Phoronix

Of the many new features coming with Linux 5.12 is KFence, short for the Kernel Electric Fence. KFence is a low-overhead memory safety error detector/validator for the kernel with lower expected overhead costs than say the Kernel Address Sanitizer. I just wrapped up some benchmarks looking out for any overhead impact of KFence on Linux 5.12 in its near-final state...

Google announced today that with Android 12.0 they will be deprecating their RenderScript APIs. Moving forward Android developers should primarily target the Vulkan API for high performance compute needs...

One of the exciting elements of last month's AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" series launch was having same-day availability in public clouds. Microsoft as one of AMD's cloud partners worked closely to deliver launch-day availability in their public cloud using EPYC 7003 series processors with the new "HBv3" instances focused on high performance computing (HPC) virtual machines. Here are some benchmarks of the Azure HPv3 instances compared to prior generation Microsoft Azure HPC instances available on-demand in their cloud.

Firefox 88.0 is out today as the latest version of Mozilla's web browser...

The first release candidate is up for version 1.7 of the Portable Computing Language, the portable OpenCL implementation that can run on CPUs and other accelerators. With POCL 1.7, OpenCL 3.0 is now being exposed and there is also improved support for SPIR-V binaries on CPUs...

It's been just one week since the release of Vulkan 1.2.175 that introduced the Vulkan Video extensions while out this morning is now the Vulkan 1.2.176 revision...

Red Hat graphics driver developer David Airlie has tried running the DOOM (2016) game on the CPU-based Lavapipe Vulkan driver... It works, but isn't fast and currently requires some hacks...

Alyssa Rosenzweig, known for her work on the Panfrost open-source driver for Arm Mali graphics, has published the latest findings around the Apple M1 graphics processor. In fact, enough understanding to get a shaded, spinning cube rendering on the Apple M1 using a simple demo so far while the open-source driver support is still the goal...

While normally after seven weekly release candidates the next stable Linux kernel release is declared, Linux 5.12 is one of those special kernels needing at least an eighth RC before going gold...

While Arch Linux now has its own convenient installer for quick and easy Arch installs, for those in search of an out-of-the-box, desktop-friendly Arch based Linux distribution Endeavour OS remains one of the leading options in 2021. This weekend marks the availability of Endeavour's April 2021 install media refresh...

Jonathan Carter who was initially elected as Debian Project Leader last year to succeed Sam Hartman has now been re-elected for another year serving in this role...

Released last week was the LuxCoreRender 2.5 open-source physically based renderer. Significant with this v2.5 update is OptiX/RTX acceleration support in addition to its existing CUDA, OpenCL, and CPU render paths. Given that, here are some fresh benchmarks of LuxCoreRender 2.5 across an assortment of NVIDIA graphics cards.

If all goes well Linux 5.12 will be released tomorrow and in turn will kick off the Linux 5.13 merge window (otherwise 5.12-rc8 will be issued and the stable then a week later). In any case once the Linux 5.13 merge window does open there are a lot of prominent changes expected...

Realtek has contributed support for the RTL8153C and RTL8156 Ethernet chipsets to their "r8152" USB network driver for the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle...

Hitting the Linux networking subsystem's "net-next" branch on Friday was the long in development WWAN subsystem/framework...

It's been another busy spring week in KDE land...

QUIC and HTTP/3 support is now appearing in Firefox Nightly and Beta build while it will begin its roll-out with the upcoming Firefox 88 stable release...

There still is much work left to be completed but Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has made its first baby steps towards ray-tracing support with Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA2" series hardware...

While openSUSE/SUSE is known for their friendliness towards the KDE desktop, this week's openSUSE Tumbleweed updates have made GNOME 40 available on this rolling-release distribution...

Debian 11 continues inching closer towards release and it looks like the developers maintaining the "Devuan" fork won't be far behind with their re-base of the distribution focused on init system freedom...

Intel's engineers working on their open-source Linux-based Compute Runtime stack just released their latest version...

Not to be confused with Assembly programming, the GNU Assembly is the new platform for a number of GNU toolchain projects like GCC, GNU C Library, GnuCOBOL, and other packages as a neutral home...

With Mesa 21.1 now branched for this collection of primarily OpenGL/Vulkan open-source drivers for Linux, feature development is on for Mesa 21.2 that will debut in Q3. One of the first major changes to land for Mesa 21.2 is the beginning of the graphics compiler support for Intel's forthcoming Xe-HP high performance graphics processor...

For GTC21 week NVIDIA has released version 11.3 of their CUDA toolkit...

Back in early 2018 were patches proposed for selectable platform support when building Intel's kernel graphics driver so users/distributions if desired could disable extremely old hardware support and/or cater kernel builds for specific Intel graphics generations. Three years later those patches have been re-proposed...

