Phoronix

With the Linux 5.15 kernel merge window likely opening next week, Matthew Wilcox of Oracle has already sent in a prominent pull request to Linus Torvalds: the initial work around landing of the memory folios patches...

Last month I wrote about the proposed reflink support for Wine that would provide significant space savings for those having multiple Windows games/applications on Linux installed where Wine and derivatives like Crossover and Steam Play (Proton) generally maintain a separate "prefix" per software installation. Fortunately, that reflink support continues to be worked on for Wine where it can lead to savings up to several hundred megabytes per Wine prefix...

GTK 4.4 is out as the latest stable update to the GTK4 open-source toolkit...

Zink as an OpenGL-over-Vulkan API implementation living within Mesa merged its sub-allocator code that could deliver 10x the performance for some games. Plus it also landed OpenGL compatibility context support for getting more games working now with this open-source GL-on-VLK solution. Given the progress made in Mesa Git over the past week, here are some fresh benchmarks now for how the performance stands across various games and benchmarks.

Going on three years now there have been proposed patches for allowing per-client GPU engine statistics for being able to show on a per-game/application level how many resources across 3D/blitting/video engines are being consumed. The patches continue to be revised but sadly will be missing out on the imminent Linux 5.15 kernel merge window...

While Habana Labs has been known for their open-source and upstream Linux kernel driver for their AI training/inference accelerators with that code they had been working on as a start-up even before being acquired by Intel, it's continued to cause friction that they rely in user-space on closed-source components like their compiler. That in turn is again causing problems for changes that the Habana Labs kernel driver planned to land with the upcoming Linux 5.15 cycle...

Running Linux on the Apple M1 with various out-of-tree patches is now capable of booting to a GNOME desktop albeit lacking any OpenGL/graphics acceleration...

While Linux 5.14 stable is expected next weekend, the Reiser4 (and experimental Reiser5) file-system driver code has been finally updated for compatibility with the Linux 5.13 kernel series...

The Linux 5.14 cycle is playing out smoothly and will likely lead to the Linux 5.14 stable kernel release happening next weekend...

Since the start of July we've seen Intel beginning Linux support patches for their DG2 graphics card that is now known by the "Alchemist" codename. There's been several rounds of DG2 patches since they started publicly pushing out the code -- including some notable work like DisplayPort 2.0 bring-up -- while sent out this Sunday is another important piece of the puzzle: getting the device memory (the dedicated vRAM) actually working with the open-source driver...

While it was busy on the hardware side of the house with Intel talking up all of their forthcoming hardware, Intel's open-source software engineers remain very busy working not only to enable their next-generation hardware but other open-source efforts they've invested in like the iNet wireless daemon...

Red Hat's Hans de Goede continues doing a commendable job improving the Linux support for various laptops with key improvements. One of the latest efforts by this longtime kernel developer has been about getting DisplayPort over USB Type-C connections working for more Intel hardware...

While Intel is normally very punctual in providing support for major new CPU features under Linux and often landing them well in advance of general hardware availability, their work around Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) has taken a long longer than normal and is still going through new rounds of code review to get accepted into the mainline Linux kernel...

Due to the growing threat posed by file-less malware attacks where malware code is executed from anonymous executable memory pages that aren't backed by data on the file-system, the "NAX" Linux security module has been seeing work recently for helping to protect against such scenarios...

It's been another busy week in KDE land with the seemingly never ending improvements to the Plasma Wayland session as well as introducing some new features like a new Overview Effect...

It's been nearly two months since Proton 6.3-5 released for powering Valve's Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux. The latest Proton update was just released with many improvements...

AMD has published their fifth revision of SEV-SNP support for the KVM hypervisor and guest VM support for this Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging functionality found with new EPYC 7003 series server processors...

OpenSSH 8.7 is out today as the newest feature release for this widely-used SSH server/client software...

AMD has launched the Infinity Hub as their newest open-source software portal around HPC software via easy-to-deploy Docker containers...

Earlier this week Amazon introduced Intel Xeon Scalable 3rd Gen "Ice Lake" powered EC2 cloud instances and marks their first x86-based sixth-generation offerings that follow their "M6g" Graviton2 instances launched last year. Curious about the "M6i" Ice Lake performance with AWS, here are a number of benchmarks looking at the performance and value of the new M6i instances compared to former Intel M5 instances as well as Amazon's own M6g Graviton2 instances.

Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt continues working on some important performance fixes for the GNOME desktop...

Work continues on getting the Broadcom VC4 kernel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver into shape for being able to support 4K display outputs at 60Hz...

A minor optimization was posted by an AMD engineer on Wednesday for the Linux kernel...

For passionate Phoronix readers around the Rust programming language, SixtyFPS is a new graphical toolkit offering focused on Rust but also supporting C++ and JavaScript...

