Phoronix

Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 5.13-rc3 kernel as expected as the newest weekly test release of the forthcoming Linux 5.13...

As usual when getting my hands on a new processor family, I was curious about the performance difference if booting the Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" processors with the Spectre security mitigations disabled at run-time. Ultimately there was very little difference when using the standard "mitigations=off" option for these new Intel server processors...

With recently showing desktops and servers enjoying better performance on Ubuntu 21.04 through high end hardware like Xeon Ice Lake, you might be wondering what this means for mobile Linux performance... Here are some quick weekend benchmarks of the Dell XPS laptop with Core i7 1165G7 "Tiger Lake" on Ubuntu 20.10 versus 21.04...

The Forge rendering framework that picked up Vulkan and Linux support a few years back is out this week with a new release...

Libreboot as the Coreboot downstream focused on providing a fully open-source BIOS/firmware replacement without any black boxes / binary blobs is out with a new release. The prior tagged release of Libreboot was all the way back in 2016 while has now been succeeded by a new release albeit in testing form...

With CentOS Stream to be the upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux moving forward, a CentOS special interest group is being formed that is driven by Red Hat stakeholders in helping to ensure technically interesting CentOS Stream changes made by community members are evaluated and primed for inclusion into future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases...

It's sounding like a vendor is readying to publish a "big" new open-source driver, likely a GPU driver, for the Linux kernel...

GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines "HIG" are in the process of being updated around the GTK4 tool-kit and new components like libadwaita and libhandy...

There continues a lot of work going into Virgl for 3D guest acceleration with the open-source Linux virtualization stack as well as most recently Vulkan driver activity. However, much of that work driven by Google these days is focused on Chrome OS with "Crosvm" rather than the venerable QEMU...

A security module continues to be worked on for being able to detect and mitigate against fork/execute brute force attacks to Linux systems...

Following the introduction of KHamburgerMenu, the latest KDE user-interface element being introduced is KCommandBar for expert-focused, HUD-style pop-ups...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 has reached general availability (GA) status as the latest iteration of RHEL8...

Wine 6.9 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows applications and games on Linux and other Unix-like platforms...

Announced last year was the HiFive Unmatched as the most compelling RISC-V development board to date. Following supply chain issues and everything else brought on by the pandemic, this very interesting RISC-V developer board is now shipping to customers...

Earlier this week when posting Ubuntu 20.04 LTS / 20.10 / 21.04 benchmarks on the new Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" server processors, one of the first questions that came up was about how well these new 10nm server CPUs perform with Intel's own Clear Linux distribution. While Clear Linux releases have become much less frequent and far less to communicate these days on new improvements/optimizations among other ongoing shifts with that Intel open-source project, it is still performing very strongly with 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable hardware. CentOS in these tests also had a strong showing with the increasing performance focus on that front.

NVIDIA Linux users have been looking forward to the upcoming 470 driver series for better Wayland support but for those running GeForce GTX 600/700 series graphics cards, it will mean the end of the line for new feature driver releases with their proprietary driver stack...

One month ago the University of Minnesota was banned from contributing to the Linux kernel when it was revealed the university researchers were trying to intentionally submit bugs into the kernel via new patches as "hypocrite commits" as part of a questionable research paper. Linux kernel developers have finally finished reviewing all UMN.edu patches to address problematic merges to the kernel and also cleaning up / fixing their questionable patches...

AMD submitted another set of feature changes to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of this summer's Linux 5.14 cycle...

ARM server vendor Ampere Computing has been working on an SSIF BMC-side driver for the Aspeed ASTC2500 baseboard management controller that they are looking to upstream in the Linux kernel...

Intel's open-source team maintaining their graphics compiler (IGC) have issued a big update this week...

PipeWire continues to be on an upward trajectory for managing Linux audio/video streams and becoming a viable replacement now to PulseAudio and JACK on the Linux desktop...

Red Hat is already one of the leading employers of open-source graphics driver developers and other engineers working on the upstream Linux desktop graphics stack while they are adding even more...

PostgreSQL developers continue working on juicing the maximum performance possible out of this popular open-source SQL database server...

Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks looking at the compiler performance of GCC 11 vs. LLVM Clang 12 on the Intel Core i9 11900K "Rocket Lake" processor while in this article the same tests and same software are being carried out on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X "Zen 3" desktop. With these AMD Linux tests the Clang 12 compiler not only yielded the fastest binaries at -O2 but carried through in the more optimized configurations as well.

A few weeks ago we wrote about Mesa 21.x drivers with OpenGL threading causing issues for the "Trust Factor" within the popular game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Thanks to possible intervention by Gabe Newell, this trust factor issue seems now resolved for allowing these Linux gamers with open-source graphics drivers to play on the more competitive CS:GO servers...

