Phoronix

The first release candidate of systemd 248 is now available with a number of improvements ranging from a new "system extensions images" concept to the out-of-memory daemon (OOMD) being declared stable...

One of many interesting and original open-source projects to be started in 2020 was ZLUDA, an open-spurce drop-in CUDA implementation for Intel graphics. ZLUDA - developed independent of Intel and NVIDIA - is built atop Intel's oneAPI Level Zero interface (hence the name, ZLUDA) and allows for unmodified CUDA applications to run on Intel UHD/Xe Graphics hardware with near-native performance. Well, that's the goal at least but with the initial ZLUDA release were a number of support limitations...

The changes within the remote direct memory access (RDMA) subsystem for Linux 5.12 are deemed "quite small" but there is one interesting addition courtesy of Intel...

Given the recent release of Arch Linux based EndeavourOS and a Phoronix Premium supporter recently pointing out SalientOS as another interesting Arch-based Linux distribution, here are benchmarks showing how these easy/quick to deploy Arch based operating systems with sane defaults compare to that of Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation, and Intel's own Clear Linux. This round of February 2021 Linux benchmarking was carried out on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X desktop stemming from premium member feedback.

Microsoft engineers continue increasing their contributions to the Linux kernel where it makes business sense for them, such as in the case of securing the Azure cloud given that around 50% or more of the instances run Linux. With Linux 5.12 there are integrity subsystem improvements coming from Microsoft...

Sent in last week were some AMDGPU "fixes" for Linux 5.12. While there are some fixes as part of the series, there are some new (minor) features enabled...

Dav1d is already the most performant and leading AV1 software decoder we have seen while out today is v0.8.2 that should speed-up the video decode process even more on modern x86/x86_64 and ARM hardware...

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the staging/IIO updates for the Linux 5.12 kernel and this time around are lighter than normal but still with a few interesting items worth mentioning...

Following the recent major rewrite to KDE's KWin compositor code there are more exciting improvements likely to come for KWin in improving its Wayland compositor support...

The block subsystem and related storage changes were merged today for the in-development Linux 5.12 kernel...

Earlier this month at the virtual FOSDEM 2021 conference was an interesting presentation on how European developers are preparing for AMD-powered supercomputers and beginning to figure out the best approaches for converting existing NVIDIA CUDA GPU code to run on Radeon GPUs as well as whether writing new GPU-focused code with OpenMP device offload is worthwhile...

Oracle continues maintaining Solaris 11.4 with monthly stable release updates but there still is no public sign of anything past 11.4 for this operating system that was once exciting during the Sun Microsystems days. But with this week's 11.4 SRU30 release, at least there are many package updates...

There is a lot of new hardware enablement with the ARM platforms and DeviceTree additions for the Linux 5.12 kernel merge window...

Mesa's on-disk shader cache, which is used for speeding up game load times by avoiding the redundant recompiling of shaders on successive loads and also helping performance for software that compiles shaders on-the-fly, is seeing a big improvement with Mesa 21.1. Mesa 21.1-devel merged this weekend the new single file cache implementation...

While the first week of a new merge window is often one of the busiest times for Linus Torvalds in overseeing the Linux kernel, until last night there was no actual Linux 5.12 code being pushed into the Linux Git repository. Linus was offline most of the week due to winter storms preventing him from pushing to the Git repository and interacting much with the mailing list...

XFS maintainer Darrick Wong characterized the file-system driver changes for Linux 5.12 as "a lot going on this time, which seems about right for this drama-filled year."..

With Fedora 34 aiming to use PipeWire by default for audio use-cases currently handled by PulseAudio and JACK, the Red Hat developers working on PipeWire remain very busy in addressing bugs and wiring up new functionality for this audio and video framework/server...

It's been nearly one year to the day since the release of Netrunner 20.01 as this desktop Linux distribution focused on providing a good KDE-based desktop environment and backed by Blue Systems. Today Netrunner 21.01 has been released as the latest step forward for this KDE desktop distribution built atop a Debian base...

With Valve's Portal 2 having added a Vulkan renderer by way of DXVK for converting Direct3D calls to Vulkan, here are some initial benchmarks with several different AMD Radeon graphics cards for seeing the performance of this nearly decade old game on Linux with the existing OpenGL rendering path compared to that of the new Vulkan rendering option.

When it comes to original, open-source computer games the 0 A.D. real-time strategy game is among the best. The game has been developed as open-source for more than a decade for this ancient warfare themed game. The prior 0 A.D. Alpha 23 release happened back in May 2018 while now it's finally been succeeded by 0 A.D. Alpha 24...

An exciting new capability with perf in Linux 5.12 is the ability to collect instruction latency metrics as part of the performance reports, but relies on hardware capabilities for now only found in next-generation Intel Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" processors...

The Mesa release train once again fell off the tracks for Mesa 21.0 but on Friday the fifth release candidate managed to ship...

