Phoronix

Go 1.18 is out today as a significant update to this Google-backed programming language while continuing to still maintain Go 1.x compatibility...

It's been expected for many months now, but Google today at their Game Developer Summit keynote formally announced that Valve's Steam gaming client is coming to Chrome OS...

AMD today announced the ship date and suggested pricing for their much anticipated Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor as well as new Ryzen 7/5/3 series processors...

Intel announced today their initial investment of over €33 billion into the EU as part of their IDM 2.0 strategy...

Published at the start of the new year was 2.3k patches providing "fast kernel headers" as a major speed-up to Linux kernel build times and addressing the dependency hell among all the header files in the Linux kernel source tree. It will likely take some time for that massive patch series to work its way to mainline in full, but at least for Linux 5.18 already the patches touching the kernel's scheduler area are ready to land...

Earlier this month AMD began publishing code for their "GFX940" graphics block as a new CDNA GPU, presumably what will be the AMD Instinct MI300 series as their next-gen datacenter GPU. More GFX940 open-source driver enablement work is getting underway...

While there have already been a number of vulnerabilities exhibited for Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) from Prime+Probe to Plundervolt, Spectre-like attacks, SGAxe, and others, it looks like they expect more still to come in the future. Intel engineers are working on the ability for SGX to gracefully handle live CPU microcode updates without a reboot, which these days is increasingly driven for security mitigations and system administrators wanting to apply said updates right away while foregoing downtime...

It's been nearly one year since Microsoft published CBL-Mariner 1.0 as their internal Linux distribution in use at the WIndows company. Microsoft continues building upon CBL-Mariner and using it for a variety of use-cases from within Azure (for Sphere OS) to WSL and much more. They continue publishing monthly ISO releases for those wanting to use this Microsoft Linux spin for their own uses...

Panfrost's PanVK Vulkan driver for Arm Mali graphics hardware had been exposing Vulkan API 1.1 support but that was premature and has now been reverted to Vulkan 1.0...

While Debian 11 "Bullseye" released just last August, there is already talk of development milestone dates for Debian 12 "Bookworm" for a likely release in 2023...

Microsoft in late 2020 announced DirectStorage as a new API in the DirectX family focused on delivering faster I/O performance for games to yield quicker game load times and more expansive virtual worlds. After being in a limited developer preview since last year, today Microsoft is making the DirectStorage API broadly available...

Recently merged to the Linux 5.17 Git code as a fix and now working its way to stable kernel series as a back-port is blanket disabling of PCI ATS on all Navi 10 and 14 GPUs due to problematic vBIOS configurations...

The team at OnLogic is celebrating Pi Day today by announcing the Factor 201 as a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 built for industrial IoT use-cases...

The open-source Intel HDA audio driver for Linux already supports Alder Lake S, P, M, and N series of processors while now there is support being added for "AlderLake-PS" as a seemingly yet to be announced variant...

Bcachefs as the next-generation Linux file-system born out of the kernel's block cache code is aiming to possibly go upstream in 2022 and as a result has been trying to work through its remaining invasive changes and other big ticket items before proceeding. Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet has put out another status update on this open-source file-system effort...

Linus Torvalds was hoping to release the stable Linux 5.17 kernel today but instead opted for Linux 5.17-rc8 as an extra release candidate...

ReactOS as the open-source project striving for binary compatibility with Windows applications/drivers is still working away in 2022 on symmetric multi-processing (SMP) support...

Back in Q4 the Mesa 21.3 release added Vulkan ray-tracing support for the RADV driver. That RADV ray-tracing support has continued to mature and see performance optimizations. The latest major achievement for RADV's ray-tracing support is implementing support for the Vulkan KHR_ray_query extension...

For quite a while now the modern AMD Linux kernel graphics driver (AMDGPU/AMDKFD code) has been the single largest driver within the mainline Linux kernel code-base. It's been far larger than the other upstream kernel drivers given the complexities of modern GPUs and is only becoming even larger...

One of the most prominent additions to the Linux 5.17 kernel is the introduction of the AMD P-State driver akin to Intel's P-State driver and aims to deliver better energy efficiency than AMD Zen 2 and newer processors currently on the ACPI CPUFreq driver. With Linux 5.18 an AMD P-State tracer tool is to be included with the kernel source tree for helping to analyze and tune this new driver...

Back in February PostgreSQL began working on Zstd compression support and now with the latest code changes of the past week, this modern compression algorithm developed at Facebook is now able to play a greater role with this leading open-source database server...

We are a little more than one week away from the official GNOME 42.0 desktop release and packages are beginning to prepare their "v42.0" releases...

Axis Communications on Friday published "Roadtest" as their initial patch-set for this new Linux driver testing framework...

Going along with the recent patches to stop building a.out support for Linux's Alpha and m68k architecture ports as the last of the CPU architectures that were still building the kernel with the support enabled, developers are ready to remove the x86 a.out support outright...

KDE developers remain very busy and productive even with everything going on in the world. This week the KDE desktop enjoyed many more fixes and improvements across the board...

Wine 7.4 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems...

