Phoronix

During the past month were a number of updated Phoronix Test Suite test profiles made available on OpenBenchmarking.org as part of our open-source cross-platform benchmarking framework...

The POWER architecture updates have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 5.14 merge window with a few changes worth pointing out this round...

Darktable 3.6 is out as this summer's feature update to this open-source RAW photography software package and a great alternative to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom...

KDE developers ended June with yet more Plasma Wayland fixes plus a number of other worthwhile fixes too...

Shipping now as the successor to last November's big OpenZFS 2.0 release is OpenZFS 2.1 as quite a worthy follow-on release...

In celebrating the US holiday weekend, Wine 6.12 has arrived for popping in enjoying the latest Windows games and applications on Linux...

The MMC/MEMSTICK updates for Linux 5.14 bring more work on bettering the kernel's Secure Digital card support...

With Microsoft making public this week their early Windows Insider Preview builds of Windows 11, curiosity got the best of me to give it a whirl in looking at the performance of the early Windows 11 preview build compared to Ubuntu Linux.

Intel has wrapped up a 3+ year effort to overhaul and replace its existing RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) driver. With Linux 5.14 is their shiny new "IRDMA" driver while their former driver is being immediately removed...

Another release candidate of systemd 249 is available for testing while the actual release appears imminent...

The 64-bit ARM architecture changes were submitted this week for the ongoing Linux 5.14...

Following recent reports Intel has begun seeding the Xe-HPG DG2 graphics card to developers and various reported leaks around the next-gen "DG2" graphics card, Intel's open-source Linux driver engineers have begun publishing patches for enabling the DG2 as well as the Xe_HP SDV...

The MIPS code within the Linux kernel remains in a mature but rather stagnate state while the upstream MIPS architecture development has ceased and most vendors these days using Arm or RISC-V instead or even OpenPOWER prospects. But there still are some ongoing MIPS improvements to the Linux kernel...

Bringing up Intel discrete graphics on Linux especially when it comes to accelerated 3D rendering has been a very lengthy process for the DG1 graphics card enablement, but it may soon actually start working...

The PHP 8.1 alpha releases got underway in June in working towards the next annual feature release for the PHP scripting language...

The Linux 5.14 RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) and EDAC (Error Detection And Correction) changes have landed with several improvements this time around on the Intel side...

Besides Sapphire Rapids introducing Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX), new developer documentation has detailed AVX-512 FP16 capabilities coming with the next-generation Xeon processors. Intel has posted initial developer documentation around AVX512FP16 as well as a big set of GCC and LLVM Clang compiler patches for handling the new intrinsics...

While Clang PGO support was sent in for Linux 5.14 as part of Clang compiler handling updates for this next kernel version, the functionality was subsequently dropped out and a new pull request issued after criticism from Linus Torvalds and others...

The Direct Rendering Manager (kernel graphics/display driver) updates for Linux 5.14 are putting on the pounds with nearly 300k lines of new code added (312,187 insertions, 22,367 deletions). The big increase is driven by new AMD Radeon graphics support added, a new Microsoft driver added, and other changes...

During this past month on Phoronix were 242 original Linux/open-source/hardware related news articles written by your's truly and another 18 featured Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles. This month also marked Phoronix.com turning seventeen years old for delivering Linux hardware reviews and news...

One of the exciting initiatives taking place recently within the CentOS camp has been the CentOS Hyperscale special interest group that is backed by engineers from Twitter and Facebook along with other organizations. They've been making more progress on offering their hyperscaler-focused packages/updates and even onto publishing a CentOS Hyperscale Workstation operating system image for testing...

With the recent NVIDIA 470 series Linux driver beta this R470 branch is the point at which NVIDIA is ending its GeForce 600/700 series "Kepler" support. The 470 driver series will be maintained as a long-lived driver that will continue to see security updates and Linux kernel / X.Org Server compatibility updates for another three years. If this end-of-life status has you thinking about trying out the open-source "Nouveau" Linux driver with Kepler, here are some current benchmarks.

The latest public code patches on the mailing list today are preparing for newer AMD heterogeneous servers that will have Aldebaran GPU nodes connected via xGMI links to the CPU(s) and the GPU dies in turn having HBM2 memory...

Michel Dänzer of Red Hat is preparing the release of XWayland 21.1.2 as the newest update to this standalone XWayland package separate from a whole X.Org Server release for running X11 clients within a Wayland environment...

The HID subsystem updates for Linux 5.14 continue improving consumer device support from newer AMD Ryzen laptops to multi-touch improvements...

AMD has issued their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q2 for Linux driver update as their quarterly packaged driver update intended for use with Radeon Pro graphics cards and former FirePro line-up...

