Phoronix

For being a virtual event, AMD's keynote for Computex Taipei 2021 is filled with quite a bit of excitement and multiple product announcements. Here are the highlights for AMD's new announcements at Computex 2021.

AMD currently just supports Vulkan ray-tracing with their Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards while now there is independent work being done on Mesa's unofficial Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) to allow ray-tracing to work with older generations of GPUs like Vega and Polaris...

This week on 5 June marks 17 years since starting Phoronix.com for Linux hardware reviews and also 13 years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 for advancing open-source/Linux benchmarking...

Genode OS as the from-scratch open-source operating system framework built atop a micro-kernel abstraction layer and various original user-space components is out with its version 21.05 update...

One of Valve's many open-source projects is GameNetworkingSockets as a basic transport layer for games to handle UDP-based messaging, P2P networking, encryption, IPv6, and other network handling functionality of particular use to games / game engines...

In recent months there has been a lot of Linux kernel patches for bringing up Alder Lake S and Alder Lake P while more recently the enablement patches for Alder Lake M low-power mobile has begun...

Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan has landed the latest XWayland improvements into X.Org Server Git for primarily benefiting the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack...

Simple CPU throttling isn't sufficient for cooling some NVIDIA Tegra devices running the upstream Linux kernel so thermal cooling integration into the device frequency "devfreq" scaling code is in the work for such high performance NVIDIA SoCs...

Intel is kicking off Computex Taipei 2021 week by announcing new 11th Gen Intel Core processors as well as Intel 5G Solution 5000 as their first 5G product intended for next-gen PCs...

Linux 5.13-rc4 is out this US Memorial Day weekend and it has ticked up to being a rather large weekly test release...

While there are no signs of X.Org Server 1.21 shipping anytime soon, being merged today to the Git code-base is bumping X Input to version 2.4 with the introduction of touchpad gestures...

The Cairo 2D vector graphics library used by the likes of GTK, Mozilla, WebKit, and many other open-source projects is seeing some big strides made on its SVG back-end...

With May quickly drawing to a close, here are some fresh Linux gaming benchmark figures for the latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on their respective latest Linux graphics drivers while looking at the performance across a variety of OpenGL and Vulkan games/workloads...

Linux kernel developer Konstantin Ryabitsev has been working on Patatt as a cryptographic-based patch attestation system. While started a while ago, there is renewed interest in such patch attestation following the University of Minnesota "hypocrite commit" debacle...

While the official/reference Rust compiler implementation is LLVM-based, there continues to be the independent effort working on a GCC Rust front-end as an alternative full implementation of the Rust programming language...

The Linux 5.14 kernel this summer will feature improved support for a new MikroTik 10G/25G NIC...

RenderDoc 1.14 was released on Friday as the newest feature update to this open-source, cross-platform / cross-API graphics debugger...

KDE developers are wrapping up May with more performance optimizations and bug fixes in tow...

The AMD Radeon "AMDGPU" kernel driver for Linux is poised to report more graphics throttling status information to user-space...

Released today was a new version of the Raspberry Pi OS (nee Raspbian) with various improvements over its prior update from March...

Yet another release candidate of OpenZFS 2.1 is now available for testing and this time around there are some interesting changes to note...

While yesterday was the Threadripper 3990X Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks, with recently picking up the $450 Lenovo IdeaPad 3 15 with Ryzen 5 5500U, prior to wiping the Windows 10 preload I ran some benchmarks to see how that default Microsoft Windows 10 Home installation compared to a fresh install of Ubuntu 21.04 for maximizing the performance potential of this budget six core / twelve thread laptop.

Chrome 91 released this week with WebAssembly SIMD by default, new JavaScript APIs, and other improvements. Plus there are also some performance improvements too, here are some benchmarks...

Last year we wrote about Dell working on a hardware privacy driver for Linux as with 2021 laptops they are beginning to add hardware-based privacy buttons for disabling microphone and camera support. That Dell Hardware Privacy platform support is now set to be introduced to the mainline kernel with Linux 5.14...

The Linux 5.14 kernel this summer is going to bring a reworked user-space API for Intel's DG1 graphics card and their future discrete graphics offerings. This change to the Intel kernel graphics driver's user-space API, which is currently flagged as "broken" until it has been proven sufficiently capable for user-space needs and stable, is principally needed for handling of device local memory (dedicated vRAM)...

Added to the Arch Linux install media back in April was Archinstall as a quick/easy installer for the Linux distribution. Released today is now Archinstall 2.2 as the latest advancement for this convenient Arch Linux installer...

Frontier as the first US exascale supercomputer being commissioned by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Department of Energy. while being powered by AMD CPUs/GPUs is in the process of seeing more Linux kernel changes for bringing up the new platform...

Earlier this month were benchmarks looking at Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 21.04 on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X desktop to which Ubuntu came out roughly 8% faster than the Microsoft OS on average. But what about the difference for HEDT systems? Given the more radical performance difference we have seen in the past with Windows vs. Linux for Threadripper systems, here are some recently conducted benchmarks on that front with the 64-core Threadripper 3990X.

