Phoronix

As part of our various end-of-Q2/H1'2021 recaps, here is a look back at the most popular Intel Linux/open-source news so far this year...

Frequency invariance support for the ACPI CPPC CPUFreq driver originally landed in Linux 5.13 but was reverted late in the cycle due to problems (possible kernel oops) while now that's been cleaned up and is trying again for Linux 5.14 with this functionality striving for more accurate load tracking...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues seeing new features and improvements to this file-system that is increasingly used by Android devices and other flash/SSD-focused systems...

Last summer I wrote about Intel prototyping their Mesa drivers to use the IGC compiler, which followed Intel transitioning their Windows driver to use this compiler that was originally written for their open-source Linux compute stack. While they were making good progress last year on having their Mesa drivers use the IGC compiler, the project has been pushed back...

Systemd 249 has been promoted to stable as the newest version of this Linux init system...

For quite a while now Samsung engineers have been developing an in-kernel SMB3 file sharing server for the Linux kernel. In recent months that code has been maturing more and now the latest version of this KSMBD kernel code has been published...

The Linux 5.14 input subsystem updates have landed with new hardware support and other changes...

Earlier this year was the proposed NVIDIA code from NVIDIA for allowing Mesa's GBM to support alternative back-ends. This support is notable given that most Wayland compositors are catering to using Mesa's Generic Buffer Manager (GBM) rather than EGLStreams or other options for buffer management. That support code has now been merged into Mesa 21.2...

Adding to the lengthy list of features for Intel's next-gen Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" processors next year is an admittedly experimental feature called RAR, or Remote Action Requests...

The Linux 5.14 kernel so far is running smoothly in my early tests across a variety of systems but coming in this morning is a pull request having the potential to cause some fall-out on x86/x86_64 systems but hopefully will not...

Arm engineers are working on the Active Stats Framework (ASF) that is a new kernel framework for Linux effectively combining the current roles of CPUFreq and CPUIdle...

The staging changes were submitted on Monday for the ongoing Linux 5.14 for this area of the kernel where immature / yet-to-be-cleaned-up code lives to prove itself before being ready to graduate to the proper mainline kernel area...

The Linux Foundation and their partners are today announcing their intent to form the Open 3D Foundation to help foster 3D game and simulation technologies. As a key part of this new Open 3D Foundation, Amazon's Lumberyard game engine that started off based on CryEngine is going to see an Apache 2.0 licensed copy made available as the Open 3D Engine (O3DE).

For those making use of Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) for enjoying Linux application support within Windows, here are some early benchmarks of the inaugural Windows Insider Preview build of Windows 11 with WSL2 against Windows 10 and then Ubuntu Linux bare metal on the same hardware.

The Qt Company today issued the first of several expected betas for the upcoming Qt 6.2 toolkit release that will also be their first Qt 6 long-term support version...

While RISC-V secures much of the spotlight these days when it comes to open-source processor instruction set architectures, OpenRISC is still moving along and soon should see more OpenRISC LiteX drivers upstreamed...

More build artifacts of CentOS Stream 9 are being published now while more OS images are still on the way. CentOS Stream 9 is open for contributions as RHEL's future upstream...

Greg Kroah-Hartman on mailed in the USB/Thunderbolt changes targeting the Linux 5.14 merge window...

There is now covid going around the BSDs... DragonFlyBSD has ported it from NetBSD...

There hasn't been a major X.Org Server release since v1.20 three years ago and not much interest in seeing a new release with more Linux distributions switching to Wayland-based desktops and XWayland recently seeing its own standalone releases. But now there is an X.Org Server 21.1 development release as the first step towards a possible new stable release in the future...

It's coming three years later than originally planned but with Ubuntu 21.10 this autumn the Debian packages will now be compressed via Zstd for offering speedier decompression speeds...

A set of Linux kernel patches to the asus-wmi driver are pending that improve the support for newer ASUS gaming laptops...

Last year I wrote about NVIDIA working on Vulkan support for RDMA memory. That work around RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) memory usage in the Vulkan context is now available with today's Vulkan 1.2.184 specification update...

The tracing subsystem within the Linux kernel is seeing some exciting improvements with Linux 5.14 to help with low-latency analysis and also measuring operating system noise...

The Linux kernel's tooling around the perf subsystem is the latest area seeing a lot of work for Intel's upcoming Alder Lake processors with a mix of high performance and low power processor cores...

