Phoronix

The MSM DRM driver for supporting the open-source display/graphics support with Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs has submitted their main feature pull request to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.16 merge window...

Pyston as the alternative Python implementation open-sourced originally by Dropbox is forming ambitious plans for a bright future...

It's been over one year since Intel disclosed Advanced Matrix Extensions and began posting patches for bringing up AMX support under Linux in anticipation of Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors. While the compiler-side work to GCC and LLVM/Clang has been landing, finally with the forthcoming Linux 5.16 cycle that AMX support appears ready for landing...

Following the NVIDIA 495 beta Linux driver from earlier this month, NVIDIA 495.44 is out today for Linux users as the stable release...

Now that Windows 11 has been out as stable and the initial round of updates coming out, I've been running fresh Windows 11 vs. Linux benchmarks for seeing how Microsoft's latest operating system release compares to the fresh batch of Linux distributions. First up is the fresh look at the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance on an Intel Core i9 11900K Rocket Lake system.

With Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" beginning development, Canonical is soliciting community feedback as they plot out more of the planned changes for this next major release and areas to focus on enhancing over the next six months...

Last week I mentioned how Mesa landed Vulkan 1.1 support for the V3DV driver most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer. With those changes in Mesa Git, The Khronos Group has now officially granted this driver Vulkan 1.1 conformance for the Raspberry Pi 4...

AMDGPU changes already queued up in DRM-Next for Linux 5.16 brought initial code for DisplayPort 2.0 ahead of next-gen GPUs with this connectivity support. Sent out today as a separate pull request is wiring up the DisplayPort 2.0 Multi-Stream Transport (MST) capability for the AMDGPU kernel driver...

A new pull request is pending for implementing multi-queue block (blk-mq) support within OpenZFS' Zvol code, which can lead to sizable performance benefits...

While the Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 SoCs are a decade old, the mainline Linux kernel continues working to improve the power management / thermal behavior for them in order to deal with heating issues for devices relying on these SoCs...

Linus Torvalds normally releases new kernel versions on Sundays like clockwork, but yesterday was one of the rare occasions where that trend was interrupted...

Ahead of Intel's inaugural Intel Innovation event taking place virtually later this week, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger published an open letter to an open ecosystem...

Just one week ago Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe was optimizing the kernel to get 8 million IOPS on a single CPU core. He progressed the week hitting around ~8.9M IOPS per-core and began to think he was hitting the hardware limits and running out of possible optimizations. However, this week he is kicking things off by managing to hit 10 million IOPS!..

While Linux 5.15 isn't even making its debut for another week or two, there is already a lot to look forward to when it comes to Linux 5.16. Here is a look at some of the new features expected for the 5.16 cycle...

Quietly released earlier this year was the Dynatron A39 heatsink that is capable of up to 280 Watts heat dissipation for satisfying even the very latest, high-end AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors. This Dynatron A39 TR4/sTRX4/SP3 heatsink has been working out very well for those needing to cool a Threadripper/EPYC system in a 3U or larger enclosure.

Following the recent RISC-V Bitmanip work in Binutils, the GCC 12 compiler has now landed preliminary support for the RISC-V ISA's bit manipulation extension...

Meson 0.60 was released on Sunday as the newest version of this increasingly popular and widely-used cross-platform build system...

Earlier this month AMD's open-source driver engineers began posting patches for the AMDGPU kernel driver to handle USB4 DP tunneling. That tunneling for DisplayPort with USB4 is for upcoming Yellow Carp / Rembrandt APUs. The USB4 driver bring-up within AMDGPU continues...

In addition to Loongson working on Linux kernel support for their MIPS-derived LoongArch CPU architecture, the first bits of the GNU toolchain support for this Chinese CPU architecture have been merged...

Earlier this year was news that Google is finally working to open-source their Fibers user-space scheduling framework. For the better part of the past decade they have been developing this user-space scheduling framework and finally now are working on offering public, open-source code intended for upstream around their work...

Bareflank, as what started a few years ago as a Linux hypervisor written in modern C++ and focused on security and other new features as a "hypervisor SDK" of sorts, is now up to version 3.0...

For a number of months Mediatek engineers have been posting some Linux kernel driver code for bringing up the AI Processing Unit (APU) within the MT8192 SoC while out this weekend is the complete patch series at more than eight thousand lines of code...

Recently I wrote about Vortex86 processors seeing detection work under Linux for improving the state of these aging x86 32-bit SoCs. That work is now slated to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 5.16 cycle for those running these aging SoCs/processors...

It's been an exciting week for KDE developers with preparing their formal support for handling NVIDIA's driver with GBM support as well as getting fingerprint authentication finally in place, among other improvements...

The FreeBSD team has begun preparations for their next release process with an aim to ship FreeBSD 12.3 in early December...

Last week was the virtual Vulkanised Fall 2021 event hosted by The Khronos Group. The two-day event was focused on all things Vulkan and for those that missed it all of the slide decks and other material are now available...

Wine 6.20 was released today as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

Patches queued this week into the platform-drivers-x86 "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 5.16 merge window will provide some useful improvements to System76 laptop owners...

PipeWire 0.3.39 was released on Thursday as the newest update to this audio/video stream solution for Linux systems that continues proving itself capable of replacing the roles of JACK and PulseAudio, among other use-cases...

While for many years we have been accustomed to seeing Intel land their new hardware feature enablement work in the Linux kernel and related components well ahead of products shipping, occasionally there are lapses due to various internal and external timings. The launch of Sapphire Rapids is quickly approaching and one of the major additions is Advanced Matrix Extensions with its Linux support still being in the works...

GCC 12 isn't seeing its stable release until around March~April as usual, but with feature development slowly wrapping up as approaching the next stage of development next month to focus on fixes, recently I wrapped up some preliminary benchmarks for how GCC 12.0 is currently performing against GCC 11.2 on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (Zen 3) system...

Valve continues embracing DXVK-Native for allowing more of their older games to target Vulkan by using this Direct3D-to-Vulkan translation layer for native games. DXVK-Native 1.9.2a is out with the latest fixes and improvements...

Intel's "parallel submission" user-space API for their i915 kernel graphics driver has been queued into DRM-Next today ahead of the Linux 5.16 kernel cycle...

A new Steam client beta is out with a few Linux enhancements worth noting...

SiFive just shared word that at today's Linley Conference they teased their Performance P550 successor that will "set a new standard for the highest efficiency RISC-V processor available."..

Following this week's release of Chrome 95, Google has now promoted Chrome 96 to beta status...

The release candidate to XWayland 21.1.3 is out today with just a few changes but made significant by support for the NVIDIA 495 series driver GBM code path...

It's been a half-year already since AMD introduced the EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors that continue performing well and gaining marketshare. While the recently released Ubuntu 21.10 is not a long-term support (LTS) release, for those wondering what this latest Linux distribution means for EPYC 7003 series performance, here is a look at its performance across many benchmarks against that of Ubuntu 21.04 that was released right after the Milan launch and then Ubuntu 20.04 as the current LTS stable series.

AMD patches this month have begun preparing support for a new CPU feature called Smart Trace Buffer (STB)...

Mesa's V3DV driver for supporting newer Broadcom VideoCore graphics hardware with Vulkan now is advertising v1.1 support. This Vulkan 1.1 support in V3DV is notable as the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer are the most notable beneficiaries of this driver...

The ongoing supply chain issues across the semiconductor industry (and more broadly) are now impacting the Raspberry Pi operations for end-users/customers when it comes to pricing...

The Ruby programming language implementation has merged YJIT, its new just-in-time (JIT) compiler...

NVIDIA has made available CUDA 11.5 today as the latest version of their popular but proprietary compute stack/platform. Notable with CUDA 11.5 is that CUDA-Python has reached general availability status...

GIMP 3.0 as the GTK3 port of this open-source Adobe Photoshop alternative has been talked about for nearly a decade now and the work remains ongoing. However, out today is GIMP 2.99.8 as the newest development snapshot...

Last year Intel announced ControlFlag as a machine learning tool for helping to uncover bugs within code. ControlFlag promised impressive results after being trained on more than one billion lines of code and at the end of 2020 was already being used internally on Intel's code-bases from firmware to software applications. We hadn't heard anything more about ControlFlag this year... Until today. Intel has now made ControlFlag open-source for helping to autonomously detect more programming bugs...

The newest feature release to Eclipse OpenJ9 is now available, the high performance Java Virtual Machine originating from IBM J9...

Just one week ago was the public launch of the Radeon RX 6600 as the newest offering in the RDNA2 GPU line-up. While in our Radeon RX 6600 Linux review the performance was good on AMD's well regarded open-source driver stack and standing ground against the likes of the GeForce RTX 3060 with NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver, it turns out the RX 6600 Linux performance can be even better already. Here are benchmarks of the Radeon RX 6600 on Linux across six different driver configurations.

Separate from all the ongoing Apple Silicon/M1 bring-up work for the Linux kernel, the Linux 5.16 cycle is set to support this year's Apple Magic Keyboard...

Queued this week into the Linux PCI subsystem's "next" branch is the Apple PCIe driver needed to enable PCI Express support for Apple SoCs such as the M1...

Thanks to the nature of open-source, AMD engineers for the "AMDGPU" kernel graphics driver are looking to make use of Intel's new i915 buddy allocator code they introduced as part of all their video memory management changes as part of their discrete graphics bring-up...