Phoronix

To no surprise at all, the X.Org Developers' Conference 2021 will be carried out virtually similar to last year given the COVID-19 pandemic. The free XDC2021 registration and call for presentations has now been issued...

One of the interesting performance-related kernel patch series to come about so far this year has been Google's multi-generational LRU framework that is promising to offer much better performance in addressing the kernel's expensive page reclaimation handling...

With the Linux 5.13 merge window past, Intel's open-source graphics driver developers have submitted their initial queue of new patches to DRM-Next of material they have ready ahead of the Linux 5.14 kernel cycle this summer...

For those that wait until the first point release of a new quarterly Mesa 3D driver stack feature release before upgrading, now is the time to move to the Mesa 21.1.1 series...

Seemingly by the minute today there are more free software projects leaving the Freenode IRC network and moving to alternative IRC networks or other chat platforms...

Mozilla detailed today how their year-long effort so far aiming to improve the stability of the Firefox web browser on Linux is paying off...

Ampere is going public today with a strategy and road-map update where they have now publicly acknowledged they are developing their own in-house server CPU cores.

While there is more to consider when choosing a Linux distribution than just the out-of-the-box performance, for those curious about the performance of recent Ubuntu releases for running with Intel's new 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" processors, here are some benchmarks showing how the performance has improved from Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS to Ubuntu 20.10 and now the recent Ubuntu 21.04 Linux release.

While the Nintendo Wii U game console is approaching a decade since launch and has already been discontinued for several years, work towards a mainline Linux kernel driver for properly supporting the Wii U gamepad continues...

A small patch merged to X.Org Server Git enables support for MIT-SHM shared memory pixmaps with XWayland...

POCL 1.7 is out as the newest version of this "Portable Computing Language" that aims to effectively allow OpenCL to run well on various CPU architectures as well as other targets like OpenCL over NVIDIA CUDA and AMD HSA...

Oracle on Tuesday released Solaris 11.4 SRU33 as the latest monthly stable release update for this largely idling operating system. With the thirty-third stable release update to Solaris 11.4 are delivering some arguably long overdue features...

WebGPU as a next-gen web standard for accelerated graphics and compute is stepping closer to reality with the first public working drafts having been published...

Google used their Google I/O conference today to introduce the first beta of the upcoming Android 12 mobile operating system...

Mike Blumenkrantz working under contract for Valve on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation continues making remarkable progress on this Mesa code...

Two years after KernelShark 1.0 for visualizing the Linux kernel's "trace-cmd" tracing, KernelShark 2.0 has now been realized...

While last week the NVIDIA 460.80 Linux driver was released with adding support for the RTX 3050 / RTX 3050 Ti laptop GPUs, today the NVIDIA 465.31 Linux driver debuted for officially bringing these new Ampere GPUs to this newer driver branch...

For those wondering how GCC and LLVM Clang are competing when running on Intel's latest Rocket Lake processors, here are some GCC 11 vs. LLVM Clang 12 compiler benchmarks with the Core i9 11900K running from the newly-released Fedora Workstation 34 featuring these very latest compilers. The compiler benchmarks were carried out at multiple optimization levels on each compiler.

More than a decade ago when the open-source graphics driver stack was being modernized with kernel mode-setting and better handling the stack for OpenGL, composited desktops and the like, TTM (Translation Table Maps) was born for managing GPU video RAM by the kernel Direct Rendering Manager drivers. While Intel initially expressed interest in TTM, they ultimately decided to create GEM as the Graphics Execution Manager for handling their video memory management needs. Now in 2021 with Intel aggressively pursuing discrete graphics, they are working on TTM support...

AMD has issued its newest AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver code drop today and with this update comes some new optimizations and improvements...

It's been a month and a half since AMD published a security analysis of their new Zen 3 "Predictive Store Forwarding" feature that while helping performance could theoretically lead to a new side-channel attack. While they published a Linux patch to allow disabling PSF if desired for increased security, to this day they remain in the works and have yet to be mainlined...

Back in 2007 Apple effectively acquired the open-source CUPS project and in 2017 then decided to no longer develop CUPS under the GPL but instead the Apache 2.0 license for this widely-used Unix/macOS/Linux print server. But then at the end of 2019 the CUPS lead developer left Apple and following that public development of CUPS seemingly halted. Fortunately, now there is a happy next chapter to the CUPS printing story...

The open-source Panfrost graphics driver stack that is now seeing support backed by Arm is going to see Mediatek MT8183 support with the upcoming Linux 5.14 kernel cycle this summer...

Google announced today the accepted projects/students for this year's Google Summer of Code. While for GSoC 2021 Google trimmed the length of this summer coding initiative and also cut the stipend amounts, there ended up being still a good turnout for this year with some interesting projects to be attempted...

Virglrenderer that is part of the open-source Linux effort to provide accelerated OpenGL to guest virtual machines has been enjoying some new micro-optimizations...

