Phoronix

Created this year has been the CentOS Kmods special interest group for dealing with deprecated device support and out-of-tree modules. This Kmods SIG has begun crafting their initial set of extra kernel modules for use on CentOS...

As reported on last week, an updated Zstd implementation for the Linux kernel is being re-attempted by Zstd developer Nick Terrell at Facebook. Today he sent out the latest Zstd kernel patches to provide a much newer version of the code compared to what is currently mainlined and will provide much better performance and numerous fixes...

Canonical continues advancing their Wayland-based Mir stack for embedded and IoT use-cases. Out today is Mir 2.5 with the latest features as they work to provide better support for on-screen keyboards...

Vulkan 1.2.195 is out today as the latest weekly update to this high performance, industry standard API for graphics and compute...

Not only did Microsoft release Windows 11 on Monday but they also released the latest monthly update to CBL-Mariner as the company's in-house Linux distribution...

In April 2020 there was the somewhat surprising announcement of Micron announcing their own open-source storage engine designed for SSDs and persistent memory. The Heterogeneous-Memory Storage Engine (HSE) has been redesigned and on Monday debuted in v2.0 form with some fundamental changes...

While the formal announcement has yet to hit the wire, releasing today is Firefox 93.0 as the newest monthly feature update to Mozilla's web browser...

Merged to Mesa 21.3-devel this weekend was a rework to the display list interface for the Gallium3D code and Mesa state tracker and wired up for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. This latest driver overhead reduction is another sizable win for AMD's open-source OpenGL driver on Linux...

Python 3.10 is out as the latest major update for this widely-used programming language's official implementation...

Google announced today that Android 12 is now officially available from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP)...

I've just been informed by AMD that they have now made their code public to a new project called GPUFORT. This new GPUFORT project will live under the Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) umbrella and is their latest endeavor in helping developers with large CUDA code-bases transition away from NVIDIA's closed ecosystem...

The newest patch series by AMD open-source Linux graphics driver engineers worth mentioning is around USB4 DisplayPort tunneling support for next-generation AMD hardware supporting USB4 connectivity...

It's been one year now since Intel launched Tiger Lake mobile processors and since then we've been running routine benchmarks of the Core i7 1165G7 on Linux. Tiger Lake at launch was performing well under Linux but its performance has continued evolving nicely since on Linux, especially as it pertains to the Xe Graphics with the open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers. With Ubuntu 21.10 due out later this month, there is another performance boost to enjoy.

Mesa 21.3 recently landed RADV ray-tracing support for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver with RDNA2 graphics processors. Now the software-based/emulated Vulkan ray-tracing support has been merged for handling pre-RDNA2 GPUs...

The Lumina Desktop Environment as the BSD-3 licensed desktop originally spearheaded for TrueOS/PC-BSD but found supported as well by other BSDs and Linux distributions is out with a rare new release...

In recent weeks the AVX-512 FP16 support has been landing within the GNU Compiler Collection codebase for next year's GCC 12 release...

Since the launch of AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors earlier this year there has been support for SEV-SNP as the latest evolution of Secure Encrypted Virtualization. The mainline Linux kernel still isn't yet supporting SEV Secure Nested Paging from the upstream kernel, but the out-of-tree patches continue to be available for those interested and development work continues in getting that code ready for mainline as well as ironing out other features...

Linus Torvalds has declared Linux 5.15-rc4 as the latest weekly release candidate of the maturing Linux 5.15 codebase...

The Linux kernel is trying again to enhance the low-latency playback mode of its USB audio driver...

While Intel Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" processors with Advanced Matrix Extensions are set for a Q2'22 ramp in production, one of the key new features that has yet to be properly plumbed in the mainline Linux kernel is for supporting AMX...

Announced this week was the Fairphone 4 as the latest iteration of this smartphone focused on being "sustainable and ethical" and now the initial patches have been sent out for providing mainline Linux kernel support...

Intel's newest weekly Compute-Runtime update providing open-source OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support for their graphics hardware is now reader with broader support for upcoming Alder Lake S processors...

OpenBLAS 0.3.18 is out today as the latest feature update to this widely-used, open-source BLAS implementation...

Intel on Friday formally released their oneAPI Toolkits 2021.4 release as the latest collection of their various software components for a multi-vendor, multi-architecture software platform across CPUs and XPUs (GPUs / accelerators)...

Version 0.6 of helloSystem is now available as the FreeBSD-based open-source operating system project taking design cues from Apple's macOS...

