Phoronix

The release candidate to XWayland 21.1.3 is out today with just a few changes but made significant by support for the NVIDIA 495 series driver GBM code path...

It's been a half-year already since AMD introduced the EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors that continue performing well and gaining marketshare. While the recently released Ubuntu 21.10 is not a long-term support (LTS) release, for those wondering what this latest Linux distribution means for EPYC 7003 series performance, here is a look at its performance across many benchmarks against that of Ubuntu 21.04 that was released right after the Milan launch and then Ubuntu 20.04 as the current LTS stable series.

AMD patches this month have begun preparing support for a new CPU feature called Smart Trace Buffer (STB)...

Mesa's V3DV driver for supporting newer Broadcom VideoCore graphics hardware with Vulkan now is advertising v1.1 support. This Vulkan 1.1 support in V3DV is notable as the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer are the most notable beneficiaries of this driver...

The ongoing supply chain issues across the semiconductor industry (and more broadly) are now impacting the Raspberry Pi operations for end-users/customers when it comes to pricing...

The Ruby programming language implementation has merged YJIT, its new just-in-time (JIT) compiler...

NVIDIA has made available CUDA 11.5 today as the latest version of their popular but proprietary compute stack/platform. Notable with CUDA 11.5 is that CUDA-Python has reached general availability status...

GIMP 3.0 as the GTK3 port of this open-source Adobe Photoshop alternative has been talked about for nearly a decade now and the work remains ongoing. However, out today is GIMP 2.99.8 as the newest development snapshot...

Last year Intel announced ControlFlag as a machine learning tool for helping to uncover bugs within code. ControlFlag promised impressive results after being trained on more than one billion lines of code and at the end of 2020 was already being used internally on Intel's code-bases from firmware to software applications. We hadn't heard anything more about ControlFlag this year... Until today. Intel has now made ControlFlag open-source for helping to autonomously detect more programming bugs...

The newest feature release to Eclipse OpenJ9 is now available, the high performance Java Virtual Machine originating from IBM J9...

Just one week ago was the public launch of the Radeon RX 6600 as the newest offering in the RDNA2 GPU line-up. While in our Radeon RX 6600 Linux review the performance was good on AMD's well regarded open-source driver stack and standing ground against the likes of the GeForce RTX 3060 with NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver, it turns out the RX 6600 Linux performance can be even better already. Here are benchmarks of the Radeon RX 6600 on Linux across six different driver configurations.

Separate from all the ongoing Apple Silicon/M1 bring-up work for the Linux kernel, the Linux 5.16 cycle is set to support this year's Apple Magic Keyboard...

Queued this week into the Linux PCI subsystem's "next" branch is the Apple PCIe driver needed to enable PCI Express support for Apple SoCs such as the M1...

Thanks to the nature of open-source, AMD engineers for the "AMDGPU" kernel graphics driver are looking to make use of Intel's new i915 buddy allocator code they introduced as part of all their video memory management changes as part of their discrete graphics bring-up...

It's been a half-year since talking about the Wii U gamepad driver that's been in development with mainline ambitions for supporting this wireless gamepad in conjunction with the Nintendo Wii U console. The driver has just been revised to address earlier code review comments, again renewing interest in the effort and possible mainlining in a future kernel version...

Oracle has published its latest quarterly update to GraalVM, the open-source Java JVM/JDK implemented in Java that also supports other execution modes and programming languages from Python to R to Ruby...

Chrome 95 has rolled out as stable today as the latest version of Google's web browser...

In recent months we have seen a lot of RadeonSI optimizations focused on SPECViewPerf with AMD seemingly trying to get this open-source OpenGL driver into very capable shape moving forward for workstation GL workloads. Hitting Mesa 22.0-devel today is yet another round of patches for tuning SPECViewPerf...

Karanbir Singh who had served as the CentOS Project Leader and involved with the community-based RHEL distribution since 2004 has stepped down from his roles...

Announced earlier this year for Google Cloud was a new family of virtual machines called Tau VMs. The initial T2D instances are powered by AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors to deliver leading performance and are also positioned to deliver great value in going up against the likes of Amazon's Graviton2 instances. Tau VM instances are now available as a preview and Google has provided us with gratis access to the new instance types for benchmarking.

Last Friday night we spotted OpenCL 3.0.9 with several new extensions included. Today The Khronos Group is formally announcing these latest OpenCL additions focused on Vulkan interoperability as well as neural network inferencing...

With OSS-Fuzz for continuous fuzzing of open-source projects and along with working on the various sanitizers for compilers, Google has been doing a lot for proactively uncovering software defects in key open-source projects. Now though a group of their engineers have been working on SiliFuzz for software aiming to discover new CPU defects...

As another possible performance win for RadeonSI Gallium3D as AMD's open-source Radeon OpenGL driver on Linux systems is enabling of NGG culling for Navi 1x consumer graphics processors rather than limiting it only to newer Navi 2x (RDNA2) GPUs...

After successfully getting Mesa's software-based Lavapipe Vulkan implementation building on Haiku last month along with related Mesa code for headless support, a developer independent of AMD has started work on porting the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" to Haiku...

