Phoronix

July was a pretty damn exciting summer month amid the pandemic thanks to many interesting Linux software and hardware announcements...

SDL 2.0.16 is being prepared for release as the successor to SDL 2.0.14. Particularly for Linux users this SDL 2.0.16 update is significant with some key enhancements for this library that is common to multi-platform games and part of the Steam runtime...

Lutris 0.5.9-beta1 is out this Sunday as a rather significant update to this open-source Linux game manager. With this new version there are many new features for this centralized game launcher...

At the end of 2019 a rework to the Linux kernel's pipe code saw some of its logic reworked to only wake up readers if needed and avoid a possible thundering herd problem. But it turns out some Android libraries abused the functionality and this has led to broken Android applications when moving to recent kernels. While the user-space software is in the wrong, the kernel is sticking to its policy of not breaking user-space and as such Linus Torvalds has changed the code's behavior for Linux 5.14 and to be back-ported to prior stable kernels...

It's looking like the new NTFS file-system kernel driver developed by Paragon Software and over the past year revised more than two dozen times could be ready for mainlining in the kernel in about one month's time when the Linux 5.15 merge window opens. Everything is finally aligning and looking like the code is in good enough shape for its initial merging though not necessarily replacing the existing NTFS driver at this point...

As a weekend blast from the past, the Linux 5.14 kernel saw some Alpha CPU architecture updates -- including various fixes and the removal of an Alpha-specific binary loader for running a decades dated x86 software emulator...

For those looking to purchase a high-end Linux-friendly web camera for your home office or other environment, there are a few more options now compatible with Linux's fwupd if interested in having the capability of updating the camera firmware under Linux...

The real-time (RT) patches for the Linux kernel still appear a ways off from mainline but at least there is movement on this important patch series for embedded and other use-cases needing real-time support...

While KDE on Wayland has generally enjoyed good HiDPI support, it's now taken until 2021 for KDE's X11 HiDPI support to be in a position of greater usability after evolving over the years...

What started off as Lindows twenty years ago as an easy-to-use Linux-based operating system with great Wine integration and easy application support but then changed to Linspire following a Microsoft lawsuit has had quite a journey. PC/OpenSystems LLC revived Linspire after a multi-year gap following the closure of Xandros and since then it's been a rather peculiar platform. Today they are now shifting focus once again...

Wine developers have popped open a new bi-weekly development snapshot of this software that allows Windows games/applications to run on Linux and macOS along with being what powers Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and CodeWeavers' CrossOver...

Intel's Compute-Runtime stack for providing open-source OpenCL and Level Zero compute for their graphics hardware under Linux is out with a new release...

For those making use of Radeon graphics on Linux with an X.Org-based environment and not using the generic xf86-video-modesetting DDX but rather than the xf86-video-amdgpu driver, AMD today put out a rare update to that diminishing driver component...

AMD driver engineers have submitted their latest batch of AMDGPU feature updates to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the Linux 5.15 merge window opening up in about one month's time. With this latest pull request the big addition is the new "Cyan Skillfish" GPU support...

VMware has found the Linux 5.13 kernel that was released as stable one month ago has led to a serious performance regression for their ESXi enterprise hypervisor...

Years ago particularly when the open-source Linux GPU drivers were in their infancy it was known in some cases having to fake/spoof the GPU driver name or model in order to workaround artificial bugs / problematic code paths targeted to a particular OpenGL driver or even to achieve greater performance. With a new Mesa merge request called "Unleash the dragon!", this is still very much a problem in 2021 even now in the Android space...

For those wondering what has been going on in the Xubuntu camp for this Xfce desktop spin of Ubuntu, a Xubuntu 21.10 development update was shared concerning package changes and other happenings...

Following last week's release of Chrome 92, Google has now made available the Chrome 93 beta as the next iteration of their cross-platform web browser...

In addition to the AOCC compiler for Zen CPUs, another LLVM/Clang downstream maintained by AMD is the AOMP compiler as where they host their various patches not yet merged around Radeon OpenMP offloading support. This week marked the release of AOMP 13.0-5 as their latest work on that front for the newest OpenMP GPU offloading capabilities...

AMD just lifted the embargo on the Radeon RX 6600 XT, its newest entry in their RDNA2 line-up and optimized for delivering a superior 1080p gaming performance against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 series. The RX 6600 XT isn't hitting retail availability until August and that is when we'll be able to publish benchmarks, but for now here is an overview of this new graphics card launching at the $379 price point.

Valve just pushed out a rather significant Steam beta update for gamers across Windows, macOS, and Linux...

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz is known for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation but recently has also been engaged in some of the Lavapipe software Vulkan driver work and related to that is the venerable LLVMpipe OpenGL Gallium3D driver. Needless to say, there's some interesting work happening...

Those having to deal with data stored on NTFS partitions from Linux have been eagerly awaiting the "NTFS3" kernel driver that Paragon Software has been working now for a year to upstream into the Linux kernel. No pull request has been sent in yet but the twenty-seventh spin of this driver was published today...

Following the recent benchmarks seeing how AMD's new AOCC 3.1 compiler has brought some performance improvements over the prior AOCC 3.0 release that introduced initial Zen 3 optimizations, here are some benchmarks looking at how that latest AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler performance compares to the upstream LLVM Clang 12 compiler for which it is based as well as against GCC 11 as the latest GNU compiler release that remains common to Linux systems.

