Phoronix

While Plasma 5.21 isn't even out for a few more days, there is now a big reason to look forward to KDE's Plasma 5.22 release later in the year: KWin finally supports direct scan-out for full-screen games/apps!..

FOSDEM, the Free Open-Source Developer Europeans' Meeting, remains one of the top open-source/Linux events in my book. Each February for this long tenured event thousands of open-source/Linux enthusiasts would gather in Brussels, Belgium for many technical and interesting talks on a wide range of subjects. Unfortunately due to the COVID-19 pandemic, FOSDEM can only take place virtually this year but that does allow for broader participation and you can enjoy all of the content online this weekend...

For those that have been meaning to try out an Arch Linux based distribution that is easy-to-use and not time consuming with sensible defaults, EndeavourOS is out with its first new spin since 2021 -- and in fact their first fresh ISO release since September...

While the AMDGPU back-end has been part of mainline LLVM for years, not until now has it supported an OpenMP toolchain for offloading to Radeon GPUs...

For those following the saga of the AMD frequency invariance regression on Linux 5.11 since the Christmas investigative benchmarking looking at the performance regressions, everything now looks like it will be buttoned up in time for the Linux 5.11 stable release. As noted yesterday, there was a curve ball this week in that the patch proposed by SUSE's Giovanni Gherdovich in January to address the frequency invariance regression was turned down by the Linux power management maintainer and instead he (Rafael Wysocki of Intel) proposed an alternative patch that instead modified the CPUFreq driver. Given it's getting late into the cycle, it's been a mad rush of re-conducting benchmarks on this new kernel patch and now it looks like that solution will be sent in the coming days for Linux 5.11.

The GNU Network Utilities (inetutils) has seen its first major release in nine years or even the first release at all in six years since the prior point release. With GNU inetutils 2.0 are several updates to common programs like ping and ifconfig...

In addition to this week seeing Zink now running on NVIDIA's proprietary driver for supporting this Gallium3D-based OpenGL over Vulkan implementation, it can now run on top of Lavapipe as the CPU-based Vulkan implementation. But for end-users that is really something you would want to avoid...

The plan for Fedora 34 to improve font rendering by enabling HarfBuzz in FreeType was approved this week by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee...

Intel sent out a news release on Thursday proclaiming their new 11th Gen H35 "Tiger Lake H" processors deliver the "fastest single-threaded laptop performance" thanks to the Core i7 11375H delivering up to 5GHz turbo frequencies...

Stemming from the attention shined on the matter of uncertainty how long the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel will be maintained due to a current lack of committed support, stable maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman penned a new blog post outlining the (easy) process of testing new kernel release candidates and simply reporting the feedback...

The Linux kernel's floppy driver dates back to the original days of the kernel back in 1991 and is still being maintained thirty years later with the occasional fix...

A new developer feature coming to the Linux 5.12 kernel thanks to a Canonical developer is software audio jack injection support...

The second point release to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is now officially released. Notable with Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS is the new hardware enablement (HWE) stack that brings the Linux kernel, Mesa, and related components from Ubuntu 20.10, which means better hardware support that tends to be most notable around better open-source graphics support...

Security firm Corellium has been working on enabling the Apple M1 SoC under Linux and last month they posted initial Linux kernel patches for the Apple M1. Meanwhile independent developer Hector Martin has also been working on Apple M1 enablement via crowdfunding and today he posted his initial set of Linux kernel patches for bringing up the Apple 2020 hardware under Linux...

The AMD "frequency invariance" saga with Linux 5.11 continues... While there was a patch to address the previously noted performance regression caused by the introduction of frequency invariance and seen when using the Schedutil governor, a new CPUFreq-side patch series has been proposed instead -- both of which are addressing the performance issue with this new kernel for AMD Zen 2 / Zen 3 systems...

With Mesa 21.0 releasing soon here is a look at the new features for this quarter's release of these open-source Vulkan / OpenGL driver implementations.

Sent in today to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.12 kernel cycle were "fixes" but some interesting items worth noting in this batch...

The open-source Broadcom graphics driver code most notably used by Raspberry Pi devices will be seeing at least slightly better performance come next quarter's Mesa 21.1 release...

In addition to VKD3D-Proton working on support for DXR ray-tracing another high profile Direct3D 12 feature being implemented on top of Vulkan is support for variable rate shading...

For those wondering where Ubuntu's Mir is being used in current form with their continued development of it these days as a Wayland compositor, it turns out it is being used within smart exercise mirrors as at least one implementation...

Following in the footsteps of Apache Superset and Apache ECharts, DataSketches has been promoted to being a top-level project within the Apache Software Foundation...

Zink as the generic OpenGL implementation built atop the Vulkan API while leveraging Mesa's Gallium3D can now work atop NVIDIA's proprietary graphics driver...

Google engineers are proposing a new framework called "Know, Prevent, Fix" in dealing with open-source security vulnerabilities...

For fans of the Solus Linux distribution, Solus 4.2 is now available as the project's latest release for this optimized, desktop-minded platform...

Following the December release of Qt 6.0, the Qt 6.0.1 toolkit is available today with the first batch of bug fixes to further stabilize the Qt6 code-base...