If all goes well the Linux 5.12 stable kernel will be released this weekend. It's been a fairly calm week so far in Linux 5.12 Git land but if things tick up Linus Torvalds may defer the stable release by one week to allow for an eighth and final release candidate. In any case, Linux 5.12 is packing a lot of exciting changes...

Recently from NVIDIA we received the rest of the NVIDIA RTX 30 series line-up for cards we haven't been able to benchmark under Linux previously, thus it's been a busy month of Ampere benchmarking for these additional cards and re-testing the existing parts. Coming up next week will be a large NVIDIA vs. AMD Radeon Linux gaming benchmark comparison while in this article today is an extensive look at the GPU compute performance for the complete RTX 20 and RTX 30 series line-up under Linux with compute tests spanning OpenCL, Vulkan, CUDA, and OptiX RTX under a variety of compute and rendering workloads.

For fans of LXQt or those still looking for a nice lightweight Qt5 desktop, LXQt 0.17 is out as the latest version of this open-source desktop environment...

OpenZFS 2.1 is nearing release as the next feature update to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently supporting Linux and FreeBSD systems...

It should come as little surprise -- especially given the recent news of Google allowing Rust to be used for Android system-level code -- but engineers at the search giant are in support of Rust code being used within the mainline Linux kernel...

After the release cycle dragged on an extra month due to blocker bugs, LLVM 12 was officially tagged on Wednesday night as the latest half-year update to this open-source compiler stack...

A new release of Hangover is now available for getting Wine up and running with cross-architecture support so you can enjoy the likes of Windows games and applications under 64-bit ARM and IBM POWER hardware on Linux...

As scheduled, Metro Exodus saw its native Linux port debut today. This first person shooter from 4A Games launched on Windows and consoles in 2019 while the 4A Engine powered game only debuted today for macOS and Linux. Previously it would work with Steam Play but now there is a native Linux port albeit with some kinks still to work out...

Last month the initial infrastructure for allowing the Rust programming language to be used within the Linux kernel landed in the Linux-Next tree for more widespread testing ahead of its possible inclusion in the mainline kernel. Now a "request for comments" has been started again on the kernel mailing list around the prospects of Rust code for the Linux kernel...

Google officially promoted Chrome 90 to its stable channel today as the latest feature update to their cross-platform web browser...

Feature development for this quarter's Mesa 21.1 release is now over with it having been branched from main and the first release candidate issued...

Over the past year there has been an uptick in Linux developers from different vendors working on laptop privacy screen support under Linux. When it comes to the support with newer Lenovo ThinkPad laptops, it looks like that kernel support could soon land and the GNOME desktop is already preparing to support this feature...

At the end of March NVIDIA released the 465 beta Linux driver while today has been promoted to stable in the form of the 465.24.02 release...

For those wondering how the Windows vs. Linux performance compares with Intel's new Rocket Lake processors for both the CPU performance and some initial cross-platform exposure for the Xe Graphics, here are some preliminary benchmarks with the Core i9 11900K.

Earlier this month I reported on a WMI temperature driver for Gigabyte motherboards being worked on by an independent developer. That "gigabyte-wmi" driver is now slated for inclusion in the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle...

The feature freeze and code branching for Mesa 21.1 is imminent but last minute feature work continues to pour in. Hitting Mesa Git this morning as the latest activity were some fixes and improvements in Gallium Nine for providing Direct3D 9 support atop Gallium3D drivers to Wine/Windows programs...

The "Virgl" virtual 3D GPU project for providing OpenGL (and work-in-progress VirtIO-GPU Vulkan) acceleration within guest virtual machines continues to mature for improving the open-source Linux desktop virtualization stack...

The Linux Foundation's OpenBMC project to provide an open-source BMC firmware stack is quite exciting for freeing this low-level aspect of servers, but finding a supported motherboard that works well with OpenBMC can be a challenge at this stage. Fortunately, Linux 5.13 is set to support a lower-cost motherboard option in hopes of boosting OpenBMC development/usage...

FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE is now officially available as the debut of the big FreeBSD 13 feature update...

System76 has their in-house Pop!_OS Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu and have long been customizing their GNOME-based desktop. However, the Linux PC vendor is now taking things a step further by developing their own desktop environment dubbed COSMIC...

Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative has uncovered another security issue with the X.Org Server...

SiFive's OpenFive business unit announced today they have completed their first tape out of a RISC-V processor core using TSMC's 5nm process...

For years we have been eager to learn more about the long mentioned Vulkan Video API, which was supposed to come in H1-2020, but now has finally arrived with today's v1.2.175 update in provisional form. The new Vulkan Video extensions allow for GPU-accelerated video encode/decode. The initial public work is treated as a provisional specification and with limited codec coverage but will be expanded upon in time...

Last month Google engineers proposed multi-generational LRU for Linux to enhance the kernel performance and today the work has advanced to a second version...

Vulkan 1.2.175 is now public as the latest Vulkan API specification and it's bringing with it many new extensions...