has been queuing a number of enticing performance optimizations ahead of the Linux 5.17 merge window kicking off around the start of the new year. Covered already was a big TCP optimization and a big improvement for csum_partial() that is used in the network code for checksum computation. The latest optimization is improving the AF_UNIX code path for those using AF_UNIX sockets for local inter-process communication...

Back during the Linux 5.15 cycle Intel contributed an improvement for tiered memory systems where less used memory pages could be demoted to slower tiers of memory storage. But once demoted that kernel infrastructure didn't have a means of promoting those demoted pages back to the faster memory tiers should they become hot again, though now Facebook/Meta engineers have been working on such functionality...

In addition to Vulkan support and a lot of graphics renderer work happening for Godot 4.0, adding to the expansive feature list is improved multi-player capabilities...

RenderDoc 1.17 released this week as the newest version of this leading cross-platform, cross-API graphics debugging utility...

Intel open-source driver engineers have been working on USI stylus support for the Linux kernel. The Universal Stylus Initiative (USI) aims to offer interoperability of active styluses across touchscreen devices...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for the prominent VK_KHR_synchronization2 extension introduced earlier this year...

Landing in Mesa on Black Friday was DMA-BUF Feedback support within the EGL code as another important step forward for Wayland...

China's Loongson continues bringing up LoongArch processor support for Linux with this MIPS64-based ISA now seeing the complete patch series for review to enable the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...

KDE developers are trying to ensure the reliability of their desktop environment and thus they have recently begun a renewed effort on bug fixing. There is also talk of starting a KDE initiative focused on "15 minute bugs" for "embarrassing" issues that can be easily found within minutes. In any event, this week saw a lot of bug fixing in the KDE world...

Merged this Friday afternoon into the Linux 5.16 development kernel is fixing a performance issue affecting some Intel Alder Lake motherboards...

For those in the US, Happy Thanksgiving. As usual tradition for marking the US Thanksgiving and "Black Friday" / "Cyber Monday" start of the Christmas shopping season, I am once again running a Phoronix Premium special to help support site operations...

Intel's open-source engineers today released the Compute-Runtime 21.47.21710 as their latest update to this open-source compute stack for Linux systems enabling their graphics processors to enjoy performant OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support...

When running on the very latest Linux 5.16 Git kernel paired with recent Mesa and various experimental components to the virtualization stack, it is possible getting at least basic Vulkan acceleration working within QEMU guest virtual machines that in turn is accelerated by the host...

Those using the open-source AMD Radeon OpenGL driver "RadeonSI" on Linux the performance within the popular Minecraft game is about to be a lot better...

For those that happen to have older ASUS Transformer tablets powered by a NVIDIA Tegra SoC, the Linux 5.17 kernel cycle early next year is enabling a number of them to work off the mainline kernel...

LLVM developers have been working recently to land their new ThreadSanitizer run-time. The TSan as a reminder is the compiler instrumentation with associated run-time library for being able to detect data races...

FUTEX2 as in the new futex_waitv system call landed in Linux 5.16 back during the merge window for improving the efficiency of running Windows games on Linux for those that rely on Windows' WaitForMultipleObjects functionality with futex_waitv is now the ability to wait on multiple futexes. That new system call is now supported on more architectures with the next Linux 5.16 release candidate...

PHP 8.1.0 was just officially released as the latest annual feature update to this widely-used, server-side programming language...

Added to the Arch Linux install media back in April was Archinstall for easy and quick installations. It's worked very well for basic Arch Linux installs in a matter of minutes while with Archinstall 2.3 now available it has even more features...

Wireshark as the very useful and powerful open-source packet analyzer for networking and other communication protocols is out with a shiny new release...

With Mesa 21.3 having released last week and its first point release due next week, Mesa 21.2.6 has been published as likely the last update to that N-1 series for these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers...

Last week NVIDIA announced the Image Scaling SDK as an open-source, cross-platform GPU image upscaling implementation that with their own hardware makes use of DLSS. Following the brief exposure over the past week, NVIDIA Image Scaling SDK 1.0 has been formally christened...

It's been almost two months since Proton 6.3-7 released and two weeks since 6.3-8 RC while this evening that Proton 6.3-8 stable release is out for empowering Valve's Steam Play in running Windows games on Linux...