Users of various Intel Tiger Lake graphics and other "Gen12" graphics SKUs like the DG1 discrete graphics cards could soon be seeing a huge performance speed-up with the open-source Linux driver...

The V3DV open-source Vulkan driver in Mesa for Broadcom graphics most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer continues maturing nicely...

LibreOffice 7.1 has just been released as the latest version of this cross-platform, open-source office suite that now carries "Community" branding and promoting of "Enterprise" variants as well...

Intel engineers have been working on "Vdmabuf" as a VirtIO-based DMA-BUF driver for the Linux kernel. This driver is intended for their growing multi-GPU use-cases and also in cases of GPU virtualization where wanting to transfer contents seamlessly to the host for display purposes...

On top of Godot 4.0 having a Vulkan renderer, native Wayland bits, and other graphics improvements, it's also seeing significant CPU and GPU optimizations...

Intel's Embree open-source ray-tracing library has won an Academy Award in the form of a Scientific and Technical Achievement Award...

Lenovo continues working on a number of contributions to the upstream kernel thanks to their work on preloading various Linux distributions on a number of different devices. In cooperation with Red Hat engineers over the past year we have seen a lot of Lenovo related improvements and the latest set to come with the Linux 5.12 cycle is ACPI platform profile support for their laptops...

Fedora 34 is planning to switch to using Intel's modern Sound Open Firmware audio driver as it should be in good shape now and superior to the existing sound driver. This is ahead of Intel likely switching to the Intel SOF driver code path by default in the upstream kernel once this change has first been vetted by Fedora users...

Given the daily progress and changes made to the open-source AMDGPU Linux kernel driver and the Mesa drivers providing the open-source OpenGL (RadeonSI) and Vulkan (RADV) support, here is a look at how the Radeon RX 6800 series performance is currently for the latest Linux graphics driver code compared to the performance seen back on the November launch day for the Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT graphics cards.

Canonical today is shipping Ubuntu Core 20 as their minimal, containerized version of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS focused on IoT and embedded uses...

Mesa 21.1 has merged a common dispatch framework for use by Vulkan drivers to allow for better code sharing and the possibility of some Vulkan extensions to be more easily supported across all drivers...

Released last month was Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 while now it's been succeeded by Phoronix Test Suite 10.2.1 as a point release to this quarter's stable series...

For the better part of a year now we've seen patches for Intel's kernel graphics driver working on fair low-latency scheduling that in part has been inspired by the design of BFS/MuQSS. While it's too late for seeing the work land with Linux 5.12, the latest batch of 57 patches were sent out this week...

A combination of new year updates and updating benchmarks ahead of Ice Lake Xeon / Rocket Lake / Ryzen 5000 series mobile / EPYC 7003 Milan has led to a number of new and updated test profiles being available via the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org...

The user interface changes for GNOME 40 are quickly nearing the finish line with just two weeks to go until the UI freeze...

With the start of the new month comes the Steam Survey figures out of Valve for the month prior. For January 2021 there is an increase in the Linux gaming percentage as it gets back to flirting with the 1% mark...

Microsoft's Extensible Storage Engine that has been in use for more than a quarter century and present since Windows NT 3.51 and Microsoft Exchange 4.0 is now open-source...

OpenZFS 2.0.2 is out today as the latest version of this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently supported on Linux and FreeBSD systems...

Canonical has been working on developing a new desktop installer built around Google's Flutter toolkit and they aim to introduce it later this year in Ubuntu 21.10...

The GNU C Library 2.33 release is out today as expected. Exciting with this libc update is HWCAPS in making it easier to load optimized libraries for modern CPUs...

With Ubuntu 21.04 planning to use Wayland by default with GNOME aside from when running on NVIDIA graphics, you may be wondering about the current performance delta between running GNOME Shell on the X.Org session for Linux gaming versus its quite solid Wayland support. Or, rather, in the case of most games still - piped through XWayland. Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the GNOME X.Org vs. Wayland performance on Ubuntu with the Radeon RX 6800 XT.

While Qt 6.0 wasn't even released a full two months ago, the Qt 6.1 feature freeze went into effect this morning in trying to get out this next update sooner...

In the works over the past year for the GNOME desktop environment is dynamic triple buffering when the GPU is running behind in rendering the desktop. In doing so, the GPU utilization should increase and the GPU clock frequencies in turn should ramp up to meet the demand - thereby ideally getting the rendering back on track if prior frames were running late. That triple buffering support has been re-based to the GNOME 40 code-base but still is unlikely to land until the next cycle with GNOME 42...

Two years ago patches were posted in working on Wine support for IBM POWER / OpenPOWER hardware. The aim with that enablement has been to run Windows programs on POWER 64-bit hardware via Wine with the related "Hangover" project for handling the cross-architecture difference. The Wine patches for PPC64 have now been revived with hopes of mainlining them now that Wine 6.0 has passed...

For those wondering how say AVX heavy a particular program is being benchmarked or if a given program/benchmark supports making use of new instruction set extensions such as Vector AES or forthcoming AVX VNNI or AMX, the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org can now provide that insight on a per-test basis with common CPU instruction set extensions...