Made public this week was the Spectre-BHB / BHI vulnerability and while only Intel and Arm processors are currently believed to be impacted, in the course of that research the folks at VUSec discovered AMD's current Retpoline strategy for Spectre V2 mitigations is not adequate. This has led to a change in behavior for AMD processors and is already applied to the Linux kernel. Here is a look at what it means for desktop and server performance due to the change in return trampoline handling.

For AMD Navi "RDNA1" GPUs and newer having at least Video Core Next 2.0 (VCN2) for the video coding block, a new feature was merged today into Mesa 22.1-devel for the open-source AMD video acceleration stack...

Linux 5.17 will hopefully be released on Sunday and with that next kernel there are many exciting features in tow. But for as great as Linux 5.17 is, there are many features I am already eager for with Linux 5.18. Here is an early look at a number of the changes expected in this next kernel version...

In addition to releasing FreeBSD 13.1-BETA1, the FreeBSD project also published its Q4'2021 status report to recap all of the open-source activities achieved for this BSD operating system during the past quarter...

Back in 2019 that seems like an eternity ago with all that's gone on in the world, the Linux kernel deprecated a.out support. This executable / object code / shared library file format was used prior to the dominance of ELF but is seldom if ever used today. There have been pending patches to finally remove a.out from the kernel while the plan now is to stop building it on Alpha and Motorola 68000 targets to see if anyone notices/cares...

Out today is the first beta release of the upcoming FreeBSD 13.1 operating system update...

OpenZFS 2.1.3 is out today as the latest version of this open-source ZFS file-system implementation compatible with modern Linux and FreeBSD systems...

Made public on Tuesday was BHI / Spectre-BHB as the newest offshoot from Spectre V2. There were Linux patches immediately posted for affected Intel and Arm processors while also making adjustments to AMD CPUs around its Retpoline handling. The VUSec security researchers that discovered BHI are recommending Retpolines be enabled for newer processors even those with hardware mitigations against Spectre V2, but that's that performance cost? Here are some initial benchmarks.

AMD posted this morning a new Linux kernel patch series for enabling a new feature for "upcoming processors" that is almost definitively for Zen 4, continuing their work in recent weeks around more open-source patches in preparing for their next-generation processors...

When Linus Torvalds gets motivated and behind kernel changes, they tend to happen more quickly, with the latest example being the switching from the C89 language standard to C11 (GNU11). That change is now expected early on for the Linux 5.18 merge window...

Assuming nothing major comes up in the next few days, the Linux 5.17 kernel is expected to be released on Sunday. While we have been covering Linux 5.17 kernel activity already for a while prior to the merge window even getting going, here is a convenient look at some of the most interesting changes to find in this new release...

A set of 13 patches were posted overnight for improving the Intel Linux kernel graphics driver's handling of the power-savings feature Display Refresh Rate Switching (DRRS) for laptops...

MorphOS as the AmigaOS-like operating system now in development for more than two decades and targeting PowerPC hardware is out with version 3.16 as its first major release in over a year...

Mesa 22.0 is out today as the quarterly feature update to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers used widely by Linux systems...

Since the release at the end of February of Valve's Steam Deck there has been numerous Phoronix readers wondering about the CPU performance of the Steam Deck's AMD APU in non-gaming workloads and just how viable the Steam Deck could be for a converged device for desktop uses. Here is some commentary on that front and benchmark results.

Blender 3.1 is out today as the newest feature release to this incredibly powerful, open-source and cross-platform 3D modeling software...

As part of diversifying their supported range of Linux distributions since it was announced CentOS 8 would be going end-of-life, the popular cPanel commercial software package for easing the administration of Linux web server has added support for AlmaLinux and wit cPanel v102 is full support for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS...

Microsoft has laid out a proposal whereby they are hoping to contribute support for DirectX, the HLSL shading language, and Vulkan graphics support to the upstream LLVM/Clang compiler...

AMD continues recruiting more Linux engineers to join the company not only for their EPYC server processors given the dominance of Linux on the server/HPC front but also as part of their growing Linux client ambitions covering custom SoCs using Linux from Valve's Steam Deck to the Tesla in-vehicle infotainment system over to just running AMD Ryzen processors on Linux. This is good to see given AMD's traditionally much smaller Linux pool of talent compared to Intel's massive Linux/open-source engineering headcount...

One of many promising kernel patch series at the moment for enhancing Linux kernel performance is the multi-gen LRU framework (MGLRU) devised by Google engineers. They found the current Linux kernel page reclaim code is too expensive for CPU resources and can make poor eviction choices while MGLRU aims to yield better performance. These results are quite tantalizing and MGLRU is now up to its ninth revision...

Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) as part of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) is set to be supported as part of the upcoming Linux 5.18 kernel. Last night the IBT patch series has queued into TIP's x86/core ahead of the Linux 5.18 merge window...

PanVK as Panfrost's open-source Vulkan driver in Mesa for Arm Mali graphics hardware is seeing progress on handling compute shaders...

Godot 4.0 continues marching closer to its much anticipated release with today marking the fourth release candidate already for this open-source game engine...

Within minutes of the BHI speculative execution vulnerability going public, patches were merged into the mainline Linux kernel Git tree for mitigating this offshoot from Spectre V2. The Intel and Arm processors affected by BHI (also referred to as Spectre-BHB) have mitigation work plus a change also impacts AMD processors too...