Phoronix

Merged into Mesa 22.1-devel this morning is Kopper, a big improvement particularly for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver code...

Last year Fedora developers and users were discussing the packaging of ROCm components to make it easier to deploy this Radeon open-source GPU compute stack. Five months later, some of the Radeon Open eCosystem components have made it into Fedora for easier installation but the HIP and OpenCL front-ends to ROCm haven't yet been successfully packaged...

Linux 5.18 is bringing many random/RNG improvements thanks to the work of kernel developer Jason Donenfeld. One of the changes though that had to be backed out during the merge window was trying to get /dev/random and /dev/urandom to behave exactly the same. While reverted for now with the 5.18 code, Donenfeld has prepared a change that should get it into good shape for major architectures with the next kernel cycle...

We are less than one week out from the Linux 5.18 merge window having ended and already the first pull request of "drm-misc-next" material has been submitted to DRM-Next for staging until the Linux 5.19 cycle rolls around in late May...

Google engineer Yu Zhao has sent out the "v10" patches of the MGLRU Linux kernel feature for enhancing system performance and especially for providing a better experience in dealing with system memory pressure...

As a Linux kernel change for benefiting AMD CPUs going back to Zen 1 and for matching behavior Intel has had in place since the Core 2 times, AMD submitted a patch for having the Linux kernel use the MWAIT instruction instead of HALT for when the system isn't using the CPU idle driver either for C-states being disabled by the BIOS or the driver not part of the kernel build. In turn this can lead to around a 21% improvement in exit latency on affected systems...

Here is a combination not normally expected... Microsoft engineers have submitted patches for review enabling AMD GPU hot-plugging support with the Radeon "AMDGPU" Linux kernel driver...

At the end of March Ubuntu 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish" successfully transitioned from the former Mesa 21.3 series to Mesa 22.0 as the current stable series for these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers. There are also a few changes to mention with Ubuntu 22.04's Mesa support this LTS cycle...

Back in February AMD engineers sent out a "request for comments" on x2APIC virtualization (x2AVIC) support. Those patches have now been refined beyond the RFC state and sent out today as a patch series for further review on the Linux kernel mailing list...

Tachyum is a startup working on "the world's first universal processor" that can be used from AI to HPC to hyperscale computing needs. The Tachyum processor aims to replace the needs of discrete TPUs / GPUs / XPUs into a single homogeneous processor architecture. While still running as an emulated platform, Tachyum has announced that in addition to Linux they have managed to boot and run FreeBSD on their ISA...

Ahead of the upcoming Mesa 22.1 feature freeze, the Mesa Vulkan drivers both big and small have been preparing merge requests for wiring up a number of recently introduced Vulkan extensions...

A new Wayland protocol has been proposed for dealing with fractional scaling of surfaces that paired with wp_viewport can be used for achieving fractional scaling...

It had been over one month since the last AMDVLK code drop while now has been succeeded by a new AMDVLK version bring one new extension and several fixes...

Hitting the mainline Linux Git tree today was a rather interesting fix... It turns out that when Linux was resuming from S3 suspend, it wasn't correctly restoring the MSRs for the boot CPU around handling speculative execution mitigations...

While there are many new features with Linux 5.18 with its merge window having just ended days ago, feature code is already beginning to accumulate within the various "-next" branches for what will be Linux 5.19 this summer. Patches merged today get AMD Branch Sampling (BRS) functionality in place for Zen 3 processors with that next kernel cycle...

For the Fedora 37 release later this year the developers are looking at deprecating legacy BIOS support and making UEFI a requirement for x86_64 systems...

While in early access since last year, today Epic Games has officially announced the release of Unreal Engine 5...

AMD on Monday began shipping the Ryzen 5 5500 as a ~$159 USD processor in the Zen 3 family. The Ryzen 5 5500 offers 6 cores / 12 threads with a 65 Watt TDP rating in making for a fairly robust offering for its low price point. I've had the Ryzen 5 5500 in the lab the past few days and in this article are some initial benchmarks seeing how this mid-range processor performs.

Vulkan 1.3.211 is out today and comes with another new extension for helping implementations like Mesa's Zink for implementing the OpenGL API atop Vulkan...

Fwupd 1.7.7 is out this morning as the newest version of this open-source firmware updating solution that pairs with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for allowing robust BIOS/firmware updating under Linux...

Mozilla is officially shipping Firefox 99 today and the last feature release before next month's Firefox 100 milestone...

On top of other recent RADV ray-tracing improvements, there is another recently opened merge request pending that can dramatically help some Vulkan ray-tracing workloads with much better performance...

With Fedora 36 working its way towards release later this month, more developer attention and planning is turning to Fedora 37 that will be released this autumn. One of the changes being talked about this week is for signing RPM contents for a means of trusting the files that are executed...

AMD engineers on the ROCm team have released AOMP 15.0-0 on Monday as the newest version of their Radeon OpenMP compiler code. It also turns out they are working on another Radeon GPU compute compiler called "AFAR"...

