Phoronix

Sent in last weekend to the Linux 5.13 kernel was the change so Linux x86/x86_64 will always reserve the first 1MB of RAM in order to avoid corruption issues with some BIOS and frame-buffers sometimes fiddling with that lowest portion of system memory. While the thought was reserving that first 1MB unconditionally was a bit onerous and that perhaps Windows has some way of determining how much low memory area to reserve, it turns out Windows has been employing this same behavior for years...

Often times when checking out thin clients and industrial PCs / IoT units from OnLogic and other industrial PC vendors, they tend to be Intel powered and within the forums the first question is often about any AMD equivalent... For those wondering about any new AMD-powered thin clients / mini-ITX systems within an aluminum chassis, OnLogic has introduced the TM800...

It's shipping one year late but GRUB 2.06 is now officially available as the latest version of this widely-used open-source bootloader...

In addition to making public new security advisories this Patch Tuesday requiring updated CPU microcode, Intel also issued a press statement about their ongoing fight against speculation vulnerabilities with their processors...

Intel just issued a big set of CPU microcode updates for addressing a new set of security advisories just made public...

Following their tease last week, AMD today formally announced the Radeon PRO W6000 series as their newest and most powerful RDNA (2) based workstation cards...

KDE's big Plasma 5.22 desktop release is now available with maturing its Wayland support continuing to be one of the big ongoing focuses for the project...

More information on openSUSE's FrontRunner initiative are now being shared as a rebuild of SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Open Build Service and allowing for staging changes to advance architecture enablment for future Leap releases...

Mir continues to be developed by Ubuntu-maker Canonical as a set of libraries and Wayland compositor for building Wayland-based shells with integrated window management and other features to ease the bring-up and catering to business use-cases around IoT and digital signage, among other uses. Out today is version 2.4 of Mir with more features and fixes...

Being proposed within the CentOS project is a new special interest group for providing kernel modules not otherwise available within CentOS Stream. This would also include changes around where CentOS / Red Hat disable some kernel modules or artificially limit the scope of supported hardware...

While Wine's bi-weekly development releases are normally in good shape and suitable for Linux gamers and other enthusiasts wanting to run Windows games and applications on Linux or macOS, Wine 6.0.1 is out this week for those sticking to the yearly stable releases with follow-on point releases...

Following last month's release of Qt 6.1, the first point release of this latest Qt6 stable series is now available...

It looks like AMD's rising marketshare in the data center is paying off as AMD is hiring more Linux kernel engineers...

Announced at the end of last year was an experimental Wayland driver for Wine providing native Wayland support without relying on X11/XWayland. In the months since that yet-to-be-merged driver has continued supporting more functionality and with the latest update is much more viable...

As part of the curiosity-driven benchmarks and areas of technical interest now that we've gotten some of our initial Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" benchmarks out of the way has been looking into the performance of Linux's P-State CPU frequency scaling driver on the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable server. Benchmarked for the latesting testing was the power/efficiency out-of-the-box with P-State powersave as used by default with many Linux distributions against the P-State "performance" mode as well as putting P-State into passive mode to be able to via intel_cpufreq to try the Schedutil governor that relies on the kernel's scheduler utilization data for making frequency scaling decisions. Here is a number of power/performance governor benchmarks with the dual Xeon Platinum 8380 server in these varying kernel configurations.

Sadly there isn't much to report on at this time around improved open-source "Nouveau" driver support for the recent GeForce RTX 20 and RTX 30 series while even the GTX 900 and GTX 1000 series graphics processors are in poor shape for this unofficial driver. But when it comes to the aging GeForce 200 series, select models there are finally seeing OpenGL ES 3.1 supported by this open-source driver...

Mesa's Direct3D 12 driver maintained by Microsoft as part of their WSL and Windows OpenGL-over-D3D12 efforts has added a means of being able to select between multiple GPUs/adapters...

While Qt 6.1 released just one month ago, Qt 6.2 as of today is already into its feature freeze. This quicker than normal time to feature freeze comes due to this year's Qt releases being tightened up following the Qt 6.0 debut at the end of last year. Qt 6.2 will be the first Long Term Support (LTS) release of the Qt6 series...

Queued up now into the EXT4 file-system's "dev" tree is the recent work on a journal checkpoint ioctl (EXT4_IOC_CHECKPOINT) and optional support for TRIM/discard or zero-out support on journal flushes. This is the work that came about in recent months in working to ensure the privacy of deleted file names from the system...

Vulkan 1.2.180 is out as the latest revision to this graphics/compute interface. Vulkan 1.2.180 comes with a number of fixes/clarifications to the spec plus the addition of two more extensions...

Linux's RAW driver (RAW_DRIVER) for providing direct I/O access to block devices is finally set to be removed with the Linux 5.14 kernel this summer since its deprecation all the way back in the mid 2000s and its use has been discouraged even longer...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.13-rc5 ahead of Linux 5.13 potentially releasing later this month but depending upon how the rest of the cycle plays out could end up in early July...

The latest updates to Valve's Proton Experimental build for Steam Play should be offering lower input latency...

Version 2.32 of the Git distributed revision control system is now available with a variety of improvements from performance optimizations to usability enhancements and a whole lot of bug fixes...

