Phoronix

After a quiet holiday period the Linux 5.16 kernel is set to be introduced as stable this Sunday. Here is a look at the sixteen most exciting features to find with Linux 5.16...

As part of the various end-of-year Linux comparisons that I've made a habit of over the past 17 years, with the EOY 2021 benchmarking I was rather curious to see how Intel's Clear Linux distribution has evolved Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" performance since that platform launched in Q2'2021. It turns out there have been some terrific optimizations squeezed out of that latest-generation Xeon Scalable platform on Intel's Clear Linux. In this article is a look at the Ubuntu and Clear Linux performance on the flagship Xeon Platinum 8380 2P reference server back around the time Ice Lake launched and then again using the latest software packages that closed out 2021.

For those assigning VFIO devices to guest virtual machines, the initialization/start-up process may soon be much faster with a set of patches volleyed by Oracle...

In preparation for Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors, Linux 5.16 adds support for Advanced Matrix Extensions. But that AMX bring-up is more invasive than when introducing AVX as with AMX the feature needs to be "requested" for use by user-space, among other changes. As such extra handling also needed to be introduced for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) that hadn't made it for v5.16 but now it looks like the AMX KVM support may be ready for mainline...

Longtime Linux users will likely recall when it was commonplace to modify /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* files for managing your network connections. Fortunately, that's largely a thing of the past and Fedora 36 is looking to remove support for those legacy network configuration files from new Fedora installs...

It looks like EXT4 with Linux 5.17 will finally be supporting the FS_IOC_GETFSLABEL and FS_IOC_SETFSLABEL ioctls that several other prominent file-systems have been supporting the past few years...

Recently there have been reports of some AMD Ryzen powered notebooks being unable to correctly suspend from resume in s2idle mode. It appears the issue ultimately stems from a firmware setting issue and a set of Linux patches were sent out today to address the condition...

Mutter landed a prominent addition today for GNOME 42: the Wayland compositor now supports the recently introduced DMA-BUF feedback extension...

After the many years now that AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has been seeing relentless optimizations for GCN and now RDNA GPUs paired with the fact more Linux games targeting Vulkan (or going through Direct3D to Vulkan), one might think in 2022 that the OpenGL driver optimization efforts would let up... But that doesn't appear to be the case with well known AMD RadeonSI developer Marek Olšák pursuing yet more optimizations...

2022 will hopefully be the year that PipeWire becomes commonplace on desktop Linux distributions for managing both audio/video streams. New PipeWire releases come quick in working to address remaining gaps in this Red Hat led solution and ensuring it can fulfill the use-cases previously handled by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK...

The AMD P-State driver that has been available in patch form since September and stems from AMD's collaborations with Valve around the Steam Deck will be introduced to mainline with the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel...

NVIDIA Reflex is an SDK for game developers for measuring and reducing rendering latency. But now there is an alternative, open-source implementation of those APIs that can work across drivers/vendors while still helping to reduce rendering latency: meet LatencyFleX...

Merged into the mainline Linux kernel a decade ago was the CleanCache patch series but now it's set to be retired...

The RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan drivers within Mesa 22.0 have now added an override for controlling the number of enabled compute units (CUs) for the graphics processor...

Last year Google quietly open-sourced the Graphics Flight Recorder (GFR) for sorting out GPU hangs and crashes. GFR is implemented as an implicit Vulkan layer that works on both Windows and Linux...

After taking a roughly month-long holiday, Mike Blumenkrantz -- who has been leading the work on Mesa's Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation for Valve -- is back at the game...

Google this afternoon promoted the Chrome 97 web browser to its stable series...

While most Linux gamers are making use of DXVK these days for efficiently mapping Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan when running Wine/Proton for enjoying Windows games on Linux, Wine developers still maintain WineD3D for going from Direct3D to OpenGL for cross-platform compatibility. Out today is a new patch series improving the WineD3D performance...

Intel is using CES 2022 to announce the 12th Gen Intel Core mobile processors led by the H-series processors, new 35-Watt and 65-Watt 12th Gen Core desktop CPUs, an updated Intel Evo specification, and an update on their DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics efforts.

As expected, NVIDIA has used its CES 2022 address to announce the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti albeit in brief form. The GeForce RTX 3050 was also announced...

AMD CEO Lisa Su is beginning her CES 2022 keynote right now. Lisa will be talking up the company's consumer wares for the year with a particular focus expected on the Ryzen 6000 series mobile "Rembrandt" processors and AMD CPUs with 3D V-Cache.

For software like Mozilla Firefox that relies on the cross-vendor Video Acceleration API (VA-API) for hardware GPU-based video decoding and doesn't support NVIDIA's proprietary NVDEC interface for video decoding, there is an in-development VA-API implementation that works atop NVIDIA NVDEC...

Back in 2020 Microsoft announced their "Pluton" security chip that woulld be coming to future AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm processors. The Pluton security processor is designed to improve the system security under Windows and now we find out that AMD's forthcoming Ryzen 6000 "Rembrandt" mobile processors will be the first featuring this security feature that may prove controversial to Linux/open-source fans...

Last week I called attention to the new "x86-android-tablets" driver being prepared for introduction in Linux 5.17. That driver aims to fix up the mess of various x86 Android-focused tablets failing to run off the mainline Linux kernel or having various device issues in doing so. Since that prior article, more patches have been posted to address additional tablet issues...

With more organizations such as Alibaba configuring their servers to share CPU cores/resources among applications these days rather than exclusively assigning CPU cores to individual applications/tasks, the Chinese company is proposing a new "group balancer" for the Linux kernel scheduler...

