Microsoft and systemd developers are proposing a global counter for block device changes for the Linux kernel to better track changes and having a unique system-wide number for disk and other block device changes rather than on a per-disk basis...
Back in April was the last time we saw much XeHP specificc ode land in the open-source Mesa driver code while this week there was a fresh batch of code merged...
With this autumn's Fedora 35 release there should be better performance out-of-the-box for those employing LUKS/dm-crypt encryption while using 4K sector size based storage...
Linux 5.13 will debut tomorrow if Linus Torvalds is comfortable with the state of the code-base, which in turn will mark the opening of the Linux 5.14 merge window. Here is a look at what is on the table for this next follow-on version of the Linux kernel...
While some Huawei engineers are currently facing criticism for submitting superfluous kernel patches in an effort to boost their own or the company's standing in the kernel community, other engineers at Huawei are working on more substantive kernel patches. Here's a rather peculiar new patch series out on Friday where a Huawei engineer is effectively proposing an in-kernel transactional database...
Even with Akademy 2021 this week as the annual KDE developer conference, thanks in part to it being a virtual event the KDE developers still managed to remain quite productive on new code changes...
Coreboot making progress on its temporary RAM initialization code (cache as RAM) means that its usage of the FSP-T binary blob is increasingly unnecessary...
Earlier this month were benchmarks looking at GCC 11 performance with varying optimization levels and features like link-time optimizations. Stemming from reader requests, here are now similar reference benchmarks off LLVM Clang 12.0 on the same system with going from -O0 to -Ofast and toggling -march=native and LTO usage.
Earlier this month systemd 249-rc1 arrived with a variety of new features and improvements. Now for closing out the month is a second release candidate...
If all is looking well on Sunday, Linus Torvalds will be releasing Linux 5.13 as stable rather than going with a 5.13-rc8 test release and pushing the final version back by an additional release. In either case, Linux 5.13 is coming out soon and with many new features in tow...
Among the many projects under the GNU umbrella, the GNU Health official project has been about working on the libre digital health ecosystem and their most recent effort is on MyGNUHealth as an effort around libre personal health records...
Following the announcement this week that AMD is dropping pre-Polaris GPU support (or pre-Raven Ridge support for APUs) from their mainline Radeon Software driver on Windows, the AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver has also now similarly discontinued that older GPU support...
Since Crocus was merged into mainline Mesa last week we have been looking at benchmarks of this new open-source Intel Gallium3D driver designed exclusively for older Intel graphics hardware (i965 Gen4 through Haswell Gen7, plus Cherrvyiew and experimental Gen8 Broadwell) compared to the existing open-source i965 classic driver. Prior articles have looked at the quite good performance with Haswell while Sandy Bridge is in somewhat rough shape. Today's testing is going in the middle and looking at the Crocus vs. i965 OpenGL driver performance for Ivy Bridge with the once great Core i7 3770K.
For those wondering about the recent skyrocketing in LVFS/FWUPD usage for Linux firmware updates, it appears to be attributed to Dell pushing out a massive number of updates with more than one hundred models impacted by newly-disclosed BIOS/UEFI vulnerabilities...
As expected this morning Microsoft officially lifted the curtain on Windows 11 as the latest evolutionary step to their operating system past Windows 10...
Amazon today launched AWS BugBust as a global coding challenge where they are hoping to see one million software bugs addressed and to reduce technical debt by over $100 million USD...
As part of Google's latest work on trying to enhance open-source software security, months after starting their own open-source vulnerability database they are now looking to push an open-source vulnerability interchange schema to make it easier to exchange information on vulnerabilities and making it easier for automated analysis...
With the latest mainline Git kernel as well as the newest stable point releases as of Wednesday, a Spectre issue with the kernel's BPF subsystem has been addressed...
Alibaba engineers are looking to mainline an x86_64 tuned version of the SM4 cipher that with making use of AVX and AES-NI can allow for a dramatic performance speed-up...
Valve's Dota 2 game is the latest adding support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution and the first time having a Linux-native game support FSR for enhanced image upscaling...
With the KVM code set to be merged in the coming weeks for the Linux 5.14 kernel, support for fast XMM hypercalls is coming for its Hyper-V guest support in allowing for some performance benefits...
