Phoronix

The rewritten NIR back-end for the R600 Gallium3D driver with a focus on improving performance for old Radeon HD 5000/6000 series hardware has been merged! This also allows proper FP64 usage finally for the Radeon HD 6900 "Cayman" series graphics cards...

FEX-Emu is an open-source emulator project that has been particularly focused on being able to run x86/x86_64 games on AArch64 with great speed including around Steam and Steam Play (Proton) Windows games...

Back in Linux 5.17 the AMD P-State "amd_pstate" driver was introduced for Ryzen and EPYC systems as an alternative to the ACPU CPUFreq frequency scaling driver with an emphasis on delivering better power efficiency for modern AMD Zen 2 and newer systems. Since the mainlining there hasn't been too much change to this driver but now a new patch series has been sent out with some updates...

Established last year was the CentOS Hyperscale SIG as a special interest group with the backing of Facebook and Twitter among other hyperscalers in providing updated packages and other optional modifications to CentOS Stream to make the distribution more practical for use within their large-scale infrastructure environments...

From the recent setup of the MSI Alder Lake motherboard flashed with Dasharo/Coreboot I had an extra LGA-1700 motherboard around. With some Phoronix readers in the past having inquired about more Alder Lake benchmarks on the low-end, I picked up a Core i3 12100 processor that features four performance cores / eight threads. For those curious about the CPU performance and that of the integrated UHD Graphics 730, here are some Ubuntu Linux performance benchmarks with the i3-12100 and other similar processors.

The Blender open-source 3D modeling software is in the process of working on a new GPU-accelerated, real-time compositor...

The newest version of the MGLRU patches were posted and I've also finished up some more benchmarks of this Multi-Gen LRU kernel feature...

Mesa 22.2 as the quarterly feature update to this collection of open-source predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers has been pushed back by two weeks. This delay is for allowing more last minute features to land, which will hopefully ensure that Intel Arc Graphics and RDNA3 support is in better shape for this release...

As time goes on more open-source projects are beginning to make better use of AVX-512 support even though it's no longer enabled in the latest Alder Lake processors. After reporting on the big AVX-512 wins for JSON parsing with simdjson, another open-source project finding gains is the Tesseract optical character recognition (OCR) engine...

Following yesterday's debut of Meteor Lake platform support within Intel's Graphics Compiler, Intel's "i915" Linux kernel graphics driver has begun seeing patches around Meteor Lake support as that 14th Gen Core successor to Raptor Lake...

The cross-platform wxWidgets GUI toolkit is out today with version 3.2 that represents more than 15,000 commits and comes the better part of a decade since they started their last stable release series...

Yesterday's surprise was that Lennart Poettering quietly had left Red Hat following a decade and a half there leading PulseAudio among other projects and ultimately going on to start systemd that has fundamentally reshaped modern Linux distributions. It turns out he had joined Microsoft and continuing his work on systemd...

In addition to Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers being very busy rounding out their DG2/Alchemist enablement patches, beginning to mainline "Ponte Vecchio" work starting with Linux 5.20, and having already done the bit of enablement for Raptor Lake graphics that is predominantly based on existing Alder Lake, they have also started their Meteor Lake bring-up...

The SUSE/openSUSE Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) that is being viewed as the eventual successor to SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 is likely to require higher system requirements for x86_64 CPUs. Just how much newer the Intel/AMD support requirement will be has yet to be firmly decided but they are looking at a baseline of "x86-64-v3" that would effectively mean requiring Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX)...

Last week's Vulkan 1.3.219 release introduced the VK_EXT_shader_module_identifier that was worked on in part by Valve. This ability for software to query an identifier associated with a Vulkan shader module is seeing quick driver adoption and is preparing for use within VKD3D-Proton as an efficiency improvement...

Given the recent releases of openSUSE Leap 15.4 and AlmaLinux 9.0, here are some fresh Linux server/workstation-oriented benchmarks on a dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" platform and running the fresh releases of various enterprise Linux choices.

For as popular as the Raspberry Pi 4 has been since its 2019 launch, Fedora hasn't officially supported this Arm single board computer with its Linux distribution. But now thanks to the upstream, open-source graphics acceleration finally coming together for the Raspberry Pi 4, with Fedora 37 they may end up finally providing "official" support for this popular, low-cost developer board...

It's great seeing AMD continuing to hire for more Linux/open-source driver developers. Beyond their many roles they are still working to fill on the CPU side of the house, they have a new job posting in hiring for their open-source GPU driver stack with a focus on multimedia efforts...

While Apple just recently introduced their first M2-powered Apple Silicon devices, thanks to the dedication of Hector Martin with Asahi Linux and not too many breaking changes over the M1, Asahi Linux is looking at "soon" having a Linux release to support the new platform...

Oracle Linux 9 as Oracle's offshoot of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is now available in general availability (GA) form. Besides being based on RHEL9, Oracle Linux 9 offers up their latest "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" for extra kernel features while also continuing to produce a Red Hat Compatible Kernel flavor as well...

AMD today sent out "new stuff" concerning their AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel graphics and compute drivers to DRM-Next in preparation for the Linux 5.20 cycle kicking off in a few weeks...

System76 has announced a new Lemur Pro laptop model that is now offering 12th Gen "Alder Lake" Intel processors while continuing to feature Coreboot firmware...

To much surprise, the lead developer of systemd Lennart Poettering who also led the creation of PulseAudio, Avahi, and has been a prolific free software contributor has reportedly left Red Hat...

