Phoronix

The Asahi Linux project has published their October and November status update to provide an overview of where the Apple Silicon / Apple M1 open-source support is now at as we approach the end of 2021...

Intel's stellar open-source graphics driver team sent in their latest batch of feature updates to DRM-Next for staging ahead of next month's Linux 5.17 cycle kicking off. Notable with this pull among other changes is initial support for next-generation Raptor Lake S graphics while Alder Lake P graphics are considered stable / promoted from being behind the experimental flag...

While POWER CPUs have generally been well received by the free software community for being open-source friendly especially with the OpenPOWER Foundation, IBM's latest-generation POWER10 processors are continuing to be an upset...

Back in early 2019 Microsoft announced Windows Terminal as a new terminal for Windows that seemed rather Linux-inspired and supported tabs and other modern functionality. Beginning in 2022, Microsoft will make Windows Terminal their default terminal program on Windows 11...

QEMU 6.2 is now officially available as the newest feature release for this widely used key open-source component to the Linux virtualization stack...

Following recent Steam database entries suggesting as much, Valve this evening formally pushed out a new Counter-Strike: Global Offensive build introducing initial Vulkan API rendering support...

Amazon has passed along word that they are hiring for Linux gaming engineers that are experienced in the likes of Valve's DXVK and Proton efforts as well as being experienced with the Mesa open-source graphics drivers, Vulkan, and more...

The first alpha release of Weston 10.0 is now available as the next feature update to Wayland's reference compositor...

For those looking at upgrading your business notebook this holiday season, here are our first benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U mobile processor under Linux using a Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2. For ~$1299 USD this holiday season on sale, this Linux-friendly ThinkPad offers a lot with the 8-core / 16-thread Zen 3 processor with Vega graphics, 32GB LPDDR4X 4266MHz system memory, 1TB NVMe SSD, 4K IPS display, and legendary ThinkPad build quality.

Canonical is looking to increase the outlook for Ubuntu on FPGAs and has announced a collaborative partnership with Xilinx to get the Linux distribution working on more of their hardware...

Linux PC vendor System76 has released Pop!_OS 21.10 as the newest version of their Ubuntu-based operating system...

Given the age of the X.Org/X11 code-base security issues have become quite frequent. It was nearly a decade ago that the X.Org Server was considered a "security disaster" and a security researcher saying it's even worse than it looks. Today another batch of X.Org Server security vulnerabilities have been made public...

While the ETC2 texture compression standard is royalty-free and popular for OpenGL / GLES / Vulkan use, recent AMD Radeon GPUs and APUs have removed their native support for this alternative to the likes of ASTC and S3TC. But now in Mesa 22.0 there is emulated ETC2 support for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver to in turn improve this open-source driver's Android support...

Upstreaming progress is being made on a new "HIPSPV" toolchain for AMD's HIP path so that SPIR-V kernels can be executed and ultimately allowing for execution by OpenCL drivers. This HIPSPV effort driven outside of AMD aims to be able to allow HIP code to work on other GPU drivers such as those from Intel...

Fedora 36 is planning to use plocate as its new provider of the locate command for finding files on file-systems. Plocate should make for even faster locating of files on disk as well as doing so using less CPU cycles...

The latest GCC Git activity for next year's GCC 12 compiler is adding of ARMv8.8-A support...

Fedora 36 feature work continues building up for what will make another exciting update to this Linux distribution come April. The latest approval is more exciting work on the OSTree / CoreOS front...

A minor update to AMD's Radeon Open eCosystem "ROCm" software is out today for open-source GPU computing...

AMD has issued a nice end-of-year update to the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler (AOCC) that also includes Fortran support as well as a new release of their AMD Optimizing CPU Libraries (AOCL)...

GCC 12 is nearing release in a few months time as the annual feature update to the GNU Compiler Collection for this Free Software Foundation backed code compiler. On top of new C/C++ language features and various optimization improvements, there is updated tuning for Intel's new Alder Lake processors. Here are some early GCC 11.2 vs. GCC 12 development benchmarks looking at the performance on a Core i5 12600K.

Fwupd 1.7.3 is out today as the newest version of this open-source software that integrates with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for offering streamlined system and device firmware updates under Linux...

PipeWire 0.3.41 is out as the newest version of this increasingly-used Linux audio/video stream server solution...

Queued up as part of the x86/core changes intended for the Linux 5.17 cycle is dropping of the AMD 3DNow! code within the kernel. While 3DNow! brings back fond memories from the days of AMD's K6 and early Athlon processors, AMD deprecated the instructions a decade ago and no longer found in newer processors. Removing of the 3DNow! kernel code is being done as part of some code improvements...

Ubisoft issued a new job posting for a Linux developer, which has many Linux gamers excited especially as it's mentioned for an "unannounced project." Unfortunately, contrary to all the emailed tips in overnight about the job posting, it ultimately will likely prove to be of little interest to the gaming community...

It looks like EXT4 come Linux 5.17 could be making use of the kernel's new mount API. Queued up into EXT4's "dev" branch is transitioning the EXT4 file-system driver to using the kernel's modern mount API...

AMD's "RDNA" class GPUs support wavefront sizes of 32 and 64 compared to older GCN GPUs at 64 threads. Going back to 2019 RadeonSI began making use of Wave32 for some shaders but now for Mesa 22.0 next quarter there are greater Wave32 improvements that have landed...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.16-rc5 and while things are looking normal at this stage, he announced that this 5.16 cycle will drag on longer due to the Christmas / New Year's holidays...

OpenRazer as the open-source, community-maintained collection of Razer peripheral support for Linux is out with a new release...

One of the Intel patch series we have been waiting to see mainlined since all the way back in 2018 is around per-client GPU metrics reporting for being able to show various GPU engine activity on a per-process basis. Every once in a while the patches have been revived but have yet to reach mainline. They recently were revved once again, leaving us hope that in 2022 we might finally see this standardized per-client/process GPU statistics reporting land in the mainline kernel...

This year there has been a lot of Linux kernel work around improving the handling of tiered memory servers, namely those with traditional system RAM augmented by Intel Optane DC persistent memory. There has been work to demote pages during reclamation to the slower persistent memory, improving NUMA balancing around such systems to optimize memory placement, transparent page placement and related work around tiered memory Linux servers...

Coming with future Intel CPUs is Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) to further enhance the security of virtual machines (VMs) and it's sounded a lot like AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) in many regards and in fact now for the Linux kernel Intel is looking at leveraging some of that SEV code to allow for more code sharing between these CPU features to improve virtualization security...

Aside from the separate work around experimental Vulkan Video decode support, thanks to Intel recently there have been a number of Vulkan improvements to the FFmpeg code around new accelerated filters...

One year after Apple introduced the M1 SoC and the effort began to bring-up this Apple Silicon under Linux, the effort remains ongoing and more code is inching closer to the mainline kernel...

The recent activity around x86 (x86_64 included) straight-line speculation mitigation handling is set to culminate with this security feature being set for mainline with the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle...

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS isn't expected to run on aging IBM POWER8 hardware as Canonical is shifting its PPC64EL architecture baseline to POWER9 for building packages...

Even with the holidays quickly approaching, KDE developers remain very busy in landing fixes -- especially crash fixes -- and fixing up Plasma's Wayland session for ensuring it is very polished for 2022...

SeaBIOS as the open-source x86 BIOS implementation commonly used by QEMU as well as a Coreboot payload is out with a new release...

The highly anticipated Godot 4.0 game engine release continues moving closer and should soon see an official alpha release...

Following last week's Wine 6.23 development release, Wine 7.0-rc1 was just declared in marking the end of feature development and beginning preparations for issuing Wine 7.0.0 stable in January...

The open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver work covered yesterday about a big optimization by leveraging NIR and going through that intermediate representation and relying on common NIR optimizations has now been merged into Mesa 22.0. This is a step-up from the existing open-source OpenGL driver support for old Radeon 9500 through Radeon X1000 series (R500) graphics processors. A similar conversion is also planned for the old Nouveau driver handling NVIDIA "NV30" era graphics processors too...

While it won't make it for the upcoming Wine 7.0, the Wayland driver for natively supporting this X11 successor continues maturing and in the not too distant future will hopefully begin receiving more widespread testing via Wine-Staging...

It's been a while since last having a hearty BSD benchmark comparison on Phoronix in part due to the latest hardware platforms generally lagging behind with how well supported they are by the various BSDs. But stemming from a Phoronix Premium supporter recently requesting some fresh BSD benchmarks, here is a look at how DragonFlyBSD 6.0.1, FreeBSD 13.0, NetBSD 9.2, and OpenBSD 7.0 are competing against various Linux distributions like CentOS, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu.

With Intel's Atom x6000E "Elkhart Lake" SoCs there is a new block called the Programmable Services Engine (PSE) that is an Arm Cortex-M7 companion core that handles various tasks. Unfortunately, with the PSE it means a new binary-only firmware module. With the Programmable Services Engine likely to come with future Intel platforms too, Coreboot developers and open-source enthusiasts are calling on Intel to now open-source this firmware to avoid having this extra binary blob and further complicating future open-source firmware efforts...

Back in 2018 for the Linux 4.18 kernel was introducing the Restartable Sequences system call for allowing faster user-space operations on per-CPU data. By avoiding atomic operations in cases like incrementing per-CPU counters, modifying per-CPU spinlocks, reading/writing to per-CPU ring buffers, and similar, Restartable Sequences can provide a performance advantage. The GNU C Library is landing its revised support for making use of this system call...

Sent to DRM-Next this week for queuing until the Linux 5.17 merge window in January is the latest batch of drm-intel-gt-next updates, which has hang fixes and more preparations for Intel discrete graphics...

It's been over one month since the release of AMDVLK 2021.Q4.1 as the latest open-source AMD Vulkan driver update, which is off the wagon compared to the prior weekly/bi-weekly release cadence. But today thankfully it's been succeeded by AMDVLK 2021.Q4.2 as the newest driver release...

Patches started earlier this year for allowing the parallel bring-up of secondary CPU cores for x86_64 processors have gotten back to being worked on and were sent out on Thursday for review...

While earlier this year AMD dropped pre-Polaris support from their mainline Radeon Software Windows driver, under Linux with open-source software older GPUs can live on much longer with superior driver support... Pending for Mesa 22.0 and as a surprise Christmas gift for those with nearly two decade old GPUs, a big optimization is pending for those with ATI Radeon R300/R400/R500 series graphics cards still in operation...

Systemd 250 is gearing up for release this month and today marked the availability of the first release candidate (and RC2 as a brown paper bag update). Systemd 250 is packing a rather large number of new features and changes across the board for this dominant Linux init system and service manager...

An exciting new development for GNOME 42 is allowing input events to happen at their full input device rate, which is great news for high refresh rate Linux gamers, input tablets, and similar use-cases...