Phoronix

Wine 6.16 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release of this widely-used software for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other systems...

Current Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe started out in the late 90's taking over maintainership of the Linux kernel's CD-ROM driver code. However, as he's busy these days with IO_uring and other prominent I/O activities for Linux, he's hoping someone interested and capable would want to take over the Linux kernel's CD-ROM code...

A number of Phoronix readers have been asking about some fresh file-system comparisons on recent kernels. With not having the time to conduct the usual kernel version vs. file-system comparison, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS file-system benchmarks on a speedy WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe solid-state drive...

The Linux kernel has already sported SM4 cipher algorithm implementation optimized for AES-NI and AVX while now an Alibaba engineer has contributed an AVX2 optimized variant for even greater performance...

For nearly the past decade there has been calls for deprecating the Liux kernel's frame-buffer "FBDEV" device code though the code remains within the kernel. While these days most display drivers are DRM-based even in the embedded world, a lot of FBDEV code still ends up in kernel builds even when just wanting to use DRM's FBDEV emulation layer. But a patch proposal out of Red Hat would further split-up the FBDEV core support to allow less of it to be built...

On top of all the PCI IDs in place already for the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver, another 17 PCI IDs were added in a new patch for this open-source Radeon graphics driver...

While Ubuntu 21.10 isn't being released for another two months, the release schedule for Ubuntu 22.04 has been published that is rather notable in being the next bi-annual long-term support (LTS) release...

PipeWire, for managing audio/video streams on Linux and proving itself to be a viable replacement to PulseAudio and JACK, is out with a new update...

Google promoted Chrome 94 to beta status today with some exciting changes...

Started back in 2018 was an effort by the NetBSD project to update their operating system WiFi drivers by re-syncing more code from FreeBSD and making various improvements. Three years later the work has yet to be merged but after stalling for some time is back to being worked on by interested developers...

Earlier this month was a look at the LLVM Clang 13 performance on EPYC 7003 showing this forthcoming compiler update to be in good shape for AMD Zen 3, but how is the performance looking on the Intel side? This round of benchmarking is looking at the LLVM Clang 11 / 12 / 13 compiler performance on Intel's flagship Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" 2P server configuration.

After a slight delay, Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS is available today as the newest point release for the current Ubuntu Linux long-term support release...

The GNOME project has launched "Apps For GNOME" at apps.gnome.org for highlighting the ecosystem of available GNOME applications...

The Qt Company has formally released Qt Creator 5.0 today as their latest version of this Qt/C++ minded integrated development environment...

Google Chrome OS engineers are working on making Linux's VirtIO-GPU driver more extensible. The VirtIO-GPU driver has been modeled around the Virgl protocol for handling 3D within guest virtual machines but with a new context type addition they aim to support additional protocols...

Going back to June of last year there has been work on Intel bringing up Advanced Matrix Extension (AMX) that will debut with next-gen Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" processors as a new programming paradigm. Over the past year they have published patches for the Linux kernel and open-source toolchains with GCC and LLVM Clang. One year later, the AMX kernel patches are up to their tenth revision but will miss out on the imminent Linux 5.15 merge window...

It was just last month that the Linux kernel saw a pipe code change to address a user-space regression due to the kernel's policy about not breaking the user-space even if that non-kernel code is in the wrong. A similar kernel regression fix was merged today...

The work I initially wrote about last week for AMD optimizing their C3 entry handling to avoid an unnecessary cache flush will now be picked up for the upcoming Linux 5.15 kernel cycle...

OpenShot 2.6 has been released as the newest version of this non-linear open-source video editing system for Linux...

Earlier this month the AMD Ryzen 5 5600G and Ryzen 7 5700G desktop APUs officially launched for retail availability. Unfortunately we were not seeded with any review sample for being able to conduct Linux testing on these Zen 3 APUs with Vega graphics, but ended up purchasing one afterwards due to the number of readers inquiring about the Linux support. Here are some preliminary benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G.

