Phoronix

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...

The W3C has promoted the Web Audio API to now being an official standard as a JavaScript API for creating and manipulating audio content directly within web browsers...

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) with Fwupd has been serving on average around 40k~50k firmware updates per daay to Linux users relying on this cross-vendor, open-source firmware distribution service with FWUPD for applying firmware updates under Linux. But yesterday its usage just skyrocketed with more than 100,000 firmware updates in a single day... That's great for adoption but the motivation for the mass firmware updates may be something rough on the horizon...

Last week marked the end of feature work for the AMDGPU driver (and other DRM drivers) for the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle. Sent out today though were the first set of AMDGPU fixes targeting Linux 5.14 that does include a recently talked about throttler status feature...

In conjunction with supported Lenovo systems, a new "Think-LMI" driver is on its way to the mainline Linux kernel for allowing some BIOS/firmware settings to be accessed and configured within Linux...

Intel's Speed Select Technology introduced since Cascade Lake for providing more granular power/performance controls was done in the name of performance but it turns out an ISST Linux driver inefficiency could lead to a 10%+ performance hit for some HPC benchmarks...

The Zink component to Mesa that provides a generic OpenGL implementation built atop the Vulkan API recently hit another "massively improved performance" milestone by Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz...

The wildly successful Blender 3D open-source modeling software has been working hard towards its Blender 3.0 release but will likely now be proactively delayed to allow developers more time to relax with COVID-19 lockdowns/restrictions loosening, the possibility of developer meetups pre-3.0, and letting more changes flow into this big feature release...

Going along with a number of other recent WebAssembly interpreter/run-time releases, Wasmer 2.0 has been released as this popular WebAssembly WASI and EmScripten run-time...

Since the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" series launch back in March we have carried out many benchmarks with their flagship processors like the EPYC 7763 and 7713 processors and some of the frequency optimized SKUs, but what about the performance lower down the product stack? Up for benchmarking today is a look at the AMD EPYC 7343 and 7743 processors in 1P and 2P configurations against other AMD EPYC Milan processors as well as Intel's Xeon Platinum 8380 Ice Lake processors.

Last month plans were published for Fedora Cloud 35 to use the Btrfs file-system by default, similar to Fedora Workstation using Btrfs by default for several releases. That plan has now been signed off on by FESCo allowing for this change to happen...

In addition to the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed looking at HWCAPS / x86-64 feature levels for being able to provide greater out-of-the-box performance by selectively loading more tuned libraries depending upon the CPU in use, SUSE Linux Enterprise / openSUSE Leap are also looking at offering similar functionality that may turn up in time for the next point release / service pack...

There has been a number of new VirtIO driver additions recently to the Linux kernel like for sound and Bluetooth for the expanding VirtIO specification while one still in the works for mainlining is the GPIO guest driver...

The GNU C Library (Glibc) saw another batch of Year 2038 "Y2038" preparations on Tuesday for the Unix timestamp for when the time since 1 January 1970 can no longer be stored in a signed 32-bit integer...

The first release candidate of systemd 249 is now available for testing with yet more new and improved features...

A new version of Alpine Linux is now available for this distribution that's popular for container use and other environments requiring a small footprint or those simply preferring its Busybox + Musl libc usage...

Intel's "Gen12" Xe Graphics should be performing marginally better with next quarter's Mesa 21.2 feature release for its open-source ANV Vulkan driver...

Similar to Portal 2 getting Vulkan rendering support earlier this year by leveraging DXVK to convert Direct3D calls to Vulkan, Valve's Left 4 Dead 2 has now received similar treatment alongside a big update out today...

A new release of DXVK is available for running Direct3D 9/10/11 games over the Vulkan API that is most notably used by Steam Play (Proton) for allowing many Windows games to run gracefully on Linux...

Given the success and popularity of their Jetson AGX developer board, NVIDIA has now launched the Jetson AGX Xavier Industrial Module that is a rugged, module-based version of the AGX Xavier intended for various industrial / manufacturing / construction use-cases...

Landing this week in Mesa 21.2's development code is Crocus Gallium3D providing a new Intel OpenGL driver for i964 "Gem4" through Haswell "Gen7" graphics. While even Haswell graphics are showing their age these days, I couldn't help but to fire up a few benchmarks seeing how this new Crocus open-source OpenGL driver performs against the existing "i965" classic open-source driver for Linux systems.

There's a new, cross-platform, cross-API graphics benchmark out there that is free to download and focused on delivering maximum GPU acceleration support when rendering hundreds of thousands of objects...

For those that have been wanting to build a passively cooled PC or at least keeping the number of fans to a minimum, Noctua just officially announced the NH-P1 as their high-end passive cooler. It's a massive heatsink but aims to be able to cool higher-end AMD and Intel desktop processors...

The GCC compiler has long had a requirement that all contributors assign their copyright to the Free Software Foundation. Recently GCC dropped that copyright assignment policy and now the GNU C Library is looking at making a similar move...