Phoronix

For those running Linux MD RAID10 arrays you may have found the performance around discard requests such as when running MKFS and FSTRIM operations to be rather slow... Well, with Linux 5.13 it will be lightning fast...

Google's open-source SwiftShader has been supporting a software-based Vulkan implementation for some time, building off its prior OpenGL / GLES and D3D9 support. While SwiftShader's Vulkan implementation has received heavy investment and attention from Google, it turns out Mesa's Lavapipe software implementation is beginning to pull ahead...

Intel's latest addition to Mesa 21.1 with their "ANV" Vulkan driver is... A null hardware layer...

Besides Valheim, there hasn't been much in the way of native Linux game releases recently to really get excited about with much of the activity these days being through Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux. But in April there will be at least two high profile native Linux game releases...

This week marked the hard feature freeze for QEMU 6.0 along with the tagging of QEMU 6.0-rc0. The QEMU 6.0 release should happen around the end of April for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Launched last week with the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors was the AOCC 3.0 code compiler as AMD's downstream of LLVM Clang with various patches now catering to optimized for Zen 3. Last week some preliminary benchmarks of AOCC 3.0 on the Ryzen 9 5950X were carried out to good results. Since then I have begun putting AOCC 3.0 through its paces on a AMD EPYC 7003 series server to overall great results.

Panfrost has been the Gallium3D driver providing open-source OpenGL for Arm Mali Bifrost and Midgard GPus while now "PanVK" is in development as an open-source Vulkan driver...

While Intel is well known and loved for their generally very timely open-source hardware enablement under Linux, occasionally there are exceptions to that long-standing tradition of having the support squared away ahead of product launches. One of the areas where Intel has been slow at enabling their open-source Linux support is around their Gaussian and Neural Accelerator (GNA) but that driver is now coming together for being mainlined hopefully in the near future...

Besides Linux kernel developers still working to optimize code due to Retpolines overhead three years after Spectre rocked the ecosystem, another area kernel developers have still been actively working on is core scheduling for controlling the behavior of what software can share CPU resources or run on the sibling thread of a CPU core. That core scheduling work is finally closer to the mainline Linux kernel...

The Generic USB Display Driver "GUD" has just been sent in as part of the latest DRM-Misc-Next material to DRM-Next which in turn will land for Linux 5.13. The Generic USB Display Driver is nifty and allows for opening up possibilities like turning a Raspberry Pi Zero into a USB to HDMI display adapter among other fun use-cases...

When it comes to open-source Arm Mali graphics on Linux, the Panfrost Gallium3D driver is what's talked about the most given that it's for supporting newer generations of Mali graphics hardware. But the Lima Gallium3D driver effort remains ongoing for supporting older Mali 400/450 series hardware...

Last week there were a few round of Zen 3 compiler patches published and quickly merged into the GCC 11 compiler code-base ahead of its imminent release, This week there is some new activity albeit fixes for this new "Znver3" target...

For those that tend to wait until at least the first point release before moving to a new Mesa feature release, Mesa 21.0.1 is out today while Mesa 20.3.5 was also released as the last of that Q4'2020 driver series...

Announced nearly three years ago by NVIDIA as one of their open-source projects was the DALI library for GPU-accelerated data augmentation and image loading. The DALI library today reached the v1.0.0 milestone...

Intel's VA-API library (libVA) is out with a new end-of-quarter release for this open-source Linux video acceleration interface...

In addition to AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors offering fantastic performance, another important highlight for these new Zen 3 server processors is SEV-SNP for upping the Secure Encrypted Virtualization capabilities. AMD has been offering SEV "Secure Nested Paging" patches via a GitHub repository while now they are working towards mainlining this feature for the Linux kernel...

While the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source OpenGL driver for Linux systems is very well received and generally outperforming the proprietary AMD OpenGL driver on Linux/Windows and performing very strong against NVIDIA's proprietary OpenGL driver too, it's not game over for this older graphics API and AMD is still working to lower the CPU overhead even further for this open-source code...

The big GNOME 40 desktop update is now available...

AMD today released their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q1 driver packages for Windows and Linux systems...

Raised during the recent discussion over looking at removing Mesa's classic drivers from the mainline tree this year is that there still exists an effort trying to create an Intel Gallium3D driver for older pre-Broadwell graphics currently only served by the i965 classic driver. That Crocus effort continues to be worked on but isn't yet mainline...

AOMedia libaom 3.0.0 was released on Tuesday by Google engineers as this reference AV1 video encoder...

While Microsoft often likes to proclaim their "love" for Linux, it's been independent open-source developer Maximilian Luz that has been spearheading improvements for Microsoft Surface devices on Linux. With Linux 5.13 his latest work on better handling Microsoft Surface device detachment handling should land...

