Phoronix

There is a patch pending that improves the Linux kernel's dealing with the hybrid P and E cores found with Intel's new Alder Lake processors that will benefit some systems/motherboards...

A fourth iteration of the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver patches for Linux have been sent out for review and testing...

FWUPD 1.7.2 is out as the latest release of this leading open-source solution for handling firmware updates under Linux for devices from motherboard UEFI to peripheral firmware...

OpenCL 3.0.10 has been tagged as the newest revision to the OpenCL 3.0 API...

Intel last month open-sourced "ControlFlag" for finding bugs within source code by using AI with training off more than a reported one billion lines of code. Intel has said they have successfully been using it within their software from applications down to firmware. The new milestone today is ControlFlag 1.0 being released...

Earlier this month I provided benchmarks showing the Intel UHD Graphics 770 with Alder Lake compared to other CPUs/APUs under Linux. Those tests were done with the latest open-source Intel Linux graphics driver code at the time, but for those running Alder Lake and wondering if it's worthwhile moving from the stable versions to more bleeding-edge components, this article is for you.

With Chrome 96 released, Google has now promoted Chrome 97 to beta as the next iteration of their web browser...

The Linux 5.16 merge window now past, an initial batch of changes from drm-misc-next has been sent in to DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 5.17 cycle kicks off around the start of the new year...

The latest Zink development code paired with the forthcoming "Copper" work is yielding an OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation that when running on NVIDIA's proprietary Vulkan driver is even able to outperform NVIDIA's own proprietary OpenGL driver for at least one notable Linux game...

Prominent FFmpeg developer Cyanreg has begun working on an experimental Vulkan hardware acceleration video decoder for FFmpeg...

The open-source Nouveau driver's support for the GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" series remains very limited -- most notably, without any 3D acceleration support -- but now the GA106 GPU can light up for the GeForce RTX 3060...

Last month I reported on activity around Straight Line Speculation "SLS" mitigation for x86_64 CPUs, similar to the work carried out by Arm last year on their SLS vulnerability. That work on the x86 (x86_64 inclusive) side has now been merged to GCC 12 Git and a kernel patch is expected to come shortly that will flip it on as the latest CPU security protection...

After nearly a decade of Slackware 14, the Slackware 15.0 release is moving closer to debut and now effectively under a hard feature freeze...

NVIDIA today released their latest Vulkan beta drivers for Windows and Linux...

Mesa 21.3 is now out as the latest quarterly feature release to this collection of open-source graphics drivers...

The recently-ended Linux 5.16 merge window saw significant I/O improvements driven primarily by maintainer Jens Axboe's recent focus on relentlessly optimizing the block and IO_uring code for record-setting per-core IOPS. As good as those improvements are, Linux 5.17 should be even better...

Intel passed along news today of their development efforts around Universal Scalable Firmware, a new initiative they are pursuing to simplify and scale firmware development for hardware from edge computing devices to the cloud...

Back in the day Ubuntu's Wiki was a great resource for Linux documentation but less so these days while the Arch Linux Wiki is often viewed as a gold standard for open-source documentation. Canonical though is now hoping to radically improve the documentation for Ubuntu and its other software offerings...

Following the news from last week of experimental Zink code running Wayland's Weston compositor over this Mesa-based OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation, developer Mike Blumenkrantz has opened up about some of the ongoing work to improve the efficiency of Zink and making such advancements a reality...

The Linux 5.17 kernel next year will support temperature monitoring for a "new generation" of AMD Zen processors...

NVIDIA is looking to enable run-time power management for the VFIO PCI Linux driver to allow for better power-savings...

Back in 2018 Intel founded Sound Open Firmware as their effort to provide an open-source audio DSP firmware and software development kit. AMD has begun supporting Sound Open Firmware too now, initially for the Renoir audio co-processor (ACP)...

Last week Google engineers uncovered a reference count underflow issue affecting all Linux kernels going back to v4.14 in 2017. This issue led to memory leaking from one process to another and only uncovered by accident. To address this class of memory corruption issues moving forward, Google is proposing a new "Page Table Check" feature moving forward...

Following last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5, CentOS Linux 8 version 2111 has been released as its RHEL 8.5 rebuild. This comes ahead of CentOS 8 becoming end-of-life at year's end...

Vulkan 1.2.199 is out with another new extension driven as part of Valve's work around Steam Play (Proton) and the Direct3D over Vulkan efforts...

Along with introducing DLSS 2.3 today, NVIDIA is making public an open-source Image Scaling SDK with promised cross-platform GPU support...

