Phoronix

AMD has issued its newest AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver code drop today and with this update comes some new optimizations and improvements...

It's been a month and a half since AMD published a security analysis of their new Zen 3 "Predictive Store Forwarding" feature that while helping performance could theoretically lead to a new side-channel attack. While they published a Linux patch to allow disabling PSF if desired for increased security, to this day they remain in the works and have yet to be mainlined...

Back in 2007 Apple effectively acquired the open-source CUPS project and in 2017 then decided to no longer develop CUPS under the GPL but instead the Apache 2.0 license for this widely-used Unix/macOS/Linux print server. But then at the end of 2019 the CUPS lead developer left Apple and following that public development of CUPS seemingly halted. Fortunately, now there is a happy next chapter to the CUPS printing story...

The open-source Panfrost graphics driver stack that is now seeing support backed by Arm is going to see Mediatek MT8183 support with the upcoming Linux 5.14 kernel cycle this summer...

Google announced today the accepted projects/students for this year's Google Summer of Code. While for GSoC 2021 Google trimmed the length of this summer coding initiative and also cut the stipend amounts, there ended up being still a good turnout for this year with some interesting projects to be attempted...

Virglrenderer that is part of the open-source Linux effort to provide accelerated OpenGL to guest virtual machines has been enjoying some new micro-optimizations...

Going along with the recent releases of FreeBSD 13.0, DragonFlyBSD 6.0, and OpenBSD 6.9, NetBSD 9.2 is now available as the latest feature release of this BSD operating system...

Fedora 35 is looking to replace the unmaintained SDL 1.2 packages with using the sdl12-compat compatibility layer for better handling of vintage Linux games by this upcoming distribution release...

While we are sure to see only more AI accelerator drivers introduced to the Linux kernel over the coming years, the open-source driver situation for the Linux kernel is increasingly becoming a fragmented mess already and disagreements among kernel developers continue to be reignited over the mainlining process and the handling of these drivers...

With the new dav1d 0.9 AV1 decoder release bringing AVX2 Assembly for higher bit depth videos, the performance improvements are very pronounced with modern Intel and AMD systems...

Making some rounds this weekend is the "Lima" project. No, not to be confused with the open-source Arm Mali reverse-engineered project of the same name, but rather an effort to be like an unofficial "macOS subsystem for Linux."..

The second weekly release candidate is now available for Linux 5.13...

As written about a few days ago, the open-source Dav1d AV1 decoder has added AVX2 Assembly for higher bit depth decoding. Dav1d 0.9 is now available with this optimization and more...

While past the Linux 5.13 merge window, some reorganizing/cleaning to the AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) code was merged to mainline today to make it easier for when the SEV-SNP and other feature code is submitted for Linux 5.14 or later...

With word this week that KDE's Dolphin file manager has adopted a hamburger menu that has re-ignited the discussion once more over client versus server-side decorations for the KDE desktop...

A Fedora 35 change proposal submitted this week that is ruffling some feathers is over removing the "allow SSH root login with password" option from Fedora's Anaconda installer...

For those interested in the story of PipeWire for handling Linux audio/video needs not only for the Linux desktop itself but coming to cars / infotainment systems and more, there is an interesting Red Hat interview going over the history and other topics pertaining to PipeWire...

While the Plasma 5.22 beta was released this week, it's not game over yet for still getting more fixes into this next KDE desktop release, especially as it concerns their maturing Wayland support...

One of the features already found in new Intel "Tiger Lake" CPUs but not yet supported by the Linux kernel is Key Locker for securing AES keys on the system. Going back months there has been various patch series working toward Key Locker support while the actual patch series getting things ready for usage was just sent out again under a "request for comments" flag...

Zstd has already been enjoying phenomenal growth throughout the open-source software ecosystem thanks to its feature set and impressive performance, but can it get even better? Yes, with Zstd 1.5 that is out today there are some more mighty impressive performance improvements...

For those of you still relying on a GCC 8 compiler, it's time to upgrade beyond that considering GCC 11 debuted just several weeks back, but if you are on the 2018 era compiler for enterprise/legacy reasons, GCC 8.5 is out as one last hurrah...

Following this week's id Tech 3 based Daemon engine update, the open-source first person shooter / real-time strategy game Unvanquished has just issued its long overdue v0.52 beta release...

KDE developers this week have issued the much anticipated Plasma 5.22 beta for testing, which is exciting this time around largely for bringing its Wayland support up to par for daily use with quite a lot of polishing and optimizations...

This week DragonFlyBSD 6.0 was released and while I have just begun in my benchmarks of this new DragonFlyBSD release, the numbers so far are quite compelling for this BSD compared to its prior release.

While PHP 8.0 was released at the end of last year, it wasn't added to Ubuntu 21.04 given all the changes at play over PHP 7.4. But now for Ubuntu 21.10, that transition to PHP 8 is now happening to ensure it's in good enough shape for the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS cycle...

