Phoronix

AMD is preparing updates to their SMCA (Scalable Machine Check Architecture) driver code for future CPUs and points to processors having different bank layouts between CPU cores on the package...

Landing in Mesa 22.0 on Sunday night was the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" support for the recently introduced VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering extension...

It's been a number of months since GRVK 0.4 as the open-source project re-implementing AMD's defunct Mantle API over the modern Vulkan API that was originally based on the former. With Sunday's release of GRVK 0.5, this Mantle-on-Vulkan translation layer is now capable of correctly rendering Battlefield 4...

OpenIndiana as the open-source operating system forked from what was Sun's OpenSolaris and now based on Illumos is out with its latest half-year update...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.16-rc4 as the latest weekly release candidate for Linux 5.16 that will debut as stable in early 2022...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers continue making their driver preparations for being able to accommodate Vulkan ray-tracing with upcoming Xe HPG graphics having ray-tracing hardware capabilities...

This week's set of "x86/urgent" changes for the Linux 5.16-rc4 kernel due out later today has some Spectre V1 fixes after kernel commits last year ended up partially messing things up around its SWAPGS handling. These fixes in turn will also likely be back-ported to relevant stable kernel series...

A year after Arm processors began mitigating straight-line speculation, Linux developers have been working on similar straight-line speculation mitigations for x86/x86_64 processors...

XWayland is increasingly great shape especially when it comes to fulfilling the needs of gamers with simply running games lacking native Wayland support with great speed. But when it comes to other use-cases there are occasionally gaps and areas not yet fulfilled by XWayland versus the conventional X.Org Server. One of the latest examples of a feature now correctly wired up is touchpad gesture handling...

While RHEL9 is just in beta form right now, due to CentOS Stream 9 now having launched and that effectively serving as the bleeding-edge of the RHEL9 upstream, EPEL 9 has already launched...

Genode OS as the interesting open-source operating system framework is out with its v21.11 release this week and delivers on many hardware improvements and other features...

Added to the in-development Linux 5.16 kernel was cluster-aware scheduling designed to enhance system performance where groups of CPU cores may share caches or similar and thus the scheduler could benefit from knowing that information for making more optimal task placement. But as I pointed out early on with Linux 5.16, this cluster scheduling is hurting the Intel Alder Lake performance on the new kernel. Intel is now working to correct this by making the cluster scheduling configurable and disabling this functionality by default for hybrid CPUs such as Alder Lake...

Ahead of Intel ARC graphics cards premiering next year, Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers remain very busy preparing for the next-generation graphics capabilities...

AMD on Friday published a new version of their Advanced Media Framework "AMF" software development kit that enhances the multimedia processing capabilities for Radeon hardware...

Taking place this week was the annual Open-Source Firmware Conference "OSFC" devoted to open-source firmware from Coreboot to open-source BMC solutions and other low-level booting/initialization efforts...

This week saw many fixes landing for the KDE desktop components along with some UI tweaking and other alterations...

The day has finally come that Mesa's classic OpenGL drivers (non-Gallium3D) have been cleared out of the code-base as part of their modernization effort for mainline...

Wine 6.23 is now available for running Windows applications and games on Linux, macOS, and the BSDs. Up next will be the Wine 7.0 release candidate that also marks the feature freeze for what will be the next annual Wine stable release...

EndeavourOS as the two year old Linux distribution project built atop Arch Linux is out with a shiny new release. Beyond package updates, the new release has several default changes like now making use of the wonderful PipeWire. Looking to 2022, EndeavourOS is also exploring the possibility of a gaming-optimized build of their OS...

Last month BattlEye-using games began running on Steam Play when using the latest Steam client beta paired with the experimental version of Proton. However, it still does require the intervention of the game studio to request the support be enabled for a particular game. Today in time for any weekend gaming is several more games using the BattlEye anti-cheat software working on Linux...

The Intel-led open-source Cloud-Hypervisor project that provides a VMM focused on cloud workloads and supports interfacing with Linux's KVM and Windows' MSHV is out with a big feature update. Cloud-Hypervisor is also the project that is known for its use of the Rust programming language and built in part off Rust-VMM...

A few days ago it marked two years since the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X / 3970X launched. While we are eager to see next-gen Threadripper, for now is a look at how the open-source Linux performance has evolved for these still-impressive HEDT processors by comparing the Linux performance at launch to where it is today with the very latest upstream Linux software.

While there has been CentOS Stream 8, following last month's RHEL 9 Beta there is now official availability of CentOS Stream 9...

Blender 3.0 is officially releasing today as a huge update to this open-source 3D modeling software that in recent years has become backed by numerous large hardware/software companies and has rivaled proprietary software for its capabilities...

TURNIP as the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hit a new official milestone this week...