Formed last year was the CentOS Hyperscale SIG for back-porting major package versions and other features back to CentOS and other interesting features for modern enterprise environments...

GNOME developer Chris Davis has laid out plans for at least some of the work items he and other open-source developers hope to accomplish for GNOME 43 and future releases...

When it comes to system recovery on Linux, users are most often only left with a command-line for trying to recover from a failed kernel boot, borked boot loader configuration, or other show-stopping problems. With Fedora Workstation right now they have only their CLI-based Linux recovery process but are eyeing the possibility of creating a complementary GUI-based recovery environment...

GNU Compiler Collection developers are working towards the stable release of GCC 12 in the next month or so as GCC 12.1. A GCC status report was issued today and there still is just under two dozen regressions of the highest priority (P1) to address or otherwise demote those regressions to lower priority...

With Linux 5.18-rc1 released last night the merge window is now over for feature work on Linux 5.18. So as usual here is my feature overview of all the changes for Linux 5.18 that caught my eye and were interesting for this kernel that is working its way towards the stable debut by late May.

It was just two months ago AMD completed its acquisition of Xilinx and now its newest data center play is entering into a definitive agreement to acquire Pensando...

To complement their minimal install images and various stage archives produced, the Gentoo project has restarted the process to also begin producing a LiveGUI DVD/USB image as a more friendly first encounter with this Linux distribution...

Over the past month we have seen more open-source Radeon Vulkan ray-tracing support build up inside Mesa 22.1 with KHR_ray_query support merged, missing stubs that at least allow Doom Eternal to get further along with its ray-tracing code path, and now there is ray primitive culling that has landed...

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller took to Twitter on Sunday with a long series of tweets of his personal opinion going after NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack and encouraging the company to be more like Intel and AMD with regards to open-source driver support...

A Linux driver for the DDC/CI control protocol for modern displays (well, even many of those going back to ~2005) has been available out-of-tree while finally there has been recent work on getting this driver upstreamed into the kernel...

After LLVM moved from C++11 to allowing C++14 code within the LLVM code-base itself in 2019, LLVM developers are now preparing the transition to C++17...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.18-rc1 to cap off the two week merge window for Linux 5.18 as the next major version of the Linux kernel...

The Linux 5.18 merge window is ending today while sent in this morning were a batch of "x86/urgent" updates that include enabling the CONFIG_WERROR knob by default for Linux x86/x86_64 default configuration "defconfig" kernel builds...

Qt 6.3 is expected for release in the coming weeks and with it comes enhanced Wayland support along with the ability for developers to easily create custom shell extensions...

Coming together over the past year has been uutils as a Rust-based Coreutils implementation to replace the long-used GNU Components. Since last year Uutils has been good enough to yield a working Debian Linux system at least for the basics while out this weekend is a new version of uutils...

Building the Linux kernel with LLVM/Clang rather than GCC has continued maturing nicely since the support was mainlined two years ago and additional LLVM/Clang functionality continues to be optionally supported by the Linux kernel. With Linux 5.18 there is an improvement around the handling of the LLVM environment variable for dealing with versioned compiler binaries or compiler installations outside of the PATH...

Last week the main RISC-V pull for Linux 5.18 brought Sv57 five level page table support, improved PolarFire SoC support, an optimized MEMMOVE code, support for Restartable Sequences, and more. A second batch of RISC-V feature updates were sent out this week and now merged for making Linux 5.18 even better for this open processor ISA...

A huge milestone has been reached in the rustc_codegen_gcc effort that aims to offer a GCC-based Rust compiler alternative to the LLVM-based official Rust compiler...

As longtime Linux users likely know or even those reading Phoronix over the years, Wacom devices have generally worked well on Linux. Not that it should be particularly surprising, Wacom recently published a blog post talking up their twenty years of Linux support for their various drawing pens and tablets...

ReactOS as the open-source operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Windows applications/games/drivers has made much progress over the past two decades but in some areas still lacking like still working on SMP/multi-core support and other functionality. To some surprise, some of the older Battlefield games are at least now in a playable state on ReactOS...

Following Intel's Arc A-Series mobile graphics introduction from earlier in the week, Intel open-source engineers have released their Media Driver/SDK 22.3.1 version that includes more DG2/Alchemist feature enablement...

With March wrapped up here is a look back at the most popular open-source Linux news and articles for the month...

This week brought "an enormous number of Plasma bugfixes and UI improvements" and other changes to the KDE desktop stack...

There hasn't been clear guidance from Valve whether Steam Deck units will participate in the Steam Survey (I haven't seen any survey myself there either) but it's looking like possibly not as the Steam on Linux marketshare dipped lower in March...

Lutris as the open-source game manager that is popular with Linux gamers for managing titles across the likes of Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, and other sources. Today's Lutris 0.5.10 release brings support for the Steam Deck along with other improvements...

Last week saw the main KVM virtualization pull for the Linux 5.18 feature updates while sent in today was a second batch of improvements for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine...