Phoronix

Announced two years ago was the OpenPOWER Microwatt as an FPGA-based soft CPU core...

Last week Valve introduced Vulkan rendering support for Left 4 Dead 2. The L4D2 Vulkan support is similar to that of Portal 2 where DXVK is being leveraged for translating the Direct3D calls to Vulkan rather than relying on their OpenGL translations. For those wondering what this means for L4D2 performance on Linux with modern GPUs, here are some benchmarks of Left 4 Dead 2 when testing the OpenGL and Vulkan rendering options.

Landing in mainline Mesa 21.2 development code last week was the "Crocus" Gallium3D driver for old Intel hardware spanning from the Intel 965 chipset days "Gen4" up through Crocus supporting Haswell "Gen7" graphics. The i965 to Haswell span has been the focus since the official Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver already in Mesa supports the Broadwell "Gen8" up through all current Intel UHD/Xe Graphics. But now Crocus with the latest Mesa code has added Gen8 support...

Intel-owned Habana Labs has submitted their set of driver updates to char/misc ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.14 merge window...

Even though Vulkan ray-tracing support on Intel graphics hardware isn't coming until Xe HPG avaiability, Intel's Linux graphics driver developers have been preparing since last year. In preparation for the Xe HPG launch, Intel's open-source talent have for many months already been preparing the Vulkan ray-tracing functionality wither another batch of code being merged today...

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger continues working on restructuring the company and today announced some new leadership as well as business unit changes...

While in the past we have seen Intel CPU microcode updates lead to measurable performance differences on multiple occasions, this month's CPU microcode update doesn't end up being all that concerning for real-world performance...

Hitting mainline Mesa today for Mesa 21.2 next quarter is PanVK as the open-source Vulkan driver in development for newer Arm Mali GPUs...

NVIDIA announced yesterday they would be releasing DLSS Linux support tomorrow and indeed they have delivered on that first milestone of Deep Learning Super Sampling support for Linux gamers. NVIDIA has published their first 470 driver series beta in the form of the NVIDIA 470.42.01 build...

AMD today released FidelityFX Super Resolution that was announced earlier this month at Computex. Today it's Windows-only with no Linux support being introduced. FidelityFX Super Resolution is open-source but the code drop will not be until next month...

SiFive today is announcing the Performance P550 as the fastest RISC-V processor yet while also announcing the Performance P270 too...

For those wondering how well the likes of FreeBSD 13.0 and DragonFlyBSD 6.0 performance on AMD's EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors launched earlier this year, here are some initial benchmarks of those BSDs alongside a few Linux distributions. With recently having a Tyan 1U server in the lab with EPYC 7543 32-core processor, I've been running a number of BSD benchmarks on it given these recent BSD releases have been running well on this 1P server.

AMD has shifted all their graphics processors and APUs prior to Polaris / GCN 1.4 to being legacy and will not be supported by their new Radeon Software Adrenalin releases...

The latest JavaScript API to see a public working draft out of the W3C is for a Web Neural Network API...

The Haiku open-source operating system inspired by BeOS has been in development since 2001. It took until September 2018 for the Haiku R1 Beta and then last summer was succeeded by Haiku R1 Beta 2. Now a year later the third beta for this inaugural release is now approaching...

Google engineers have prepared a set of Linux kernel patches allowing for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) / SEV-ES encrypted state to allow for local migration support of these encrypted virtual machines on the same host...

NVIDIA announced earlier this month that they would be bringing DLSS to Linux / Steam Play and tomorrow they will be introducing that initial driver support...

Merged this past week was Crocus as the new open-source Intel Gallium3D driver developed by the community and used for Gen4/i965 through Gen7/Haswell generations of Intel graphics. This week I ran some Crocus benchmarks on Intel Haswell comparing against the existing i965 classic Mesa DRI driver while in this article are some comparison driver benchmarks using Intel Sandy Bridge graphics for those still running those once popular processors.

Stemming from last month's Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 release and then the RHEL 8.4 based updates to Alma Linux, Oracle Linux, and CentOS 8, RockyLinux has today reached general availability on its v8.4 release...

Linux 5.14 is bringing a new input driver to support an open-source joystick that can be used for DIY electronics purposes and other use-cases. The schematics and firmware are open-source for building the joystick device yourself or can be purchased for about $10 USD...

Last week Intel shipped a big update to their open-source Intel Graphics Compiler "IGC" that is used currently by their Windows driver, their Linux compute stack, and potentially their Linux graphics drivers moving ahead...

Vulkan 1.2.182 is out and on top of various documentation fixes/clarifications, there are a few new extensions added with this revision...

Following last month's Unvanquished 0.52 beta for this open-source game that has long been in development, Sunday marked the release of Unvanquished 0.52.1...

Linus Torvalds is celebrating Father's Day by releasing Linux 5.13-rc7. Kernel maintainers and testers managed to keep him happy the father of Linux happy this week by keeping to a small change set for this late-stage release candidate...

Published all the way back in September 2019 was a Linux driver for supporting the Pass-Through DMA controller for EPYC processors. The PTDMA hardware allows for high bandwidth memory-to-memory and I/O copy operations. Now mid-way through 2021 that AMD PTDMA Linux driver remains in the works and is up to its tenth driver revision while waiting to see if it's now ready for mainline or further changes are still deemed necessary...

