It's arguably long overdue, but landing today within Mesa 22.1 is support in the V3D driver for Mesa's on-disk shader cache functionality. By adding this shader cache to V3D it can help with the performance of this Gallium3D open-source driver most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer single board computers...
The much anticipated dav1d 1.0 open-source AV1 video decoder has been released! Dav1d 1.0 is a big update to this leading CPU-based AV1 decoder that now offers AVX-512 support for newer Intel CPUs, threading enhancements, and more...
While AMD EPYC processors offer phenomenal performance at the high-end for servers with up to 64 cores / 128 threads per socket, eight memory channels, and other features, not all server deployments call for such capabilities. In the lower-end dedicated web server rental space, budget web hosting, and similar personal / small office server space, AMD Ryzen processors can prove more than capable. Already some dedicated server providers are offering AMD Ryzen powered servers and more are expected to come soon -- especially with even more server-minded wares for Ryzen expected next generation. In looking at this space, we have been testing a number of AMD Ryzen processors recently compared to Intel Xeon E class competition for looking at the performance and value in the low-end dedicated server space.
Mesa has long had the OpenCL "Clover" Gallium3D state tracker that has supported OpenCL 1.x but lacked important extensions that impaired its practicality. With AMD backing their ROCm compute stack in more recent years and Intel going with their Compute-Runtime stack for oneAPI and OpenCL support, there also isn't a major backer to Clover besides Red Hat engineers and the community. Now though "Rusticl" has been published as a new Mesa OpenCL implementation written in the Rust programming language...
A small but important change was just merged into GCC 12 ahead of its upcoming release in a month or so and also the same patch back-ported now for the GCC 11 stable series...
Last week marked the release of FreeBSD 13.1 Beta 1 with many changes in particular benefiting this BSD OS on POWER and RISC-V hardware. Out today is the latest beta release...
WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld has recently been spearheading many improvements to the Linux kernel's random number generator (RNG) code and building off the work found in Linux 5.17, the Linux 5.18 kernel will bring a lot more on this front...
Miguel Ojeda who has been leading the Rust programming language support for the Linux kernel today posted his fifth spin of this patch series providing the optional Rust integration for the Linux kernel that includes example driver code...
Since the end of last year with Linux 5.16 there has been support for setting the thermal/performance preference with newer HP Omen laptops having ACPI Platform Profile support. This allows for toggling between cool / balanced / performance modes. Now for Linux 5.18 the HP-WMI driver is being improved upon for handling some newer laptops that have a different thermal policy interface...
AMD is now among the latest companies backing the AlmaLinux OS Foundation for that increasingly popular free build derived from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources now that CentOS 8 is end-of-life...
Last year AMD announced FidelityFX Super Resolution for high performance, spatial upscaling for video games across platforms. Today ahead of GDC week AMD announced FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0...
As a public service announcement for those using the "MESA_GLSL_CACHE" environment variable for controlling where your graphics driver shader cache resides or using "MESA_GLSL_CACHE_DISABLE" for forcing off this on-disk shader cache, the environment variables have been renamed...
Back in late 2020 it was originally talked about for Canonical's effort around Snap packages to switch to LZO compression for faster start-up times. Today they published a new blog post on the Ubuntu site highlighting the Snap speed-ups while looking at KDE packages. The LZO-compressed packages are faster than XZ indeed, but still rather a lengthy start-up time for cold apps...
AMD's Radeon Linux graphics driver developers are looking at enhancing the GPU reset experience so more information about the troublesome event can be communicated up the stack for better informing the user and/or taking greater action to ensure the desktop gets successfully restored...
The latest Linux kernel patch activity out of AMD in preparation for next-generation "Zen 4" processors is enabling AMD Performance Monitoring Version Two "PerfMonV2" support...
After revolutioning Linux storage I/O, the kernel's IO_uring interface is continuing to be buffed into shape for handling Linux networking needs too...
As part of wanting to drop unused i686 package builds from Fedora Linux, Fedora developers -- and in particular the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee -- want to know from the community what i686 (x86 32-bit) packages users still make use of...
Arm continues working on improving the open-source compiler support for their forthcoming Armv9 processor designs. The latest to report on is the tuning additions for the Neoverse-N2 and Neoverse "Demeter" targets...
Keith Packard continues developing Picolibc as his C standard library alternative to the likes of Musl and uClibc for a libc implementation that runs well on embedded hardware, especially for platforms with limited amounts of RAM...
QEMU 7.0 is working its way towards release as an important component to the open-source Linux virtualization stack. QEMU 7.0 brings with it many notable new features and changes for this open-source processor emulator...
Mesa developer Mike Blumenkrantz who is employed by Valve and known for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan work has recently been working on enhancements to Lavapipe...
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...
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 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...
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...
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.
Phoronix