Phoronix

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...

Ubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri" is now officially available as the latest six-month update to Ubuntu Linux and also serving as the last release prior to the next long-term support cycle, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

NVIDIA 495.29.05 is out today as the first public Linux driver in the 495 series...

Not only is Ubuntu 21.10 releasing today but over on the BSD side of the table is the debut this morning of OpenBSD 7.0...

While we recently looked at autumn 2021 Linux distributions on Intel Tiger Lake for seeing how these various latest distributions are competing on client platforms, in today's article is a look at how well the latest Linux distributions perform when using the latest-generation Intel Xeon Scalable 3rd Gen "Ice Lake" server hardware with two Xeon Platinum 8380 processors. AlmaLinux, Arch Linux, CentOS Stream, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu were battling it out on this Intel reference server.

KDE Plasma 5.23 is officially out this morning as the newest major open-source desktop release and is known now as the KDE 25th Anniversary Edition...

With Qt 6.2 LTS having shipped at the end of September, The Qt Company is now turning their attention to Qt Creator 6 as the next version of their Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment...

Moving forward regular respins of the openSUSE Leap images are expected to include the latest package updates in making for a more pleasant out-of-the-box experience...

A new feature for upcoming XeHPG graphics that was merged into Intel's open-source Linux OpenGL and Vulkan drivers today was for tessellation distribution and geometry distribution across the graphics hardware...

Mesa 21.3 feature development is now over with the code having been branched and the first release candidate issued...

The Linux kernel has supported Retpolines for over three years now as part of their Spectre Variant Two mitigations while now a patch series is proposed that rewrites Retpoline's rewrite logic...

Released back in May was the shiny DragonFlyBSD 6.0 release while today a point release for it has been issued...

Today AMD is officially launching the Radeon RX 6600 graphics card as a trimmed down model from the Radeon RX 6600 XT that launched back in August. This new (non-XT) model has a suggested price of $329 USD and here is a look at how well this RDNA2 graphics card is performing under Linux.

Arriving back in April were the initial Vulkan Video extensions that included support for video decode of H.264 and H.265 while the initial video encode support was limited to H.264. Out today with Vulkan 1.2.196 is the new extension allowing for H.265 encoding with this new industry-standard video API...

Landing in time for the imminent Mesa 21.3 feature freeze / code branching is support for the EGL_EXT_present_opaque extension on Wayland. While this EGL extension may not sound too exciting, for some OpenGL games on Wayland it will address some transparency issues...

Chinese vendor Loongson continues working on their Linux kernel patches enabling the LoongArch processor ISA as their fork from MIPS. While early on when copying existing MIPS open-source code they were quick to call their new ISA "not MIPS", in these later patch series they continue to refer to their ISA as "a bit like MIPS or RISC-V."..

One of many exciting additions with the forthcoming Linux 5.15 kernel is DAMON landed as a data access monitoring framework. DAMON opens up new possibilities around proactive reclamation of system memory and other interesting features. Currently though it's limited to monitoring the virtual address space of the kernel but a new set of patches out allow for physical address space monitoring as well...

Red Hat already employs numerous open-source graphics driver developers from DRM subsystem maintainer David Airlie to numerous others on his team working on areas from Mesa OpenCL support to Heterogeneous Memory Management to other user and kernel-space improvements for open-source Linux graphics. Red Hat has now put out a call to hire yet another experienced Linux GPU driver developer...

Intel has contributed AVX-512 optimizations to upstream Numpy. For those using Numpy as this leading Python library for numerical computing, newer Intel CPUs with AVX-512 capabilities can enjoy major speed-ups in the range of 14~32x faster...

GNOME developer Allan Day has provided an update on behalf of the GNOME design time around some of their recent platform design improvements and some of the changes they are talking about in the near future...

Linux block subsystem maintainer and lead IO_uring developer Jens Axboe had a goal of hitting 7M IOPS per-core performance this week. On Monday he managed to already hit 7.2M IOPS and today hit 7.4M IOPS with his latest work-in-progress kernel patches...

PoCL is the open-source project implementing OpenCL for CPU-based execution as well as multi-device support by getting its Portable Computing Language implementation working atop NVIDIA GPUs via CUDA, AMD GPUs via HSA, and other back-ends by way of LLVM. PoCL 1.8 is out today as the newest feature release...