Over the past year developers from Igalia, Collabora, and others have been involved in bringing up support for the OpenGL EXT_external_objects extension within the Intel open-source drivers. That work is now squared away as one of the pieces for offering better interoperability between OpenGL and Vulkan...

While other mobile operating systems have for years been on a 64-bit software stack and in the process of phasing out 32-bit app support, Jolla is celebrating Sailfish 4.1 as finally marking their first fully 64-bit Sailfish OS software stack -- for use currently just with the Sony Xperia 10 II smartphone...

Last month with the Radeon Software for Linux 21.10 driver there was finally Vulkan ray-tracing support added to that proprietary Vulkan driver component, the first time that Vulkan ray-tracing has been available on Linux for any AMD Radeon 6000 series graphics card across the multiple driver options. Last month I posted some initial Vulkan ray-tracing AMD vs. NVIDIA Linux benchmarks while questions were raised how well the driver performs with NVIDIA's Quake II RTX port. Here are some initial benchmarks for those wondering...

Qt Multimedia should return for Qt 6.2's release later this year and is perhaps the module changing the most in its transition from Qt5 to Qt6...

Following last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4, various downstreams are beginning to release their respective updates based against the RHEL 8.4 changes...

Merged today to Linux 5.13 Git and marked for back-porting to stable series is a new "confused deputy" weakness and affects kernels going back to Linux 2.6.12 from 2005...

Epic Games today pushed Unreal Engine 5 out to early access. Like with UE4, Unreal Engine 5 continues offering native Linux support and allowing use of the Vulkan API...

The AMD Ryzen 5 5500U with six cores / twelve threads within a Lenovo laptop at $449 USD is quite a steal. This is also my first time benchmarking the AMD Ryzen 5 5500U after waiting months on Ryzen 5000 series laptop availability. Here are some initial benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 5500U under Ubuntu 21.04 Linux against various other Intel/AMD laptops.

Just one week after AMDVLK 2021.Q2.3 is now another update to this open-source AMD Vulkan driver for Linux systems...

Apple's shiny new in-house M1 Arm chip is the latest processor challenged by a security vulnerability. The "M1RACLES" vulnerability was made public today as a covert channel vulnerability by where a mysterious register could leak EL0 state...

Fedora Workstation has been defaulting to the Btrfs file-system since F33 while other editions of Fedora Linux have continued using their defaults. With Fedora Cloud 35, this cloud spin of Fedora is now also looking to migrate to Btrfs...

The BLAKE3 high performance crypto hashing function that is much speedier than MD5, SHA-1/SHA-2/SHA-3, and the former BLAKE2, is nearing its v1.0 release for its official Rust and C implementations...

Google has released Chrome 91 as a rather exciting feature update to their open-source, cross-platform web browser...

Linux 5.14 to debut later in the summer will allow for hot unplugging of AMD Radeon graphics cards such as when using an external GPU enclosure or passing back a GPU from a virtual machine to the host. Up until now the AMDGPU kernel driver hasn't cooperated nicely with the Radeon GPU for hot unplug events...

The Rowhammer security exploit affecting DRAM memory modules has a new chapter with Google now detailing "half-double" as a new technique for exploit of system memory...

Earlier this month in our initial benchmarking of DragonFlyBSD 6.0 we found DragonFlyBSD 6.0 performing much better than DragonFlyBSD 5.8, but how does that put its performance up against FreeBSD 13.0 and Ubuntu Linux for reference? Here are such benchmarks in our latest benchmarking of DragonFlyBSD 6.0, FreeBSD 13.0 (with both GCC and Clang), and Ubuntu Linux.

With the Linux 5.14 cycle this summer the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) should land its new "RO" feature read-only mode...

Arm today announced the Cortex-X2 as their new flagship Armv9 processor design...

Intel's open-source driver engineers remain very active on bringing up their discrete graphics card support under Linux with restructuring of the kernel driver to handle local/dedicated memory among a variety of other changes needed. Plus there are new features with the latest generation of Intel graphics such as the Protected Xe Path (PXP) for hardware-protected sessions for multi-user / multi-process scenarios. The Intel PXP code for their Linux driver has been in the works since last year and the latest revision now submitted...

It's been a while since last having any major/exciting optimizations to the GNOME desktop to report on by Canonical's Daniel van Vugt that is known for his performance work over the past few years, but some optimizations are forthcoming...

The first alpha release of LibreOffice 7.2 is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable release of this open-source office suite update in August...

After Intel originally proposed zero-copy capability for the Linux kernel's AF_XDP high performance packet processing code years ago and implemented for their higher performance network hardware/drivers, with Linux 5.14 the common Intel "IGC" Gigabit Ethernet driver is set to introduce AF_XDP zero-copy support...