Phoronix

AMDVLK 2021.Q1.1 is out this morning as the first update of the year for the open-source official AMD Vulkan Linux driver and it's an exciting update...

A Linux fix is on the way for a new quirk to address an issue whereby some AMD Radeon graphics cards have an issue with the resizable BAR (AMD Smart Access Memory) handling that could lead to lower performance...

Proton Experimental 5.13-20210107 is out today as the first 2021 release of this Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Following last month's initial benchmarks of the AMD "znver3" support that landed in the GCC 11 compiler was a request by a premium supporter to see the AMD Zen 3 benchmarks at more compiler optimizations. Well, here are those numbers for those wanting to pursue aggressive compiler optimizations on a shiny AMD Ryzen 9 5950X.

While Intel is generally well regarded for their Linux development practices especially as it pertains to continuous integration and their test labs for vetting code prior to reaching the mainline Linux kernel to minimize the risk of regressions or other unintended side effects, those running older Haswell GT1 low-end graphics have seen the past several kernel versions going back a half-year yield a GPU hang at boot...

Intel has released their High Performance Computing Reference Stack 2.0 as the latest Docker image optimized for HPC/AI workloads...

Alyssa Rosenzweig who is known for her work on reverse-engineering Arm GPUs and in particular the multi-year effort so far working on the Panfrost open-source driver stack has taken up an interest in Apple's M1 graphics processor...

The GNOME Shell user experience improvements and other components continue in development at full-speed for the GNOME 40 release due out in March...

NVIDIA today released the 460.32.03 Linux graphics driver as their first stable release in the 460 driver series...

The Intel-developed IWD Linux wireless daemon is out with its first feature release of 2021...

Surprisingly it has taken until 2021 but the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver now supports using the company's own Radeon GPU Profiler...

NVIDIA's Wayland support is finally coming together albeit long overdue with DMA-BUF passing support and now patches pending against XWayland for supporting OpenGL and Vulkan hardware acceleration with their proprietary driver...

The release of Fedora 34 this spring is now cleared to enable systemd-oomd by default for all spins in an effort to enhance the out-of-memory / memory pressure experience on Linux...

It was just at the end of December that the Mesa 21.0 development code enabled OpenGL 3.2 support for Freedreno, the open-source Gallium3D driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware. Now in time for Mesa 21.0 still, OpenGL 3.3 support has been achieved...

Linux 5.10.5 LTS is out today with at least one rather interesting addition...

With this week marking three years since Spectre and Meltdown were made public in ushering in a wave of CPU security disclosures that followed and mitigations that often resulted in measurable performance hits, here is a look at how the performance costs stand today with various new and older Intel CPUs as well as AMD processors too. This article is looking at the current performance costs under Linux with the default mitigations and then the run-time disabling of the relevant mitigations for each of the processors under test while using an up-to-date Ubuntu 20.10 paired with the new Linux 5.10 LTS kernel.

AMD has begun staging their new open-source driver code ahead of the next AMDVLK driver release that will likely occur this week or next. With this latest AMDVLK code dump, there is easy run-time switching support between the AMDVLK and RADV Vulkan drivers...

Released at the end of November was the much anticipated OpenZFS 2.0 open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems. Today that has been succeeded by OpenZFS 2.0.1 with support for newer Linux kernels and many bug fixes...

Yet another big change being eyed for Fedora 34 is to sign individual files within shipped RPM packages. The signatures will use the Linux Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) and in turn can be used to enforce run-time policies around only allowing the execution of trusted files...

With Linux 5.12 the Broadcom BCM2711 SoC used by the Raspberry Pi 4 will see 10 and 12-bit color support with the VC4 Direct Rendering Manager driver...

Google engineers continue working on the Linux kernel around "Restricted DMA" for helping to protect systems that lack DMA access control for hardware without an IOMMU...

It's been recently elaborated why the likes of FreeSync support over HDMI aren't coming to the open-source drivers, at least not yet... It stems from the decision by the HDMI Forum to prevent public access to the HDMI specification, which in turn is hurting open-source graphics drivers...

While LLVM 12.0 should be out around March as the next half-year feature update to this innovative and widely-used open-source compiler stack, LLVM 11.0.1 is now being christened as the only planned stable point release to LLVM 11...

Adding to the long list of changes for Mesa 21.0 is the Panfrost Gallium3D driver that provides open-source OpenGL for Arm Mali graphics hardware now supporting Arm Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC) for Bifrost GPUs...

While Intel has Clear Linux as an aggressively optimized Linux distribution catering towards their hardware, there isn't a direct equivalent for optimally showcasing the performance potential of current AMD platforms. Clear Linux often offers leading performance on Zen CPUs but that is obviously not by design but just an artifact of a lot in common between the latest Intel and AMD microarchitecture features. One of the few distributions (or only notable one) offering specific AMD Zen optimized builds has been OpenMandriva. With the OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 release candidate shipping this week, I ran some fresh benchmarks looking at how OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 RC1 compares between its generic x86_64 image and that of the Zen optimized build as well as in turn how that performance compares to Clear Linux and Ubuntu 20.10.

