Phoronix

The Khronos Group and LunarG have announced an updated Vulkan SDK that includes now formally providing support for Apple platforms, including Apple Silicon systems via Universal Binaries...

At the start of the month Intel sent out their initial graphics driver changes targeting Linux 5.12 while now a secondary set of changes have been sent to DRM-Next...

Ubuntu 21.04 will do away with the existing practice on Ubuntu Linux systems of making new user home directories world-readable...

The AMD Radeon "AMDGPU" open-source Linux kernel driver is tacking on another new feature: Secure Display TA...

While the i3 window manager has been around for more than a decade, it's taken until now for an i3 window manager spin of Fedora to be solicited and approved...

Finally in 2021 with the GNOME 40 release is the ability of GNOME's Nautilus file manager to show and sort by file creation times.....

In addition to pursuing many technical changes for its Linux distribution like systemd-oomd by default, Btrfs Zstd compression, and standalone XWayland releases, the Fedora project is also looking to overhaul its community outreach this year...

As one step below the existing GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, NVIDIA announced the RTX 3060 from the virtual CES event...

Following Intel's product announcements yesterday, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su providing her virtual keynote this morning for the virtual CES 2021. Here are the highlights for how AMD is aiming to make 2021 even more exciting than their prior stellar year...

So far for the virtual CES this week there hasn't been any big CXL 2.0 announcements since the Compute Express Link 2.0 specification was finalized back in November, but the Linux kernel support for this CPU-to-device interconnect continues coming together and will be hopefully mainlined in a coming release...

The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Gallium3D code within Mesa has wired up DRM shim support for basically faking the support in the absence of real hardware. This is mainly useful for testing the Nouveau OpenGL shader compiler code path without any actual code execution...

Following last month's release of the big GTK 4.0 toolkit, GTK 4.0.1 is out as the first stable point release for this free software toolkit...

Adding to the changes abound at CentOS beyond CentOS 8 going EOL at year's end to focus instead on CentOS Stream feeding into the future RHEL, the likes of Facebook and Twitter are now proposing a Hyperscale special interest group for this RHEL-based platform...

While the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) allows selecting between your choice of optional compression algorithms like LZO, LZ4, and Zstd -- plus even specifying specific file extensions to optionally limit the transparent file-system compression to -- it doesn't allow easily specifying a compression level. That is fortunately set to change with the Linux 5.12 kernel this spring...

Intel's virtual CES press conference took place today. Here are the highlights from 10nm Pentium Silver and Celeron processors to a preview of Rocket Lake and forthcoming 11th Gen Core H processors.

The support for Clang LTO of the Linux kernel for link-time optimizations when using that GCC alternative compiler looks like it will land with Linux 5.12...

Last year with Fedora 33 zRAM was switched on by default. The setup was that using a compressed zRAM drive for swap space leads to better performance and in turn a better user experience. Some spins of Fedora have been using swap-on-zRAM by default going back many releases while since F33 it's been used for all spins. Now with Fedora 34 the configuration is being further refined...

Here is a look at how the performance of Intel's Clear Linux compares for the end of 2020 against the end of 2019 and 2018 on the same hardware platform for looking at the Intel performance optimizations made to this open-source Linux distribution. This was another year of Intel engineers making more headway on out-of-the-box Linux performance even though they have been less vocal about the project over the past year.

AMD is back on track publishing more Zen 3 compiler support patches for the LLVM compiler stack...

Adding to the growing list of Mesa 21.0 features is spare memory support for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver...

The newest platform working on Vulkan API support is... Blackberry's QNX...

Mesa 21.0 is bringing some overdue improvements for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver with the game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive...

The POWER10 architecture is adding several new instructions to help prevent return-oriented programming exploits...

While Linux 5.11-rc2 was tiny due to the holidays, with developers and testers returning to work the Linux 5.11-rc3 release that was just issued is much bigger...

Several months back you may recall that Linux 5.9 kernel regression we noted that in turn was bisected to code introduced by Linus Torvalds around page lock fairness. That was ultimately worked out in time with allowing a control over the page lock (un)fairness to address the regressed workloads while being fair enough to satisfy his original change. But now this week for Linux 5.11, Linus Torvalds has again altered the behavior. It then ended up causing a PostgreSQL database server performance regression but fortunately any impact should be very minimal and hopefully not appearing in any real-world situation...

With Linux 5.10 having shipped as the latest Long Term Support (LTS) release to be maintained for at least the next five years, a discussion has begun over dropping a number of old and obsolete CPU platform support currently found within the mainline kernel. For many of the architectures being considered for removal they haven't seen any new commits in years but as is the case once proposals are made for them to be removed there are often passionate users wanting the support to be kept...

BeOS-inspired Haiku OS can now run with Mesa 21.0 well using the latest development code...

With this week's R460 driver release also comes a number of security updates. Several security issues have been patched in both the NVIDIA Windows and Linux graphics driver components...

While Fedora has been well known for years in always shipping the very latest packages in its distribution as of release even if it means using the likes of a near-final GCC compiler pre-release, developers have decided to postpone the shipping of PHP 8.0 until the autumn with their Fedora 35 release...

As part of Intel's lengthy "Keem Bay" upstreaming for Linux as their latest-generation Movidius VPU offering, now that much of the core infrastructure bits are all mainlined, the latest focus has been on their Vision Processing Unit enablement...

Stemming from the renewed attention this week of Haswell GT1 graphics being broken for the past half-year under Linux with the latest versions of the kernel, a revised patch was sent out to restore that graphics support for low-end Haswell Celeron/Pentium processors. As part of that, a new option is being introduced to allow disabling security mitigations of the Intel graphics driver...

This week AMD engineers published their initial code for the AMDGPU/AMDKFD Linux kernel driver for providing a Heterogeneous Memory Management based Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) memory manager that ultimately will be used by their ROCm compute stack...

Alibaba developers released an updated version of their "blazing fast" lightweight deep learning framework MNN, or the Mobile Neural Network...

With last week's release of dav1d 0.8 for CPU-based AV1 video decoding we provided a number of x86_64 benchmarks while questions were raised around the ARM64 and POWER9 performance. Here are such benchmarks for those wondering about the AV1 video decoding speed on those architectures...

KDE's KWin window manager / compositor has seen a "near total rewrite" of its compositing code that should sharply improve the desktop...

Building off yesterday's Wine 6.0-RC6 release is an updated Wine-Staging build...

With Linux 5.11 the Intel Linux graphics driver is bringing async page-flipping for Gen9/Skylake and newer. However, patches pending for a future release (potentially 5.12) would extend that performance benefiting feature now all the way back to the Ironlake days...

The first of several batches of feature updates to the AMDGPU kernel driver were sent in on Friday for anticipation of the Linux 5.12 kernel merge window that should be opening up in February while the stable Linux 5.12 debut will happen likely by/around May. With this initial pull does come some new features and improvements around the recent AMD graphics processor support additions...

Wine 6.0-rc6 is out today as the latest weekly release candidate of Wine 6.0 that will be released in the near future. Either due to nearing the end of the release cycle and/or Wine developers having a post-holiday hangover, Wine 6.0-RC6 is coming in light on new fixes...

As noted before the holidays that Mozilla Firefox was ready to enable AVIF image decoding by default, now that the holidays have passed and developers back to their keyboards, Firefox today has re-enabled AVIF by default...

Last month we provided benchmarks of Ampere Altra against Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC with the Q80-33 CPUs in a 2P / 160 core configuration. From that article, reader questions were raised about how this high performance ARM server chip compares to Amazon's Graviton2 processors, so in this article today are such benchmarks. The Graviton2 via an AWS m6g.metal instance with 64 cores was compared to the Ampere Altra Q80-33 in its 2P 160 core configuration, 1P 80 core configuration, and then a 64 core configuration to match the Graviton2 by disabling the excess cores.

Another NVIDIA engineer has made his first contribution to Mesa in the rather interesting focus of fixing up Volta so atomic operations will work with OpenCL SVM...

Coming out in early 2020 were patches by an Amazon engineer to implement flushing the L1 data cache on context switching in the name of security given the various data sampling vulnerabilities. That work so far has been rejected from the mainline kernel but today was updated and makes it harder to enable and thus moving forward could stand chances to finally see the opt-in functionality merged to mainline...

Linux Mint 20.1 is out today as the latest version of this user-friendly, desktop-focused Linux distribution built off Ubuntu 20.04 LTS...

AMDVLK 2021.Q1.1 is out this morning as the first update of the year for the open-source official AMD Vulkan Linux driver and it's an exciting update...

A Linux fix is on the way for a new quirk to address an issue whereby some AMD Radeon graphics cards have an issue with the resizable BAR (AMD Smart Access Memory) handling that could lead to lower performance...

Proton Experimental 5.13-20210107 is out today as the first 2021 release of this Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Following last month's initial benchmarks of the AMD "znver3" support that landed in the GCC 11 compiler was a request by a premium supporter to see the AMD Zen 3 benchmarks at more compiler optimizations. Well, here are those numbers for those wanting to pursue aggressive compiler optimizations on a shiny AMD Ryzen 9 5950X.

While Intel is generally well regarded for their Linux development practices especially as it pertains to continuous integration and their test labs for vetting code prior to reaching the mainline Linux kernel to minimize the risk of regressions or other unintended side effects, those running older Haswell GT1 low-end graphics have seen the past several kernel versions going back a half-year yield a GPU hang at boot...

Intel has released their High Performance Computing Reference Stack 2.0 as the latest Docker image optimized for HPC/AI workloads...