It's been three months since AMD published a security whitepaper outlining the possibility of a side channel attack with PSF. The Predictive Store Forwarding functionality is new to AMD Zen 3 (Ryzen 5000 / EPYC 7003 series) processors and as part of their security analysis they are allowing users the ability to opt-out of using this feature in the name of greater security but the feature still hasn't been picked up for the mainline Linux kernel...
While Valve has been working on Vulkan-based rendering for Source Engine games by making use of DXVK for translating the game engine's native Direct3D calls to the Vulkan API, with some yet-to-be-merged Mesa patches around Gallium Nine there is much better performance to see with Gallium Nine at least for the RadeonSI driver...
Ubuntu maker Canonical has partnered up with the Blender Foundation to offer paid enterprise support around the long-term support versions of Blender...
The Qt Company has announced the debut of Qt 6.2 Alpha as it prepares for its September release with many more modules finally making the transition from Qt5 to Qt6...
Last week Valve introduced Vulkan rendering support for Left 4 Dead 2. The L4D2 Vulkan support is similar to that of Portal 2 where DXVK is being leveraged for translating the Direct3D calls to Vulkan rather than relying on their OpenGL translations. For those wondering what this means for L4D2 performance on Linux with modern GPUs, here are some benchmarks of Left 4 Dead 2 when testing the OpenGL and Vulkan rendering options.
Landing in mainline Mesa 21.2 development code last week was the "Crocus" Gallium3D driver for old Intel hardware spanning from the Intel 965 chipset days "Gen4" up through Crocus supporting Haswell "Gen7" graphics. The i965 to Haswell span has been the focus since the official Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver already in Mesa supports the Broadwell "Gen8" up through all current Intel UHD/Xe Graphics. But now Crocus with the latest Mesa code has added Gen8 support...
Even though Vulkan ray-tracing support on Intel graphics hardware isn't coming until Xe HPG avaiability, Intel's Linux graphics driver developers have been preparing since last year. In preparation for the Xe HPG launch, Intel's open-source talent have for many months already been preparing the Vulkan ray-tracing functionality wither another batch of code being merged today...
While in the past we have seen Intel CPU microcode updates lead to measurable performance differences on multiple occasions, this month's CPU microcode update doesn't end up being all that concerning for real-world performance...
NVIDIA announced yesterday they would be releasing DLSS Linux support tomorrow and indeed they have delivered on that first milestone of Deep Learning Super Sampling support for Linux gamers. NVIDIA has published their first 470 driver series beta in the form of the NVIDIA 470.42.01 build...
AMD today released FidelityFX Super Resolution that was announced earlier this month at Computex. Today it's Windows-only with no Linux support being introduced. FidelityFX Super Resolution is open-source but the code drop will not be until next month...
For those wondering how well the likes of FreeBSD 13.0 and DragonFlyBSD 6.0 performance on AMD's EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors launched earlier this year, here are some initial benchmarks of those BSDs alongside a few Linux distributions. With recently having a Tyan 1U server in the lab with EPYC 7543 32-core processor, I've been running a number of BSD benchmarks on it given these recent BSD releases have been running well on this 1P server.
AMD has shifted all their graphics processors and APUs prior to Polaris / GCN 1.4 to being legacy and will not be supported by their new Radeon Software Adrenalin releases...
The Haiku open-source operating system inspired by BeOS has been in development since 2001. It took until September 2018 for the Haiku R1 Beta and then last summer was succeeded by Haiku R1 Beta 2. Now a year later the third beta for this inaugural release is now approaching...
Google engineers have prepared a set of Linux kernel patches allowing for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) / SEV-ES encrypted state to allow for local migration support of these encrypted virtual machines on the same host...
NVIDIA announced earlier this month that they would be bringing DLSS to Linux / Steam Play and tomorrow they will be introducing that initial driver support...
Merged this past week was Crocus as the new open-source Intel Gallium3D driver developed by the community and used for Gen4/i965 through Gen7/Haswell generations of Intel graphics. This week I ran some Crocus benchmarks on Intel Haswell comparing against the existing i965 classic Mesa DRI driver while in this article are some comparison driver benchmarks using Intel Sandy Bridge graphics for those still running those once popular processors.
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