The Linux x86/x86_64 kernel code already had logic in place for reserving portions of the first 1MB of RAM to avoid the BIOS or kernel potentially clobbering that space among other reasons while now Linux 5.13 is doing away with that "wankery" and will just unconditionally always reserve the first 1MB of RAM...

In addition to getting Intel's Alder Lake hybrid processors ready for the Linux kernel and other areas of the operating system stack, Intel's open-source engineers have continued their trend in recent weeks of upstreaming more Alder Lake work into Coreboot...

Robert McQueen, the President of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, wrote a post this week ultimately about the GNOME project's need to broaden its focus in order to attract more new users and ultimately to be able to raise funds from new organizations outside of their traditional reach. If they aren't able to find new funding sources, they may need to scale back in some of their efforts but still have a sufficient safety net...

For two years now we have seen various open-source patches around ENQCMD instructions for the code compilers and the Linux kernel. This Enqueue Stores support is part of Intel's Data Streaming Accelerator coming with Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids". But even with Sapphire Rapids not launching until later this year, the already merged Linux kernel code is force-disabling the ENQCMD instructions support as the current kernel support is deemed "broken beyond repair" and will need to be reworked...

A few months ago you may recall word of Crocus as a new Mesa Gallium3D driver for supporting Intel Gen7 Haswell graphics and older back through the i965 class hardware. That Gallium3D driver for the aging class of Intel graphics is nearing mainline Mesa with the work-in-progress merge request now pending as of this week...

GNU Poke debuted earlier this year as a new GNU project providing an interactive editor and integrated, interactive programming language for dealing with binary data. Poke makes it easier to analyze binary data and their data structures as well as manipulating said binary data...

Today marks seventeen years since I started Phoronix.com for what would become the leading Linux hardware reviews and benchmarking site. The 5th of June also marks 13 years now since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 for leading open-source benchmarking...

Adding to other networking changes queuing up for the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle, NVMeTCP Offload has begun landing into "net-next" ahead of this next kernel merge window...

Due to not too old versions of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) possibly generating bad code with the "-O3" compiler optimization level and sometimes there not being performance benefits, Linus Torvalds remains against using this optimization flag when compiling the Linux kernel...

It's been a few releases since there has been much in the way of new additions to Wine-Staging worth talking about. This staging/experimental version of Wine has at some points carried 700+ patches over upstream Wine but with not many new patches introduced recently while the flow of patches from staging to upstream Wine continuing, at this point its down to "only" 571 patches. With today's Wine-Staging 6.10 there are also some new improvements incorporated into this build...

Next week will mark the release of the Plasma 5.22 desktop with its Wayland support now much more mature alongside various performance improvements and a variety of other enhancements. Plasma 5.22 is a big step forward while already some feature work is going into Plasma 5.23 and the next round of KDE application updates...

As another cork to pop on the Phoronix 17th birthday weekend, Wine 6.10 has been released for running Windows applications and games on Linux...

While waiting for NVIDIA to publicly launch a beta of their much anticipated 470 Linux driver series, today they issued a new 470.76 release of their WSL "Windows Subsystem for Linux" driver...

Recently we have been running a number of compiler benchmarks looking at the recently released LLVM Clang 12 and GCC 11 open-source code compilers. There is as healthy and competitive competition as ever between GCC and Clang with the mainline Linux kernel these days working well under Clang, more software projects shifting to Clang by default, and the performance being as tight as ever between GCC and Clang for compiled C/C++ code on x86_64 and AArch64. In today's article are benchmarks of Clang 12 vs. GCC 11 on the dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 Ice Lake server.

With the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle, the USB sound driver will ideally exhibit lower latency when starting playback...

The Haiku open-source operating system inspired by BeOS continues advancing with work ranging from their hardware support and low-level kernel features up through user-interface work...

WASM3 v0.5 released this week for that WebAssembly interpreter that claims to be the fastest. The Wasmer WebAssembly runtime for WASI/EmScripten meanwhile released its initial 2.0 release candidates this week where it's been upping the performance...

Ahead of the long-awaited Atari VCS game console launching this month, the SDL2 library has added the mapping for the Linux game console's controllers...

Arm has released version 3.0 of its encoder for Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC), the lossy compression algorithm popular with OpenGL (ES) and Vulkan that is royalty-free and available through official extensions...

Following last week's stable release of Chrome 91, Google has now promoted Chrome 92 to beta...

One of the elusive kernel patch series we have been eager to see for the mainline Linux kernel has just been spun up a fourth time...

While CentOS Linux 8 is being discontinued at the end of the year in favor of Red Hat focusing those resources on CentOS Stream, CentOS Linux 8 2105 was released today as the newest version that is now based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 sources...

Following this week's big AMD keynote at the virtual Computex 2021, AMD just sent out emails teasing another launch event coming next week...

NVM Express Inc today published NVMe 2.0 as a family/library of specifications rather than being a monolithic specification in order to allow them to advance faster and independently of each other...

NVIDIA has now published the 460.84 Linux driver as the latest in their long-lived 460 driver series...

AMD has submitted their latest batch of feature work on the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver to DRM-Next of new material queuing for the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle...