Phoronix

KDE developers are trying to ensure the reliability of their desktop environment and thus they have recently begun a renewed effort on bug fixing. There is also talk of starting a KDE initiative focused on "15 minute bugs" for "embarrassing" issues that can be easily found within minutes. In any event, this week saw a lot of bug fixing in the KDE world...

Merged this Friday afternoon into the Linux 5.16 development kernel is fixing a performance issue affecting some Intel Alder Lake motherboards...

For those in the US, Happy Thanksgiving. As usual tradition for marking the US Thanksgiving and "Black Friday" / "Cyber Monday" start of the Christmas shopping season, I am once again running a Phoronix Premium special to help support site operations...

Intel's open-source engineers today released the Compute-Runtime 21.47.21710 as their latest update to this open-source compute stack for Linux systems enabling their graphics processors to enjoy performant OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support...

When running on the very latest Linux 5.16 Git kernel paired with recent Mesa and various experimental components to the virtualization stack, it is possible getting at least basic Vulkan acceleration working within QEMU guest virtual machines that in turn is accelerated by the host...

Those using the open-source AMD Radeon OpenGL driver "RadeonSI" on Linux the performance within the popular Minecraft game is about to be a lot better...

For those that happen to have older ASUS Transformer tablets powered by a NVIDIA Tegra SoC, the Linux 5.17 kernel cycle early next year is enabling a number of them to work off the mainline kernel...

LLVM developers have been working recently to land their new ThreadSanitizer run-time. The TSan as a reminder is the compiler instrumentation with associated run-time library for being able to detect data races...

FUTEX2 as in the new futex_waitv system call landed in Linux 5.16 back during the merge window for improving the efficiency of running Windows games on Linux for those that rely on Windows' WaitForMultipleObjects functionality with futex_waitv is now the ability to wait on multiple futexes. That new system call is now supported on more architectures with the next Linux 5.16 release candidate...

PHP 8.1.0 was just officially released as the latest annual feature update to this widely-used, server-side programming language...

Added to the Arch Linux install media back in April was Archinstall for easy and quick installations. It's worked very well for basic Arch Linux installs in a matter of minutes while with Archinstall 2.3 now available it has even more features...

Wireshark as the very useful and powerful open-source packet analyzer for networking and other communication protocols is out with a shiny new release...

With Mesa 21.3 having released last week and its first point release due next week, Mesa 21.2.6 has been published as likely the last update to that N-1 series for these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers...

Last week NVIDIA announced the Image Scaling SDK as an open-source, cross-platform GPU image upscaling implementation that with their own hardware makes use of DLSS. Following the brief exposure over the past week, NVIDIA Image Scaling SDK 1.0 has been formally christened...

It's been almost two months since Proton 6.3-7 released and two weeks since 6.3-8 RC while this evening that Proton 6.3-8 stable release is out for empowering Valve's Steam Play in running Windows games on Linux...

With Intel Tiger Lake mobile processors introduced last year there has been good open-source support going back to launch, but a few of the more niche features have seen slower than normal handling for getting the features supported by the upstream Linux kernel. The latest patch series being revived now is for Intel Key Locker support...

Alpine Linux 3.15 is out today as the newest feature update to this lightweight/embedded/containers focused Linux distribution known for its musl+Busybox usage along with OpenRC as the init system...

With AMD having published a new revision to their AMD P-State Linux CPU frequency scaling driver that they are working towards mainlining with a goal of better power efficiency on Linux, here are some initial benchmarks of that new patch series when using a Ryzen 5 5500U notebook.

A status update on Blender's "Cycles X" project was published today ahead of the upcoming Blender 3.0 release and with already some feature additions planned for Blender 3.1...

The Zhouyi AI accelerator was developed by Arm China and is found in some SoCs so far. An open-source Linux kernel driver is being worked on for it but unfortunately for now at least any mainline ambitions are immediately stalled over the lack of an open-source user-space/client...

Well known open-source Linux graphics expert David Airlie of Red Hat has recently been working on early Vulkan Video support for Mesa's Radeon "RADV" and Intel "ANV" drivers. As part of that effort and in part due to lack of software making use of Vulkan Video extensions right now, he has started exploring the feasibility of implementing the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) atop Vulkan Video...

An effort recently restarted that originally dates back many years is the "pvUSB" front-end driver for Linux to allow physical USB devices to be used within Xen domains...

The latest Linux kernel patches confirm that next-gen AMD Zen processors are capable of featuring up to twelve CCDs...

