Phoronix

AMD open-source driver developers today merged another big set of patches providing various micro-optimizations and other enhancements to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

While the Linux kernel still hasn't added any formal control yet for AMD Predictive Store Forwarding to disable it short of also toggling Spectre V4 / SSBD, with the Linux 5.16 kernel the AMD PSF bit will now be exposed to KVM guest virtual machines so that they -- either with a patched/future kernel or for other operating systems -- may choose to toggle explicitly disable this AMD CPU feature...

After seeing some initial release challenges, Fedora 35 Beta was released today across the Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, and Fedora IoT flavors as well as their other versions...

The past month we have started our testing of Ampere's Altra Max M128-30, the company's new 128 core server processor, and in this article today are our initial benchmarks of this promising chip for high core count servers in both 1P and 2P configurations tested.

Vulkan 1.2.194 is out as the latest spec revision to this high performance graphics and compute API...

While Keith Packard is known for his work on X11/X.Org, the past few years he has also been developing Picolibc as a C library intended for embedded systems. He also recently jumped from SiFive to Amazon and appears at the ecommerce giant to be working on Picolibc in an official capacity, presumably for use on Amazon's growing hardware devices...

The open-source Solaris/Illumos ecosystem certainly isn't vibrant these days like back during the Sun Microsystems times with OpenSolaris, but OmniOS continues progressing as one of the few still-active and useful Solaris/Illumos-powered platforms...

While many years ago Fedora's Java support was in great shape with quickly integrating OpenJDK going back to IcedTea, these days Fedora's Java packages are barely maintained and largely fallen into disrepair...

Since July we've seen AMD open-source driver engineers posting code for "Cyan Skillfish" as an APU with Navi 1x graphics. While initial support for Cyan Skillfish was merged for Linux 5.15, it turns out the display code isn't yet wired up due to being a different DCN2 variant for its display block...

A batch of feature updates was submitted today for DRM-Next of early feature work slated to come to the next version of the Linux kernel...

There has been talk of Intel moving to offer more license-able/opt-in features for hardware capabilities found within a given processor as an upgrade. We are now seeing the Linux signs of that support coming with a driver for "Intel Software Defined Silicon" to allow for the secure activation of such features baked into the processor's silicon but only available as an up-charge option...

With the in-development Linux 5.15 kernel there is now support for ACPI Platform Profiles on supported ASUS laptops. This ASUS laptop platform profile support joins the likes of HP, Dell, and Lenovo laptops already having this support exposed under Linux that allows users to control their power/performance preference. Here are some tests with the ASUS ROG Strix G15 AMD Advantage laptop with the platform profile options under Linux 5.15.

It's been a while since having any news to report on Bcachefs as the promising open-source file-system born out of the Linux kernel's block cache code. However, Kent Overstreet continues working tirelessly on it and has now merged Bcachefs' snapshot support...

The Linux kernel support around the Nintendo Wii and Wii U game console hardware continues to improve and now a new Nintendo crypto driver is being tackled based on reverse-engineered documentation...

Adding to the growing list of Mesa 21.3 features for next quarter's feature release is Lavapipe now supporting Vulkan 1.2...

The nanoMIPS architecture that was announced by MIPS in 2018 for embedded devices to lower power consumption and yield smaller code footprints was announced for the MIPS I7200 but since then there hasn't been much of nanoMIPS. However, MediaTek is now looking to contribute upstream the compiler support for this processor ISA into GCC...

Linus Torvalds has now issued the third weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 5.15 kernel...

Given last week's release of Chrome 94, here are some fresh browser benchmarks looking at Firefox 92 stable against Chrome 94 running on Ubuntu Linux...

GNU Wget2 2.0 has been released for this successor to GNU Wget. There are many improvements to this GPLv3+ licensed program. Over the original GNU Wget, Wget2 is faster, supports more protocols especially around HTTP/2 and compression, supports multi-threading / parallel connections, and other improvements...

Earlier this month AMD published their "amd-pstate" Linux driver that leverages ACPI CPPC data to make more informed CPU frequency scaling decisions with an aim to boost the performance-per-Watt for Zen 3 (and eventually Zen 2) processors on Linux. The second spin of that "amd-pstate" Linux kernel driver is now available for testing...

It was just last month when ~3.5M IOPS per-core was impressive with the code for Linux 5.15 to further push Linux's I/O limits. Now for code likely to be included in Linux 5.16 it's currently at 3.8M IOPS with a single tread...

With the KDE Plasma 5.23 release quickly approaching, feature development is already heating up for Plasma 5.24 while concurrently driving many fixes into the v5.23 codebase...

For several years now Facebook engineers have been working on BOLT as a way to speed-up Linux/ELF binaries. This "Binary Optimization and Layout Tool" is able to re-arrange executables once profiled to generate even faster performance than what can be achieved by a compiler's LTO and PGO optimizations. One of the latest BOLT efforts has been on optimizing the Linux kernel image...

Earlier this month Intel engineers posted their initial Linux kernel enablement around x86 User Interrupts with this feature premiering with Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" CPUs. As implied by the name, the User Interrupt functionality allows for interrupts to bypass the kernel for more efficient, low-latency, low-utilization interrupts being received by other user-space tasks. Intel talked more about User Interrupts this week at LPC2021...

While the OpenZFS 2.1 feature release has been available since July, for those still using the OpenZFS 2.0.x series and not yet prepared to make the jump to that big new release with dRAID and other changes, OpenZFS 2.0.6 was released this week...

Building off yesterday's Wine 6.18 development release is now the next Wine-Staging installment that has more than six hundred extra patches on top...

Another item is now crossed off the XWayland TODO list with OpenGL sRGB support wired up...

Wine 6.18 has been popped as the newest bi-weekly development release of this software that allows Windows applications and games to run under Linux and in turn what also powers Steam Play's Proton...

Yesterday it was Epic Games confirming Easy Anti-Cheat for Linux and Wine/Proton ahead of the Steam Deck launch and today it's BattlEye confirming Proton / Steam Deck support...

IBM engineer Daniel Axtens presented at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference on the prospects of using the Rust programming language for creating modules for the GRUB2 boot-loader...

Coreutils 9.0 is now available and it's a significant update to this collection of common open-source utilities found on effectively all Linux systems...

A few weeks ago I finally received the HiFive Unmatched from SiFive as their flagship RISC-V development board. As a reminder this is their mini-ITX development board that is powered by their U740 SoC and features 16GB of DDR4 system memory, one PCI Express x16 slot that can work with AMD Radeon graphics cards on Linux, and other features. It's been a delight playing with this developer platform and enclosed are some early benchmarks as well showing off the U740 performance as well as how the Linux software support/performance has been evolving.

MidnightBSD 2.1 debuted this week as the latest version of one of the few desktop-focused BSD open-source operating system projects...

Canonical has released the final beta of next month's Ubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri" release...

With Chrome 94 having shipped this week, Google has now promoted Chrome 95 to beta...

As a follow-up to A Fix Is Pending For That Linux 5.15 Performance Regression, Linus Torvalds decided to pull the fix directly into Linux 5.15 Git today for addressing this real-world, measurable performance regression...

Not too surprising given the Steam Deck is inching closer towards release and we've known Valve has been working to improve the anti-cheat situation for games on Linux, but today EAC owner Epic Games officially announced Easy Anti-Cheat for both Linux and macOS...

The promising FUTEX2 work focused on improving the Linux performance for running Windows games via Wine/Proton by extending futex to wait on multiple locks is still moving forward...

Last week was the article on noticing various workloads performing slower on the Linux 5.15 development kernel. There is now a patch pending that in testing so far does indeed correct the performance drop on this forthcoming kernel.

Microsoft's "CLOn12" effort to allow OpenCL over DirectX 12 by leveraging Mesa now has landed a major rework to its code within Mesa...

Qing Zhao of Oracle presented yesterday during the LPC2021 GNU Tools Track around the work they and others have been engaged in for improving the security of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...

Most Linux distributions are currently coming up short from offering adequate security around full disk encryption and authenticated boot. Prominent Linux developer Lennart Poettering even argues that your data is "probably more secure if stored on current ChromeOS, Android, Windows or macOS devices."..

The latest batch of miscellaneous Direct Rendering Manager changes are on their way to DRM-Next for Linux 5.16. Notable from this new drm-misc-next batch is the new "panel-edp" driver...

Systemd-oomd as the out-of-memory daemon originally developed by Facebook has been maturing nicely since being merged last year and then its most notable deployment to date has been with Fedora 34's debut earlier this year. Anita Zhang of Facebook provided an update today on the systemd-oomd effort...

Valve today published a "Steam Deck FAQ" page sharing some additional information on this forthcoming Arch Linux powered handheld game system that will begin shipping at the end of Q4...

Google's Android had been notorious for all of its downstream patches carried by the mobile operating system as well as various vendor/device kernel trees while in recent years more of that code has been upstreamed. Google has also been shifting to the Android Generic Kernel Image (GKI) as the basis for all their product kernels to further reduce the fragmentation. Looking ahead, Google is now talking of an "upstream first" approach for pushing new kernel features...

Merged yesterday for Mesa 21.3 was open-source Vulkan ray-tracing for AMD RDNA2 / RX 6000 series GPUs with the RADV driver. Opened today now is a merge request that would provide Vulkan ray-tracing with RADV to pre-RDNA2 GPUs on this driver going back to the likes of Polaris, granted the performance is another story...

GNOME 41 is out as the latest half-year update to this open-source desktop environment...

Earlier this month AMD posted their initial public patches for the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver that leverages ACPI CPPC for ultimately aiming to provide better power efficiency and more responsive CPU frequency scaling / performance state decisions on Zen 3 (and Zen 2 eventually) processors. This is part of the effort around AMD and Valve collaborating for better Linux efficiency especially with the AMD-powered Steam Deck.

While the GNU Compiler Collection has supported OpenACC for a few years now as this parallel programming standard popular with GPUs/accelerators, the current implementation has been found to be inadequate for many real-world HPC workloads leveraging OpenACC. Fortunately, Siemens has been working to improve GCC's OpenACC kernels support...