Phoronix

With a few weeks having passed since the Fedora 35 debut, more feature work and planning around next spring's Fedora 36 are underway...

As part of David Howells of Red Hat long-term work on improving the caching code used by network file-systems, he today posted a big patch series rewriting the fscache and cachefiles code as the latest significant step on that adventure...

CodeWeavers is kicking off the new week by releasing CrossOver 21.1 for Linux, macOS, and Chrome OS users wanting to enjoy Windows games and applications...

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and FWUPD on their great upward trajectory has in recent times been expanding beyond their initial focus of desktop/laptop hardware to supporting more server platforms for firmware updating. The latest feature driven by their growing server interests is "best known configuration" handling for where there are multiple independently-versioned firmware packages for a given system and may be support recommendations or potential version conflicts between the the different firmware packages...

Last week Amazon Web Services released Amazon Linux 2022 in preview form and since then I've been trying out their new cloud-optimized Linux distribution. It's been working out well on AWS (to no surprise) but also great was the level of performance provided by this now-Fedora-based distribution.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.16-rc3 with plenty of fixes included. With it being US Thanksgiving week, he's also having fun with this kernel by having adjusted the codename to "Gobble Gobble" in reference to turkeys...

PHP 8.1 released on Thursday as the latest major feature release for this programming language. In this article are some benchmarks of PHP 8.1.0 on an AMD EPYC powered Linux server compared to prior releases going as far back as PHP 5.6.

Net-next has been queuing a number of enticing performance optimizations ahead of the Linux 5.17 merge window kicking off around the start of the new year. Covered already was a big TCP optimization and a big improvement for csum_partial() that is used in the network code for checksum computation. The latest optimization is improving the AF_UNIX code path for those using AF_UNIX sockets for local inter-process communication...

Back during the Linux 5.15 cycle Intel contributed an improvement for tiered memory systems where less used memory pages could be demoted to slower tiers of memory storage. But once demoted that kernel infrastructure didn't have a means of promoting those demoted pages back to the faster memory tiers should they become hot again, though now Facebook/Meta engineers have been working on such functionality...

In addition to Vulkan support and a lot of graphics renderer work happening for Godot 4.0, adding to the expansive feature list is improved multi-player capabilities...

RenderDoc 1.17 released this week as the newest version of this leading cross-platform, cross-API graphics debugging utility...

Intel open-source driver engineers have been working on USI stylus support for the Linux kernel. The Universal Stylus Initiative (USI) aims to offer interoperability of active styluses across touchscreen devices...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for the prominent VK_KHR_synchronization2 extension introduced earlier this year...

Landing in Mesa on Black Friday was DMA-BUF Feedback support within the EGL code as another important step forward for Wayland...

China's Loongson continues bringing up LoongArch processor support for Linux with this MIPS64-based ISA now seeing the complete patch series for review to enable the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...

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.