The issue of having a beginner/easy-to-use focused desktop Linux distribution but not installing new security updates by default without user intervention is that for many users they fall behind in applying often important security fixes...

Earlier this week saw the release of Plasma 5.21 while KDE developers have been busy working on fixes/improvements to that for the first point release as well as moving forward in other areas like integrating Git support into Kate...

The sound subsystem changes were submitted on Friday by maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE for the in-development Linux 5.12 kernel...

Kodi 19.0 "Matrix" is now available for this popular open-source, cross-platform HTPC solution...

In addition to having DXVK 1.8 released for Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan, Valve's VKD3D-Proton project also is enjoying a new release in time for weekend gamers wanting to run the latest Direct3D 12 titles via Vulkan on Linux with Steam Play...

Linux 5.12 with queued thermal changes will avoid prematurely shutting down mobile Intel workstations when a "critical" thermal threshold is reached that isn't too critical...

It looks like the open-source driver support to the next-generation CDNA GPU / MI100 "Arcturus" successor is on the way. Hitting mainline AMDGPU LLVM is a new "GFX90A" target adding new interesting features for compute...

With LLVM 12 due for release next month and GCC 11 not being far behind, it's the season for fresh compiler benchmarks. In today's article is a look at the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (Zen 3) compiler performance between LLVM Clang 11.1 against the current LLVM Clang 12.0 Git development code in its feature-frozen state.

Back in December there was an experimental driver for native Wayland support within Wine published by Collabora developer Alexandros Frantzis. A new version of the Wayland patches for Wine have now been published...

The DRM kernel graphics/display driver updates were sent in today for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window. Two of the biggest features are VRR/Adaptive-Sync now being supported for Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics while on the AMD side there is initial "OverDrive" overclocking support for their newest RDNA 2 GPUs...

As expected, the new port of the Linux kernel to the Nintendo 64 game console from the 90's is now being mainlined in 2021 with the Linux 5.12 kernel.....

Now that Mesa 21.1 has OpenGL 4.6 support for Zink, the attention is turning to fixes for the OpenGL Conformance Test Suite and juicing as much performance as possible out of this OpenGL on Vulkan driver layer within Mesa...

Portal 2, Valve's puzzle platform game that has been around for a decade already, is now seeing Vulkan rendering support added by leveraging DXVK...

DXVK 1.8 is out as the newest feature release of this translation layer for Direct3D over Vulkan...

While the GTK 4.0 toolkit just released in December, GTK 4.2 is already gearing up for release next month with GNOME 40...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) with the Linux 5.12 kernel will allow configuring the compression ratio when enabling the transparent file-system compression support with LZ4 or Zstd...

The HP ZBook Studio G7 aims to attract Linux developers and data scientists by not only offering a powerful hardware combination and by pre-loading Ubuntu 20.04 LTS but in also shipping a variety of tools and other software packages pre-configured for a modern developer and data scientist workload. We have been testing the HP ZBook Studio G7 for the better part of two months for this Linux-loaded mobile workstation and in this article is a look at this new HP device along with plenty of benchmarks, including Windows vs. Linux performance tests and more.

The first public developer preview is out today of Android 12...

There is an interesting change with the TTY/serial changes for the in-development Linux 5.12 kernel...

NVIDIA is launching the CMP - the Cryptocurrency Mining Processor -- that will be a line of hardware focused on professional mining with an emphasis on Ethereum...

Released yesterday was the Linux 5.10.17 LTS kernel and what makes this point release a bit more notable than usual is that it backports the CPUFreq patches from 5.11 that were used for addressing the earlier AMD performance regression on Linux 5.11 and often leading to net improvements as well over prior kernel series. The CPUFreq patches were back-ported while the AMD frequency invariance support was not, so what does the performance look like for the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel? Here are some benchmarks...

David Miller sent in the big batch of networking improvements today for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window...

Independent kernel hacker Con Kolivas is out with his latest "ck" patch-set against the newly-minted Linux 5.11 stable kernel and re-basing the MuQSS scheduler against the latest code-base...

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the big set of USB/Thunderbolt updates already for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window...

Consulting firm 3mdeb that specializes in embedded systems with an emphasis on open-source firmware solutions like Coreboot is hosting an interesting virtual event later today...

Oracle today released their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 Update 5 intended for use on their RHEL-based Oracle Linux. Oracle's "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" tends to be a newer Linux LTS kernel with extra features compared to what is found in the current RHEL / Red Hat Compatible Kernel builds...

David Sterba on Tuesday submitted the Btrfs file-system updates for the Linux 5.12 kernel, which once again include more performance optimizations and notable new features...

For those either needing a well-built, fanless computer that can run fine as a Linux desktop or are looking for an industrial-rated edge computing system, the Helix 500 is an interesting product from OnLogic (formerly, Logic Supply) that fills the space for a dependable, petite PC and ships with Windows, Linux, or even no OS at all if just preferring to load your own operating system of choice.