Phoronix

The Radeon RX 6600 XT was announced at the end of July as AMD's newest RDNA2 graphics card and is optimized for a performant 1080p gaming experience. For those wondering about its performance, this morning the embargo lifts to be able to talk about its performance. Here are the first Linux gaming benchmarks of the Radeon RX 6600 XT against a wide assortment of other AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Firefox 91.0 is out this morning as the latest monthly update to Mozilla's cross-platform web browser...

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has been working on a number of improvements in recent days to the RADV Vulkan driver's handling around delta color compression (DCC) fast clears...

Future AMD CPUs -- potentially AMD EPYC 7004 "Genoa" -- will be supporting 5-level paging...

Intel's Graphics Compiler "IGC" that is used by their Windows driver as well as the Intel Compute Runtime for OpenCL / Level Zero support (and potentially the Mesa drivers in the future) has now landed Alder Lake P enablement...

It looks like X.Org Server 21.1 (long in development the past few years as X.Org Server 1.21) will see a stable release in the coming weeks...

Intel's next-generation C/C++ compilers are fully leveraging the LLVM compiler stack in place of their former proprietary compiler code-base. Intel has "complete[d] adoption" of LLVM moving forward for their C/C++ compiler needs...

The latest AMD SEV work happening to the Linux kernel for benefiting EPYC servers with virtualization is the new "sev_secret" module for allowing guests to access confidential computing secret areas...

For more than one year now Oracle engineers have been working on Trenchboot support for securely booting the Linux kernel. Sent out today is the third revision of this work for establishing a dynamic root of trust for measurement...

Last month after Microsoft began publishing their Windows Insider Preview builds of Windows 11, I ran some early Windows 11 benchmarks against Linux using an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. Linux led in those benchmarks on the AMD Zen 3 desktop while for those wondering if that still holds true for Intel hardware, here are benchmarks of a Core i9 11900K "Rocket Lake" desktop with Windows 10 21H1, Windows 11 in its latest preview build as of testing, and then compared to Arch Linux / Clear Linux / Ubuntu.

Audio/video encoders and decoders are one of the areas where usage of the Rust programming language has increasing interest for speed and safety. One of the most promising Rust-written encoders at the moment is Rav1e for AV1 video encoding and it's now working towards its v0.5 release...

Merged one month ago was RadeonSI enabling by default its optimization to replace uniforms with literals inside shaders. This uniform inlining helped with SPECViewPerf and other workloads but it turns out in the process sharply drove up CPU usage when running some games...

Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS is expected later this month as the next point release to the "Focal Fossa" long-term support cycle. With this update comes the hardware enablement stack from Ubuntu 21.04 which in turn means Linux 5.11 and Mesa 21.0 graphics support is available as package updates now...

Synopsys is looking to phase out support for the oldest ARC processors found within the mainline Linux kernel...

Linus Torvalds just released the fifth weekly release candidate of Linux 5.14 and he's happy with how it's shaping up a few weeks before release...

0 A.D. as the long in development real-time strategy game developed by Wildfire Games is out with its twenty-fifth alpha release...

Thunderbird 91.0 is approaching release as an annual feature release to this open-source, cross-platform mail client and RSS reader. Given the current release is Thunderbird 78 from last July, there is a lot in store for this "2021" update...

The Linux kernel already supports making use of Arm's True Random Number Generator (TRNG) SMCCC interface within the random seed code while for the upcoming Linux 5.15 cycle an "arm_smccc_trng" driver is being added and will allow exposing the entropy to user-space...

Intel engineers on Friday submitted a big batch of kernel graphics driver improvements to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the Linux 5.15 merge window...

The months-long effort for adding DRM lease support to Wayland via a new protocol has now been merged into Wayland Protocols as a new staging addition. The "drm_lease_v1" is principally motivated for improving the virtual reality head-mounted dispkay support under Wayland...

It's been two years already since Latte Dock 0.9 was released while finally Latte Dock 0.10 is ready to officially meet the world this weekend...

The first week of August saw many fixes land in the KDE camp as they prepare for their software to be used on more third-party products, with Steam Deck being just the latest notable product leveraging KDE...

Last week's AMDGPU pull request to DRM-Next for Linux 5.15 added support for the "Cyan Skillfish" APU and other early work while an additional pull request was submitted on Friday...

Several improvements were merged on Friday to Mesa's Gallium3D Nine state tracker that allows for an alternative means of Direct3D 9 support within Wine...

In recent months there has been an effort to update GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) to reflect the GTK4 toolkit and recommendations around new widgets, utility panes, and more for enhancing the accessibility of GNOME applications, arguably looking better, and just otherwise modernizing aspects of the HIG that haven't been touched in months. That updated GNOME HIG is now official...

AMD has published their newest open-source Vulkan driver snapshot from their official sources that comprise this "AMDVLK" offering for Linux users...

After the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT was announced last week and ahead of the retail availability next week, today AMD's "unboxing embargo" has expired for this new RDNA2 graphics card focused on delivering high 1080p frame rates. The card we have been testing out under Linux is the ASRock Phantom Gaming RX 6600 XT.

Mozilla is trying once again to enable AVIF image decoding support by default within the Firefox web browser. AVIF is the promising image file format based on using AV1 in the HEIF file format...

Amazon's Data Access Monitor "DAMON" code is now set for introduction in Linux 5.15...

Intel security researchers have been working on implementing toolchain-optimized fine-grained Control Flow Integrity (CFI) support on top of Intel's hardware-based Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET). By leveraging Intel CET, the Control-Flow Integrity overhead is much lower than the otherwise pure software/compiler-based approach. This Linux security improvement is being worked on under the name of FineIBT...

Flax Engine 1.2.6222 is out today as the first v1.2 update for this cross-platform, open-source but commercial game engine...

The ongoing FUTEX2 work for making the futex handling more like Windows to in turn help Windows games on Linux via Wine (with a focus on Steam Play's Proton) has taken a new turn...

This summer we have been testing the Tyan Transport CX GC68B8036-LE as one of the company's newest options for those in the market for an AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" 1U 1P barebones server. Across our wide range of Linux and BSD benchmarking this Tyan Transport CX GC68B8036-LE with Tyan S8036GM2NE motherboard has been holding up well and meeting our requirements and proven reliability in having tested Tyan products now at Phoronix for over the past 16 years.

While Samba is well known for SMB/CIFS server support on Linux and other platforms for supporting Microsoft's SMB networking protocol for file and print services, Samba is implemented in user-space while Samsung has been pursuing an SMB server implemented in kernel-space for better performance and wiring up new features that can be more easily accomplished within the kernel...

Merged into the GNU Compiler Collection development code on Wednesday was an initial implementation of Assembly support for its analyzer...

Mesa 21.2 is out as the latest quarterly update to this open-source Linux graphics driver stack for user-space, most notably providing the Intel and Radeon OpenGL/Vulkan drivers among others...

Running eBPF kernel programs continues to be increasing popular and used for a variety of use-cases in production environments but one of the challenges is around needing to compile the (e)BPF programs for a given kernel while BPF CO-RE has been working to change that. The LLVM Clang compiler already supports the ability for BPF "Compile Once, Run Everywhere" while now Oracle engineers are working to bring the same level of support to GCC...

As part of their work around Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) support for Linux, Intel engineers are proposing a driver filter option for Linux to be able to set allow or deny lists of driver(s) that can or cannot be loaded by the booted kernel...

Following last month's look at the ASUS ROG Strix G15 AMD Advantage laptop with Ryzen 9 5900HX processor and some of the initial hurdles seen on Ubuntu, readers were curious about how well other Linux distributions fared compatibility wise or if offering better performance elsewhere. Here are some tests across Arch Linux, Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation, and Ubuntu 21.04 for reference.

The X.Org Server has picked up a new "-fakescreenfps" option to help with VNC and other remote display scenarios...

The program/schedule for this year's XDC21 X.Org Developers' Conference was posted this week ahead of the event occurring in mid-September. There are many interesting talks about X.Org and beyond, which in recent years largely revolve around Mesa and Wayland...

One of the AMD patch series that has been in the works for more than one year is the PTDMA driver providing pass-through DMA engine support on Linux. The driver is now up to its eleventh revision but the mainlining might happen soon...

With AMD's increasing marketshare on the CPU and GPU front, scoring more data center wins, and also scoring custom design wins for Linux-based environments such as with the Tesla Model S and most recently with the Steam Deck, AMD continues hiring more Linux engineers...

AMD has released ROCm 4.3 as the newest version of their Radeon Open eCosystem stack for providing open-source GPU compute and CUDA portability for their supported graphics processors under Linux. ROCm 4.3 is the biggest update we've seen for this important enterprise piece to their enterprise GPU compute stack in a while...

Longtime kernel developer Kees Cook of the Google Security Team published a post on Google's Security Blog today effectively calling for more organizations to devote a greater number of engineers to the upstream Linux kernel in order to improve open-source security...

CodeWeavers has announced the release of CrossOver 21.0 as the latest major update to their commercial software powered by Wine for running Windows games and applications on Linux and macOS...

Last year Sabrent launched the Rocket 4 Plus PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid-state drive and left me puzzled for months finding that the Linux performance was coming in short of expectations under Linux. However, Sabrent recently released a firmware update (v1.2) for the Rocket 4 Plus and now the drive seems to be much better positioned under Linux.

After being started by LinkedIn and open-source now for more than a half-decade while incubating at the Apache Software Foundation the past three years, Apache Pinot is the latest project graduating to become a top-level Apache project...

LLVM 13.0 feature development has ended with the code now branched and the first release candidate tagged...

X-Plane is not only the most realistic flight simulator that has long offered native Linux support but it's the only instance of a Vulkan-powered flight simulator I am aware of. While long tied to OpenGL, the company behind X-Plane is making it clear that the graphics rendering future is with Vulkan (and Metal when talking about Apple platforms)...