Last week there was the release of AOCC 2.3 as AMD's LLVM Clang downstream focused on Zen-optimized support. Meanwhile on the graphics side of the house, this week ushered in AOMP 11.12 as their LLVM Clang downstream focused on Radeon OpenMP GPU offloading...
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary highlighting the desktop project's changes for the week. WebRTC support with the screencast code in Plasma now works on Wayland, but the Plasma Wayland changes are lighter than we've seen in recent weeks. Instead the emphasis this week seems to have been on enhancing KDE's usability...
For over the past year there has been work on the new "Maple Tree" data structure led by Oracle for the Linux kernel and this week marked the patches being sent out in "request for comments" (RFC) form with the aim still on helping the kernel performance...
Announced earlier this year by Micron was the HSE open-source storage engine aimed for low-latency, speed-performance on modern SSD storage and ideal for powering the likes of NoSQL databases. In squeezing out one more major release before year's end, HSE 1.9 was released on Friday...
Following last week's Wine 6.0-RC1 release that marked the feature freeze and start of the release process for the annual stable Wine release, Wine 6.0-RC2 is out today with the latest assortment of fixes...
Just one week shy of one year since CUPS founder Michael Sweet left Apple, which in turn seemingly led to the downfall of CUPS, PAPPL 1.0 has been released as his modern alternative printer application framework...
For those curious how the AMD Zen 3 performance is looking between Windows and Linux, here are the first round of benchmarks with a Ryzen 9 5900X system.
The Linux 5.10 kernel is expected to be released this Sunday that will in turn start the Linux 5.11 merge window. Based on the material queued so far into the various "-next" branches, here is a look at what should be on the table for this next major kernel release and come February will be the first major kernel release of 2021...
Following the recent OpenZFS 2.0 release, a new feature that has landed in the latest OpenZFS development code is the ability to respond to CPU and memory hot-plugging...
Intel's INT340X thermal code that is used by the likes of the Intel Thermal Daemon "Thermald" for thermal/power management with their modern SoCs will now be able to accept workload hints for making more informed thermal decisions...
Google as part of their involvement in the Open-Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) has devised the "Criticality Score" as a means of judging crucial open-source projects...
For those wondering how the open-source Radeon Linux graphics drivers compare to the Radeon Software Windows drivers for the recently released Radeon RX 6800 XT, here are some preliminary data points looking at the OpenGL / Vulkan performance between Windows and Linux for RDNA 2.
One of the big features to look forward to with Intel's Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" is the introduction of AMX as the Advanced Matrix Extensions. While Sapphire Rapids looks to be at least one year out still, the company's open-source compiler engineers have already been hard at work on the software infrastructure support...
The Linux 5.11 merge window is expected to open next week and while AMD has already queued several rounds of updates into DRM-Next ahead of that period, some last minute items were submitted overnight for this next Linux kernel version and what will be the first major kernel release of 2021...
Following the original, first-generation PowerPC CPU support being removed in the Linux 5.10 kernel, the original PowerPC 400 series is also looking like it will now be removed as well from the kernel...
Raspberry Pi's V3DV Vulkan driver is on quite a streak lately. The V3DV driver has seen inclusion in Mesa 20.3, Vulkan 1.0 conformance, and Wayland support, more performance work is being pursued with those initial milestones reached. Meanwhile the V3D OpenGL driver is also being improved upon still...
While Apple continues to drive their own Metal graphics/compute API, Vulkan support built atop Metal continues to mature thanks to the open-source MoltenVK project. With the MoltenVK's latest update is now support for Apple Silicon with the M1's new GPU...
Back in May was AMD's celebration of the GPUOpen re-launch and that included the introduction of the Radeon Memory Visualizer (RMV) as their newest tool at the time. But rather strange for being a "GPUOpen" development tool is that it was Windows-only and not actually open-source. Today that has now changed with Radeon Memory Visualizer going open-source...
While AMD Smart Access Memory has already been supported under Linux for some time with its resizable BAR functionality, only now with all the excitement around the feature being promoted with the Ryzen 5000 series and Radeon RX 6000 series hardware is the Mesa driver code beginning to see some optimizations for it...
Last week AMD published their Zen 3 support for GCC code compiler. That initial support, which has already been merged into GCC 11, is the initial support flipping on newly supported instructions but not yet offering any tuned scheduler model or other optimizations compared to the existing Zen 2 path. In any case, here is a look at the performance changes with building the open-source benchmarks under test with "znver3" compared to the prior Zen 2 and Zen 1 targets along with generic x86_64 and then also looking at the performance if catering the compiler targets for Intel's Skylake and Haswell processors.
