Phoronix

Another week, another batch of new AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver feature work ready for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the next kernel cycle. Feature code continues building up in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.19 cycle...

Even amid all the April software releases, KDE developers remain very busy working on their open-source desktop stack...

Wine 7.7 is out as the latest bi-weekly release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux...

Mesa's Rusticl is a yet-to-be-merged OpenCL implementation for Mesa Gallium3D drivers written in the Rust programming language. The latest code now can pass the Khronos OpenCL 3.0 Conformance Test Suite!..

With Mesa 22.1 having been branched and working its way towards release in early to mid May, it's a good time to deliver some fresh Linux gaming benchmarks on the latest GPU drivers. In this article are some reference benchmark results of various AMD Radeon graphics cards on Mesa 22.1-rc1 as of branching paired with Linux 5.17 and then benchmarked against NVIDIA's latest driver and various GeForce RTX GPUs.

Last year open-source developers called on Intel to open-source their "PSE" firmware. The Programmable Services Engine (PSE) introduced with Elkhart Lake is an Arm Cortex-M7 companion core responsible for various tasks and is programmed by a binary-only firmware module. While it started out as a proprietary, binary blob, the PSE firmware has now been open-sourced!..

Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media has done on a terrific job on the development of SVT-AV1 for open-source, high performance CPU-based AV1 video encoding. This morning marks the release of SVT-AV1 1.0...

While to date no major hardware vendors are focusing on their open-source Mesa-based drivers for running on Windows (though there has been independent work like building RADV on Windows), other Mesa code is seeing interest and usage under Windows...

Laid out earlier this month was a change proposal for removing legacy X.Org drivers with the Fedora 37 release later this year...

Back in February was the interesting work laid out by Red Hat engineers for their looking at using eBPF within the kernel's HID subsystem. A new patch series attempting this innovative use of the in-kernel JIT virtual machine has been published...

While the Mesa 22.1 feature release will hopefully be out in about two weeks, out today is Mesa 22.0.2 as the newest point release for the current Mesa stable series. With this release slipping an extra week, there are even more bug-fixes than usual back-ported into this version...

NVIDIA by way of their GPU compute / CUDA Fortran interests and having acquired the PGI compiler company nearly a decade ago has been active contributors to the LLVM Fortran scene. NVIDIA spearheaded the work on the modern LLVM Fortran compiler support and worked with other vendors and the open-source ecosystem on the since-upstreamed FLANG compiler. NVIDIA had been maintaining a "fir-dev" downstream for their latest Fortran compiler patches while now moving forward they will be focused on upstream LLVM contributions...

Proton 7.0-2 is out today as the newest version of this Wine downstream that powers Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux / SteamOS...

One of the less talked about features with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" is Canonical offering up a "beta" of a real-time Linux kernel image for use with this long-term support release. In doing so, Canonical is expanding their aim for Ubuntu Linux within industrial and other use-cases demanding real-time needs...

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" is now available for download...

OpenBSD 7.1 is out this morning as the newest version of this popular, security-minded BSD operating system...

Longtime Linux users especially those that frequented Linux conferences/events in pre-COVID times are likely familiar with Dirk Hohndel. Dirk has a well known track record with Linux going back to the 90's, good friend and diving buddy with Linus Torvalds, and now somewhat surprisingly has moved on to promoting a blockchain effort...

At the end of last year you may recall the talked about Linux kernel patches for booting systems faster by allowing the parallel bring-up of secondary CPU cores. It's been a while since hearing much about that effort but seems to have hit a snag in that the code is running into problems on early Zen CPUs and older...

Along with the Raptor Lake P Linux kernel graphics driver support that should work its way to mainline for the v5.19 cycle, merged to Mesa 22.2 today is the Raptor Lake P bits for the Intel OpenGL / Vulkan drivers...

