Phoronix

There is a lot of new hardware enablement with the ARM platforms and DeviceTree additions for the Linux 5.12 kernel merge window...

Mesa's on-disk shader cache, which is used for speeding up game load times by avoiding the redundant recompiling of shaders on successive loads and also helping performance for software that compiles shaders on-the-fly, is seeing a big improvement with Mesa 21.1. Mesa 21.1-devel merged this weekend the new single file cache implementation...

While the first week of a new merge window is often one of the busiest times for Linus Torvalds in overseeing the Linux kernel, until last night there was no actual Linux 5.12 code being pushed into the Linux Git repository. Linus was offline most of the week due to winter storms preventing him from pushing to the Git repository and interacting much with the mailing list...

XFS maintainer Darrick Wong characterized the file-system driver changes for Linux 5.12 as "a lot going on this time, which seems about right for this drama-filled year."..

With Fedora 34 aiming to use PipeWire by default for audio use-cases currently handled by PulseAudio and JACK, the Red Hat developers working on PipeWire remain very busy in addressing bugs and wiring up new functionality for this audio and video framework/server...

It's been nearly one year to the day since the release of Netrunner 20.01 as this desktop Linux distribution focused on providing a good KDE-based desktop environment and backed by Blue Systems. Today Netrunner 21.01 has been released as the latest step forward for this KDE desktop distribution built atop a Debian base...

With Valve's Portal 2 having added a Vulkan renderer by way of DXVK for converting Direct3D calls to Vulkan, here are some initial benchmarks with several different AMD Radeon graphics cards for seeing the performance of this nearly decade old game on Linux with the existing OpenGL rendering path compared to that of the new Vulkan rendering option.

When it comes to original, open-source computer games the 0 A.D. real-time strategy game is among the best. The game has been developed as open-source for more than a decade for this ancient warfare themed game. The prior 0 A.D. Alpha 23 release happened back in May 2018 while now it's finally been succeeded by 0 A.D. Alpha 24...

An exciting new capability with perf in Linux 5.12 is the ability to collect instruction latency metrics as part of the performance reports, but relies on hardware capabilities for now only found in next-generation Intel Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" processors...

The Mesa release train once again fell off the tracks for Mesa 21.0 but on Friday the fifth release candidate managed to ship...

The issue of having a beginner/easy-to-use focused desktop Linux distribution but not installing new security updates by default without user intervention is that for many users they fall behind in applying often important security fixes...

Earlier this week saw the release of Plasma 5.21 while KDE developers have been busy working on fixes/improvements to that for the first point release as well as moving forward in other areas like integrating Git support into Kate...

The sound subsystem changes were submitted on Friday by maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE for the in-development Linux 5.12 kernel...

Kodi 19.0 "Matrix" is now available for this popular open-source, cross-platform HTPC solution...

In addition to having DXVK 1.8 released for Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan, Valve's VKD3D-Proton project also is enjoying a new release in time for weekend gamers wanting to run the latest Direct3D 12 titles via Vulkan on Linux with Steam Play...

Linux 5.12 with queued thermal changes will avoid prematurely shutting down mobile Intel workstations when a "critical" thermal threshold is reached that isn't too critical...

It looks like the open-source driver support to the next-generation CDNA GPU / MI100 "Arcturus" successor is on the way. Hitting mainline AMDGPU LLVM is a new "GFX90A" target adding new interesting features for compute...

With LLVM 12 due for release next month and GCC 11 not being far behind, it's the season for fresh compiler benchmarks. In today's article is a look at the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (Zen 3) compiler performance between LLVM Clang 11.1 against the current LLVM Clang 12.0 Git development code in its feature-frozen state.

Back in December there was an experimental driver for native Wayland support within Wine published by Collabora developer Alexandros Frantzis. A new version of the Wayland patches for Wine have now been published...

The DRM kernel graphics/display driver updates were sent in today for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window. Two of the biggest features are VRR/Adaptive-Sync now being supported for Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics while on the AMD side there is initial "OverDrive" overclocking support for their newest RDNA 2 GPUs...

As expected, the new port of the Linux kernel to the Nintendo 64 game console from the 90's is now being mainlined in 2021 with the Linux 5.12 kernel.....

Now that Mesa 21.1 has OpenGL 4.6 support for Zink, the attention is turning to fixes for the OpenGL Conformance Test Suite and juicing as much performance as possible out of this OpenGL on Vulkan driver layer within Mesa...

Portal 2, Valve's puzzle platform game that has been around for a decade already, is now seeing Vulkan rendering support added by leveraging DXVK...

DXVK 1.8 is out as the newest feature release of this translation layer for Direct3D over Vulkan...

While the GTK 4.0 toolkit just released in December, GTK 4.2 is already gearing up for release next month with GNOME 40...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) with the Linux 5.12 kernel will allow configuring the compression ratio when enabling the transparent file-system compression support with LZ4 or Zstd...