While the Linux 5.16 merge window just ended and that kernel won't be out until the tail end of the calendar year, already for Linux 5.17 new material is beginning to accumulate in the respective subsystem development trees... One set of changes merged this morning from Google can provide a sizable performance win around TCP performance in the datacenter...

AMD released AOMP 14.0 during SC21 week as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang-based compiler providing OpenMP GPU offload support for Radeon graphics processors...

For over four years now Red Hat has been working on Stratis as their new Linux storage solution. As an alternative to shifting to newer file-systems like Btrfs or the controversial OpenZFS, Stratis has been about offering similar advanced Linux storage features while building atop LVM, DeviceMapper and XFS all while using the modern Rust programming language. Stratis Storage 3.0 is now available as the latest work on this front...

Currently when running Linux distributions within Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), systemd isn't used but that could soon be changing at least for Ubuntu...

Besides the efforts out there for implementing the likes of Direct3D, OpenCL, and OpenGL on top of Vulkan, there does still exist the hobbyist project for implementing AMD's Mantle API atop Vulkan for which the Khronos API was originally based. A new Vulkan extension is now being proposed to help in that Mantle-on-Vulkan effort...

As expected GCC 12 has now entered its "stage 3" development phase where the free software developers involved will focus on bug fixing rather than landing shiny new features...

Mesa 22.0 development code now has basic support in the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for OpenCL powered by the Clover state tracker...

The Lightweight Java Game Library "LWJGL" has seen its first release in more than two years for this library that provides bindings for a number of different native APIs. With not seeing a release since before the pandemic, there is a lot in store with today's LWJGL 3.3 release...

A new Family 19h microcode binary was merged today into the linux-firmware.git repository that serves as the central source for all of the binary firmware/microcode files for Linux systems...

Git 2.34 is out today as the newest feature update to this widely-used, distributed version control system...

Now that the Linux 5.16 merge window has ended with yesterday's Linux 5.16-rc1 release, here is my lengthy original overview of what I find most interesting out of this new kernel version. Linux 5.16 won't be out as stable until around the end of the calendar year or early next year, but it will sure make one nice Christmas gift with all of the shiny new features in tow.

With the big Blender 3.0 release due out near year's end there was the Cycles X rewrite that landed and unfortunately removed OpenCL support in the process. While that left AMD Radeon graphics without Blender GPU-accelerated support, in time for the v3.0 release there is now AMD HIP support in place...

Google has released Chrome 96 a day early as the latest routine update to their cross-platform web browser...

Following a lot of improvements the past few years to the Intel Linux kernel graphics "i915" driver it looks like it's ready to enable run-time power management auto-suspend support by default...

The open-source Vulkan driver support for the video decode (and presumably after that, encode) extensions continues moving along for the Radeon "RADV" and Intel "ANV" Mesa drivers...

Patches were recently sent out that implement support for RISC-V's Scalar Cryptography Extension within the GNU Compiler Collection...

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 5.16-rc1 in moving past the exciting merge window and onto bug fixing for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Linux 5.16-rc1 is coming out later today and already I'm seeing some fallout in the new kernel's performance... In particular, bad news for Alder Lake that is already seeing the Linux performance trailing Windows 11 seemingly due to the lack of Thread Director integration right now in the kernel and any other missing optimizations around Intel's hybrid architecture. A new feature of Linux 5.16 is unfortunately having unintended regressions for Alder Lake with at least the flagship Core i9 12900K. Here are the results from the latest kernel bisecting that uncovered this latest upstream slowdown.

Intel, Amazon AWS, IBM, Qualcomm, and UIUC researchers have been collaborating over a proposed "Tensor LLVM Extensions" (TLX) to make this open-source compiler infrastructure more suitable for targeting AI accelerators and other emerging classes of hardware...

While not coming as part of the new 5.16 cycle, one of the exciting patch series to come about this year has been Google's work on the Multigenerational LRU (MGLRU) Framework for improving performance around the kernel's page reclaim handling...

This week marked the release of QEMU 6.2-rc0 as the first test candidate for this upcoming update that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Mesa's open-source "Turnip" driver that provides Vulkan support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware and complementary to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver can now handle Vulkan 1.2...

While Zstd is used in various areas of the Linux kernel for data compression from transparent file-system compression with the likes of Btrfs to allowing kernel modules be compressed with this Zstandard algorithm, the in-kernel code had fallen years outdated. Finally with Linux 5.16 that Zstd in-kernel implementation is now being brought up to modern standards and delivering better performance too...

Another batch of SMB3/CIFS client changes were submitted and merged today for the Linux 5.16 merge window. Plus the KSMBD changes were also merged today for that in-kernel SMB3 file server...