Right now when it comes to Motorola 68000 "m68k" emulation with Linux the most powerful target is the Quadra 800 that is limited to just 1GB of RAM and specific interfaces. But on the way is the new "Virtual M68k Machine" that is much more powerful...

ROCm 4.0 released back in December with "CDNA" GPU support while now ROCm 4.1 has been released as the newest quarterly feature release to this open-source Radeon compute stack focused primarily on HPC/data-center needs...

Nokia Bell Labs announced today that the copyright to the Plan 9 operating system software has been transferred to the Plan 9 Foundation for all future development of this novel distributed operating system that originated in the 80's...

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is hosting a webcast to provide an update on the company's manufacturing and other engineering efforts...

Manjaro 21.0 is out today as the newest feature release to this popular desktop Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux...

Now that Xfce 4.16 has been out for a while after successfully hitting its one-year release cycle goal and some maintenance updates to Xfce 4.16 have been made, planning for Xfce 4.18 is beginning...

Mozilla Firefox 87.0 is out today as the newest release of this open-source, cross-platform web browser...

Consulting firm Igalia continues working on the open-source Broadcom V3DV Mesa Vulkan driver that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and later SBCs. Since reaching Vulkan conformance they have continued working on further enhancing the performance of this driver...

Fedora 34 Beta is out today as the march is on towards this latest installment of this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution...

Published back in January was the initial work on a HMM-based SVM memory manager for the open-source Radeon compute stack. A second version of that work is now available as it continues working towards the mainline kernel...

Excitement is building around initial support for the Rust language within the Linux kernel that arrived in Linux-Next and is now seeing more developer interest...

They are a bit late in doing so, but Ubuntu developers are working to figure out if it makes sense to run FSCK "file-system check" at boot time. It turns out Ubuntu Server and other Ubuntu installations making use of their Curtin installation component haven't enabled the functionality for FSCK at boot but now they are (re)visiting the matter...

Shells.com is a "personal cloud computer" that makes it possible to have a remote secure desktop from the browser whether it be running on a smartphone, tablet, smart TV, or other device. They have been supporting a number of different Linux distributions while more continue to be on the way...

With Mesa 21.0 released earlier this month following a one month delay, the Mesa 21.1 release calendar has now been published for that next quarterly feature release...

It's been proposed in the past but never acted upon yet but the idea of dropping/retiring Mesa's "classic" OpenGL drivers from the mainline code-base and letting them potentially live on in an "LTS" branch has once again been brought up...

With some Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards sporting a USB-C interface for USB-C monitors or VR headsets, AMD has been working on the open-source Linux driver support for this interface...

In addition to the last minute AMD Zen 3 "znver3" tuning in GCC 11, also landing rather late are scheduling updates for the GNU Compiler Collection around the IBM POWER10 processor target...

Announced back in 2019 was the OpenPOWER Microwatt FPGA Soft CPU Core. OpenPOWER's Microwatt is a VHDL-based design for an open-source POWER ISA processor. core. The Microwatt is a basic 64-bit POWER core that can be run for software simulations or on FPGA hardware. But now Microwatt will actually see chip fabrication thanks to a program sponsored by Google...

Of the many possible areas for advancing Linux and open-source, the latest project being embraced by the Linux Foundation is Liquid Prep for helping farmers water their crops. It's a noble cause but not too Linux centered unless talking about cloud resources...

One week ago AMD introduced the EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors while this morning Intel has made public when they will be formally introducing their 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors...

Following last week's release of the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card and Radeon Software for Linux 20.50, the new "Navy Flounder" microcode required for this GPU to function with the open-source AMDGPU Linux driver stack has been published...

It's looking like the Linux 5.13 kernel will better support some Thrustmaster wheels due to new driver code providing for proper USB device initialization...

Vulkan 1.2.173 is out this morning as the latest revision to this high performance graphics/compute API...

FreeCAD 0.19 was released this weekend as the newest major feature release for this respected open-source CAD solution / parametric 3D modeling solution...

The fourth weekly release candidate to Linux 5.12 is now available for testing ahead of its anticipated stable release next month...

While Razer has talked up Linux support in the past, so far they have not officially offered Linux support for their range of wares popular with gamers. However, thanks to the open-source community there has been the likes of OpenRazer offering up support for the company's keyboards, mice, and other peripherals under Linux thanks to reverse engineering. Today marks the release of OpenRazer 3.0 for furthering this effort...

In addition to the legacy IDE driver code ready to go from the mainline Linux kernel, receiving its final death sentence now is also the WiMAX support...

It's been three years that Retpolines (return trampolines) have been around as part of the Spectre defenses on Linux and kernel developers in particular are still working to better optimize different areas of their code to deal with the performance overhead incurred...