Phoronix

Facebook this week announced the open-sourcing of CompilerGym as their effort to improve compiler performance by leveraging machine learning to tackle optimization work...

While earlier this year AMD shifted their Radeon Software driver focus to only supporting Polaris / GCN 1.4 and newer, when it comes to the open-source driver support on Linux there still is occasional activity going back to the ATI Radeon R300 days from nearly two decades ago...

PipeWire from the start was designed around handling the needs of both audio and video streams on Linux. While PipeWire is already in use for screencasting/recording under Wayland and working with Flatpak'ed applications, recently much of PipeWire's focus has been on addressing the use-cases of JACK and PulseAudio on the sound side. Now that the audio support is in quite good shape, Red Hat engineers are back to focusing on improvements to the video support...

Given this week's release of Fedora 35 Beta I have begun my benchmarking to look at how this next installment of Fedora Linux is shaping up given that it tends to be at the forefront of open-source innovations given Red Hat's investments. For our initial F35 benchmarking is looking at the Fedora Server 35 Beta performance compared to Fedora 34 on a dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 server.

LLVM 13.0 was tagged overnight as the latest half-year update to this widely-used, very powerful open-source compiler stack...

The first release candidate of the forthcoming PoCL 1.8 "Portable Computing Language" implementation is now available for testing...

Arm engineers have begun landing their Armv9 enablement work in the GNU compiler toolchain...

Valve published new versions of Proton and Proton Experimental last night...

That's a wrap for September with 229 original news articles and another 13 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles, all written by your's truly. It was another eventful month with Linux 5.15 moving forward, a lot of driver activity by AMD and Intel, and other open-source milestones like the release of GNOME 41 and the shipping of the Ubuntu 21.10 and Fedora 35 beta releases...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are evaluating possible improvements to the Linux kernel for accommodating CPU and GPU synchronized priority scheduling...

In addition to Linux 5.15 adding a new AMD audio driver for "Van Gogh" APUs such as found in the forthcoming Steam Deck, AMD's open-source Linux driver engineers have also been working on other audio improvements -- this time on the Chromebook front...

Intel has some new announcements around their neuromorphic computing research...

Linux kernel developers have been working tirelessly to squeeze more performance out of IO_uring and the block / I/O code in general. IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe who also serves as the Linux block subsystem's maintainer (among other roles and major contributions over the years) has used his system as a baseline for evaluating such kernel improvements. He's now moved to using AMD Zen 3 while sticking to Intel Optane storage and is seeing a mighty speed boost out of AMD's latest processors...

PostgreSQL 14.0 is now officially available as the latest version of this widely-used, open-source SQL server...

Google's work on the VirtIO DRM kernel driver around the notion of "context types" and being able to initialize different types of contexts is set to be merged for Linux 5.16 in opening up more use-cases for this driver that is an important part of the open-source virtualization graphics stack for graphics...

Qt 6.2 LTS is out today as the first long-term support release in the Qt6 series and also with all of the major modules now ported over from Qt5 in aiming to make this a suitable point to transition from Qt 5.15 LTS...

AMD has pushed out one more code drop of their AMDVLK official open-source Vulkan driver before ending out the quarter...

From our Ampere Altra Max M128-30 Linux performance preview earlier this week, one of the questions a number of readers were wondering about and a question I also still had open was on the Altra Max pricing... I've now received the current price list and actually comes in much lower than expected for a 128-core CPU in 2021...

Succeeding Mesa 21.2.2 from earlier this month that was a much delayed and in turn very large release, Mesa 21.2.3 is out today and it's on the quieter side...

Libcamera as an open-source camera stack that has been coming together over the past few years has been maturing quite well, broadening its supported hardware and feature set, and more in filling a void in the Linux camera ecosystem...

Recently I carried out some updated Windows 11 benchmarks against Linux to look at how this forthcoming Microsoft operating system release is competing with Ubuntu. In this article is a fresh look at the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) performance on the near-final Windows 11 against Ubuntu Linux.

AMD this morning announced a goal of increasing the energy efficiency of EPYC processors running AI training and high performance workloads by 30x... Within the next four years...

Merged this morning into the LibreOffice code-base is the initial Qt6 VCL plug-in...

While the Linux kernel is increasingly supporting the use of Zstd for various compression purposes, the current Zstd code within the kernel is out-of-date and efforts so far to re-base it against the closer to upstream Zstd state have been stalled. Fortunately, a new attempt at getting the Zstd code updated for the Linux kernel will be published soon...

With the initial Steam Deck release quickly approaching, Valve continues to be quite busy on a variety of improvements to enhance their Steam Linux builds...

AMD open-source driver developers today merged another big set of patches providing various micro-optimizations and other enhancements to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

While the Linux kernel still hasn't added any formal control yet for AMD Predictive Store Forwarding to disable it short of also toggling Spectre V4 / SSBD, with the Linux 5.16 kernel the AMD PSF bit will now be exposed to KVM guest virtual machines so that they -- either with a patched/future kernel or for other operating systems -- may choose to toggle explicitly disable this AMD CPU feature...