The Netfilter project has announced the release of Nftables 1.0.0 for their user-space code for interfacing with the Linux kernel's Nftables subsystem for network filtering and classification...

For those that prefer to hold off on upgrading to a new Mesa stable release series until the first point release is out, Mesa 21.2.1 is now available as the first update to this quarter's Mesa 21.2 series...

The W3C has been working on the "Open Screen Protocol" as part of their Second Screen Working Group. This effort has been about having a web standard so web pages can drive secondary screens to display web content. Unfortunately, the plans are currently being complicated by a number of software patents issued to Apple...

Intel this week hosted a virtual Architecture Day where they talked up their latest efforts from Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids to their next-generation discrete graphics capabilities as well as other new offerings around IPUs and more. Here are the highlights from Intel Architecture Day 2021 and with a particular focus from our Linux angle.

Many will recall DFI motherboards from close to two decades ago for their wildly colored "LANParty" motherboards but in recent years the company has been focusing on IoT and industrial hardware where, of course, Linux has much relevance. DFI and Canonical today announced an AMD-powered Ubuntu-loaded "industrial Pi" single board computer...

LibreOffice 7.2 Community is out today as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source, cross-platform office suite...

While Ubuntu normally ships with the very latest GNOME desktop version issued just before release time, with Ubuntu 21.04 they stuck to GNOME 3.38 rather than punting early to GNOME 40. In the Ubuntu 21.10 development packages they since migrated to GNOME 40 but now it looks like they will be sticking to that and not pulling ahead to the near-final GNOME 41...

While not making it for last week's SDL 2.0.16 release, merged on Wednesday to the SDL2 development code is an "SDL_GeometryRender" interface that stems from feature requests going back nearly a decade for this graphics API independent triangle rendering API...

Independent developer Luke Jones continues making good progress on improving the "ASUS-WMI" driver for better ASUS laptop support on Linux...

After one and a half years in development of MATE 1.26 as a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop components, this release is now available with initial Wayland support and more...

It looks like 2022 is when we will start seeing DisplayPort 2.0 hardware broadly available... It was just earlier this week I wrote about AMD working on DisplayPort 2.0 for their open-source Radeon Linux driver and now coincidentally today Intel has begun their open-source Linux graphics driver enablement for DP 2.0...

It's been over two years since The Khronos Group acknowledged they were working on safety critical Vulkan and now finally the 1.0 release is approaching for this graphics/compute interface suitable for safety critical systems...

Krita 5.0 is on the way as the next major feature release to this popular, open-source digital painting program...

This past weekend marked the release of Debian 11 "Bullseye" as the newest version of this major Linux distribution that is also the basis for many others. Given the popularity of Debian stable on servers, our first round of Debian 11.0 benchmarking is looking at the performance relative to Debian 10.10 on latest-generation Intel Xeon "Ice Lake" and AMD EPYC "Milan" hardware.

A set of two patches posted this week would allow the Linux kernel to be easily built with the different x86-64 micro-architecture feature levels supported by the latest LLVM Clang and GCC compilers...

Six dozen patches working on the PREEMPT-RT locking infrastructure for real-time kernels is now queued up in TIP's "locking/core" branch and will presumably be sent in for the Linux 5.15 merge window coming up quickly...

In addition to Tuesday seeing the Zink sub-allocator merged for sharply improving the performance of this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation within Mesa, the Zink Gallium3D code subsequently merged support for OpenGL compatibility contexts...

Sent out last year was a "request for comments" on "Maple Tree" as a new data structure for the Linux kernel. The latest version of the Maple Tree patches were sent out today with mixed results but for where gains are being made they can be quite significant...

Mesa's Zink Gallium3D code for implementing OpenGL-over-Vulkan can now run a heck of a lot faster with the newest Mesa 21.3 code...

Manjaro 21.1 is now available as the latest stable version of this Arch Linux based operating system...

Microsoft has released an updated version of its CBL-Mariner Linux distribution as their platform within the company that is being used for various cloud and edge computing use-cases among other purposes...

Following last week's Radeon RX 6600 XT launch, here are benchmarks of the Radeon RX 6600 XT / RX 6700 XT / RX 6800 XT graphics cards across all of the Vulkan driver options available to Linux users.

The change led by AMD engineers for adding AV1 VA-API acceleration support to the Gallium3D "VA" state tracker front-end has landed in Mesa 21.3...

The LLVMpipe driver providing a generic OpenGL implementation that's CPU-accelerated for Mesa - and more performant than alternatives thanks to LLVM - can now support OpenGL 4.5 compatibility profile contexts...

While getting late in the cycle, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee approved some additional changes for Fedora 35 due out this fall...

Ubuntu developers acknowledge "delaying this for a long time" but for Ubuntu 21.10 they are planning to ship its systemd package with the unified cgroup hierarchy (Cgroups v2) by default...