Merged back in Linux 5.4 in late 2019 was the exFAT file-system driver that has proven to be quite mature at this stage with the work led by Samsung under the blessing of Microsoft. There hasn't been much in the way of exFAT file-system driver changes in recent kernel releases given its maturity. Even with Linux 5.14 there are just two exFAT patches but end up being notable at least for some users due to fixing file-system compatibility with some digital cameras...

This US Independence Day a revised set of patches were mailed out providing support for Rust as a secondary programming language within the Linux kernel for areas where increased security and memory safety are of utmost importance. The set of 17 patches plumb the Linux kernel with initial support, an example driver, and in total amount to more than 33k lines of new code in its early form...

Linux 5.14 is ready to begin supporting some new sound hardware while some recently proposed USB audio latency improvements were rejected for now...

As part of our various Q2'21 and H1'21 Linux/open-source recaps, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news so far this calendar year...

The thermal subsystem updates for the Linux 5.14 kernel include more work on Intel's int340x driver that is used by newer Intel laptops for dealing with their varying thermal control capabilities and exposing more thermal information to user-space for use by Intel's Thermal Daemon (Thermald). This cycle the work includes a new driver that will be used by next-gen Alder Lake SoCs...

GNU Binutils 2.37 has been branched and the release process initiated for these low-level GNU components likely seeing their v2.37 release later this month...

Among the many new features that were sent in so far this week for the Linux 5.14 merge window was the long in-development work on "core scheduling" to reduce the Hyper Threading information leakage risks from side channels and help ensuring deterministic performance on such HT/SMT systems by controlling the resources that can run on a sibling thread. As a follow-up to that article from a few days ago, core scheduling will now be disabled by default...

The Linux kernel's Distributed Lock Manager as a general purpose DLM for kernel and user-space applications with cluster computing systems is seeing a useful reliability improvement with Linux 5.14...

The EXT4 file-system updates have been sent in for the ongoing Linux 5.14 merge window...

Intel open-source engineers continue working on the bring-up around Compute Express Link (CXL) as the new open standard interconnect built off PCIe aiming to empower next-generation servers...

The XFS file-system continues seeing a lot of work cleaning up the kernel driver code as well as some minor feature improvements heading into Linux 5.14...

During the past month were a number of updated Phoronix Test Suite test profiles made available on OpenBenchmarking.org as part of our open-source cross-platform benchmarking framework...

The POWER architecture updates have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 5.14 merge window with a few changes worth pointing out this round...

Darktable 3.6 is out as this summer's feature update to this open-source RAW photography software package and a great alternative to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom...

KDE developers ended June with yet more Plasma Wayland fixes plus a number of other worthwhile fixes too...

Shipping now as the successor to last November's big OpenZFS 2.0 release is OpenZFS 2.1 as quite a worthy follow-on release...

In celebrating the US holiday weekend, Wine 6.12 has arrived for popping in enjoying the latest Windows games and applications on Linux...

The MMC/MEMSTICK updates for Linux 5.14 bring more work on bettering the kernel's Secure Digital card support...

With Microsoft making public this week their early Windows Insider Preview builds of Windows 11, curiosity got the best of me to give it a whirl in looking at the performance of the early Windows 11 preview build compared to Ubuntu Linux.

Intel has wrapped up a 3+ year effort to overhaul and replace its existing RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) driver. With Linux 5.14 is their shiny new "IRDMA" driver while their former driver is being immediately removed...

Another release candidate of systemd 249 is available for testing while the actual release appears imminent...

The 64-bit ARM architecture changes were submitted this week for the ongoing Linux 5.14...

Following recent reports Intel has begun seeding the Xe-HPG DG2 graphics card to developers and various reported leaks around the next-gen "DG2" graphics card, Intel's open-source Linux driver engineers have begun publishing patches for enabling the DG2 as well as the Xe_HP SDV...

The MIPS code within the Linux kernel remains in a mature but rather stagnate state while the upstream MIPS architecture development has ceased and most vendors these days using Arm or RISC-V instead or even OpenPOWER prospects. But there still are some ongoing MIPS improvements to the Linux kernel...

Bringing up Intel discrete graphics on Linux especially when it comes to accelerated 3D rendering has been a very lengthy process for the DG1 graphics card enablement, but it may soon actually start working...