Facebook this week announced the open-sourcing of CompilerGym as their effort to improve compiler performance by leveraging machine learning to tackle optimization work...

While earlier this year AMD shifted their Radeon Software driver focus to only supporting Polaris / GCN 1.4 and newer, when it comes to the open-source driver support on Linux there still is occasional activity going back to the ATI Radeon R300 days from nearly two decades ago...

PipeWire from the start was designed around handling the needs of both audio and video streams on Linux. While PipeWire is already in use for screencasting/recording under Wayland and working with Flatpak'ed applications, recently much of PipeWire's focus has been on addressing the use-cases of JACK and PulseAudio on the sound side. Now that the audio support is in quite good shape, Red Hat engineers are back to focusing on improvements to the video support...

Given this week's release of Fedora 35 Beta I have begun my benchmarking to look at how this next installment of Fedora Linux is shaping up given that it tends to be at the forefront of open-source innovations given Red Hat's investments. For our initial F35 benchmarking is looking at the Fedora Server 35 Beta performance compared to Fedora 34 on a dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 server.

LLVM 13.0 was tagged overnight as the latest half-year update to this widely-used, very powerful open-source compiler stack...

The first release candidate of the forthcoming PoCL 1.8 "Portable Computing Language" implementation is now available for testing...

Arm engineers have begun landing their Armv9 enablement work in the GNU compiler toolchain...

Valve published new versions of Proton and Proton Experimental last night...

That's a wrap for September with 229 original news articles and another 13 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles, all written by your's truly. It was another eventful month with Linux 5.15 moving forward, a lot of driver activity by AMD and Intel, and other open-source milestones like the release of GNOME 41 and the shipping of the Ubuntu 21.10 and Fedora 35 beta releases...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are evaluating possible improvements to the Linux kernel for accommodating CPU and GPU synchronized priority scheduling...

In addition to Linux 5.15 adding a new AMD audio driver for "Van Gogh" APUs such as found in the forthcoming Steam Deck, AMD's open-source Linux driver engineers have also been working on other audio improvements -- this time on the Chromebook front...

Intel has some new announcements around their neuromorphic computing research...

Linux kernel developers have been working tirelessly to squeeze more performance out of IO_uring and the block / I/O code in general. IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe who also serves as the Linux block subsystem's maintainer (among other roles and major contributions over the years) has used his system as a baseline for evaluating such kernel improvements. He's now moved to using AMD Zen 3 while sticking to Intel Optane storage and is seeing a mighty speed boost out of AMD's latest processors...

PostgreSQL 14.0 is now officially available as the latest version of this widely-used, open-source SQL server...

Google's work on the VirtIO DRM kernel driver around the notion of "context types" and being able to initialize different types of contexts is set to be merged for Linux 5.16 in opening up more use-cases for this driver that is an important part of the open-source virtualization graphics stack for graphics...

Qt 6.2 LTS is out today as the first long-term support release in the Qt6 series and also with all of the major modules now ported over from Qt5 in aiming to make this a suitable point to transition from Qt 5.15 LTS...

AMD has pushed out one more code drop of their AMDVLK official open-source Vulkan driver before ending out the quarter...

From our Ampere Altra Max M128-30 Linux performance preview earlier this week, one of the questions a number of readers were wondering about and a question I also still had open was on the Altra Max pricing... I've now received the current price list and actually comes in much lower than expected for a 128-core CPU in 2021...

Succeeding Mesa 21.2.2 from earlier this month that was a much delayed and in turn very large release, Mesa 21.2.3 is out today and it's on the quieter side...

Libcamera as an open-source camera stack that has been coming together over the past few years has been maturing quite well, broadening its supported hardware and feature set, and more in filling a void in the Linux camera ecosystem...

Recently I carried out some updated Windows 11 benchmarks against Linux to look at how this forthcoming Microsoft operating system release is competing with Ubuntu. In this article is a fresh look at the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) performance on the near-final Windows 11 against Ubuntu Linux.

AMD this morning announced a goal of increasing the energy efficiency of EPYC processors running AI training and high performance workloads by 30x... Within the next four years...

Merged this morning into the LibreOffice code-base is the initial Qt6 VCL plug-in...

While the Linux kernel is increasingly supporting the use of Zstd for various compression purposes, the current Zstd code within the kernel is out-of-date and efforts so far to re-base it against the closer to upstream Zstd state have been stalled. Fortunately, a new attempt at getting the Zstd code updated for the Linux kernel will be published soon...

With the initial Steam Deck release quickly approaching, Valve continues to be quite busy on a variety of improvements to enhance their Steam Linux builds...