Given the dominance of Linux-based devices from embedded/mobile (Android) through data centers and Linux powering all sorts of equipment, the networking subsystem updates for new Linux kernel merge windows continues to be very lively with new hardware support and never-ending improvements and new features...

In preparing to close out the second quarter, the Intel Media Driver 2021Q2 was released today as the company's open-source stack for supporting GPU-accelerated video encode/decode on Linux...

Headlining the power management updates for the Linux 5.14 merge window is the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver now being adapted to handle hybrid processors...

The release candidates for OpenZFS 2.1 continue dragging on with Tuesday marking the eighth such test version while bringing Linux 5.13 compatibility and other fixes...

Linux PC hardware manufacturer System76 has released Pop!_OS 21.04 as the newest version of their Ubuntu downstream that also features their new GNOME-based COSMIC desktop...

The x86 platform driver updates have been submitted for the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel. This area of the kernel principally benefits x86 laptop support on Linux but also has other drivers like around the Intel Speed Select Technology and more...

AMD-specific code within Linux's KVM virtualization component previously could allow a KVM guest to breakout into the host. This bug persisted in the Linux kernel from late 2020 to March 2021 before being addressed and is the first known issue of such a guest-to-host breakout that didn't also depend upon bugs within user-space components...

After looking recently at the FreeBSD 13.0 and DragonFlyBSD 6.0 performance on AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" using a Tyan Transport CX GC68-B8036-LE server, the next round of benchmarking from this server with AMD EPYC 7543 32-core processor was looking at its support (all tested 2021 Linux distributions were running fine on this latest-generation AMD server) and performance across 11 current Linux distribution releases from Arch, CentOS, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora, Rocky Linux, Ubuntu, and openSUSE.

While Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" was talked about for launching in late 2021, that was widely expected to be delayed. Intel today proactively confirmed that Sapphire Rapids will now begin production in Q1'2022 with their ramp beginning in Q2'2022...

Quietly released last week by AMD was their Radeon Software for Linux 21.20 driver providing the latest packaged "Open" and "PRO" (Closed) driver components for use within enterprise Linux environments...

Linux 5.14 has cleared out its legacy IDE code from the kernel that means dropping more than forty thousand lines of code...

The Firewalld firewall management tool for Linux that is built around Netfilter/Nftables is preparing for its long awaited 1.0 release...

With Btrfs continuing to see new adoption by various enterprises, Linux distributions like Fedora Workstation/Cloud and SUSE/openSUSE embracing it, and there continuing to be nice upstream improvements to this file-system driver, Btrfs continues on a nice trajectory in 2021...

Compiling the Linux kernel with LLVM's Clang code compiler continues to be more featureful with plumbing now being added to handle profile-guided optimizations (PGO) to help in achieving greater performance for optimizing kernel builds for targeted workloads...

The GNU C Library (Glibc) has landed its _Fork function implementation as an async-signal-safe fork replacement that is also expected to be made part of the next POSIX standards revision...

PipeWire 0.3.31 is out today as the newest version of this audio and video streams server for the Linux desktop that is becoming a viable replacement to the likes of JACK and PulseAudio...

Earlier this year Google announced the Lyra voice codec that could work with AV1 video for video chats over 56kbps modems. Google is today shipping its newest Lyra version...

Intel is going to be disabling Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) by default for various Skylake through Coffee Lake processors with forthcoming microcode updates. Yes, this does mean performance implications for workloads benefiting from TSX. This change has seemingly not been talked about much at all publicly and I just happened to become aware of it when looking through new kernel patches...

Following yesterday's release of the Linux 5.13 kernel, the GNU folks have released GNU Linux-libre 5.13-gnu as their downstream that strips out support for loading binary-only firmware/microcode, blocks the ability to load binary-only kernel modules, and other sanitization work in the name of software freedom...

Among the early pull requests for the just-opened Linux 5.14 merge window are the scheduler updates that includes the introduction of Core Scheduling. The Core Scheduling functionality has been in the works for the past few years by multiple vendors for better securing SMT systems following various vulnerabilities coming to light around Hyper Threading...

The Hantro media driver within the Linux kernel for supporting the Hantro IP-based VPU found in Rockchip and NXP i.MX8M SoCs is seeing improvements with the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has said "yes" to using Yescrypt for hashing shadow passwords with this distribution's next release. Using Yescrypt in place of SHA256/SHA512 should lead to greater security for new user accounts...

The KVM changes were submitted early ahead of the now-open Linux 5.14 merge window...

Linus Torvalds has just released the Linux 5.13 kernel as stable...