Phoronix

Mesa 21.3 today landed a debug option that can help with the XWayland-based gaming performance around latency and for power management as well...

In addition to the big Advanced Matrix Extensions support still being in flux and the kernel-side AMX code not yet being merged, another feature of next year's Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" that we are only now seeing in early published form for the Linux kernel is handling of x86 user interrupts...

While Linux 5.15 has many new features and improvements, one of the patch series we have been eager to see land is the work introducing the new FUTEX2 system call. FUTEX2 can help improve the performance of newer Windows games running on Linux via Wine / Steam Play's Proton by better matching the Windows kernel behavior, but while it didn't land for Linux 5.15, at least a new version of the patches were posted...

After last month landing the Zink sub-allocator code for improved performance and also enabling OpenGL ES 3.2 support for Zink, lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz at Valve has been spending time this month working to get more games running on this OpenGL-over-Vulkan Mesa driver...

GDB 11.1 is now available as the latest feature update to the GNU Debugger...

Feature development is over on the Linux 5.15 kernel with Linux 5.15-rc1 being issued. It's now on to testing and bug fixing over the next two months before the kernel is christened as stable. Here is our original Linux 5.15 feature overview about all of the big changes in this next kernel version.

While Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS shipped one year ago as the last planned point release to the "Bionic Beaver", an emergency issue is leading to Ubuntu 18.04.6 now being prepared...

Of all the great stuff for AMD in Linux 5.15, one of the patches still not having yet been mainlined is the control support around Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) with Zen 3 processors. It's been six months since AMD published their security whitepaper around PSF while the Linux patch has yet to be mainlined while now it seems will be updated for a reduced focus on KVM usage...

On and off for years has been talk of an accelerator subsystem for the Linux kernel considering that for now most AI training/inference accelerator drivers end up lodged within the "char/misc" area of the kernel. That accelerator subsystem discussion has been restarted with talks of having such a subsystem or moving those drivers within the GPU/DRM subsystem space...

As expected this evening the Linux 5.15-rc1 kernel was released to top off the two week merge window that saw many changes to the kernel...

While working on my usual Linux kernel feature overview that summarizes the many articles over the past two weeks outlining all of the new features and changes merged, one area that particularly stands out for Linux 5.15 are all of AMD's upstream contributions that happened to make it in this kernel. There is a lot of new enablement on the AMD side -- both for CPUs and Radeon graphics -- but also improving existing hardware support...

The Apache Software Foundation recently published their FY2021 report for their year-ended 30 April. Even with the ongoing pandemic, the Apache Software Foundation managed to raise more than $3M USD and enjoyed a host of software successes...

We are now down to the last day of the Linux 5.15 merge window and one of the patch series we have been waiting to see if it would land during this two week period was the "folios" code -- or that also was recently renamed to "pagesets" to address some concerns over the name...

In addition to the RISC-V changes merged last week for the Linux 5.15 kernel, a second batch of patches was merged this weekend...

A change first proposed last year to the Linux kernel's Spectre mitigation defaults looks like it will soon be sent in for the mainline kernel...

While the Rust programming language support for usage within the kernel isn't landing for the Linux 5.15 merge window ending this weekend, that effort remains ongoing. A status update on the effort was shared this week about Rust usage for the Linux kernel...

Another batch of minor optimizations were merged to Mesa 21.3 for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

While much of Intel's next-gen Alder Lake processor support appears to be in good shape for Linux 5.14, some remaining items are landing for the current Linux 5.15 cycle. The latest Alder Lake support hitting the kernel is for Intel's TCC cooling driver...

CoreCtrl 1.2 was released this week as the open-source, independently-developed application for exposing more sensor support on Linux and offering various controls aroudnd over/under-clocking and other tuning. At the moment CoreCtrl is primarily focused on making the most use of AMD Radeon GPUs under Linux with some options not otherwise readily available on the platform...

Released in August was the big OpenShot 2.6 video editor update while this weekend has been succeeded by its first point release...

It's been a busy start to September for the KDE project and is now under its soft feature freeze for Plasma 5.23...

Wine 6.17 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release as we move closer towards the Wine 7.0 release around the start of the new year...

While last week was the main "char/misc" pull request for the Linux 5.15 merge window, the Habana Labs driver changes were previously reverted from there due to opposition from the upstream kernel developers in the Direct Rendering Manager space. The concerning patches around DMA-BUF have now been removed and a new pull request submitted with updates to this AI driver for Linux 5.15...

With less than one month out from the official release of Microsoft Windows 11, I was curious to run some fresh benchmarks of the latest Windows 11 Insider Preview build against Windows 10 21H1 to see how the performance is looking. Of course, also to see how Windows 11 is shaping up against Ubuntu 21.10 also due for release in October.

Intel-owned Habana Labs now has the most open software stack among AI accelerators! While Habana Labs has long provided an open-source, upstream kernel driver for their Gaudi AI training and Goya AI inference accelerators, the user-space portions including their code compiler and run-time library have been closed-source. This has been a thorn for upstream kernel developers and their standards, but now Habana Labs has open-sourced their user-space components too...