Manjaro 21.1 is on the way as the newest release of this Arch Linux based operating system that is popular for its desktop ease of use...

While solidly into the "fixes" stage of Linux 5.14 kernel development, the x86 platform driver pull request this week -- which has already been merged to mainline -- does have some new additions worth mentioning...

RenderDoc continues maturing gracefully as the leading frame-capture based graphics debugging system for OpenGL / Direct3D / Vulkan across all major operating systems as well as some consoles...

Last month I wrote about a possible global counter for block/disk changes on Linux being discussed by Microsoft and systemd developers to better track changes via a system-wide monotonically increasing number as an alternative to the existing per-disk tracking. That functionality is now queued up as part of the block subsystem changes ahead of the Linux 5.15 merge window in a few weeks...

The Mesa release train continues at full speed ahead for these open-source Linux graphics driver components...

Intel's open-source "Iris" Gallium3D driver for providing modern OpenGL driver support on their graphics hardware from Broadwell through all current Gen12 / Xe Graphics era hardware has been in great shape for some time and works wonderfully. But Intel's not done furthering this Linux OpenGL driver and today they now have threaded shader compilation merged...

OPNsense as the FreeBSD/HardenedBSD-based firewall and routing platform long ago forked from pfSense is out with its newest major release...

Less than one month since Open 3D Engine was announced based on Amazon's Lumberyard engine, the Linux support is nearly in a pleasant state...

The work going on for over a year to optionally flush the L1 data cache on context switching is going to try again for the next kernel cycle as an opt-in feature for select tasks. This was the feature rejected last year by Linus Torvalds that went on to "beyond stupid" and other concerns about it when it was trying to be mainlined originally...

While the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX performance is great on Linux once overcoming any laptop support quirks like with the ASUS ROG Strix G15 "AMD Advantage" laptop running into keyboard and WiFi issues on Linux depending upon the kernel version, how does the performance compare to Microsoft Windows 10? Here are some benchmarks of that ROG Strix G15 AMD laptop under Windows 10 as shipped by ASUS against Ubuntu 21.04 when upgraded to the Linux 5.13 stable kernel.

FreeRDP as a leading open-source implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol is up to version 2.4 and exciting about this release is multi-threaded decoding support...

A lot of new code landed yesterday in the Btrfs file-system's "for-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 5.15 merge window opening up in about one month's time...

While PipeWire continues on a nice upward trajectory for fulfilling the roles of PulseAudio and JACK along with other audio/video stream management needs, PulseAudio isn't letting up yet and on Tuesday saw its big version 15.0 release...

GCC 11.2 is now available as the latest stable version of the GNU Compiler Collection...

The open-source Mesa RADV driver for independent Radeon Vulkan driver support on Linux has been working towards supporting ray-tracing for months. Progress is being made with the latest being more test cases passes and even the Quake II RTX game rendering correctly, but the performance is far short of being satisfactory yet...

Following the formation of the Open 3D Foundation and their open-source IBM-led work around watering farms from the cloud, the Linux Foundation's newest effort is around trying to enhance firefighter safety with open-source...

Apache Cassandra 4.0 is finally available as the latest major feature release to this widely-used NoSQL database management system...

The NVMe specification provides for an abrupt shutdown mode over the normal/safe shutdown command if needing to quickly get the NVMe solid-state storage ready for powering off as quickly as possible. Currently the Linux kernel isn't making use of the NVMe abrupt shutdown command but a proposal by Micron is looking to begin its usage...

Last week AMD released their AOCC 3.1 compiler that is their downstream of LLVM Clang/Flang and carrying various yet-to-be-upstreamed patches for benefiting their latest processors. While just a point release, curiosity got the best of me for firing up benchmarks of this latest AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler release.

There is the phenomenon on Linux where when double-buffered rendering and missing vblanks can lead to the GPU running at a lower frequency when instead the opposite should happen so it will try to not miss vblanks in the first place. In the past there's been talks of "boost" support in the GPU drivers or also workarounds from user-space like dynamic triple buffering, but sent out this week is a new proposal around DMA-Fence deadline awareness as another means of addressing this problem...

Going on for more than one year now is the effort for supporting KVM virtualization with the RISC-V architecture, which is very much important for RISC-V processors to be able to eventually take lift in the server space. The KVM RISC-V enablement work is now up to its nineteenth revision but not yet clear if it's ready for mainlining...

Google engineers and other parties are interested in being able to create swap spaces on Linux systems that would be reserved just for system suspend/hibernation purposes and not for generic swapping to disk...

For those making use of Radeon GPUs for H.264 encoding on Linux, the open-source Mesa driver stack for VCN hardware has just merged support for handling H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) / temporal encoding...

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is back with another webcast following his update in March that focused on the new Intel Foundry Services, new US fabs, and more. Today's event is "Intel Accelerated" and offering an update on the company's IDM 2.0 process and packaging...

It turns out there is actually people running modern versions of the Linux kernel in 2021 that also are using floppy disks...

The Eclipse Foundation has released OpenJ9 as the latest version of their high performance virtual machine that continues advancing four years after IBM donated the original J9 code...