Phoronix

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...

Apple is at it again with further showing off the potential of their Arm-based Apple Silicon with today rolling out the M1 Ultra SoC...

The VUSec security researchers are today -- in cooperation with Intel -- disclosing another new speculative execution vulnerability... BHI is the name and it's an offshoot from Spectre V2...

Vulkan 1.3.207 is out as the latest routine update to this high performance graphics / compute API...

It's been well over two years since AMD introduced the Ryzen Threadripper 3000 series and subsequently introduced the Threadripper PRO 3000WX series as workstation-focused parts. Today AMD is introducing the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000 WX Series as the first Zen 3 based Threadripper processors.

Back in 2019 the folks at CloudFlare announced BoringTun as a Rust-written WireGuard user-space implementation. Yesterday marked the first tagged release of BoringTun in the form of version 0.4...

Last week The Khronos Group introduced Vulkan SC 1.0 in providing safety-critical Vulkan support for allowing this modern graphics API to used in new areas requiring maximum safety requirements...

The Linux kernel support is looking to drop support for Renesas (Hitachi) H8/300 CPUs once again...

A new version of the high performance, open-source Mold linker is now available with more feature additions and performance optimizations...

The latest change to be proposed for the Fedora 37 release later this year is encouraging package maintainers to drop unused 32-bit x86 (i686) packages...

With SPECViewPerf 2020 finally released for Linux I was curious to see how AMD's open-source "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver within Mesa would compare to the performance offered by AMD's proprietary OpenGL Linux driver. After all, that longstanding proprietary driver, which is distributed as part of their Radeon Software for Linux driver package, has code in common with their Windows OpenGL driver and has previously been talked up as the preferred choice for workstation customers. Well, the latest open-source driver stack was outright kicking mud at that legacy binary blob for SPECViewPerf 2020 as well as the ParaView workstation visualization software.

After a week delay in processing of the monthly Steam Survey data, the Steam Survey results for February 2022 are in! Yes, the much anticipated Steam Deck did begin shipping in February, but at the tail-end and in limited quantities, so don't expect any big surprises.....

Mozilla Firefox 98.0 binaries have hit the web today ahead of the formal release announcement tomorrow. There are various improvements in this latest monthly update to the Firefox web browser while its Wayland support for the Linux desktop remains ongoing...

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will be carrying the patches so the GNOME desktop makes use of the on-demand triple buffering support when necessary in order to boost the GPU rendering performance in order to allow for a smoother desktop experience...

The Qt Company has made a public roadmap for the Qt6 tool-kit this year with some of the items they are planning to add/enhance and are ready to talk about at this time...

With the NVIDIA 510 series Linux driver back in January NVIDIA added AV1 video decode support to their Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) driver. Now finally out is libvdpau 1.5 as the adjoining open-source VDPAU library update...

Barring any last minute issues the Linux 5.17 stable kernel is expected to be out next Sunday...

Following the recent releases of DXVK 1.10 and VKD3D-Proton 2.6 this past week, DXVK-NVAPI 0.5.3 is out this Sunday as the newest update to this library providing NVIDIA driver API "NVAPI" integration around DXVK/VKD3D-Proton for Windows games running on Linux by way of Steam Play (Proton)...

Since last month's Steam Deck launch a few Phoronix readers have been asking about USB-C hubs for expanding connectivity with this handheld Linux-powered gaming console. Pretty much any reliable USB-C hub should do, while for my purposes the past month I've been using the Anker USB-C Hub...

FEX-Emu is the open-source project striving for speedy x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 with similar objectives to Box86/Box64. FEX-Emu is working toward allowing Steam and other x86_64 Linux games to work on 64-bit Arm hardware and achieving some early success. Out today is FEX-Emu 2203 as the latest step in that direction...

Back in 2017 the Mesa open-source OpenGL driver for Broadcom VC5 hardware most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 aimed to enable anisotropic filtering (AF). However, that patch wasn't fully hooked up correctly and now this past week should be in good shape...

The open-source Tow-Boot project has been in development now for about one year as a "user-friendly" distribution of the U-Boot bootloader...

Version 7.6 of the digiKam open-source photo management software is now available with a number of enhancements...

Beyond all their timely Linux kernel contributions surrounding their processors and graphics hardware, Intel continues well with ensuring network adapters, Bluetooth, and other ASICs are generally well supported on Linux ahead of launch. With Linux 5.18 there is now support for "Madison peak" as another yet-to-be-announced Bluetooth chip...

Going back to the original Razer Copperhead mouse in 2005, I've tested many different Razer mice over the years and have exclusively used Razer mice on my main production system for basically as long. This week the scrollwheel physically broke on a Razer DeathAdder mouse I've used the past few years so quickly ordered a replacement, which sadly turned out to be the worst Razer mouse I've personally ever used, and replaced it a day later...

In development recently has been sdl12-compat as a compatibility layer that implements the SDL 1.2 interfaces atop SDL 2.0. This effort allows many older Linux games not seeing updates for SDL2 to in turn make use of the newer version by way of this compatibility layer...

Just under one month ago was the ROCm 5.0 release with formal RDNA2 support and on Friday night marked the latest point release for that open-source AMD Radeon Open eCosystem compute stack update...

Unfortunately this week the KDE project saw "overall activity was lower than usual" that in part at least seems to be fallout from the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. Sadly some Ukranian KDE contributors have been impacted by the ongoing situation and some KDE Russia contributors have also been impacted by their Internet restrictions...

Back in January I wrote about LatencyFlex as an open-source, vendor-agnostic alternative to NVIDIA Reflex. This drop-in replacement to NVIDIA's proprietary solution focused on reducing rendering latency is out with its very first release...

Apache NetBeans 13 is now available as the latest version of this popular open-source integrated development environment (IDE)...

After many years of waiting and past faltered efforts, "Imagination Tech publishing a new open-source driver" probably wasn't on your bingo card for 2022... But they are doing such with a new open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver for Mesa...

In addition to this morning's release of VKD3D-Proton 2.6, DXVK 1.10 has been released as the Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan API implementation used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton)...

VKD3D-Proton 2.6 is out as the latest update to this project used by Steam Play / Proton for mapping the Direct3D 12 API atop Vulkan for accelerating Windows games on Linux...

Besides the dance of getting all of the various open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver components upstreamed (i.e. the Linux kernel, Mesa, libdrm, LLVM back-end) and worked out to major Linux distributions in time for new graphics processor releases, another challenge has been on the firmware/microcode front with also needing those binary blobs made publicly available in time and also picked up by the Linux distributions. For some past Radeon graphics card launches AMD hasn't posted those necessary blobs until the day of or a few days past launch. Fortunately, ahead of their next launch, the initial firmware binaries were posted today...

Up to this point my Intel Alder Lake DDR5 memory testing on Linux has been limited to a set of DDR5-4400 modules given the very limited DDR5 availability. But with having recently received a DDR5-6000 kit, here is a look at how the Intel Core i9 12900K performs under Linux with memory speeds up to DDR5-6000 and running a memory scaling comparison from 3000 to 6000 MT/s.

Mesa's Venus driver providing VirtIO-GPU Vulkan support that was developed by Google as part of the Virgil effort for 3D acceleration within guest VMs can now run ANGLE. Google's ANGLE in turn is their OpenGL ES conformant implementation that can run atop Vulkan / Metal / OpenGL / Direct3D interfaces...

The Rust-based Cloud-Hypervisor that started out as an open-source VMM at Intel for cloud workloads and now developed under the Linux Foundation is out with a new feature release...

Following this week's release of Chrome 99, Google has now promoted Chrome 100 to beta...

Added back in 2020 with the Linux 5.10 kernel was the new EXT4 "fast commits" mode for reducing commit latency in the ordered data mode. Now for the upcoming Linux 5.18 cycle, that fast commits mode should be even faster...

SPEC today finally published an updated Linux-native build of their SPECViewPerf industry graphics benchmark for professional applications...

One year ago this week Qt 5.15.3 LTS was released with 200+ bug fixes for this toolkit but that long-term support release was made commercial-only. Today The Qt Company has made available an open-source release of the Qt 5.15.3 changes...

OpenBLAS recently added support for Russia's Elbrus E2000 processors, however, the OpenBLAS developers are now debating whether to drop support for these Russian domestically-produced CPUs given Russia's invasion into Ukraine...

Intel's big open-source Linux graphics driver engineering team has submitted their last feature pull of new material for inclusion into the upcoming Linux 5.18 kernel. Intel engineers remain very busy on the discrete GPU enablement both for the DG2/Alchemist Arc graphics cards as well as the forthcoming compute accelerators...

While much of Intel's Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" enablement has been squared away for a while now within the Linux kernel and related components, there are a few holdouts only now coming about in patch form and working their way to the mainline kernel with Sapphire Rapids production ramping up in the coming months...

Another round of drm-misc-next changes has been sent in to squeeze into DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.18 merge window opening later this month...

The AMDGPU Linux kernel driver is preparing a new interface for allowing user-space to submit work to the GPU that will be executed across multiple engines simultaneously...

VMware engineers are in the process of enabling 3D acceleration within their VMWGFX driver on AArch64 so those making use of VMware virtualization software on 64-bit Arm will be able to enjoy accelerated 3D guest virtual machines...

AMD developers had a busy day with merging into mainline LLVM for the AMDGPU shader compiler is a new Vega/CDNA "GFX940" GPU target as well as a GFX1036 RDNA GPU target...

Last month I covered the issue of Lenovo's ACPI Platform Profile support for AMD-powered laptops was busted on Linux. The platform profile controls were exposed but in reality did not work. Fortunately, fixed up support for this feature is now on the way to the Linux kernel for letting users choose between better performance or extended battery life and cooler operating device...

KDE/Qt-focused consulting firm KDAB has been developing CXX-Qt as a new project to improve integration of the Rust programming language with the Qt toolkit...