For two years now Intel open-source engineers have floated patches for reporting per-client engine utilization for showing on an application level how much it's leveraging the Intel graphics render/3D, blitter, and video/multimedia engines. This can be used for some nifty system information reporting like a GPU top or other system monitoring functionality. The latest version of these patches were sent out this week...

The UBports community this week released Ubuntu Touch OTA-17 as the latest version of this Ubuntu smartphone/tablet spin that is currently supporting more than two dozen different devices...

For months Linux hardware vendor System76 has been teasing their own in-house designed and manufactured keyboard with open-source firmware and various innovations. Today the embargo lifts on the System76 Launch Configurable Keyboard so we can share more about this new open hardware product.

In addition to the initial batch of AMDGPU changes for Linux 5.14 that were mailed in on Thursday to DRM-Next, the initial DRM-Misc-Next pull also was sent off on its way to DRM-Next ahead of this next kernel cycle...

Back in April we wrote about the AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2 Vulkan driver update for Radeon Linux systems while as some driver deja vu this driver version with the same changes have been re-released...

The Adreno 660 is the GPU found within the Snapdragon 888 SoC as a significantly improved graphics processor compared to the Adreno 650. Support for the Adreno 660 is now on the way to the open-source MSM DRM driver for the Linux kernel...

With the Linux 5.13 merge window past, AMD on Wednesday submitted an initial batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD/Radeon graphics driver changes to DRM-Next as feature material to be queued ahead for the Linux 5.14 cycle this summer...

Last month Intel launched their 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" processors for these 10nm server processors and SKUs up to 40 cores while boasting around a 20% IPC improvement overall and big reported improvements for AI workloads and more. Recently we received an Intel Ice Lake reference server with the dual Xeon Platinum 8380 processors so we can carry out our own performance tests. In this initial article is our first look at the Xeon Platinum 8380 Linux support in general and a number of performance benchmarks.

AMD has published initial open-source Linux graphics driver code for a new GPU dubbed Beige Goby...

Well known BIOS provider AMI is getting in on the open-source system firmware game around OpenBMC and related projects...

It looks like the years-long effort around CPU core scheduling that's been worked on by multiple vendors in light of CPU security vulnerabilities threatening SMT/HT security will see mainline later this summer with Linux 5.14...

FragAttacks was made public on Tuesday as a set of new security vulnerabilities affecting WiFi devices. These are just not some driver-level bugs but rather three of the vulnerabilities are attributed as design flaws in the WiFi standard itself and in turn most devices on the market...

GNU Guix as a cross-platform package manager based on Nix and also being the package management solution for the Linux-based GNU Guix system distribution is out with a new version...

Adding to the changes building up for LibreOffice 7.2 ahead of its debut in August is a "Command Popup" or a heads-up display (HUD) of sorts for easily running LibreOffice commands...

With C2X and potentially a future version of C++, there is finally the #elifdef and #elifndef directives. The GNU Compiler Collection is preparing its support...

Just over one month has passed since the release of Radeon ROCm 4.1 and it's now been succeeded by the ROCm 4.2 feature release...

For those making use of 10-bit AV1 content and using dav1d as the performant CPU-based decoder, the performance on modern Intel and AMD processors is about to be a heck of a lot better...

Last year Radeon Rays 4.0 brought Vulkan support while dropping OpenCL and at the same time no longer being open-source... This GPU-accelerated ray intersection library used by the likes of Radeon ProRender is out today with version 4.1 and now it's back to being open-source...

With today NVIDIA announcing the GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti laptop GPUs, they have issued the 460.80 Linux driver as their newest long-lived driver release...

Since the Linux 5.13 merge window began settling down and especially now with 5.13-rc1 out the door, I've been ramping up performance testing of the Linux 5.13 kernel. So far I've been seeing one area where the kernel is regression and stems from the scheduler changes this cycle...

Intel today is announcing their 11th Gen Core H-Series "Tiger Lake H" mobile processors that features SKUs clocking up to a 5.0GHz turbo frequency and twenty lanes of PCI Express Gen 4...

With Linux 5.13 AMD began enabling ASPM by default in the AMDGPU DRM driver for Navi 1x, Vega, and Polaris GPUs. Looking ahead to potentially 5.14, AMD appears to be ready to flip on this power-savings feature for the Radeon RX 6000 series (Navi 2x) along with older pre-Polaris GPUs too...

Ahead of this week's LibreOffice 7.2 Alpha and the feature freeze / branching next month, initial GTK4 toolkit support code has begun landing in this open-source office suite...

eBPF has been one of the greatest Linux kernel innovations of the past decade and now Microsoft has decided to bring this "revolutionary technology" to Windows Server and Windows 10...

The Daemon engine that has been in development for many years as part of the Unvanquished open-source game project released their long-awaited 0.52 beta ahead of the game's next beta later in the week. Daemon was originally based on the open-source id Tech 3 game engine but in 2021 continues pushing ahead working on features like WebAssembly support and renderer enhancements...