Canonical today formally opened the "Jammy" archive for development for what will be the next version of Ubuntu, 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish"...

Apple today announced the M1 Pro and M1 Max as their most powerful SoCs ever built by the company. The new chips feature up to a 10-core processor, 32-core GPU, and up to 64GB of unified memory...

Valve is introducing a Steam Deck Verified system for helping gamers find out what games have been verified to work well on their forthcoming AMD+Linux-powered handheld game console...

VKD3D-Proton as Valve's Direct3D 12 over Vulkan implementation for Steam Play's Proton is out with a big feature update...

With last week's release of Ubuntu 21.10, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the Linux gaming performance on this new release while testing both the GNOME Shell 40 default desktop to that of its KDE Plasma 5.22 based option. Both the X.Org and Wayland sessions for KDE and GNOME were benchmarked for seeing how the Linux gaming performance compares with the Radeon open-source GPU driver stack.

The drama around DMA-BUF code for the Habana Labs AI driver appears to be wrapping up with the Linux 5.16 cycle that is coming up...

Mesa 22.0-devel is one step closer to having OpenCL image support that is sought after by many individuals for allowing more OpenCL-enabled desktop software to work nicely with this open-source OpenCL component in Mesa...

Linus Torvalds is out with Linux 5.15-rc6 and its increase in size has him slightly worried...

Being sent in as a fix for the Linux 5.15 kernel this morning and to be back-ported to existing stable series is a behavior change that the Linux kernel will no longer use AMD Secure Memory Encryption (SME) by default on supported hardware but rather making it now opt-in due to shortcomings of some platforms...

The Vortex86 32-bit SoCs have worked under Linux for those distributions still maintaining 32-bit x86 support and where not hitting corner-cases of some i686 level features not being supported by some Vortex86 cores, but there is finally a pending kernel patch to provide proper CPU detection for Vortex86 hardware...

It was just last week that Linux optimizations were leading to possible 6M IOPS per core and then at the start of this week new patches pushed Linux past 7M IOPS per-core with an ideal hardware configuration as well. In ending out the week, 8M IOPS has been reached!..

Cloud-Hypervisor 19.0 debuted this week as the Intel-led open-source VMM focused on supporting modern cloud workloads and written in the Rust programming language while leveraging the Linux's KVM virtualization code or the Microsoft MSHV hypervisor on Windows...

Arriving in the wireless-drivers-next branch this week is the "rtw89" driver as a Realtek-contributed open-source 802.11ax WiFi driver...

This week marked the release of Plasma 5.23 in celebrating 25 years of the KDE desktop project while celebrations didn't last long with developers already hard at work on the Plasma 5.23.1 point release, feature work for Plasma 5.24, and also improvements to the KDE Applications and KDE Frameworks...

The open-source Bareflank Hypervisor project designed to prototype new hypervisors across Intel, AMD, and AArch64 platforms issued their long-awaited 3.0 pre-release on Friday...

On Thursday in addition to the releases of Ubuntu 21.10 (plus its derivatives) and OpenBSD 7.0, the Genode OS Framework based Sculpt OS saw its 21.10 release...

The Khronos Group's OpenCL working group did a quiet Friday evening tagging of OpenCL 3.0.9...

The PinePhone Pro is being announced this morning as the organization's new smartphone building upon the successes and experience of the original PinePhone Linux smartphone...

Intel's open-source engineers have shipped Compute-Runtime 21.41.21220 as the newest version of this Linux compute stack enabling OpenCL and Level Zero support with their graphics processors...

Libaom 3.2 is now available as the latest version of the official AOMedia/Google-developed AV1 Codec Library. With libaom 3.2 comes compression efficiency improvements, perceptual quality improvements, and a variety of speed-ups and memory optimizations...

Cluster scheduler support has been queued up for landing in the Linux 5.16 kernel for AArch64 and x86_64 systems for improving the CPU scheduler behavior for systems that have clusters of CPU cores...

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE is back to hacking on SALSA, the "small ALSA" library that he started a decade ago but hadn't seen a new release in six years or any code activity for the past four years... until this week...

With it getting late into the Linux 5.15 kernel cycle, the focus is shifting by the Direct Rendering Driver maintainers from new feature work targeting the next cycle (5.16) to instead on bug fixes. AMD sent out a pull request of new AMDGPU Linux 5.16 material this week that is primarily delivering bug fixes but one notable addition is finally enabling PSR by default for newer GPUs...

Made public this week by CPU security researchers at Graz University of Technology and CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security was the research paper published "AMD Prefetch Attacks through Power and Time". The paper points to AMD CPUs suffering from a side-channel leakage vulnerability through timing and power variations of the PREFETCH instruction. The paper argues that AMD CPUs should activate stronger page table isolation by default. AMD has now published their security response where they are not recommending any mitigation changes at this time. But what if Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI/PTI) proves necessary for AMD CPUs? Here are some initial benchmarks showing what that performance impact could look like.

X.Org Server 21.1 continues running slightly behind schedule but out today is a second release candidate of that upcoming xorg-server version -- the first in more than three years...

Devuan 4.0 "Chimaera" is officially out today as the latest stable release of this Linux distribution known for being a close rebuild of Debian but without a dependence on systemd...