Phoronix

It was in October of 1996 that the KDE desktop environment was founded and as such with marking twenty-five years since its creation, the forthcoming Plasma 5.23 is being advertised as the "25th Anniversary Edition" for the desktop...

As usual when the Linux 5.15 merge window began wrapping up, I set out to dive into its performance to see what is in store for this next version of the kernel and whether there was any regressions or other performance changes worth noting. Linux 5.15 overall has been in good shape for the "-rc1" state except noticing that code compilation workloads were taking longer on multiple Linux 5.15-rc1-running systems than Linux 5.14 or prior. Seeing it across multiple systems and a very real-world regression, it was worth bisecting and looking closer so here are the details.

With the Linux 5.15 merge window out of the way, the first drm-misc-next pull request has been sent in to DRM-Next for staging until the Linux 5.16 merge window opens up about two months from now...

The latest work landing for Mesa 21.3 is supporting FP16 within the LLVM-based software driver code namely for the LLVMpipe Gallium3D OpenGL and Lavapipe Vulkan drivers...

It's been known that Google has been using the open-source "MSM" DRM/KMS driver on Qualcomm-powered devices that originally started out as a reverse-engineered driver project separate from the company. Now it's also been confirmed how Google is successfully using the open-source Mesa Freedreno OpenGL and TURNIP Vulkan drivers on Qualcomm-powered Chromebooks too...

The latest area where BPF is looking to expand within the Linux kernel is its CFS scheduler...

While Microsoft has long had WGL as an API analogous to EGL for residing between OpenGL and the Windows interfaces, Microsoft has now wired up an EGL implementation for Mesa that works on Windows...

Alyssa Rosenzweig spoke today at the virtual X.Org Developers Conference about the ongoing work for bringing up Linux display and graphics support on the Apple M1 graphics processor...

AMD today released their quarterly update to the Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise graphics driver package, which includes an updated Linux build as well...

A small but important step forward is seeing AMD recently publishing their binary firmware files in advance of new GPU/APU launches for rounding out their Linux driver support stack...

Iago Toral of Igalia kicked off the first day of the virtual XDC2021 developer conference today by sharing a status update on V3DV as the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver most notably used for Raspberry Pi 4 and newer...

French telecommunications giant Orange has published "BMC" as the (e)BPF Memory Cache providing a cache focused on memcached usage within the Linux kernel...

HP's higher-end "OMEN" laptop series is set to see better support with the next kernel cycle...

The GNU Compiler Collection has already supported Intel's Tremont cores as used by the low-power Jasper Lake platform. Now though coming to GCC are some optimizations to further enhance the performance when targeting the Tremont micro-architecture...

Following portions of the merge request landing, the rest of the RadeonSI CPU-overhead-lowering work was just merged to Mesa 21.3...

Intel has released a new version of their loader for oneAPI Level Zero for loading the Level Zero software driver components...

Java 17 has made it to general availability status today with a number of improvements...

While NVIDIA has been supporting Resizable BAR for a while now with their GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards, for those exclusively using Linux it remains more of a challenge due to AIB partners generally not releasing any vBIOS updates for ReBAR support that can be easily applied under Linux. But if you do carry out an update -- such as under Windows -- the performance uplift can be worthwhile if using a game that can benefit from the support.

"Intel Seamless Update" is a forthcoming feature for Intel platforms seemingly first being exposed by their new Linux kernel patches working on the functionality... Intel is working on being able to carry out system firmware upates such as UEFI updates but doing so at run-time and being able to avoid the reboot in the process...

Libinput 1.19 is now available as the newest version of this Linux input handling library commonly used these days by both X.Org and Wayland desktops...

While Linux 5.15-rc1 was released on Sunday with its many changes, landing on Monday was a late change to raise the baseline GCC version requirement for building the Linux kernel...

Mesa 21.3 today landed a debug option that can help with the XWayland-based gaming performance around latency and for power management as well...

In addition to the big Advanced Matrix Extensions support still being in flux and the kernel-side AMX code not yet being merged, another feature of next year's Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" that we are only now seeing in early published form for the Linux kernel is handling of x86 user interrupts...

While Linux 5.15 has many new features and improvements, one of the patch series we have been eager to see land is the work introducing the new FUTEX2 system call. FUTEX2 can help improve the performance of newer Windows games running on Linux via Wine / Steam Play's Proton by better matching the Windows kernel behavior, but while it didn't land for Linux 5.15, at least a new version of the patches were posted...

After last month landing the Zink sub-allocator code for improved performance and also enabling OpenGL ES 3.2 support for Zink, lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz at Valve has been spending time this month working to get more games running on this OpenGL-over-Vulkan Mesa driver...

GDB 11.1 is now available as the latest feature update to the GNU Debugger...

Feature development is over on the Linux 5.15 kernel with Linux 5.15-rc1 being issued. It's now on to testing and bug fixing over the next two months before the kernel is christened as stable. Here is our original Linux 5.15 feature overview about all of the big changes in this next kernel version.

While Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS shipped one year ago as the last planned point release to the "Bionic Beaver", an emergency issue is leading to Ubuntu 18.04.6 now being prepared...

