Phoronix

A big patch series out of Red Hat is now queued into the XFS file-system development Git branch that is part of the new material for the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle...

Recently the mainline Linux kernel has seen a lot of improvements to its feature set when compiling it under LLVM's Clang rather than GCC as traditionally the only supported compiler. The most recent feature being brought to the Linux kernel when using Clang is finally allowing the use of compiler profile guided optimizations (PGO) for squeezing even greater performance out of the system by letting the compiler leverage the real-world profiles/metrics collected to make more informed code generation / optimization decisions...

One of the most promising BSD-based desktop distributions in recent times has been helloSystem that wants to be the macOS of BSDs with a polished desktop experience. helloSystem has been making good progress towards their goals in recent months and this weekend now issued version 0.5...

On Friday afternoon Intel released a new version of their ISPC compiler, the Implicit SPMD Program Compiler, that supports a variant of the C programming language with extensions around single-program, multiple-data programming for CPU and GPU execution. Not only does this release prepare support for upcoming Intel CPUs but also adds support now for Apple's Arm processors...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) saw queued into its "dev" tree this week the new compress_cache mount option ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle...

KDE developers didn't spend much time basking over their Plasma 5.22 release this week as they have already begun lining up changes for the first point release, new feature work for Plasma 5.23, and other improvements to this open-source desktop environment...

The Linux kernel's RISC-V support continues picking up remaining features not yet wired up beyond the base architecture support. The latest is transparent hugepages (THP) to be supported for RISC-V with Linux 5.14...

Last month we reported on CUDA documentation pointing to the NVIDIA 470 driver series to be the last supporting GeForce GTX 600/700 Kepler GPUs and that has now been summed up more formally with new guidance out of NVIDIA...

Intel's Linux engineers continue squaring away the next-generation Alder Lake hybrid processor support. In addition to continued graphics driver work and other platform device IDs being added for the upcoming Linux 5.14 kernel, it looks like ADL's Thunderbolt/USB4 support will be merged too...

Last year Intel's updated ISA extensions reference guide was updated with references to Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" having High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) given new HBM-related error codes. Now it's even more clear there are Xeon CPUs coming to market with onboard HBM memory as Intel has begun submitting Linux kernel driver changes...

With last week's launch of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and this week's launch of the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti there have been plenty of Linux gaming benchmarks on Phoronix. But for those interested in these new RTX 30 Ampere graphics cards for GPU compute or rendering workloads, in this article are many benchmarks on that front compared to various RTX 20 and RTX 30 series graphics cards.

While there was kernel talk of merging the PREEMPT_RT code in 2020 for this real-time functionality for the Linux kernel, among other times in the past that has yet to happen. These "RT" patches have long been maintained out-of-tree but it turns out that while in the past it was seemingly close for merging, that effort has stalled for lack of funding...

The seventh release candidate of OpenZFS 2.1 is now available for testing while it looks like soon it will cross the finish line as the latest feature release for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems...

Following the last AMDVLK update at the end of May, AMD has released AMDVLK 2021.Q2.4 as their newest open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver release...

Following the bump in April from Cloud-Hypervisor v0.14.x to v15, Cloud-Hypervisor 16.0 was released on Thursday for this Intel-led open-source hypervisor that is leveraging Rust and focused on cloud and security use-cases...

Earlier this year was talk of Linux finally removing its legacy IDE subsystem that has been deprecated for years in favor of just maintaining the still-supported libata code for IDE support. The libata path is much better supported and matured for nearly two decades, but one of the holdouts was some Motorola 68000 series hardware -- like early Macintosh computers -- not being supported outside of the legacy context. That is finally set to change with Linux 5.14 so in turn the legacy IDE code will likely be able to be removed soon...

Linus Torvalds is known primarily in the past for his colorful scripture on the Linux kernel mailing list while today he does have a passionate and important read on the LKML around vaccinations for COVID-19...

Back in March during the announcement of Intel Foundry Services it was mentioned that SiFive and Intel were working together to allow RISC-V chips to be fabbed within Intel's facilities. Additionally, Intel Capital previously invested in SiFive during prior funding rounds. Now it turns out Intel is reportedly positioning to potentially acquire SiFive...

Merged today into Mesa 21.2-devel is OpenGL ES 3.1 support being exposed for the Panfrost Gallium3D driver that provides open-source Arm Mali graphics...

Last month System76 launched their Launch Configurable Keyboard. They sent over this new open-source keyboard for some brief testing and I must say the build quality has been top notch and while this is their first keyboard they are bringing to market, with their US manufacturing expertise that began with their Thelio computer cases, it has carried forward with their Launch keyboard. This keyboard is beautifully crafted and among the most durable (and heaviest) keyboards I've used in the past two decades. It reminds me of the IBM Model M from a quality perspective but with its own unique advantages.

Along with Intel having wrapped up their graphics driver feature work for Linux 5.14, AMD sent in another pull request too with more feature code they have ready for their AMDGPU kernel driver in 5.14 and will likely be their last major pull for this cycle too...

For over a year Amazon engineers have been working on DAMON as a new means of monitoring data accesses under Linux. That patch series has yet to be mainlined but continues being worked on with the intention of getting it upstreamed when ready. More recently the engineers involved have been working on a DAMON-based page reclamation implementation for the Linux kernel in dealing proactively dealing with systems having high memory load...

Following this week's release of the big and long overdue GRUB 2.06 bootloader release, there is already development talk and action for the next release. Succeeding GRUB 2.0, GRUB 2.02, GRUB 2.04, and GRUB 2.06 is now going to be a bit of a version shakeup with GRUB 2.11 to be the next release...

Intel has maintained a lengthy "Optimization Reference Manual" for showing developers how to optimize code for their latest CPU microarchitectures, but accompanied by their latest manual update is now a lot of actual code samples for easing the process of learning about Intel's optimization techniques for taking full advantage of their latest processors...

For those thinking about picking up a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 laptop powered by Intel's latest-generation "Tiger Lake" processors, that model will see its second fan now properly supported by the current Linux 5.13 cycle...

For a number of years Google has developed Fibers (not to be confused with Google Fiber, their fiber Internet service) as a user-space scheduling framework. While it hasn't been open-source, the few public papers and talks on Google Fibers has been quite interesting for great performance and a novel design. Finally though Google is working towards open-sourcing Fibers and hoping to get the necessary Linux kernel modifications upstreamed...

Intel's open-source graphics driver engineers have sent in their final feature pull request to DRM-Next of new material they are wanting incorporated into Linux 5.14...

Last summer Microsoft engineers posted a DRM kernel display driver for their Hyper-V synthetic video device. One year later after going through a few rounds of code review, this Hyper-V DRM driver will be going mainline with the upcoming Linux 5.14 kernel cycle...

Last week the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti review embargo lifted while today NVIDIA has lifted it on the RTX 3070 Ti ahead of the official availability tomorrow. Here are the initial Linux gaming benchmarks looking at the performance of the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti up against the rest of the GeForce RTX 20 and RTX 30 series GPUs as well as AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series competition.

When it comes to new specifications/certifications from The Khronos Group for royalty-free open standards we are used to very low-level interfaces with exciting innovations like Vulkan and glTF but today they are doing something rather different and announcing a 3D Commerce Viewer Certification Program...

Adding to the list of planned improvements for Fedora 35 is switching to make use of Yescrypt for hashing of user passwords...

The latest work happening on AMD's Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) front is a new release of AOMP, their LLVM Clang downstream focused on carrying the latest patches around Radeon OpenMP offloading support...

Sent in last weekend to the Linux 5.13 kernel was the change so Linux x86/x86_64 will always reserve the first 1MB of RAM in order to avoid corruption issues with some BIOS and frame-buffers sometimes fiddling with that lowest portion of system memory. While the thought was reserving that first 1MB unconditionally was a bit onerous and that perhaps Windows has some way of determining how much low memory area to reserve, it turns out Windows has been employing this same behavior for years...