Chris Lord at Igalia has recently been looking at the WebKit browser engine performance as it concerns embedded devices. From this work he found that WebKit with its WPE port for embedded devices was found to be performing rather poorly on Wayland. Patches are now pending to address two uncovered issues...

While GCC 12 (GCC 12.1 stable) will be out in the coming weeks, GCC 11.3 is out today as the latest stable release in the current GCC 11 series...

Mesa 22.1-rc2 is now available as the second weekly release candidate for this quarter's Mesa3D feature release of this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan graphics drivers...

There is some exciting progress around Zink as the OpenGL 4.6 implementation built atop Vulkan APIs for generally quite performant OpenGL-on-Vulkan acceleration... Zink with the recently-merged Kopper code is even beginning to work on Windows and Laminar Research is hoping to use Zink for the next major X-Plane release!..

Merged as part of Linux 5.18 is Intel's Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) support as part of CET (Control Flow Enforcement) technology. Indirect Branch Tracking is intended to help protect against JUMP/CALL oriented attacks as part of CET's control-flow integrity protections. Meanwhile still being worked on is "FineIBT" as a more compiler-hardened version built atop Intel CET/IBT...

For those making use of the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel such as Ubuntu 22.04 with using this long-term support kernel by default, Linux 5.15.35 is out today and is a notable point release for back-porting an Intel P-State driver fix for Intel Alder Lake systems that leads to much better performance in properly deciding between P and E core selection. Here are some benchmarks on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with Linux 5.15.35 against other kernel options.

A project more than one year in the making by Emma Anholt is about to mark its completion with GLSL-to-TGSI set to be removed from Mesa whereby Gallium3D will always go through the NIR intermediate representation while older drivers still dependent upon TGSI will make use of the NIR-To-TGSI pass. Using NIR means better performance and getting rid of the GLSL-to-TGSI code path means freeing up more than twenty thousand lines of code...

The long in-development work by Intel, The Khronos Group, and other organizations on a proper SPIR-V back-end for LLVM is finally seeing code in mainline. As of last night the initial pieces have landed for the LLVM SPIR-V back-end for this Khronos open standard IR used most notably by Vulkan but for OpenCL and OpenGL as well...

QEMU 7.0 is out today as the newest version of this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

As part of the long ongoing work to improve Linux's printk() code, there has been work to allow for threaded console printing and allowing consoles to run at full-speed. That work is still ongoing but Tuesday saw the third iteration of those printk patches posted...

Back in 2020 the University of Illinois released HPVM as a heterogeneous parallel systems compiler. This compiler for CPUs / GPUs / FPGAs / other accelerators reached version 1.0 and this week HPVM 2.0 has been announced by the university research crew...

Following the RHEL 9.0 Beta from last November and CentOS Stream 9 for the bleeding-edge RHEL9, the AlmaLinux crew today announced their 9.0 beta milestone. AlmaLinux over the past year has proven itself capable as a popular, community-based RHEL alternative that started after Red Hat announced it would discontinue the no-cost CentOS Linux downstream...

WebAssembly as the W3C standard for a portable binary-code format for executable programs on the web and elsewhere continues seeing exciting new use-cases for speedy web applications and even desktop purposes. This open standard continues advancing though and the first public working drafts of WebAssembly 2.0 were published today...

NVIDIA has posted 13k lines of new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver code for review for supporting their NVDLA IP block...

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" is set to be officially released this Thursday while available today are the hopefully-final release candidate images...

Being worked on for a while has been a more powerful Motorola 68000 "m68k" virtualization target. It looks like that new virtual machine target will come with Linux 5.19 for allowing m68k guests with up to 3.2GB of RAM and up to 128 VirtIO devices...

Last weekend saw the release of Box86 0.2.6 and Box64 0.1.8 for enjoying x86 and x86_64 Linux binaries on 64-bit Arm and other CPU architectures. Out today meanwhile is the release of FEX-Emu 2204 as another open-source project making it easy to run x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64...