The HP ZBook Studio G7 aims to attract Linux developers and data scientists by not only offering a powerful hardware combination and by pre-loading Ubuntu 20.04 LTS but in also shipping a variety of tools and other software packages pre-configured for a modern developer and data scientist workload. We have been testing the HP ZBook Studio G7 for the better part of two months for this Linux-loaded mobile workstation and in this article is a look at this new HP device along with plenty of benchmarks, including Windows vs. Linux performance tests and more.

The first public developer preview is out today of Android 12...

There is an interesting change with the TTY/serial changes for the in-development Linux 5.12 kernel...

NVIDIA is launching the CMP - the Cryptocurrency Mining Processor -- that will be a line of hardware focused on professional mining with an emphasis on Ethereum...

Released yesterday was the Linux 5.10.17 LTS kernel and what makes this point release a bit more notable than usual is that it backports the CPUFreq patches from 5.11 that were used for addressing the earlier AMD performance regression on Linux 5.11 and often leading to net improvements as well over prior kernel series. The CPUFreq patches were back-ported while the AMD frequency invariance support was not, so what does the performance look like for the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel? Here are some benchmarks...

David Miller sent in the big batch of networking improvements today for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window...

Independent kernel hacker Con Kolivas is out with his latest "ck" patch-set against the newly-minted Linux 5.11 stable kernel and re-basing the MuQSS scheduler against the latest code-base...

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the big set of USB/Thunderbolt updates already for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window...

Consulting firm 3mdeb that specializes in embedded systems with an emphasis on open-source firmware solutions like Coreboot is hosting an interesting virtual event later today...

Oracle today released their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 Update 5 intended for use on their RHEL-based Oracle Linux. Oracle's "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" tends to be a newer Linux LTS kernel with extra features compared to what is found in the current RHEL / Red Hat Compatible Kernel builds...

David Sterba on Tuesday submitted the Btrfs file-system updates for the Linux 5.12 kernel, which once again include more performance optimizations and notable new features...

For those either needing a well-built, fanless computer that can run fine as a Linux desktop or are looking for an industrial-rated edge computing system, the Helix 500 is an interesting product from OnLogic (formerly, Logic Supply) that fills the space for a dependable, petite PC and ships with Windows, Linux, or even no OS at all if just preferring to load your own operating system of choice.

XWayland 21.1 is moving forward as a standalone XWayland release separated from the X.Org Server. Given that X.Org Server 1.21 isn't moving toward release with no one stepping up to oversee that long overdue update, Red Hat engineers have devised the plan for standalone XWayland releases that are separated from the rest of the xorg-server code-base to at least get the updated X11 client on Wayland support out to users...

Ingo Molnar sent in the scheduler updates for Linux 5.12 today and it includes some notable additions, including PREEMPT_DYNAMIC, which allows changing the kernel's preemption mode at boot/run-time...

The open-source, cross-platform Phoronix Test Suite 10.2.2 is out today as the newest version of our automated, production-ready benchmarking software framework...

Intel on Tuesday night released the "microcode-20210216" package as the latest update to their collection of CPU microcode binaries. This time around the only changes to the Intel CPU microcode binaries are for Skylake server CPUs and Cascade Lake B-0/B-1 processors in order to address two vulnerabilities that came to light last year...

LLVM 11.1.0 has been tagged as a special release to deal with ABI breakage on LLVM 11.0...

The pull request is pending that would allow Clang Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) to be enabled when building the Linux 5.12 kernel with this alternative compiler. The initial pull request has the compiler optimization work ready for the core infrastructure and 64-bit ARM (AArch64) while the x86_64 support isn't expected until the Linux 5.13 cycle...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved plans for "Fedora Kinoite" as the newest spin to debut this autumn alongside Fedora 35...

Last year was the interesting remarks by Microsoft that they want to "create a complete virtualization stack with Linux." The latest fruits of that are set to land with the Linux 5.12 kernel...

Out today is a new release of Intel's open-source oneDNN library used as a deep neural network library for assembling deep learning applications. With the new oneDNN 2.1 release there is now initial support for NVIDIA GPU acceleration as well as a host of improvements for running on forthcoming Intel CPUs...

Last week when conducting preliminary benchmarks of the new FreeBSD 13 operating system beta we found broad and significant performance improvements on Intel hardware but how is this popular BSD operating system performing for AMD EPYC? Here are some initial performance tests looking at FreeBSD 12.2 stable to FreeBSD 13 beta on an AMD EPYC 7F52 server.

Today marks five years since the announcement of Vulkan 1.0. Over the past five years we have seen incredible adoption of this high performance graphics API across multiple platforms, open-source Vulkan drivers that are kept up to date well with the latest spec revisions, exciting new extensions, and the spec continues to receive new extensions and revisions on an almost bi-weekly basis...

Found with mobile Intel CPUs across Tiger Lake, Ice Lake, and even Cannon Lake has been the Intel GNA accelerator. This Gaussian and Neural Accelerator is also found with Intel Gemini Lake processors and various development kits. The Intel GNA has been backed by an out-of-tree Linux driver while now the company is finally working to upstream their GNA support in the Linux kernel...