After seeing some initial release challenges, Fedora 35 Beta was released today across the Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, and Fedora IoT flavors as well as their other versions...

The past month we have started our testing of Ampere's Altra Max M128-30, the company's new 128 core server processor, and in this article today are our initial benchmarks of this promising chip for high core count servers in both 1P and 2P configurations tested.

Vulkan 1.2.194 is out as the latest spec revision to this high performance graphics and compute API...

While Keith Packard is known for his work on X11/X.Org, the past few years he has also been developing Picolibc as a C library intended for embedded systems. He also recently jumped from SiFive to Amazon and appears at the ecommerce giant to be working on Picolibc in an official capacity, presumably for use on Amazon's growing hardware devices...

The open-source Solaris/Illumos ecosystem certainly isn't vibrant these days like back during the Sun Microsystems times with OpenSolaris, but OmniOS continues progressing as one of the few still-active and useful Solaris/Illumos-powered platforms...

While many years ago Fedora's Java support was in great shape with quickly integrating OpenJDK going back to IcedTea, these days Fedora's Java packages are barely maintained and largely fallen into disrepair...

Since July we've seen AMD open-source driver engineers posting code for "Cyan Skillfish" as an APU with Navi 1x graphics. While initial support for Cyan Skillfish was merged for Linux 5.15, it turns out the display code isn't yet wired up due to being a different DCN2 variant for its display block...

A batch of feature updates was submitted today for DRM-Next of early feature work slated to come to the next version of the Linux kernel...

There has been talk of Intel moving to offer more license-able/opt-in features for hardware capabilities found within a given processor as an upgrade. We are now seeing the Linux signs of that support coming with a driver for "Intel Software Defined Silicon" to allow for the secure activation of such features baked into the processor's silicon but only available as an up-charge option...

With the in-development Linux 5.15 kernel there is now support for ACPI Platform Profiles on supported ASUS laptops. This ASUS laptop platform profile support joins the likes of HP, Dell, and Lenovo laptops already having this support exposed under Linux that allows users to control their power/performance preference. Here are some tests with the ASUS ROG Strix G15 AMD Advantage laptop with the platform profile options under Linux 5.15.

It's been a while since having any news to report on Bcachefs as the promising open-source file-system born out of the Linux kernel's block cache code. However, Kent Overstreet continues working tirelessly on it and has now merged Bcachefs' snapshot support...

The Linux kernel support around the Nintendo Wii and Wii U game console hardware continues to improve and now a new Nintendo crypto driver is being tackled based on reverse-engineered documentation...

Adding to the growing list of Mesa 21.3 features for next quarter's feature release is Lavapipe now supporting Vulkan 1.2...

The nanoMIPS architecture that was announced by MIPS in 2018 for embedded devices to lower power consumption and yield smaller code footprints was announced for the MIPS I7200 but since then there hasn't been much of nanoMIPS. However, MediaTek is now looking to contribute upstream the compiler support for this processor ISA into GCC...

Linus Torvalds has now issued the third weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 5.15 kernel...

Given last week's release of Chrome 94, here are some fresh browser benchmarks looking at Firefox 92 stable against Chrome 94 running on Ubuntu Linux...

GNU Wget2 2.0 has been released for this successor to GNU Wget. There are many improvements to this GPLv3+ licensed program. Over the original GNU Wget, Wget2 is faster, supports more protocols especially around HTTP/2 and compression, supports multi-threading / parallel connections, and other improvements...

Earlier this month AMD published their "amd-pstate" Linux driver that leverages ACPI CPPC data to make more informed CPU frequency scaling decisions with an aim to boost the performance-per-Watt for Zen 3 (and eventually Zen 2) processors on Linux. The second spin of that "amd-pstate" Linux kernel driver is now available for testing...

It was just last month when ~3.5M IOPS per-core was impressive with the code for Linux 5.15 to further push Linux's I/O limits. Now for code likely to be included in Linux 5.16 it's currently at 3.8M IOPS with a single tread...

With the KDE Plasma 5.23 release quickly approaching, feature development is already heating up for Plasma 5.24 while concurrently driving many fixes into the v5.23 codebase...

For several years now Facebook engineers have been working on BOLT as a way to speed-up Linux/ELF binaries. This "Binary Optimization and Layout Tool" is able to re-arrange executables once profiled to generate even faster performance than what can be achieved by a compiler's LTO and PGO optimizations. One of the latest BOLT efforts has been on optimizing the Linux kernel image...

Earlier this month Intel engineers posted their initial Linux kernel enablement around x86 User Interrupts with this feature premiering with Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" CPUs. As implied by the name, the User Interrupt functionality allows for interrupts to bypass the kernel for more efficient, low-latency, low-utilization interrupts being received by other user-space tasks. Intel talked more about User Interrupts this week at LPC2021...

While the OpenZFS 2.1 feature release has been available since July, for those still using the OpenZFS 2.0.x series and not yet prepared to make the jump to that big new release with dRAID and other changes, OpenZFS 2.0.6 was released this week...