While most Linux distributions will include linux-firmware.git firmware files as the collection of firmware/microcode binaries needed by various mainline Linux kernel drivers, Debian does not. While the kernel drivers are open-source, the firmware files tend to be binary-only/closed-source, but these days are increasingly necessary for any level of functional support. Thus Debian is left in the awkward position of either providing poor hardware support and users left wondering what's going on or to make some improvements to better deal with today's world of firmware necessities...

There are many networking changes already building up in "net-next" ahead of the Linux 5.19 kernel cycle kicking off this summer. Merged yesterday is support within the Mellanox Ethernet "mlxsw" kernel driver for supporting the NVIDIA Mellanox SN4800 modular switch...

With the Arch Linux based Asahi Linux running well on the Apple M1 (aside from accelerated graphics and various other features not implemented yet), one of the areas I was curious about was how well LLVM Clang and GCC C/C++ compilers compete when running on the Apple M1 with Linux. In this article are some quick benchmarks looking at how the stock compilers on Asahi currently compare for Apple's Arm-based SoC.

This year AMD engineers working on hardware enablement for Linux have been busy with EDAC driver improvements like RDDR5 and LRDDR5 handling, AMD Scalable Machine Check Architecture (SMCA) additions for "future" CPUs, and the various other areas outside of the error detection and correction field. Today though is a new patch series back in that hardware error handling space with new SMCA code...

Similar to Sony contributing PlayStation 4 compiler support in LLVM with Clang being their preferred code compiler, Sony has now begun upstreaming PlayStation 5 (PS5) support in the open-source LLVM/Clang compiler stack...

Git 2.36 is out as the newest feature release to this widely-used, open-source distributed revision control system...

Back in January was the change pushed into SDL2 Git where the library prefers Wayland by default where available rather than defaulting to using X11 support. However, pushed today into SDL2 is a revert on that earlier change due to Wayland issues that the developers are more comfortable sticking to X11/XWayland by default until various Wayland problems are addressed...

A Canonical kernel engineer is now proposing an Intel P-State performance fix for latest-generation Intel Alder Lake processors be back-ported to the Linux 5.15 LTS series. In turn this should then be picked up by Ubuntu 22.04's kernel build moving forward and others on this latest long-term support series for Linux...

Back in 2019 Western Digital announced their work on ZoneFS as a new Linux file-system just designed for specialty use-cases and running on zoned block devices. There hasn't been much code churn around ZoneFS in a number of kernel releases since it was merged back in 2020 while for Linux 5.19 this summer a number of fixes/improvements have been queuing up...

Earlier this month the change proposal was laid out for Fedora 37 looking to deprecate legacy BIOS support. That kicked the hornets nest with many Fedora users expressing their desire to see Fedora legacy BIOS support continue whether it be for running the Linux distribution on dated hardware or even just for VMs without UEFI boot. It's looking more like that responsibility of legacy BIOS support may instead be shifted to a new special interest group (SIG) to take up the work of maintaining and testing that pre-UEFI boot support...

In matching behavior already provided by the GCC compiler, LLVM/Clang has landed "RandStruct" functionality to allow optionally randomizing the structure layout for C code...

The "virtio-crypto" kernel driver for supporting the VirtIO-spec'ed virtual crypto hardware accelerator for virtual machines is about to offer significantly better performance...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.18-rc3 as the Easter Sunday kernel for testing as Linux 5.18 works its way toward a stable release toward the end of May...

There have been bug reports recently for those using GNOME Shell 42 whether it be the likes of Ubuntu 22.04 or Fedora (Silverblue) 36 Beta over crashes or blank screens appearing when making use of the Radeon DRM/KMS kernel driver. That older Radeon DRM driver is for pre-GCN 1.2 graphics processors (aside from those on GCN 1.0/1.1 that switch to using the AMDGPU kernel driver with optional module parameters) while now Mutter has landed a fix for this issue...