A decade old patch is set to be mainlined in the upcoming Linux 5.17 that has been carried by Google's Chrome OS kernel build for years and can help with security on Linux systems not relying upon systemd's udev...

It was nearly one year ago that Arm announced the Armv9 architecture as the successor to ARMv8 that was introduced a decade ago. Since then Arm has been working on adding Armv9 support to the open-source compilers such as GCC and LLVM/Clang. That initial Armv9 support has been in place for months now while on the LLVM/Clang today it received support for Armv9.3-A as the latest iteration...

Next month marks two years since AMD introduced the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-core / 128-thread processor. All of our testing of the 3990X on Linux over the past two years has been with the System76 Thelio Major, which continues holding up well with that US-assembled workstation with hand-crafted enclosure from Colorado. With System76 having recently released Pop!_OS 21.10 as the latest update to their Ubuntu Linux derived operating system and upcoming two year anniversary of the 3990X, it made for an interesting time to see how the performance of the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X and Radeon RX 5700 XT within that workstation has evolved.

Starting off a new year Intel's open-source compute stack developers have published the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) 1.0.9933 release that is used for their OpenCL / oneAPI Level Zero support on Linux and also used by their graphics driver on Windows...

One of the great successes for Arch Linux in 2021 was "archinstall" debuting on the Arch Linux install media as a convenient and quick installer for this enthusiast-minded Linux distribution. This year that easy Arch Linux installer is getting into even better shape...

A patch series sent out by IBM would introduce a new "LEGACY_PCI" Kconfig option for gating legacy PCI device support, including PCI devices attached to PCI-to-PCIe bridges and PCIe devices using legacy I/O spaces...

Well known KDE developer Nate Graham who publishes the weekly KDE desktop development summaries has published the 2022 road-map for what he sees as the major undertakings this year by this community-driven, open-source desktop environment...

The mdadm utility for managing Linux software RAID arrays is out with a new release -- its first in more than three years...

Longtime Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar posted a massive set of patches today: 2,297 patches that have been in the works since late 2020 and completely rework the Linux kernel's header file hierarchy. The goal of this "fast kernel headers" effort is to speed up kernel build times and also clean=up a lot of things in the proces to address the "dependency hell"...

Linux 5.16-rc8 is out today as a tiny holiday test candidate. If it weren't for the holidays, Linus Torvalds would have released the Linux 5.16 kernel today as stable but instead opted for an extra week of post-holiday testing...

It's coming a few days late due to New Year's, but Wine 7.0-rc4 is out as the latest weekly release candidate for this forthcoming yearly stable release. Wine 7.0 is the imminent feature update for this open-source software allowing Windows games/applications to run on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

In the mainline Linux kernel for a year now has been the Intel variable rate refresh (VRR) support for Gen12 / Xe Graphics and then with the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle that's being enabled for Gen11 Ice Lake graphics too. With the Intel i915 DRM kernel driver support for VRR/Adaptive-Sync being mature, the Intel Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan driver components are finally enabling the support by default...

Canonical is looking to capitalize on the renewed interest around Linux gaming and the raised prospects thanks to Valve's Steam Play allowing a growing number of compelling Windows games becoming playable on Linux...

The LLVM compiler stack saw record growth in 2021 both with the most amount of new code introduced in any single year as well as the most contributors per year this open-source project has ever seen. Even aside from the development metrics, LLVM had a pretty rocking 2021...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" now is making use of the common synchronization framework started by Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver developers to allow for more code sharing between the drivers...

A proposal for Fedora 36 is to implement Digest Lists Integrity Module "DIGLIM" functionality as an optional feature for effectively providing remote attestation and/or secure boot at the application level...

While the Linux 5.16 kernel release and in turn the Linux 5.17 merge window isn't happening for another week, the media subsystem pull request for v5.17 has already been mailed out with its various feature changes for this next cycle...

There were a ton of exciting kernel improvements merged in 2021 as well as introducing new hardware support and more. But for as exciting as the year was, it actually ticked lower than usual on both a commit and line count basis. Here is a look at some of the popular kernel topics in 2021 as well as a look at the yearly Git development statistics...

For those wanting to enjoy the F1 2021 racing game on Linux via Valve's Steam Play, it's slowly getting into good shape. The latest enhancement is on the Radeon Vulkan driver side with Mesa's RADV adding a workaround targeting the game...

Haiku as the open-source operating system in development for two decades as the inspirational successor to BeOS is kicking off 2022 by.... beginning to be able to run Windows applications via Wine. There is great progress being made in porting Wine to running on Haiku...

Since we are all about performance and numbers, here is a look at the 2021 statistics for OpenBenchmarking.org itself as the online complementary component to the Phoronix Test Suite...

Early in 2021 there was the inaugural release of LABWC as a stacking Wayland compositor that promoted itself as an alternative to Openbox. In kicking off the new year, LABWC 0.4 is now available...

KDE developers ended out 2021 with more Wayland session fixes coming for the Plasma 5.24 release. There was also nice user feature work like KIO-using applications such as Dolphin now properly dealing with non-user-owned locations...

It's now another year in the books and in just six months and a few days will mark 18 years since starting Phoronix.com and 14 years of developing the public, open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software...

Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media continues developing SVT-AV1 as the flagship CPU-based AV1 video encoder. With the next SVT-AV1 update there are performance optimizations as well as several new preset levels allowing for even greater performance. Here are some early benchmarks of that updated SVT-AV1.