Back in April the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system was updated for Linux 5.12 compatibility while now with Linux 5.13 being right around the corner, Edward Shishkin has updated the experimental Reiser5 file-system code for v5.12 compatibility...

Earlier this month Linux 5.13 disabled Intel's ENQCMD functionality for upcoming Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" processors as the kernel software code around it was deemed "broken beyond repair". More of the recent Intel-submitted patches around reworking kernel code in preparation for upcoming CPU features has been found to be rather hairy after already being mainlined and thus another batch of urgent x86 fixes were sent in this morning...

While vendors are increasingly just focused on Vulkan (and Direct3D under Windows), there still is plenty of OpenGL software out there especially in the workstation space where software vendors are slow to adapt. Well known RadeonSI OpenGL developer Marek Olšák of AMD landed another performance optimization this week that should benefit the likes of SPECviewperf...

The virtual KDE Akademy 2021 conference kicked off on Friday and runs through the 25th. This annual summertime event of the KDE desktop community is attended by hundreds but again carried out online due to the pandemic...

Joshua Ashton who is known for his work on DXVK (formerly D9VK) and related Steam Play / Proton graphics related efforts has submitted a proposal for a Wayland Surface-Suspension protocol...

While Debian 11 is coming up soon and its full freeze is under one month away, Debian 10.10 is out this weekend as the latest routine point release...

Merged last week to mainline LLVM 13.0 was the new "GFX1013" target for the AMDGPU shader compiler. Well, it landed twice as at first had to be reverted after breaking the build bots / sanitizer testing...

Libzip as the widely-used C library for accessing. creating, and modifying Zip archives is out with a new feature release...

Even with the warm summer weather and many municipalities loosening pandemic lockdown restrictions, KDE developers remain quite busy this summer with a variety of improvements to this open-source desktop...

For nearly one decade there has been talk of UPower 1.0 while in 2021 that still has yet to materialize for this former "DeviceKit-Power" project but at least now there is UPower v0.99.12 as the first release in two years...

Trenchboot continues to be worked on for providing boot integrity technologies that allow for multiple roots of trust around boot security and integrity. Oracle engineers on Friday sent out their latest Linux kernel patches so it can enjoy a "Secure Launch" by the project's x86 dynamic launch measurements code...

In recent months RADV lead developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen began working on Vulkan ray-tracing support for this Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver that isn't officially supported by AMD but as an alternative to the company's open-source AMDVLK driver or their cross-platform proprietary Vulkan driver. Hitting the Mesa 21.2-devel code a few minutes ago is the initial Vulkan ray-tracing bits for RADV!..

Wine 6.11 is out as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot for running an increasing number of Windows applications and games on Linux...

Just in time for the weekend Linux gamers is a new release candidate of the upcoming Proton 6.3-5 that powers Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Mesa's Zink is well known for working to provide a generic OpenGL implementation over the Vulkan API that can be used across hardware/drivers. While still focused on OpenGL-over-Vulkan, with some pending patches it turns out Zink can support Gallium3D Nine for ultimately allowing Direct3D 9 atop this layer...

A few days ago I wrote about GravityMark as a new cross-API GPU benchmark from a former Unigine developer. Being curious about the Linux GPU driver performance for this benchmark that is focused on delivering maximum GPU acceleration support, I ran some benchmarks on the latest NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards with this benchmark for OpenGL and Vulkan.

Following last month's LibreOffice 7.2 Alpha, the first beta for this open-source office suite update is now available for testing...

The Linux kernel currently has code to allow booting an initial root file-system via NFS or CIFS for non-blockdevice file-systems while a new patch aims to allow for mounting of arbitrary non-block device file-systems as root...

The MSM DRM driver changes have been submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.14 cycle for improving this open-source Qualcomm Adreno kernel graphics/display driver...

While this week's landing of the Crocus Gallium3D driver for Intel Gen4 through Gen7 graphics (i965 through Haswell) in Mesa is exciting for Linux users that are still running aging Intel systems, going back even further has been the i915g Gallium3D driver and there this week there happens to be a big improvement too...

The Modula-2 programming language developed from the late 70's to 80's might finally see mainline GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) support in 2021...

The OpenSSL project today shipped their OpenSSL 3.0 Beta, which is their equivalent to a release candidate ahead of the planned official 3.0.0 release next quarter...

Back in March NVIDIA announced they would be supporting the GeForce RTX 30 series with Resizable BAR support via a video BIOS update for supported systems. Recently I've been looking at the performance of a GeForce RTX 3080 once flashing the graphics card under Linux with Resizable BAR support and the performance is quite compelling for Vulkan-based games where this functionality is working.

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is dropping support for older x86_64 CPUs by raising the baseline requirement to "x86_64-v2" that roughly correlates to Intel Nehalem era processors and newer, so far Fedora has not changed its default. There was a proposal shot down last year for raising the x86_64 microarchitecture feature level while now that discussion has been restarted or alternatively making use of Glibc's HWCAPS facility for allowing run-time detection and loading of optimized libraries...

Google wants to see Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel so much so that they have contracted the lead developer working on "Rust for Linux" as the work aims to get mainlined...