Earlier this month were benchmarks looking at how Intel Tiger Lake performance has improved from Ubuntu 21.04 to Ubuntu 21.10, but how does Canonical's latest Linux offering compete with other autumn 2021 distributions? In this article from the Dell XPS Core i7-1165G7 Tiger Lake notebook are benchmarks of Ubuntu 21.10 going up against Arch Linux, Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation 35, and openSUSE Tumbleweed for getting an idea how the performance compares with this latest-generation Intel EVO notebook.

Intel Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) never really took off and the Linux support has been deprecated for a while with the code elsewhere in the stack already having been removed while with the upcoming Glibc 2.35 release that GNU C Library is also flushing away its support...

It's been one year now that Intel has been posting Linux kernel patches to enable AMX support for upcoming Sapphire Rapids processors. Over the past year their Linux kernel patches for enabling Advanced Matrix Extensions has gone through 11 rounds of review but that journey isn't over yet...

Lutris 0.5.9 is now available for this open-source Linux game manager program that has now added initial support for the Epic Games Store among other new options and enhancements in this new version...

Those running Microsoft's recently released Windows 11 will now be able to find the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) available from within the Microsoft Store for easier setting up of this Linux-based environment...

While Linux 5.15 brings very early bits around DG2/Alchemist graphics card support, further work is needed to bring it into usable shape for end-users. The latest new patch series to be posted came out today with more driver changes needed around local device memory handling for DG2...

Retail shopping giant Walmart has found use out eBPF programs and today announced the open-source L3AF to help in the effort...

With Ubuntu 21.10 due for release this week I've been running various Ubuntu Linux performance comparisons across a variety of hardware and overall this new release is looking to be in great shape. One of the tests I recently carried out for curiosity is seeing how the AMD Zen 2 performance has evolved now over the past two years on Linux going from Ubuntu 19.10 to Ubuntu 21.10.

Linux block subsystem maintainer and IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe continues making staggering optimizations to the kernel code to squeeze out the maximum performance potential out of his shiny new system...

Krita 5.0 Beta 2 is out today as the newest test release for this very powerful, open-source digital painting program...

It was just with Linux 5.15 last month that AMD added a new audio driver for Van Gogh APUs sporting an ACP 5.x audio co-processor (ACP) while now a new driver has been posted for Yellow Carp / Rembrandt with it introducing new ACP 6.x audio co-processor IP...

The EROFS read-only file-system is adding LZMA compression support using a new header/container format called MicroLZMA...

Linus Torvalds just pushed out the Linux 5.15-rc5 kernel release with things looking smooth for this stage and hopefully leading to an on-time release in just a few weeks...

Phoronix Test Suite 10.6.1 was released today with various improvements for our cross-platform, open-source, fully-automated benchmarking software...

The Tegra DRM driver changes were sent out on Friday of the new material destined for Linux 5.16. Notable this time around is NVIDIA's NVDEC driver being included...

Sent in this morning were an urgent set of x86 updates for the Linux 5.15-rc5 kernel due out later today...

Red Hat's Platform Tools team is making it very easy to run the very bleeding edge, development version of the LLVM toolchain and Clang compiler on the current versions of Fedora...

Debian 11 "Bullseye" debuted back in August as the latest major release for this popular community Linux distribution. Today it's been succeeded by Debian 11.1...

Barring any last minute reservations it appears the initial "FUTEX2" work that is of much interest to Linux gamers enjoying Steam Play / Proton will find that kernel functionality in Linux 5.16...

KDE developers remain very busy squashing bugs ahead of the release of Plasma 5.23 that is also known as the Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition...

Building off the earlier DRM-Next staged code from last month that brought initial DisplayPort 2.0 support and other feature work, another feature pull request was submitted today of additional AMD Radeon "AMDGPU" kernel driver changes slated for Linux 5.16...

Wine 6.19 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of Wine as the developers work towards Wine 7.0 stable in early 2022...

The Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" within Mesa 21.3 is enabling NGG culling by default for Radeon RX 6000 series (RDNA2) GPUs and newer as another performance win...

A month ago was talk of GCC developers enabling the vectorizer at the common "-O2" optimization level and now that change has landed into the GCC 12 development code-base...