A new patch series has been posted implementing Runtime Verification (RV) for the Linux kernel...

To no surprise at all, the X.Org Developers' Conference 2021 will be carried out virtually similar to last year given the COVID-19 pandemic. The free XDC2021 registration and call for presentations has now been issued...

One of the interesting performance-related kernel patch series to come about so far this year has been Google's multi-generational LRU framework that is promising to offer much better performance in addressing the kernel's expensive page reclaimation handling...

With the Linux 5.13 merge window past, Intel's open-source graphics driver developers have submitted their initial queue of new patches to DRM-Next of material they have ready ahead of the Linux 5.14 kernel cycle this summer...

For those that wait until the first point release of a new quarterly Mesa 3D driver stack feature release before upgrading, now is the time to move to the Mesa 21.1.1 series...

Seemingly by the minute today there are more free software projects leaving the Freenode IRC network and moving to alternative IRC networks or other chat platforms...

Mozilla detailed today how their year-long effort so far aiming to improve the stability of the Firefox web browser on Linux is paying off...

Ampere is going public today with a strategy and road-map update where they have now publicly acknowledged they are developing their own in-house server CPU cores.

While there is more to consider when choosing a Linux distribution than just the out-of-the-box performance, for those curious about the performance of recent Ubuntu releases for running with Intel's new 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" processors, here are some benchmarks showing how the performance has improved from Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS to Ubuntu 20.10 and now the recent Ubuntu 21.04 Linux release.

While the Nintendo Wii U game console is approaching a decade since launch and has already been discontinued for several years, work towards a mainline Linux kernel driver for properly supporting the Wii U gamepad continues...

A small patch merged to X.Org Server Git enables support for MIT-SHM shared memory pixmaps with XWayland...

POCL 1.7 is out as the newest version of this "Portable Computing Language" that aims to effectively allow OpenCL to run well on various CPU architectures as well as other targets like OpenCL over NVIDIA CUDA and AMD HSA...

Oracle on Tuesday released Solaris 11.4 SRU33 as the latest monthly stable release update for this largely idling operating system. With the thirty-third stable release update to Solaris 11.4 are delivering some arguably long overdue features...

WebGPU as a next-gen web standard for accelerated graphics and compute is stepping closer to reality with the first public working drafts having been published...

Google used their Google I/O conference today to introduce the first beta of the upcoming Android 12 mobile operating system...

Mike Blumenkrantz working under contract for Valve on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation continues making remarkable progress on this Mesa code...

Two years after KernelShark 1.0 for visualizing the Linux kernel's "trace-cmd" tracing, KernelShark 2.0 has now been realized...

While last week the NVIDIA 460.80 Linux driver was released with adding support for the RTX 3050 / RTX 3050 Ti laptop GPUs, today the NVIDIA 465.31 Linux driver debuted for officially bringing these new Ampere GPUs to this newer driver branch...

For those wondering how GCC and LLVM Clang are competing when running on Intel's latest Rocket Lake processors, here are some GCC 11 vs. LLVM Clang 12 compiler benchmarks with the Core i9 11900K running from the newly-released Fedora Workstation 34 featuring these very latest compilers. The compiler benchmarks were carried out at multiple optimization levels on each compiler.

More than a decade ago when the open-source graphics driver stack was being modernized with kernel mode-setting and better handling the stack for OpenGL, composited desktops and the like, TTM (Translation Table Maps) was born for managing GPU video RAM by the kernel Direct Rendering Manager drivers. While Intel initially expressed interest in TTM, they ultimately decided to create GEM as the Graphics Execution Manager for handling their video memory management needs. Now in 2021 with Intel aggressively pursuing discrete graphics, they are working on TTM support...

AMD has issued its newest AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver code drop today and with this update comes some new optimizations and improvements...

It's been a month and a half since AMD published a security analysis of their new Zen 3 "Predictive Store Forwarding" feature that while helping performance could theoretically lead to a new side-channel attack. While they published a Linux patch to allow disabling PSF if desired for increased security, to this day they remain in the works and have yet to be mainlined...

Back in 2007 Apple effectively acquired the open-source CUPS project and in 2017 then decided to no longer develop CUPS under the GPL but instead the Apache 2.0 license for this widely-used Unix/macOS/Linux print server. But then at the end of 2019 the CUPS lead developer left Apple and following that public development of CUPS seemingly halted. Fortunately, now there is a happy next chapter to the CUPS printing story...

The open-source Panfrost graphics driver stack that is now seeing support backed by Arm is going to see Mediatek MT8183 support with the upcoming Linux 5.14 kernel cycle this summer...

Google announced today the accepted projects/students for this year's Google Summer of Code. While for GSoC 2021 Google trimmed the length of this summer coding initiative and also cut the stipend amounts, there ended up being still a good turnout for this year with some interesting projects to be attempted...