Phoronix

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...

While now into September, Microsoft just published its "August 2021" update to their CBL-Mariner Linux distribution with a variety of changes...

The Intel-led open-source Cloud-Hypervisor project building off Linux's KVM (and also supporting Microsoft MSHV) and being cloud-focused and leveraging the Rust programming language for greater security is out with its newest major release...

Akin to FUSE for file-systems in user-space, VDUSE is set to be merged for Linux 5.15 in adding support for vDPA devices in user-space...

At last! AMD has posted the Linux kernel driver patches for their new "AMD-PSTATE" driver! This driver with modern AMD Zen CPUs (initially limited to Zen 3) to achieve greater performance per Watt / power efficiency on Linux than the conventional ACPI CPUFreq driver...

AMDVLK 2021.Q3.6 is out as the latest routine open-source code drop for this official AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver...

A new kernel patch series was posted this morning working on AMD Branch Sampling "BRS" support...

Going back to September 2019 was work on the AMD PTDMA driver for supporting this controller found on modern AMD processors for high bandwidth memory-to-memory and I/O copy operations. With the Linux 5.15 cycle the AMD PTDMA driver is finally being merged to the mainline kernel...

One of the nice low-level improvements we've seen with Linux 5.15 is a number of pieces falling into place in the quest of upstreaming the real-time (RT) patches for Linux. The latest merge makes SLUB RT-compatible...

Ahead of the official GNOME 41 release later this month, the release candidate is now available to facilitate more testing...

The DAMON kernel functionality developed by Amazon engineers has successfully landed in the Linux 5.15 tree...

For those wondering how the upcoming Ubuntu 21.10 release is looking for Intel "Rocket Lake" owners, here are some Ubuntu 21.04 versus 21.10 development benchmarks across dozens of different tests...

Since last year AMD has been working to get its s2idle / suspend-to-idle S0ix sleep state code in order for supporting this lowest power platform idle state on newer AMD laptops and there has also been other AMD suspend/resume improvements in recent times. Now with the Linux 5.15 kernel cycle is an important fix for the AMD s2idle code...

Power E1080 server as their first in a new family of servers based on the IBM POWER10 processor. Sadly though not all of the POWER10 firmware is open-source...

OverlayFS continues to be used by Linux IoT/embedded devices and other use-cases as a union mount file-system. With Linux 5.15 the OverlayFS file-system continues to improve...

Facebook last week formally announced CacheLib as their new open-source caching engine designed for web scale services and to make for effective non-volatile memory caching to offset the increasing costs of DRAM...

Last month Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers began posting patches working on DisplayPort 2.0 support for their driver with DG2/Alchemist now set to be Intel's first GPU supporting the newest DP standard. DP 2.0 enablement work continues with Panel Replay being the latest feature being worked on for their Linux driver...

In addition to Linus Torvalds dealing with the -Werror fallout, separately in kernel land there were also some significant performance regressions introduced during the Linux 5.15 that led to Linus reverting some of the changes...

Landing this past weekend was the surprise move by Linus Torvalds to enable "-Werror" behavior by default for all kernel builds. That compiler flag addition makes all warnings be treated as errors, which in turn stops the kernel build. As expected, this change has led to quite a mess...

GhostBSD 21.09.06 is now available as the latest release of this desktop-minded, FreeBSD-based operating system...

The Linux 5.15 Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes this cycle are quite exciting on the x86 (x86_64) front with several prominent additions...

While The Khronos Group previously hosted in-person Vulkan events, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic their "Vulkanised 2021" event next month has morphed into a free virtual event...

Recently with my Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 5600G and Ryzen 7 5700G Zen 3 APUs with Radeon Vega graphics I touched on the GPU graphics/compute performance in some of the basic benchmarks while in this article are a number of Steam Play and native Linux gaming benchmarks for looking at the potential for these latest-generation desktop APUs for Linux gaming.

After many development snapshots and three years worth of work, OpenSSL 3.0 is now available as a major update to this widely-used SSL library...

The X.Org Distributed Multihead X (DMX) DDX driver has been dropped from the X.Org Server source tree due to its rather broken state for more than one decade...

While Linus Torvalds isn't much of a fan of FUSE / user-space file-systems, the FUSE code within the kernel does continue making improvements...

Vulkan 1.2.191 is out this morning as the latest update to this graphics/compute API. As usual is a variety of bug fixes / clarifications to the specification while this time around is also one new extension...

For more than a year there has been work on FGKASLR for finer grained kernel address space layout randomization. While KASLR is widely-used these days, with enough guessing or unintentional kernel leakage, the base address of the kernel can be figured out. Finer grained KASLR allows for randomization at the per-functional level to dramatically boost defenses. The latest take on FG-KASLR has now been published...

To help out memory pressure / out-of-memory killing solutions like systemd-oomd or Android's LMKD, Linux 5.15 is introducing the "process_mrelease" system call to more quickly free the memory of dying processes...

The RISC-V architecture updates have landed in the Linux 5.15 kernel with more software features now being supported...

Notcurses as an open-source library designed for complex and "blingful" text user interfaces and character graphics, now works not only on Linux but also Windows and macOS. Notcurses makes it easy for CLI-based programs to support a wide range of colors, multimedia, Unicode, and other features not normally associated with command-line applications...

Intel Compute Runtime 21.35.20826 is available today with initial support for oneAPI Level Zero v1.2...

While RISC-V garners most of the interest these days when it comes to open-source processor ISAs, OpenRISC continues pushing forward with its Linux kernel support...

The platform-drivers-x86 area of the kernel continues to be quite active with particularly offering better support for modern Intel/AMD laptops. With Linux 5.15 there is another big batch of improvements that landed at the end of last week...

A change made by Linus Torvalds and merged today for Linux 5.15 is enabling the "-Werror" compiler flag by default for all kernel builds...

Being worked on for several years now on the Linux desktop has been high resolution scrolling including work for it around X Input, the libinput library used both by X.Org and Wayland systems, and the kernel driver side for the HID/input devices to support it. The latest user-space work is high resolution scroll wheel support within the next libinput release. Separately, with Linux 5.15 is now additionally support for high resolution scrolling with the Apple Magic Mouse...

One of the kernel patch series that has seen ongoing work for more than one year now is around introducing the FUTEX2 system call to better match the behavior of Microsoft Windows' NT kernel in order to allow for more efficient Proton/Wine usage that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux...

With Linux 5.15 there are optimizations for EXT4, big improvements for XFS, and significant work on Btrfs too. Rounding out the notable file-system work on Linux 5.15, the F2FS updates were submitted and subsequently landed for this next kernel version...

Released at the start of August was dav1d 0.9.1 for this high performance CPU-based AV1 open-source video decoder while now another point release is available with yet more optimizations...

After more than two decades of maintaining the Linux CD-ROM driver code, Jens Axboe who also serves as the block subsystem maintainer, IO_uring lead developer, and filling other roles, announced he was looking for someone to take over the CD-ROM code...

Stemming from an ongoing Mesa GBM discussion over introducing new gbm_bo_create_with_modifiers2 / gbm_surface_create_with_modifiers2 functions since the original "gbm_*_create_with_modifiers" functions lack support for passing usage flags, NVIDIA confirmed that the Sway Wayland compositor is working fine with their forthcoming driver supporting GBM...

While Samsung has explicitly stated before that queued TRIM works for Samsung 860 SSDs on Linux and thus leading to only older Samsung 840/850 drives being blocked from queued TRIM usage, that turns out to be inaccurate and now more quirks are added for the Samsung 860 and 870 series SSDs on Linux...