Phoronix

Alpine Linux 3.15 is out today as the newest feature update to this lightweight/embedded/containers focused Linux distribution known for its musl+Busybox usage along with OpenRC as the init system...

With AMD having published a new revision to their AMD P-State Linux CPU frequency scaling driver that they are working towards mainlining with a goal of better power efficiency on Linux, here are some initial benchmarks of that new patch series when using a Ryzen 5 5500U notebook.

A status update on Blender's "Cycles X" project was published today ahead of the upcoming Blender 3.0 release and with already some feature additions planned for Blender 3.1...

The Zhouyi AI accelerator was developed by Arm China and is found in some SoCs so far. An open-source Linux kernel driver is being worked on for it but unfortunately for now at least any mainline ambitions are immediately stalled over the lack of an open-source user-space/client...

Well known open-source Linux graphics expert David Airlie of Red Hat has recently been working on early Vulkan Video support for Mesa's Radeon "RADV" and Intel "ANV" drivers. As part of that effort and in part due to lack of software making use of Vulkan Video extensions right now, he has started exploring the feasibility of implementing the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) atop Vulkan Video...

An effort recently restarted that originally dates back many years is the "pvUSB" front-end driver for Linux to allow physical USB devices to be used within Xen domains...

The latest Linux kernel patches confirm that next-gen AMD Zen processors are capable of featuring up to twelve CCDs...

Out today is Vulkan 1.2.200 as the newest spec revision to the Vulkan graphics/compute API...

Given current memory pricing and extremely limited availability of DDR5 memory modules, many Phoronix readers have been requesting DDR4 vs. DDR5 memory benchmarks for Alder Lake on Linux. After picking up a DDR4 Z690 motherboard, here are some reference benchmarks between DDR4 and DDR5 when testing with the Core i5 12600K on Ubuntu Linux in a variety of real-world workloads.

Intel just released IGC 1.0.9289 as a huge update to their open-source Graphics Compiler used on Linux currently by their OpenCL/oneAPI Level Zero compute stack and also by Windows with their official driver...

Arcan as an open-source display server stack originally built atop a game engine and embracing VR/XR, and pushing forward on other new technologies is out with a new version...

Last week I wrote about a big TCP performance optimization having been queued up into net-next for Linux 5.17. That optimization can yield significant TCP throughput improvements especially with today's high-end 100Gb+ network hardware. There is now another separate juicy optimization to benefit the Linux network performance in the next kernel cycle...

Wayland Protocols 1.24 is out today as the latest revision to this official collection of the Wayland protocols/specifications. Notable with the 1.24 revision is the introduction of wp_linux_dmabuf_feedback...

While OpenPrinting is now leading development of the CUPS print server, PAPPL continues to be developed by CUPS founder Michael Sweet as a modern open-source printer application framework. PAPPL 1.1 as a big feature release is on the way...

Amazon Web Services has made Amazon Linux 2022 now publicly available in preview form as the newest version of their Linux distribution...

Libreboot 20211122 has been released as the downstream fork of Coreboot on providing fully free software boot firmware support...

British Linux PC vendor Star Labs now has support for their StarBook Mk V laptop upstreamed into Coreboot, which marks their second product having this achievement...

Last year with Intel "Tiger Lake" was the introduction of Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) for helping fend off return/jump-oriented attacks and as part of CET is hardware Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) support. There have been patch series working to implement CET's IBT support but after having gone through 30 rounds of review and not being merged, a new take on it was submitted today...

For those looking to assemble your own AMD EPYC 7002/7003 series 2P server or workstation, the ASRock Rack ROME2D16-2T we have been testing out for the past quarter and it's been holding up well across our daily benchmarking and other Linux and BSD tasks. The board has been working out very well and is currently available from retailers like NewEgg.

Microsoft's latest work in the area of open-source graphics drivers with the Mesa stack is for adding Direct3D 12 video acceleration support...

Going back two years already ASpeed developers have been working on prepping AST2600 support for Linux, their seventh generation server management processor / BMC. The latest open-source driver activity points to the AST2600 having DisplayPort support...

The Linux kernel continues to see improvements around ASUS laptop support on Linux, but the contributions have not been coming directly from the company but rather the community and sometimes after reverse-engineering...

IWD as the Intel-developed iNet Wireless Daemon that can serve as a replacement to the likes of WPA_Supplicant while integrating nicely with NetworkManager / systemd-networkd / ConnMan is out with a new version...

EROFS-Utils as the collection of open-source user-space utilities for the read-only EROFS file-system is out with a big update...

Linus Torvalds just issued the second release candidate of Linux 5.16 following the closure of the merge window last Sunday...

Going on for more than a half-decade now has been the effort around Linux Random Number Generator as a new /dev/random implementation for Linux. After more than five years, LRNG continues to work towards being mainlined and today marks the 43rd revision to these patches...

A set of more than two dozen patches by Google engineer Sean Christopherson overhauls KVM's x86/x86_64 TDP MMU zapping and flushing code...

For years LLVM has been working on a massive relicensing of its code-base but that effort is still ongoing as they are still trying to track down some past contributors to collect their sign-offs on the change...

Gluster 10 was released this past week as the open-source scalable/distributed network file-system led by Red Hat...

Well known AMD OpenGL open-source driver developer Marek Olšák managed to land yet more performance optimizations this week into Mesa 22.0...

As expected when writing about Wine 6.22 yesterday that the annual stable release dance was likely upon us, plans were laid out today for that Wine 7.0 release...

Even with the holidays ahead the KDE developers remain very busy improving their desktop software stack for Plasma 5.24 and other forthcoming component releases...

Picolibc as the open-source C library optimized for small embedded systems with limited RAM capacities is out with a new update...

With GCC 12 having added a new option to enable Straight Line Speculation "SLS" mitigation for x86/x86_64 CPUs, Linux kernel developers are preparing to enable this new compiler feature for further reducing undesirable speculation exposure...

Wine 6.22 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms like macOS and FreeBSD. Wine 6.22 brings more improvements while the Wine 7.0 stable release is inching closer...

Box86 as the open-source project to run Linux x86 binaries on other CPU architectures like ARM is out with a new feature release along with the accompanying Box64 project for x86_64 treatment. With today's Box86 update is even expanded Vulkan support now good enough for handling DXVK...

Following experimental Zink work to improve the NVIDIA driver support as part of the broader Copper initiative that also allows running Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan for Wayland's Weston compositor, another milestone has now been reached...

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...