Phoronix

As expected, support for the initial Apple M1 SoC support and 2020 Apple Silicon devices (Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air) has landed into the Linux 5.13 kernel...

Over the past month we have been quite impressed by the performance of the EPYC 7003 series Milan processors when looking at the top-tier parts, but how does Zen 3 do for lower-tier server CPUs? Recently we were supplied with two EPYC 72F3 processors from AMD for these 8-core high performance SKUs. In our initial look at the EPYC 72F3 Linux performance is seeing how they compare to the similar previous-generation EPYC 7F32 processor.

Linux 5.11 brought mainline support for Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) after a lengthy mainlining process. Building off that SGX enclaves support in the mainline kernel more recently has been support for SGX with KVM virtualization and now for mainline Linux 5.13 that guest-side support is landing for KVM guests...

The Khronos Group used the International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL 2021) to release OpenCL 3.0.7 as the latest OpenCL 3 revision that brings with it some new extensions...

Freshly re-based against yesterday's Linux 5.12 kernel, GNU Linux-Libre 5.12-gnu is now available as the latest version of this GNU cleansed kernel now carrying a codename of "Freedo Misses Tasha"...

Flatpak 1.11.1 is out this morning as the first development step towards the eventual Flatpak 1.12 stable release...

Version 1.6 of FWUPD is now available for firmware updating of motherboard BIOS and other device firmware under Linux...

The "x86/misc" pull request this morning for the newly-opened Linux 5.13 merge window adds the new KCPUID utility contributed by Intel...

Vulkan 1.2.177 is out today as the newest version of the Vulkan specification and this time around introduces one new extension that aims to help OpenGL translation layers and potentially other implementations atop this graphics API...

Following yesterday's Linux 5.12 release the merge window for Linux 5.13 is officially open. One of the first pull requests of this new merge window is for the platform-drivers-x86 updates, which primarily encompass Intel/AMD Linux laptop driver support improvements and other related x86 platform drivers...

MuSE is a MIDI and audio sequencer with audio recording and editing support. MuSE supports plug-ins to form a complete digital audio workstation. This GPL-licensed audio software is now up to version 4.0 and with it comes a redesigned user-interface...

After a week delay, the Linux 5.12 kernel was just released as stable...

GCC 11 is expected to be released next week following its recent release candidates...

LunarG, the consulting firm known for their contributions around Vulkan and also having been involved with Mesa development over the years and experimenting with Gallium3D features and other interesting efforts like the past LunarGLASS, is looking to hire another experienced graphics driver development engineer...

With it appearing all the essentials are in place for IBM POWER10 Linux support, in recent days we have seen an uptick in patches from IBM engineers working on POWER10 performance optimizations...

The drama in kernel land this week was University of Minnesota being banned from Linux kernel development over research they previously carried out looking at "hypocrite commits" and the possibility of intentionally introducing vulnerabilities (such as use-after-free bugs) into the kernel source tree. This weekend those researchers involved published an open letter to the Linux kernel community...

After it was pushed back last week due to blocker bugs, on Friday it was determined that Fedora 34 is now in proper shape to officially ship next week...

Queued this week into perf/core ahead of the imminent Linux 5.13 merge window is perf subsystem bring-up for Intel's next-gen Alder Lake processors...

Sony Linux engineer Peter Enderborg has proposed a soft watchdog for the Linux kernel to carry out pre-defined tasks in certain situations but not being like hardware watchdogs that would reboot the system if a problem crops up...

KDE developers continue polishing up their Wayland support and making other improvements to their desktop stack...

On top of the prior AMDGPU feature pulls for Linux 5.13 that brought Aldebaran support, FreeSync HDMI, and other improvements, another round of updates were sent in on Friday...

Wine 6.7 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games and applications on Linux...

Right now Fedora Linux predominantly uses GCC as the default system compiler except for cases where the upstream project only supports LLVM/Clang. But moving forward packagers working on Fedora could decide to switch to using LLVM Clang for building a given package where it is worthwhile...

Blender's Cycles engine is celebrating its tenth birthday today and in marking the occasion, the Blender project has announced the ongoing work on "Cycles X" as what started as a research project in preparing this engine for the next ten years. It's a big step forward for Cycles but with Cycles X the OpenCL rendering kernels are being removed...

As we have been showing in a few articles already, Ubuntu 21.04 is in good shape performance-wise and generally coming ahead of Ubuntu 20.10 and 20.04 LTS. We've seen that on a number of systems in the lab, but how does this better performance out of Ubuntu 21.04 compare to say Intel's Clear Linux? Here are some benchmarks.

You may recall last year was work that got started on being able to compile the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver on Windows. Well, this Friday the merge request finally was honored for Mesa 21.2...

The T2 Linux distribution, or "System Development Environment" (SDE) as it refers to itself, is up to version 21.4 and with it is now supporting fifteen different CPU architectures for this barebones Linux-based operating system...

The installer for the forthcoming Debian 11.0 "Bullseye release is now up to its release candidate phase for testing...

It's looking like the OpenZFS 2.1 open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems will soon be ready for release...

Following last week's release of Chrome 90, Google on Thursday debuted their beta of next month's Chrome 91 web browser...

Just ahead of the Fedora Workstation 34 release where it will be the first major Linux distribution using PipeWire as a modern alternative to PulseAudio and JACK, PipeWire 0.3.26 is now available as the newest big feature release for this audio/video stream server for the modern Linux desktop...

Earlier this week was a surprising Linux kernel networking commit that removed an IBM engineer as one of the driver maintainers for the IBM Power SR-IOV Virtual NIC driver. Seemingly at issue with this VNIC driver work was the developer using his personal email address in working on the driver in his off-hours. IBM has now clarified their stance on such work...

VKD3D-Proton 2.3 is now available as the latest release of this Steam Play (Proton) component for running Direct3D 12 games over Vulkan...

The P-State and CPUFreq "performance" governors on Linux with desktop Intel/AMD processors can be of help for gaming and other select workloads by tending to keep the CPU clock frequencies higher than the default ondemand (CPUFreq) or powersave (P-State) governors used by nearly all Linux distributions. But with Intel's new Core i9 11900K "Rocket Lake" is a dramatic difference in power and performance between the Intel P-State performance and powersave governors than what we have seen over the years with prior generations of Intel Core processors.

Ubuntu 21.04 "Hirsute Hippo" is now available...

Since the SD card specification v4.0 there has been the notion of extension registers initially for power management features that in the SD v6.0 specification also is now used for performance features. The Linux kernel is finally beginning to work towards making use of those SD extension registers...

The past few months there has been work by Google's Chrome OS engineers on Restricted DMA functionality for the Linux kernel to protect systems lacking an IOMMU...

The Samsung-led CIFSD as an in-kernel SMB3 file-sharing server continues on its trajectory toward the mainline Linux kernel...

Godot 3.3 is out today as the newest feature release for this increasingly used open-source, cross-platform game engine that is beginning to rival the capabilities of commercial game engines...

Whether you are a stable Mesa user or living more on the bleeding-edge with Git or development snapshots, there are new updates out today for this collection of open-source Linux GPU drivers...

After announcing last year that they would be supporting GUI applications with Windows Subsystem for Linux, today Microsoft published their "WSLg" preview for this feature to run Linux GUI applications atop Windows 10...

As a surprise and big disappointment, the "amd_energy" driver that exposes AMD EPYC server CPU energy monitoring metrics under Linux for being able to calculate the per-core and package power consumption and more is now set to be removed from the mainline Linux kernel...

Tomorrow's release of Ubuntu 21.04 is exciting on the desktop for Wayland by default in supported configurations and many other package updates and enhancements. But even for being a non-LTS release if you are interested in running Ubuntu Server there are some performance improvements to enjoy with newer platforms. Here is a look at the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" performance across Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, 20.10, and 21.04 with an AMD EPYC 7763 Supermicro server.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has banned a US university from trying to mainline Linux kernel patches over intentionally submitting questionable code with security implications and other "experiments" in the name of research...

HiSilicon engineers continue working on a cluster scheduler that could help the performance of certain x86 and ARM platforms on Linux...

While AMD's Mantle graphics API development has been suspended for more than a half-decade already with the Vulkan API successfully taking off, the open-source GRVK project continues to let Mantle unofficially live on by re-implementing its interfaces over Vulkan...

Succeeding January's release of GraalVM 21.0 is now GraalVM 21.1 with many performance improvements and other new features...

With Firefox 88 released yesterday, the Firefox 89 beta is now available for testing. Notable this time around is refining of the web browser's user interface...

With today's Radeon Software for Linux 21.10 packaged driver release is the first time Vulkan ray-tracing is being exposed on Linux for AMD Radeon graphics cards with any of the multiple driver options. Here are some initial benchmarks looking at how the Radeon RX 6000 series Vulkan ray-tracing performance is on Linux compared to NVIDIA's Vulkan ray-tracing support with the existing RTX 20/30 series hardware.

The release candidate to GCC 11.1 as the first stable release of GCC 11 is now available for testing. If all goes well GCC 11.1.0 will officially debut next week while GCC 12 is now in development with their latest Git code...