Going along with the recent releases of FreeBSD 13.0, DragonFlyBSD 6.0, and OpenBSD 6.9, NetBSD 9.2 is now available as the latest feature release of this BSD operating system...

Fedora 35 is looking to replace the unmaintained SDL 1.2 packages with using the sdl12-compat compatibility layer for better handling of vintage Linux games by this upcoming distribution release...

While we are sure to see only more AI accelerator drivers introduced to the Linux kernel over the coming years, the open-source driver situation for the Linux kernel is increasingly becoming a fragmented mess already and disagreements among kernel developers continue to be reignited over the mainlining process and the handling of these drivers...

With the new dav1d 0.9 AV1 decoder release bringing AVX2 Assembly for higher bit depth videos, the performance improvements are very pronounced with modern Intel and AMD systems...

Making some rounds this weekend is the "Lima" project. No, not to be confused with the open-source Arm Mali reverse-engineered project of the same name, but rather an effort to be like an unofficial "macOS subsystem for Linux."..

The second weekly release candidate is now available for Linux 5.13...

As written about a few days ago, the open-source Dav1d AV1 decoder has added AVX2 Assembly for higher bit depth decoding. Dav1d 0.9 is now available with this optimization and more...

While past the Linux 5.13 merge window, some reorganizing/cleaning to the AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) code was merged to mainline today to make it easier for when the SEV-SNP and other feature code is submitted for Linux 5.14 or later...

With word this week that KDE's Dolphin file manager has adopted a hamburger menu that has re-ignited the discussion once more over client versus server-side decorations for the KDE desktop...

A Fedora 35 change proposal submitted this week that is ruffling some feathers is over removing the "allow SSH root login with password" option from Fedora's Anaconda installer...

For those interested in the story of PipeWire for handling Linux audio/video needs not only for the Linux desktop itself but coming to cars / infotainment systems and more, there is an interesting Red Hat interview going over the history and other topics pertaining to PipeWire...

While the Plasma 5.22 beta was released this week, it's not game over yet for still getting more fixes into this next KDE desktop release, especially as it concerns their maturing Wayland support...

One of the features already found in new Intel "Tiger Lake" CPUs but not yet supported by the Linux kernel is Key Locker for securing AES keys on the system. Going back months there has been various patch series working toward Key Locker support while the actual patch series getting things ready for usage was just sent out again under a "request for comments" flag...

Zstd has already been enjoying phenomenal growth throughout the open-source software ecosystem thanks to its feature set and impressive performance, but can it get even better? Yes, with Zstd 1.5 that is out today there are some more mighty impressive performance improvements...

For those of you still relying on a GCC 8 compiler, it's time to upgrade beyond that considering GCC 11 debuted just several weeks back, but if you are on the 2018 era compiler for enterprise/legacy reasons, GCC 8.5 is out as one last hurrah...

Following this week's id Tech 3 based Daemon engine update, the open-source first person shooter / real-time strategy game Unvanquished has just issued its long overdue v0.52 beta release...

KDE developers this week have issued the much anticipated Plasma 5.22 beta for testing, which is exciting this time around largely for bringing its Wayland support up to par for daily use with quite a lot of polishing and optimizations...

This week DragonFlyBSD 6.0 was released and while I have just begun in my benchmarks of this new DragonFlyBSD release, the numbers so far are quite compelling for this BSD compared to its prior release.

While PHP 8.0 was released at the end of last year, it wasn't added to Ubuntu 21.04 given all the changes at play over PHP 7.4. But now for Ubuntu 21.10, that transition to PHP 8 is now happening to ensure it's in good enough shape for the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS cycle...

For two years now Intel open-source engineers have floated patches for reporting per-client engine utilization for showing on an application level how much it's leveraging the Intel graphics render/3D, blitter, and video/multimedia engines. This can be used for some nifty system information reporting like a GPU top or other system monitoring functionality. The latest version of these patches were sent out this week...

The UBports community this week released Ubuntu Touch OTA-17 as the latest version of this Ubuntu smartphone/tablet spin that is currently supporting more than two dozen different devices...

For months Linux hardware vendor System76 has been teasing their own in-house designed and manufactured keyboard with open-source firmware and various innovations. Today the embargo lifts on the System76 Launch Configurable Keyboard so we can share more about this new open hardware product.

In addition to the initial batch of AMDGPU changes for Linux 5.14 that were mailed in on Thursday to DRM-Next, the initial DRM-Misc-Next pull also was sent off on its way to DRM-Next ahead of this next kernel cycle...

Back in April we wrote about the AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2 Vulkan driver update for Radeon Linux systems while as some driver deja vu this driver version with the same changes have been re-released...

The Adreno 660 is the GPU found within the Snapdragon 888 SoC as a significantly improved graphics processor compared to the Adreno 650. Support for the Adreno 660 is now on the way to the open-source MSM DRM driver for the Linux kernel...