Often times when checking out thin clients and industrial PCs / IoT units from OnLogic and other industrial PC vendors, they tend to be Intel powered and within the forums the first question is often about any AMD equivalent... For those wondering about any new AMD-powered thin clients / mini-ITX systems within an aluminum chassis, OnLogic has introduced the TM800...

It's shipping one year late but GRUB 2.06 is now officially available as the latest version of this widely-used open-source bootloader...

In addition to making public new security advisories this Patch Tuesday requiring updated CPU microcode, Intel also issued a press statement about their ongoing fight against speculation vulnerabilities with their processors...

Intel just issued a big set of CPU microcode updates for addressing a new set of security advisories just made public...

Following their tease last week, AMD today formally announced the Radeon PRO W6000 series as their newest and most powerful RDNA (2) based workstation cards...

KDE's big Plasma 5.22 desktop release is now available with maturing its Wayland support continuing to be one of the big ongoing focuses for the project...

More information on openSUSE's FrontRunner initiative are now being shared as a rebuild of SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Open Build Service and allowing for staging changes to advance architecture enablment for future Leap releases...

Mir continues to be developed by Ubuntu-maker Canonical as a set of libraries and Wayland compositor for building Wayland-based shells with integrated window management and other features to ease the bring-up and catering to business use-cases around IoT and digital signage, among other uses. Out today is version 2.4 of Mir with more features and fixes...

Being proposed within the CentOS project is a new special interest group for providing kernel modules not otherwise available within CentOS Stream. This would also include changes around where CentOS / Red Hat disable some kernel modules or artificially limit the scope of supported hardware...

While Wine's bi-weekly development releases are normally in good shape and suitable for Linux gamers and other enthusiasts wanting to run Windows games and applications on Linux or macOS, Wine 6.0.1 is out this week for those sticking to the yearly stable releases with follow-on point releases...

Following last month's release of Qt 6.1, the first point release of this latest Qt6 stable series is now available...

It looks like AMD's rising marketshare in the data center is paying off as AMD is hiring more Linux kernel engineers...

Announced at the end of last year was an experimental Wayland driver for Wine providing native Wayland support without relying on X11/XWayland. In the months since that yet-to-be-merged driver has continued supporting more functionality and with the latest update is much more viable...

As part of the curiosity-driven benchmarks and areas of technical interest now that we've gotten some of our initial Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" benchmarks out of the way has been looking into the performance of Linux's P-State CPU frequency scaling driver on the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable server. Benchmarked for the latesting testing was the power/efficiency out-of-the-box with P-State powersave as used by default with many Linux distributions against the P-State "performance" mode as well as putting P-State into passive mode to be able to via intel_cpufreq to try the Schedutil governor that relies on the kernel's scheduler utilization data for making frequency scaling decisions. Here is a number of power/performance governor benchmarks with the dual Xeon Platinum 8380 server in these varying kernel configurations.

Sadly there isn't much to report on at this time around improved open-source "Nouveau" driver support for the recent GeForce RTX 20 and RTX 30 series while even the GTX 900 and GTX 1000 series graphics processors are in poor shape for this unofficial driver. But when it comes to the aging GeForce 200 series, select models there are finally seeing OpenGL ES 3.1 supported by this open-source driver...

Mesa's Direct3D 12 driver maintained by Microsoft as part of their WSL and Windows OpenGL-over-D3D12 efforts has added a means of being able to select between multiple GPUs/adapters...

While Qt 6.1 released just one month ago, Qt 6.2 as of today is already into its feature freeze. This quicker than normal time to feature freeze comes due to this year's Qt releases being tightened up following the Qt 6.0 debut at the end of last year. Qt 6.2 will be the first Long Term Support (LTS) release of the Qt6 series...