Phoronix

Linus Torvalds' schedule due to travels remains a bit off and as such Linux 5.17-rc2 is already available this morning...

AMD open-source engineers sent out a request for comments on a new kernel feature called "PAN", or Process Adaptive autoNUMA. Early numbers shown by AMD indicate that PAN can help with performance in some workloads on their latest server hardware by a measurable amount...

The latest GNOME 42 feature work to mention is a ten month old merge request landing that cleans up and improves the XWayland termination for when there are no more X11 clients running within the GNOME Wayland session...

One of the additions with EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors introduced last year was SEV-SNP as the "Secure Nested Paging" addition to AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization found with EPYC processors. While they have maintained an out-of-tree Linux source repository with the SEV-SNP patches, the mainline kernel is still lacking support for these latest security features but the code continues to undergo revisions and review for its eventual upstreaming...

For those interested in using Distrobox to augment your operating system's package selection, not all containers are created equally. Distrobox developer Luca Di Maio recently did some tests for looking at the Linux container performance...

Developed during Google Summer of Code last year was an updated screenshot and screen recorder user interface. That improved screenshot/screencasting UI was merged this week for GNOME 42...

Prominent Mesa developer Jason Ekstrand who formerly led Intel's "ANV" Vulkan driver effort and being one of their open-source driver developers originally involved with the NIR intermediate representation work wrote a detailed and excellent blog post outlining its successes eight years running. While it still gets brought up into discussions from time to time (including quite recently stemming from a RISC-V graphics thread) why Mesa doesn't use LLVM IR or SPIR-V directly as its intermediate representation, NIR continues as a striking success and used by all major Mesa drivers...

Back in summer 2020 was a proposal for Zstd-compressed Linux firmware so that the growing number of firmware binaries shipped by the linux-firmware tree could be Zstd-compressed to save disk space while being able to more quickly decompressed the data compared to other firmware compression options...

Along with Wine 7.1 releasing on Friday, Wine-Staging 7.1 is also available as the more bleeding-edge version of Wine that carries more than five huundred extra patches atop the code-base...

KDE developers have been very busy this month working up to the Plasma 5.24 LTS release in February. Plus with the 15 minute bug initiative underway and working to address remaining issues with the Plasma Wayland session, it's been a busy start of 2022...

In addition to this week bringing Oracle's GraalVM 22.0 release, Eclipse has released OpenJ9 0.30 as the latest version of their open-source Java Virtual Machine (JVM)...

Version 1.16 of the Basis universal GPU texture codec developed by well known developer Rich Geldreich's Binomial LLC...

With Wine 7.0 having been released, the code freeze is over and we are now onto the Wine 7.x bi-weekly development releases that will then culminate with the Wine 8.0 stable release one year from now. In kicking off the new development series, Wine 7.1 is out today...

DXVK-NVAPI as the open-source project implementing support for NVIDIA's NVAPI within the realm of DXVK is out with a new release, which is exciting for NVIDIA Linux gamers...

Wayland Protocols 1.25 was released today as the collection of testing and stable Wayland protocols. New to Wayland Protocols 1.25 is the session-lock-v1 protocol being experimental and responsible to handle session locking...

The first release candidate of GStreamer 1.20 is now available for testing of this widely-used, open-source multimedia framework...

Ahead of the Intel Arc "Alchemist" graphics cards shipping this year, Intel's open-source developers have continued ironing out the Linux driver support. The most recent kernel patches are for getting their Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support in order...

Wasmer 2.2-rc1 is out today as the WebAssembly run-tme to "run any code on any client" with its broad platform coverage and allowing numerous programming languages from Rust to PHP to C# being able to be compiled into WebAssembly and then running on any OS or embedded into other languages for execution...

JEDEC has published the JESD238 HBM3 standard as the next version for High Bandwidth Memory...

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will likely do away with the Ubuntu/Canonical Partner Archive where their software partners could upload select proprietary/binary-only software for easy access by Ubuntu users...

The Arm Mali Valhall architecture reverse-engineering started last summer and while limited in the reverse engineering capabilities for several months, it looks like by this summer we'll hopefully see a working driver for Arm's newer graphics IP...

OPNsense, the FreeBSD-based firewall/router software stack forked from pfSense, is out with its first major release of 2022...

The first set of feature updates have been submitted to DRM-Next for staging until the Linux 5.18 kernel cycle begins around the end of March...

In addition to closing in on the Godot 4.0 release, another equally exciting effort in the open-source game engine space is the Open 3D Engine originally from the Amazon Lumberyard code and backed by the Linux Foundation and other organizations. Open 3D Engine 2111.2 is out today as the newest stable point release for this less than one year old open-source game engine effort...

As expected, Intel's open-source "ANV" driver is ready to go with Vulkan 1.3 for Mesa 22.0...

Since Intel's Alder Lake launch one of the test requests to come in a few times has been about the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver and how its performance differs with the various governor choices available for altering the CPU frequency scaling behavior. Now that Linux 5.16 stable is out and running in good shape on Alder Lake, here are some Core i9 12900K benchmarks looking at various CPU frequency scaling choices and their impact on raw performance as well as CPU thermals and power consumption.

This will hopefully be the year that PipeWire becomes commonplace on the Linux desktop across all major distributions for audio/video stream management. But for as good as PipeWire is already, frequent point releases continue evolving the functionality and ironing out compatibility improvements for existing JACK and PulseAudio integration. PipeWire 0.3.44 is out today as another step in the right direction...

As of yesterday Intel's contributed Programmable Services Engine "PSE" support has been merged into mainline Coreboot for supporting this Arm-based dedicated offload engine found within select Intel processors...

One of Microsoft's Linux/open-source surprises for 2021 was publishing of CBL-Mariner as their internal Linux distribution used for a variety of purposes at the company. Microsoft has kept to updating CBL-Mariner publicly on a monthly basis and continuing to make it easier to test out and enhance its usefulness. Last night they published their January 2022 build of Microsoft's Linux operating system...

The DirectFB library had been a popular option for embedded systems in running off the Linux frame-buffer to avoid the full overhead of an X11 server. But a number of years ago DirectFB disappeared and ultimately stopped being maintained. Meanwhile Wayland has been making lots of inroads into mobile/embedded and areas once popular for DirectFB use. But now it turns out DirectFB2 is in development as a fork of the original DirectFB...

In addition to this week seeing Raptor Lake S support added for Mesa 22.0, the Alder Lake N additions have also been merged for this quarter's Mesa update...

Archinstall as the quick and easy-to-use installer for the Arch Linux distribution is out with a new point release delivering a few worthwhile enhancements to the text-based OS installer...

Intel's "i915" kernel graphics driver has been patched for a software issue that could lead to malicious user-space trigger DMAR read/write faults or worse is the possibility of user-space gaining access to random memory pages. Unfortunately, the security fix comes with performance implications...

After slipping from the original shipping target of Q4 due to component shortages, Valve is making good on their Q1'2022 shipping plans for the Steam Deck...

With today's SDL2 Git, Wayland is now preferred over X.Org/X11 by default without having to set the SDL video driver environment variable...

Yet another open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver improvement being worked on by Valve's engineers is around better controlling variable rate shading "VRS" behavior with a focus on improving power savings for the Steam Deck...

At the top-end of Intel's current Alder Lake line-up is the Core i9 12900K while at the opposite end is the Celeron G6900... The Celeron G6900 is a dual-core Alder Lake processor with a suggested customer price of $42~52 USD (though for the limited quantities available, I ended up paying $69). Curiosity got the best of me for seeing how well this lowest-end Alder Lake part performs under Ubuntu Linux.

AMDVLK as AMD's official open-source Vulkan Linux driver derived from their Radeon Software driver sources but using the LLVM shader compiler back-end is out with a new release. AMD is ready with day-after support for the newly-launched Vulkan 1.3 specification for AMDVLK...

As part of pushing it across the Vulkan 1.3 milestone, Intel's open-source graphics driver developers have merged their VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering support to mainline...

Microsoft's D3D12 Gallium3D code for Mesa 22.0 can now handle tessellations to expose GL_ARB_tessellation_shader in exposing OpenGL over Direct3D 12...

Rqlite 7.0 is now available as a lightweight, distributed relational database. This open-source database system for cluster setups is built atop SQLite while aiming to be easy-to-use and fault-tolerant...

In recent days Mozilla has begun activating Wayland support by default on Firefox Nightly for configurations capable of running Wayland...

GraalVM 22.0 has been released for this Java VM/JDK that also supports other programming languages and run-times / execution modes. GraalVM continues to be performant and showing promising results not just for Java with JIT'ing but also ahead-of-time Java compilation to Native Image as well as for its Python implementation, WebAssembly run-time, and other targets...

In addition to Mesa 22.0 landing Vulkan 1.3 support today with the Radeon RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers, Mesa today also received initial support for next-gen Raptor Lake S processors...

It's crazy to think that in a few days it will already be six years since the debut of Vulkan 1.0, but here we are. The Khronos Group is continuing on their two year major update regiment for Vulkan and today debuting Vulkan 1.3 with more extensions moved to core as well as introducing a new "profiles" concept.

For the just-announced Vulkan 1.3, the open-source Intel "ANV" and Radeon "RADV" Vulkan drivers within Mesa are prepared to land support for this updated specification...

According to a report this morning from Bloomberg, NVIDIA is communicating to their partners that they face the real possibility their deal to acquire Arm will not come to pass...

Now that Linux 5.17 has prepared DRM privacy screen support, the GNOME 42 is ready with its user-space side support for making use of this new standardized interface...

NXP engineers continue persevering for bringing up a mainline-suitable, open-source kernel driver for their Amphion video encoder/decoder hardware. Out today is their 15th revision to the Amphion driver patches...

Ahead of the Linux-based Steam Deck hopefully shipping around the end of February, Valve announced a new Steamworks feature called Dynamic Cloud Sync...