Going into 2022 the Linux kernel's floppy driver continues to see new code improvements and fixes...

Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization has been common on Linux for a decade and a half now while more recently has been Function-Granular (or sometimes referred to as Finer-Grained) KASLR for further upping the security benefits by making it much harder to predict kernel address positions for attacks...

Fedora 36 may support using the Linux kernel's fs-verity code for allowing some interesting integrity and authenticity use-cases around RPM packages...

Along with Intel this week sending out some of their initial graphics driver changes destined for the Linux 5.17 cycle early next year, AMD today also submitted their first batch of AMDGPU DRM driver changes intended for this next kernel version...

Xen 4.16 is shipping today as the latest major release to this open-source hypervisor that continues to be hosted by the Linux Foundation...

This summer there was the surprise announcement of Amazon's Lumberyard game engine being open-sourced and it being developed as the Open 3D Engine by the then newly-created Open 3D Foundation as part of the Linux Foundation...

Released this summer was openSUSE Leap 15.3 using the same binary packages as SUSE Linux Enterprise for its SLE 15 SP3 release. Looking forward to next year, openSUSE Leap 15.4 alpha builds have begun spinning for that next installment...

Back in October SiFive teased a new performance-optimized RISC-V core and today they finally shared more public details on this Performance P650 core...

Over the past month of trying out Intel Alder Lake processors on Linux, one of the questions that has come up a few times but not readily disclosed is whether it's still worthwhile on this latest-generation process to boot with "mitigations=off" to disable CPU security mitigations to help squeeze out some otherwise lost performance. Here are some benchmarks to answer that questions.

At the end of November was a big update to Intel's Graphics Compiler while out today is IGC 1.0.9441 as the first update since to this open-source, cross-platform graphics compiler...

When debugging graphics driver/API issues or performance profiling and relying on shader dumps, the size of such dumps can quickly add up due to all of the state collected, etc, but also inefficiencies when not within contiguous memory. Fortunately for Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" for pairing with the Radeon GPU Profiler there is a significant improvement that just landed for yielding smaller file sizes...

For those wanting to add some "bling" to your command-line programs to make some "rad" terminal apps, Notcurses 3.0 was released today for designing colorful and complex text-user interfaces. Notcurses allows adding a range of multimedia, Unicode, and other graphics capabilities to command-line applications across Linux / macOS / Windows...

The Qt Company has officially shipped Qt Creator 6 as the latest major update to their Qt/C++ minded integrated development environment...

Over the past year there has been a lot of work for getting AMD's suspend-to-idle "s2idle" support in order under Linux and the latest is a one-line code change expected to help at least some Ryzen laptops behave properly...

With the beginning of a new month comes updated Steam Survey results from Valve for the month prior. The Steam on Linux marketshare continues increasing albeit ever so slightly...

While Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) functionality has been present in CPUs going back to Skylake, it took until last year with Linux 5.11 for SGX support to finally be mainlined and required more than 40 rounds of review/revisions. Finally today Intel posted patches for bringing up SGX2 as the next iteration of Software Guard Extensions and already found in shipping processors...

Wasmer as "the universal WebAssembly runtime" that focuses on being able to run WASM code on any platform is out with its next major release...

A set of two patches under review on the kernel mailing list for tweaking some kernel scheduler behavior can provide noticeable performance benefits to those using AMD EPYC and Ryzen processors on various workloads...

With the accelerating growth of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for serving up system and component firmware files to Linux users for flashing via the fwupd utility, today it crossed the milestone of having served up more than 40 million firmware files...

The first beta of LibreOffice 7.3 is now available for testing as the next installment of this leading open-source, cross-platform office suite...

An early batch of Intel kernel graphics driver feature updates intended for Linux 5.17 was sent out yesterday to DRM-Next for queuing until that next merge window opens around the start of the new year. Notable with this pull is Icelake "Gen11" graphics finally seeing variable rate refresh enabled!..

The long-awaited Tesseract 5.0 is now available as a big update to this leading open-source, optical character recognition (OCR) engine that via neural networks offers great accuracy and supports more than 100 languages for turning images of text into actual text...

NixOS is an original Linux distribution built atop its own unique Nix package manager that is focused on being functional, reliable, and reproducible. The Nix package manager concept is great but somewhat ironic is the new NixOS 21.11 release not even shipping with the latest Nix package manager version due to known regressions...

Version 1.7 of the Julia programming language implementation is now available, the open-source high-performance language that is general purpose but especially popular for computational science and numerical analysis...

With another month of the pandemic in the books, here is a look back at the exciting Linux and open-source highlights that came about during the course of November. This month was particularly exciting for new Linux kernel developments, never-ending work on open-source graphics drivers, the much anticipated launch of Intel 12th Gen "Alder Lake", gamers continuing to clamor for the Steam Deck, and much more...