While Python 3.11 is a big release and bringing significant performance improvements, users and developers may need to wait a little longer for the stable release...

MGLRU as the "Multi-Gen LRU" for reworking the Linux kernel's page reclamation code to be less taxing on the CPU and making better choices continues to look very good for the future of Linux performance...

Back in March the folks at OnLogic announced the Factor 201 as a Raspberry Pi CM4 (Compute Module 4) fitted for industrial use-cases like IoT gateways and more. The past few weeks I have been testing out this Raspberry Pi powered device and indeed it opens the door for using the Raspberry Pi within more harsh and demanding environments.

I'm currently working on a fresh comparison of the Windows vs. Linux performance for Intel's Alder Lake hybrid processors due to a number of readers inquiring how the OS support has evolved. In the process of carrying out those tests I also ran some fresh Windows vs. Linux tests with the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT for how the OpenGL and Vulkan driver performance stands...

Support for Arm's Cortex-M85 based on Armv8.1-M has been added for the LLVM 15.0 compiler release this fall...

Today's Coreboot code now has AMD Rembrandt SoC support by splitting it out from the Sabrina SoC support that has been in the works the past several months for this open-source firmware project...

A patch from TUXEDO Computers that is now queued into the input subsystem's "next" branch for Linux 5.20 adds a number of quirks to fix several Clevo / TUXEDO laptops from touchpad and keyboard issues after suspending the system...

Those making use of Ubuntu's Chromium Snap for running the Google open-source web browser have been without VA-API support for GPU-based video acceleration within this sandboxed app. Fortunately, it looks like that will soon be crossed off the list for ensuring Ubuntu users can enjoy VA-API acceleration for lowering CPU resources and better power efficiency on Intel graphics and other Mesa Gallium3D drivers supporting VA-API...

It should be hardly surprising at all for longtime Linux users aware of how Fedora Linux tends to always ship with the most modern open-source compiler toolchain support possible, but for Fedora 37 this autumn they again are planning for the latest and greatest...

Being worked on the past several years by Google engineers and others has been the KernelMemorySanitizer (KMSAN) that has already found more than 300 kernel bugs even prior to being mainlined. Sent out prior to the US holiday weekend as the fourth iteration of these patches, building off the "request for comments" sent out in 2020...

A week ago with Linux 5.19-rc4 there was concern over that weekly release being larger than normal, but this week with Linux 5.19-rc5 it's smaller than normal, which is pleasing Linux creator Linus Torvalds...

Somewhat surprisingly, AMD engineers have been working on some new Linux kernel patches for their aging Jadeite platform...

While GTK4 is still in its early stages and it will presumably be some years before "GTK5" even begins to take shape, GNOME developers are already thinking of ditching X11 support for that next major GTK release -- effectively making it Wayland-only on Linux...

In addition to Intel this week releasing the VA-API 2.15 video acceleration library, their open-source engineers also published their newest quarterly feature release of their open-source Intel Media Driver that implements the VA-API interface for their graphics hardware...

Back in 2018 Intel announced Sound Open Firmware (SOF) as their push for open-source sound firmware and looking to drive new software innovations in the audio DSP space. Out this week is Sound Open Firmware 2.2 for providing the newest features for this open-source software stack supporting Windows and Linux...

For those interested in the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver that provides reverse-engineered, open-source OpenGL support for Vivante graphics IP its newest feature is supporting GLSL asynchronous shader compilation...

For those enjoying some Linux gaming over the US holiday weekend, NVIDIA issued a rare Saturday driver update in the form of new Vulkan driver betas for Windows and Linux...

Darktable 4.0 has debuted today as a major update to this open-source, cross-platform RAW photography software suite...

After many months and a lot of work by the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developers, Linux 5.20 looks like it will be the base kernel where the DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics desktop GPUs and Arctic Sound M (ATS-M) server graphics card support will be ready in usable shape...

Linux Mint 21 is working its way toward release this summer as the latest version of this desktop OS that is being built atop Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Unlike Ubuntu 22.04 upstream that is now using systemd-oomd by default on the desktop to try to improve the low memory / system memory pressure experience, Linux Mint has now decided to avoid this daemon due to user criticism...

It's sadly been years since having anything major to report on for Xonotic, the open-source first person shooter game that started out many years ago as Nexuiz. Thankfully a new version of Xonotic was published this week and while it's just a point release, it does come with many improvements...

Firewalld 1.2 was released on Friday as the newest feature release for this Linux firewall daemon. Bug fix releases for existing stable series were released with Firewalld 1.1.2, 1.0.5, and 0.9.9...

The summer months aren't slowing down KDE developers as it's been another busy week of bug fixes and feature work for KDE developers to kick off July...

Vulkan 1.3.219 released this week and in addition to a number of documentation clarifications/corrections there are two new extensions...

With the new month comes the latest figures from Valve regarding the Steam on Linux marketshare and other metrics for the past month as a result of the Steam Survey...

Wine 7.12 is out as the newest development release of this program for running Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

The size of the linux-firmware.git tree continues to grow with Linux continuing to support more and more modern hardware that is increasingly reliant upon firmware blobs for operation. Most Linux distributions like Fedora end up installing this entire set of Linux firmware files that can easily be 200~300MB even though most systems only use a few select files. With Fedora 37 later this year they are hoping to better deal with the situation by splitting up of linux-firmware and only installing sets of firmware packages depending upon the actual hardware in use...