It's been just over one month since AMD launched the Ryzen 5000 series as the first processors part of the Zen 3 family. The Linux performance continues to be terrific with the Ryzen 5600X / 5800X / 5900X / 5950X parts in our continued benchmarking...
AMD has carried out a timely release of their RDNA 2 ISA documentation for those interested in working on any compiler support around these very latest graphics processors or working on other shader optimization approaches, etc...
A new SDL2 library release is being prepared for this widely-used, cross-platform abstraction layer popular with games for supporting a wide range of input devices / peripherals and other vast subsystem coverage in a portable manner...
There have been many workarounds and changes to the SDMA (System DMA) copy support within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver since the support was introduced years ago, but it's now been outright removed due to too many generations of AMD Radeon hardware having issues with it enabled...
QEMU 5.2 was released on Tuesday as the latest feature release for this open-source processor emulator that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack...
Intel's Deep Neural Network Library currently known as oneDNN as part of the oneAPI suite (and formerly known as MKL-DNN and DNNL) has reached version 2.0 as an open-source project...
The open-source Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is currently used by their oneAPI Level Zero and OpenCL implementations but likely to see Intel driver Mesa usage in 2021 has a new feature dubbed "IMF LA" that aims to help with the performance and close the gap with Windows...
Four years after Google began developing the "Fuchsia" operating system complete with its own kernel, Google is now becoming more open with Fuchsia development and also accepting community code contributions...
Back in October RISC-V minded startup SiFive announced the HiFive Unmatched development board as the best RISC-V development board we've seen to date. But only having 8GB of RAM was one of the few critiques which the company is now addressing...
Well here is a surprise for those that have long used CentOS as the community-supported rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux... CentOS 8 will end in 2021 and moving forward CentOS 7 will remain supported until the end of its lifecycle but CentOS Stream will be the focus as the future upstream of RHEL...
After the Radeon RX 6800 series launched just under a month ago, the flagship AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is launching today. This is currently the most powerful RDNA 2 graphics card and should work under Linux with the open-source driver stack but the card is likely to be scarcer than even the RX 6800 series...
With the Linux 5.10 kernel expected to be released this weekend, here is a look at some of the most interesting changes and new additions. Besides being the last kernel release of 2020, Linux 5.10 is significant in that it's also serving as a Long Term Support (LTS) release...
After Zen 3 support was sent out and merged into GCC 11 last week, the LLVM Clang compiler support has now been published for this newest member of the AMD Zen family...
The set of MSM DRM driver improvements have now been submitted to DRM-Next that are targeting the Linux 5.11 merge window for enhancing the Qualcomm Adreno mainline kernel graphics driver support...
HP today announced a new Ubuntu Linux offering for select mobile workstations and notebooks in the form of the "Z by HP Data Science Software" package. This isn't just pre-loading the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS OEM version on the notebook but calling it a day, rather it's been pre-loaded as well with a variety of data science software packages...
Proton 5.13-3 is out today as the latest version of this Wine downstream that powers Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games rather well on Linux...
One of the NVMe specification additions that was ratified this year is the "simple copy" command that allows for copying multiple contiguous ranges to a single destination. That simple copy operation is offloaded to the SSD controller. The Linux kernel support for NVMe simple copy is now being prepared...
While most hardware vendors don't support Linux to the extent that any products with configurable RGB lighting controls will officially be supported, OpenRGB has been one of the successful community projects for allowing many different devices to enjoy configurable, cross-vendor. and open-source RGB lighting controls...
For those that may find their hands on an Intel Tiger Lake laptop this holiday season with the "Gen12" Xe Graphics, here are some Linux OpenGL/Vulkan benchmarks in varying driver configurations if you are left wondering whether it makes sense upgrading your kernel or Mesa for better performance...
The Webboot project has been in development now for more than one year as an easy means of booting Linux ISO images from the web. From this minimal boot environment users can configure their network connection and download a new ISO or use a pre-existing ISO. From there Webboot allows kexec'ing into that ISO for booting it up...
Back in October there were engineers from Tencent proposing DMEMFS as the "Direct Memory File-System" for Linux. DMEMFS is about reserving some RAM that is not managed by the kernel to avoid that overhead and in turn expose it directly to virtual machines in the cloud. Those initial DMEMFS kernel patches have now been updated by Tencent as they continue working to get this functionality into the Linux kernel...
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