Phoronix

Taking place virtually this week has been the International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL) and SYCLcon. From these events are a lot of interesting presentations for those interested in GPU compute, heterogeneous programming, and industry API efforts...

Users of the Btrfs file-system can enjoy a number of improvements with the in-development Linux 5.13 kernel...

Linux 5.13's x86 memory management work is bringing a minor performance optimization that is particularly beneficial in light of the CPU security mitigations in recent years that have an impact on the TLB...

The crypto subsystem updates have landed in the Linux 5.13 kernel...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver changes have been submitted and merged for the ongoing Linux 5.13 kernel merge window and it brings with it many changes, especially for these open-source Intel and AMD Radeon drivers...

Following last week's release of Ubuntu 21.04 "Hirsute Hippo", the Ubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri" cycle has now begun...

One of the new security features in Linux 5.13 is the ability to randomize kernel stack offsets at each system call. This optional feature is now mainlined...

The release candidate phase has begun for openSUSE's upcoming Leap 15.3 Linux distribution release...

The printk() function dates all the way back to the original Linux kernel release and even with Linux turning thirty years old this week, work on printk is not over...

AMD engineers today published AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2 as their latest open-source public code drop of their official Linux Vulkan driver...

The Linux 5.13 development kernel is introducing a new "misc" cgroup controller. The misc cgroup controller is to be used for resources that are controlled by simply counting / limiting the number of resource instances in a scalar manner...

It's been several months since the last round of FUTEX2 patches for this system call to address the shortcomings of the current FUTEX system call. FUTEX2, which is designed in part with Wine/Proton in mind for better matching Windows semantics, has now seen a third iteration of the patches...

Intel's code for Linux kernel bus lock detection that works in conjunction with newer Intel CPUs has landed in the Linux kernel...

With Qt 6.1 being released next month, The Qt Company has published their 2021 road-map outlining some of their plans for the remainder of the calendar year...

It's Fedora 34 day! Fedora 34 is now officially available and it's quite exciting on the feature front especially with the changes to be enjoyed in Fedora Workstation 34...

GCC 11.1 is out today as the first stable release of the GNU Compiler Collection 11...

Arm published today a set of blog posts outlining more power/performance and feature details of their forthcoming Neoverse N2 and Neoverse V1 platforms...

While Fedora Workstation has been moving along with its Btrfs file-system usage and beginning to make greater use of its functionality, Red Hat does continue investing heavily in Stratis-Storage as their path forward for next-generation Linux storage with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Today marks the release of Stratis 2.4...

The "char/misc" continues to be the random catch-all subsystem for the Linux kernel for drivers and buses not fitting well into other areas of the Linux kernel. Increasingly char/misc is hosting various accelerator/offload devices with the kernel still not yet introducing its own formal accelerator subsystem. With Linux 5.13 the "char/misc" pull continues to be heavy on a wide assortment of changes...

While Zink implements OpenGL 4 and is running an increasing number of games with good performance, one of the simple "demos" it hasn't been able to render correctly in recent years has been glxgears. But that milestone is now crossed once again with the latest Mesa code...

The EROFS read-only file-system developed by Huawei is seeing some new feature work with the in-development Linux 5.13 kernel...

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the big batch of USB and Thunderbolt subsystem updates on Monday for the in-development Linux 5.13 kernel...

Working on the Linux power management code is a never-ending and increasingly important task. The ACPI and power management updates were sent in today for the Linux 5.13 merge window though this isn't as exciting as some of the recent kernels heavy on CPUFreq and P-State changes...

As expected, support for the initial Apple M1 SoC support and 2020 Apple Silicon devices (Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air) has landed into the Linux 5.13 kernel...

Over the past month we have been quite impressed by the performance of the EPYC 7003 series Milan processors when looking at the top-tier parts, but how does Zen 3 do for lower-tier server CPUs? Recently we were supplied with two EPYC 72F3 processors from AMD for these 8-core high performance SKUs. In our initial look at the EPYC 72F3 Linux performance is seeing how they compare to the similar previous-generation EPYC 7F32 processor.

Linux 5.11 brought mainline support for Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) after a lengthy mainlining process. Building off that SGX enclaves support in the mainline kernel more recently has been support for SGX with KVM virtualization and now for mainline Linux 5.13 that guest-side support is landing for KVM guests...