Last week a number of patches were merged in the quest to provide the kernel with comprehensive compile-time and run-time detection of buffer overflows. Another patch series was sent out today while still for this cycle they are expected to enable the compiler warnings around array-bounds and zero-length-bounds...

While Vulkan is quickly taking over as the dominant graphics API for Linux gamers especially with the likes of DXVK and VKD3D-Proton mapping Direct3D atop Vulkan, OpenGL remains widely used by workstation software. It's also for workstation software where AMD's "PRO" closed-source OpenGL Linux driver has traditionally competed well (and outperformed) the open-source Mesa driver. But with all the recent changes, that's either a matter of the past or close to not being relevant with the latest Mesa enhancements...

Over the past two years we have seen work around bringing up privacy screen support on Linux whereby an increasing number of laptops can reduce the amount of visible light when viewed at wide angles to try to block the screen contents from anyone potentially snooping at the screen. Ready to go now is the DRM/KMS user-space interface and the Intel graphics driver support now that there is a user-space "client" ready...

At the moment when running the X.Org Server in a multi-monitor configuration with displays of different refresh rates, it can lead to a poor experience with a variety of visual deficiencies when running an unredirected full-screen window with page-flipping for DRI3/Present. There is now a change that was merged into the X.Org Server with a new "AsyncFlipSecondaries" to improve that experience when running multiple displays of varying refresh rates...

While now into September, Microsoft just published its "August 2021" update to their CBL-Mariner Linux distribution with a variety of changes...

The Intel-led open-source Cloud-Hypervisor project building off Linux's KVM (and also supporting Microsoft MSHV) and being cloud-focused and leveraging the Rust programming language for greater security is out with its newest major release...

Akin to FUSE for file-systems in user-space, VDUSE is set to be merged for Linux 5.15 in adding support for vDPA devices in user-space...

At last! AMD has posted the Linux kernel driver patches for their new "AMD-PSTATE" driver! This driver with modern AMD Zen CPUs (initially limited to Zen 3) to achieve greater performance per Watt / power efficiency on Linux than the conventional ACPI CPUFreq driver...

AMDVLK 2021.Q3.6 is out as the latest routine open-source code drop for this official AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver...

A new kernel patch series was posted this morning working on AMD Branch Sampling "BRS" support...

Going back to September 2019 was work on the AMD PTDMA driver for supporting this controller found on modern AMD processors for high bandwidth memory-to-memory and I/O copy operations. With the Linux 5.15 cycle the AMD PTDMA driver is finally being merged to the mainline kernel...

One of the nice low-level improvements we've seen with Linux 5.15 is a number of pieces falling into place in the quest of upstreaming the real-time (RT) patches for Linux. The latest merge makes SLUB RT-compatible...

Ahead of the official GNOME 41 release later this month, the release candidate is now available to facilitate more testing...

The DAMON kernel functionality developed by Amazon engineers has successfully landed in the Linux 5.15 tree...

For those wondering how the upcoming Ubuntu 21.10 release is looking for Intel "Rocket Lake" owners, here are some Ubuntu 21.04 versus 21.10 development benchmarks across dozens of different tests...

Since last year AMD has been working to get its s2idle / suspend-to-idle S0ix sleep state code in order for supporting this lowest power platform idle state on newer AMD laptops and there has also been other AMD suspend/resume improvements in recent times. Now with the Linux 5.15 kernel cycle is an important fix for the AMD s2idle code...

Power E1080 server as their first in a new family of servers based on the IBM POWER10 processor. Sadly though not all of the POWER10 firmware is open-source...

OverlayFS continues to be used by Linux IoT/embedded devices and other use-cases as a union mount file-system. With Linux 5.15 the OverlayFS file-system continues to improve...

Facebook last week formally announced CacheLib as their new open-source caching engine designed for web scale services and to make for effective non-volatile memory caching to offset the increasing costs of DRAM...

Last month Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers began posting patches working on DisplayPort 2.0 support for their driver with DG2/Alchemist now set to be Intel's first GPU supporting the newest DP standard. DP 2.0 enablement work continues with Panel Replay being the latest feature being worked on for their Linux driver...

In addition to Linus Torvalds dealing with the -Werror fallout, separately in kernel land there were also some significant performance regressions introduced during the Linux 5.15 that led to Linus reverting some of the changes...

Landing this past weekend was the surprise move by Linus Torvalds to enable "-Werror" behavior by default for all kernel builds. That compiler flag addition makes all warnings be treated as errors, which in turn stops the kernel build. As expected, this change has led to quite a mess...

GhostBSD 21.09.06 is now available as the latest release of this desktop-minded, FreeBSD-based operating system...

The Linux 5.15 Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes this cycle are quite exciting on the x86 (x86_64) front with several prominent additions...

While The Khronos Group previously hosted in-person Vulkan events, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic their "Vulkanised 2021" event next month has morphed into a free virtual event...