As we have been expecting in recent weeks, Wasmer 1.0 has been released as the "universal WebAssembly runtime" for helping to accelerate WASM adoption and new use-cases outside of the web browser...

Fedora 34 remains under active feature development and another batch of features were unanimously approved of by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee...

While for months there have been experimental patches taking Zink to OpenGL 4.6 for this OpenGL-on-Vulkan translation layer integrated into Mesa, the upstreaming process around testing and code review is quite lengthy with up until today still only exposing OpenGL 3.3 with mainline Mesa. But with the latest Git commits, Zink is now up to OpenGL 4.1...

Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 is available today as the latest quarterly (Q1-2021) feature update to our open-source automated benchmarking framework for Linux, macOS, Solaris, Windows, and BSD platforms.

As we reported almost one year ago, Red Hat was looking at likely dropping older x86_64 CPU support from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and we now have a better idea of their plans in catering RHEL9 better to modern processors...

While many Linux users were excited when finding out the open-source AMD Radeon Linux drivers were allowing Smart Access Memory (Resizable BAR) support on older motherboards/CPUs and older Radeon GPUs rather than basically the very latest AMD products as seen on Windows, there is a change of course due to bugs. Now, officially, Mesa 21.0 is just enabling Smart Access Memory for systems with AMD Zen 3 processors and RDNA 2 graphics cards though if you have other hardware you can force-enable it...

Lutris as the open-source Linux game manager that makes it easy to install Wine game as well as various emulator games, Steam titles, and more, is out with an interesting update to kick off the new year...

PicoXcell, the ARM SoCs from PicoChip more than a decade ago before being bought out by MindSpeed and then Intel, are set to finally see their Linux support removed this year...

Keeping up with Fedora's tradition of offering the very latest open-source software packages, the straight-forward proposal was made this week to update its lightweight LXQt desktop packages against the new LXQt 0.16...

Now that more developers are returning from their holiday breaks, the first pull request to DRM-Next has been submitted of Intel kernel graphics driver material destined for Linux 5.12...

Last month we wrote about AMD engineers working on an experimental video mode optimization for FreeSync with the open-source AMDGPU Linux kernel driver. With AMD staff getting back to work following the holidays, an updated patch set was submitted today...

As part of their fundamental shift to restrict Qt LTS point releases to commercial customers, The Qt Company is closing the Qt 5.15 branch to the public tomorrow with future Qt 5.15 LTS point releases to be restricted to paying licensees...

Back on Christmas I wrote about Linux 5.11 regressing for AMD performance on Zen 2 and newer systems where the just-added CPU frequency invariance support was often hurting various workloads when using the default "Schedutil" scheduler utilization frequency scaling governor. Since then and through the holidays I have been carrying out many more benchmarks looking at the Linux 5.11 performance with a particular focus on the AMD desktop/server platforms.

Keem Bay, Intel's third-generation Movidius VPU (Vision Processing Unit), continues seeing more upstream open-source hardware support within the Linux kernel. Coming to the Linux 5.12 kernel in a couple months will be more support within the crypto subsystem...

Following RadeonSI seeing optimizations around AMD Smart Access Memory (Resizable BAR) support last month, the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" within Mesa 21.0 is also seeing similar treatment...

Another one of the features you won't find in the Linux 5.11 kernel is support for the recently ratified NVMe Simple Copy but work on supporting that feature continues...

The Ardour open-source, cross-platform digital audio workstation rung in 2021 by mainlining support for using Intel/AMD FMA functionality for greater performance...

The second weekly release candidate of Linux 5.11 is now available for testing...

There's nothing quite like some fun holiday-weekend reading as a fiery mailing list post by Linus Torvalds. The Linux creator is out with one of his classical messages, which this time is arguing over the importance of ECC memory and his opinion on how Intel's "bad policies" and market segmentation have made ECC memory less widespread...

Dav1d 0.8 was released this weekend (and subsequently 0.8.1 too) as the latest major release for this CPU-based AV1 decoder hosted by the VideoLAN project. Dav1d continues to be about offering the best AV1 decode speed and with the v0.8 series are even faster results -- so here are some of our initial data points as well from some weekend benchmarking...

In ending out a strong year for OpenBenchmarking.org growth in 2020, there were also many test profile updates and some new test profiles (benchmarks) that were made available in December for Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org users...

LLVM has added support for PowerPC LE (32-bit) as its newest target...

The numbers Steam posted on New Year's Day for the December 2020 Linux gaming marketshare showed a drop of 0.33% down to just 0.57%. That is a rather large drop but now Valve has updated their numbers and point to Linux still regressing percentage wise but not as bad as originally reported...

Building off yesterday's Wine 6.0-RC5 test release is an updated Wine-Staging build that adds nearly 800 patches atop the upstream code-base for experimental/testing features...

Fedora is preparing to ship the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel as a stable release update to those on Fedora 32 and newer...