Of all the great stuff for AMD in Linux 5.15, one of the patches still not having yet been mainlined is the control support around Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) with Zen 3 processors. It's been six months since AMD published their security whitepaper around PSF while the Linux patch has yet to be mainlined while now it seems will be updated for a reduced focus on KVM usage...

On and off for years has been talk of an accelerator subsystem for the Linux kernel considering that for now most AI training/inference accelerator drivers end up lodged within the "char/misc" area of the kernel. That accelerator subsystem discussion has been restarted with talks of having such a subsystem or moving those drivers within the GPU/DRM subsystem space...

As expected this evening the Linux 5.15-rc1 kernel was released to top off the two week merge window that saw many changes to the kernel...

While working on my usual Linux kernel feature overview that summarizes the many articles over the past two weeks outlining all of the new features and changes merged, one area that particularly stands out for Linux 5.15 are all of AMD's upstream contributions that happened to make it in this kernel. There is a lot of new enablement on the AMD side -- both for CPUs and Radeon graphics -- but also improving existing hardware support...

The Apache Software Foundation recently published their FY2021 report for their year-ended 30 April. Even with the ongoing pandemic, the Apache Software Foundation managed to raise more than $3M USD and enjoyed a host of software successes...

We are now down to the last day of the Linux 5.15 merge window and one of the patch series we have been waiting to see if it would land during this two week period was the "folios" code -- or that also was recently renamed to "pagesets" to address some concerns over the name...

In addition to the RISC-V changes merged last week for the Linux 5.15 kernel, a second batch of patches was merged this weekend...

A change first proposed last year to the Linux kernel's Spectre mitigation defaults looks like it will soon be sent in for the mainline kernel...

While the Rust programming language support for usage within the kernel isn't landing for the Linux 5.15 merge window ending this weekend, that effort remains ongoing. A status update on the effort was shared this week about Rust usage for the Linux kernel...

Another batch of minor optimizations were merged to Mesa 21.3 for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

While much of Intel's next-gen Alder Lake processor support appears to be in good shape for Linux 5.14, some remaining items are landing for the current Linux 5.15 cycle. The latest Alder Lake support hitting the kernel is for Intel's TCC cooling driver...

CoreCtrl 1.2 was released this week as the open-source, independently-developed application for exposing more sensor support on Linux and offering various controls aroudnd over/under-clocking and other tuning. At the moment CoreCtrl is primarily focused on making the most use of AMD Radeon GPUs under Linux with some options not otherwise readily available on the platform...

Released in August was the big OpenShot 2.6 video editor update while this weekend has been succeeded by its first point release...

It's been a busy start to September for the KDE project and is now under its soft feature freeze for Plasma 5.23...

Wine 6.17 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release as we move closer towards the Wine 7.0 release around the start of the new year...

While last week was the main "char/misc" pull request for the Linux 5.15 merge window, the Habana Labs driver changes were previously reverted from there due to opposition from the upstream kernel developers in the Direct Rendering Manager space. The concerning patches around DMA-BUF have now been removed and a new pull request submitted with updates to this AI driver for Linux 5.15...

With less than one month out from the official release of Microsoft Windows 11, I was curious to run some fresh benchmarks of the latest Windows 11 Insider Preview build against Windows 10 21H1 to see how the performance is looking. Of course, also to see how Windows 11 is shaping up against Ubuntu 21.10 also due for release in October.

Intel-owned Habana Labs now has the most open software stack among AI accelerators! While Habana Labs has long provided an open-source, upstream kernel driver for their Gaudi AI training and Goya AI inference accelerators, the user-space portions including their code compiler and run-time library have been closed-source. This has been a thorn for upstream kernel developers and their standards, but now Habana Labs has open-sourced their user-space components too...

Last week a number of patches were merged in the quest to provide the kernel with comprehensive compile-time and run-time detection of buffer overflows. Another patch series was sent out today while still for this cycle they are expected to enable the compiler warnings around array-bounds and zero-length-bounds...

While Vulkan is quickly taking over as the dominant graphics API for Linux gamers especially with the likes of DXVK and VKD3D-Proton mapping Direct3D atop Vulkan, OpenGL remains widely used by workstation software. It's also for workstation software where AMD's "PRO" closed-source OpenGL Linux driver has traditionally competed well (and outperformed) the open-source Mesa driver. But with all the recent changes, that's either a matter of the past or close to not being relevant with the latest Mesa enhancements...

Over the past two years we have seen work around bringing up privacy screen support on Linux whereby an increasing number of laptops can reduce the amount of visible light when viewed at wide angles to try to block the screen contents from anyone potentially snooping at the screen. Ready to go now is the DRM/KMS user-space interface and the Intel graphics driver support now that there is a user-space "client" ready...

At the moment when running the X.Org Server in a multi-monitor configuration with displays of different refresh rates, it can lead to a poor experience with a variety of visual deficiencies when running an unredirected full-screen window with page-flipping for DRI3/Present. There is now a change that was merged into the X.Org Server with a new "AsyncFlipSecondaries" to improve that experience when running multiple displays of varying refresh rates...