Out today is Vulkan 1.2.200 as the newest spec revision to the Vulkan graphics/compute API...

Given current memory pricing and extremely limited availability of DDR5 memory modules, many Phoronix readers have been requesting DDR4 vs. DDR5 memory benchmarks for Alder Lake on Linux. After picking up a DDR4 Z690 motherboard, here are some reference benchmarks between DDR4 and DDR5 when testing with the Core i5 12600K on Ubuntu Linux in a variety of real-world workloads.

Intel just released IGC 1.0.9289 as a huge update to their open-source Graphics Compiler used on Linux currently by their OpenCL/oneAPI Level Zero compute stack and also by Windows with their official driver...

Arcan as an open-source display server stack originally built atop a game engine and embracing VR/XR, and pushing forward on other new technologies is out with a new version...

Last week I wrote about a big TCP performance optimization having been queued up into net-next for Linux 5.17. That optimization can yield significant TCP throughput improvements especially with today's high-end 100Gb+ network hardware. There is now another separate juicy optimization to benefit the Linux network performance in the next kernel cycle...

Wayland Protocols 1.24 is out today as the latest revision to this official collection of the Wayland protocols/specifications. Notable with the 1.24 revision is the introduction of wp_linux_dmabuf_feedback...

While OpenPrinting is now leading development of the CUPS print server, PAPPL continues to be developed by CUPS founder Michael Sweet as a modern open-source printer application framework. PAPPL 1.1 as a big feature release is on the way...

Amazon Web Services has made Amazon Linux 2022 now publicly available in preview form as the newest version of their Linux distribution...

Libreboot 20211122 has been released as the downstream fork of Coreboot on providing fully free software boot firmware support...

British Linux PC vendor Star Labs now has support for their StarBook Mk V laptop upstreamed into Coreboot, which marks their second product having this achievement...

Last year with Intel "Tiger Lake" was the introduction of Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) for helping fend off return/jump-oriented attacks and as part of CET is hardware Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) support. There have been patch series working to implement CET's IBT support but after having gone through 30 rounds of review and not being merged, a new take on it was submitted today...

For those looking to assemble your own AMD EPYC 7002/7003 series 2P server or workstation, the ASRock Rack ROME2D16-2T we have been testing out for the past quarter and it's been holding up well across our daily benchmarking and other Linux and BSD tasks. The board has been working out very well and is currently available from retailers like NewEgg.

Microsoft's latest work in the area of open-source graphics drivers with the Mesa stack is for adding Direct3D 12 video acceleration support...

Going back two years already ASpeed developers have been working on prepping AST2600 support for Linux, their seventh generation server management processor / BMC. The latest open-source driver activity points to the AST2600 having DisplayPort support...

The Linux kernel continues to see improvements around ASUS laptop support on Linux, but the contributions have not been coming directly from the company but rather the community and sometimes after reverse-engineering...

IWD as the Intel-developed iNet Wireless Daemon that can serve as a replacement to the likes of WPA_Supplicant while integrating nicely with NetworkManager / systemd-networkd / ConnMan is out with a new version...

EROFS-Utils as the collection of open-source user-space utilities for the read-only EROFS file-system is out with a big update...

Linus Torvalds just issued the second release candidate of Linux 5.16 following the closure of the merge window last Sunday...

Going on for more than a half-decade now has been the effort around Linux Random Number Generator as a new /dev/random implementation for Linux. After more than five years, LRNG continues to work towards being mainlined and today marks the 43rd revision to these patches...

A set of more than two dozen patches by Google engineer Sean Christopherson overhauls KVM's x86/x86_64 TDP MMU zapping and flushing code...

For years LLVM has been working on a massive relicensing of its code-base but that effort is still ongoing as they are still trying to track down some past contributors to collect their sign-offs on the change...

Gluster 10 was released this past week as the open-source scalable/distributed network file-system led by Red Hat...

Well known AMD OpenGL open-source driver developer Marek Olšák managed to land yet more performance optimizations this week into Mesa 22.0...

As expected when writing about Wine 6.22 yesterday that the annual stable release dance was likely upon us, plans were laid out today for that Wine 7.0 release...

Even with the holidays ahead the KDE developers remain very busy improving their desktop software stack for Plasma 5.24 and other forthcoming component releases...

Picolibc as the open-source C library optimized for small embedded systems with limited RAM capacities is out with a new update...

With GCC 12 having added a new option to enable Straight Line Speculation "SLS" mitigation for x86/x86_64 CPUs, Linux kernel developers are preparing to enable this new compiler feature for further reducing undesirable speculation exposure...