The Khronos Group used the International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL 2021) to release OpenCL 3.0.7 as the latest OpenCL 3 revision that brings with it some new extensions...

Freshly re-based against yesterday's Linux 5.12 kernel, GNU Linux-Libre 5.12-gnu is now available as the latest version of this GNU cleansed kernel now carrying a codename of "Freedo Misses Tasha"...

Flatpak 1.11.1 is out this morning as the first development step towards the eventual Flatpak 1.12 stable release...

Version 1.6 of FWUPD is now available for firmware updating of motherboard BIOS and other device firmware under Linux...

The "x86/misc" pull request this morning for the newly-opened Linux 5.13 merge window adds the new KCPUID utility contributed by Intel...

Vulkan 1.2.177 is out today as the newest version of the Vulkan specification and this time around introduces one new extension that aims to help OpenGL translation layers and potentially other implementations atop this graphics API...

Following yesterday's Linux 5.12 release the merge window for Linux 5.13 is officially open. One of the first pull requests of this new merge window is for the platform-drivers-x86 updates, which primarily encompass Intel/AMD Linux laptop driver support improvements and other related x86 platform drivers...

MuSE is a MIDI and audio sequencer with audio recording and editing support. MuSE supports plug-ins to form a complete digital audio workstation. This GPL-licensed audio software is now up to version 4.0 and with it comes a redesigned user-interface...

After a week delay, the Linux 5.12 kernel was just released as stable...

GCC 11 is expected to be released next week following its recent release candidates...

LunarG, the consulting firm known for their contributions around Vulkan and also having been involved with Mesa development over the years and experimenting with Gallium3D features and other interesting efforts like the past LunarGLASS, is looking to hire another experienced graphics driver development engineer...

With it appearing all the essentials are in place for IBM POWER10 Linux support, in recent days we have seen an uptick in patches from IBM engineers working on POWER10 performance optimizations...

The drama in kernel land this week was University of Minnesota being banned from Linux kernel development over research they previously carried out looking at "hypocrite commits" and the possibility of intentionally introducing vulnerabilities (such as use-after-free bugs) into the kernel source tree. This weekend those researchers involved published an open letter to the Linux kernel community...

After it was pushed back last week due to blocker bugs, on Friday it was determined that Fedora 34 is now in proper shape to officially ship next week...

Queued this week into perf/core ahead of the imminent Linux 5.13 merge window is perf subsystem bring-up for Intel's next-gen Alder Lake processors...

Sony Linux engineer Peter Enderborg has proposed a soft watchdog for the Linux kernel to carry out pre-defined tasks in certain situations but not being like hardware watchdogs that would reboot the system if a problem crops up...

KDE developers continue polishing up their Wayland support and making other improvements to their desktop stack...

On top of the prior AMDGPU feature pulls for Linux 5.13 that brought Aldebaran support, FreeSync HDMI, and other improvements, another round of updates were sent in on Friday...

Wine 6.7 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games and applications on Linux...

Right now Fedora Linux predominantly uses GCC as the default system compiler except for cases where the upstream project only supports LLVM/Clang. But moving forward packagers working on Fedora could decide to switch to using LLVM Clang for building a given package where it is worthwhile...

Blender's Cycles engine is celebrating its tenth birthday today and in marking the occasion, the Blender project has announced the ongoing work on "Cycles X" as what started as a research project in preparing this engine for the next ten years. It's a big step forward for Cycles but with Cycles X the OpenCL rendering kernels are being removed...

As we have been showing in a few articles already, Ubuntu 21.04 is in good shape performance-wise and generally coming ahead of Ubuntu 20.10 and 20.04 LTS. We've seen that on a number of systems in the lab, but how does this better performance out of Ubuntu 21.04 compare to say Intel's Clear Linux? Here are some benchmarks.

You may recall last year was work that got started on being able to compile the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver on Windows. Well, this Friday the merge request finally was honored for Mesa 21.2...

The T2 Linux distribution, or "System Development Environment" (SDE) as it refers to itself, is up to version 21.4 and with it is now supporting fifteen different CPU architectures for this barebones Linux-based operating system...