Today marks the 30th birthday of Linux since it was announced by Linus Torvalds. Meanwhile in just a few days the Linux 5.14 kernel is expected to be released as stable. Here is a look back at the most prominent features coming for this kernel release...

AMD engineers continue working on preparing the Linux kernel for the Frontier supercomputer...

Loongson this summer rolled out their 3A5000 processors built on their own "LoongArch" ISA. While the company continues claiming that LoongArch is "not MIPS", the Linux kernel code they continue proposing for the mainline Linux kernel points to it being a close facsimile to MIPS...

Earlier this year when Clang LTO support was added for Linux 5.12 that link-time optimization support wasn't done solely for squeezing out greater performance but also because it's a prerequisite for making use of Clang's Control Flow Integrity (CFI) functionality. Google engineers have now sent out their latest set of patches for bringing up Clang CFI support within the Linux kernel...

QEMU 6.1 is out as the newest feature release to this widely-used, open-source Linux virtualization component...

While there is still two months to go until the Ubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri" release, since the feature freeze has now begun I've started some early testing of this next Ubuntu release. So far things are looking good as a nice upgrade over Ubuntu 21.04 and prior. Here is the first round of Ubuntu 21.04 vs. 21.10 development tests using an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X with Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics.

The Haiku open-source operating system project that continues advancing as the virtual successor to BeOS has been enjoying a successful summer...

DebConf21 officially got underway this morning with being a second year of this annual Debian conference being held exclusively online due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic...

Shortly after Intel's TDX whitepaper was made public last year for better protecting virtual machines, Intel open-source engineers began posting support patches for bringing up Trust Domain Extensions under Linux. That work remains ongoing and now further Linux kernel infrastructure work is pending to better deal with the notion of guest private memory afforded by TDX...

Made public on Monday was CVE-2021-35465 as a new security vulnerability affecting various Arm products. For unmitigated (ARMv8-M) hardware, Arm has posted a series of GCC compiler patches for working around the issue...

Announced back in April of 2020 was Micron's HSE as an open-source storage engine optimized for solid-state drives and persistent memory. After quickly crossing the v1.0 milestone and working its way up to HSE 1.9 at the end of last year, there hasn't been any updates since. Fortunately, the project is still alive and HSE 2.0 is on the way...

One of the areas where AMD's long-standing "PRO" OpenGL driver has generally held an advantage over RadeonSI Gallium3D has been around workstation software but that has been changing...

One year ago to the day Intel announced OSPray Studio as a scene graph application for rendering glTF assets and other 3D models. OSPray Studio is built off their OSPray ray-tracing engine that they've been working on for years. These Intel efforts are all part of their oneAPI initiative and today happens to mark a shiny new feature release...

AMDVLK 2021.Q3.5 is out as the newest snapshot for this open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver...

The GNOME 41 beta is now available ahead of next month's official half-year update to this open-source desktop environment...

With the Linux 5.15 kernel merge window likely opening next week, Matthew Wilcox of Oracle has already sent in a prominent pull request to Linus Torvalds: the initial work around landing of the memory folios patches...

Last month I wrote about the proposed reflink support for Wine that would provide significant space savings for those having multiple Windows games/applications on Linux installed where Wine and derivatives like Crossover and Steam Play (Proton) generally maintain a separate "prefix" per software installation. Fortunately, that reflink support continues to be worked on for Wine where it can lead to savings up to several hundred megabytes per Wine prefix...

GTK 4.4 is out as the latest stable update to the GTK4 open-source toolkit...

Zink as an OpenGL-over-Vulkan API implementation living within Mesa merged its sub-allocator code that could deliver 10x the performance for some games. Plus it also landed OpenGL compatibility context support for getting more games working now with this open-source GL-on-VLK solution. Given the progress made in Mesa Git over the past week, here are some fresh benchmarks now for how the performance stands across various games and benchmarks.

Going on three years now there have been proposed patches for allowing per-client GPU engine statistics for being able to show on a per-game/application level how many resources across 3D/blitting/video engines are being consumed. The patches continue to be revised but sadly will be missing out on the imminent Linux 5.15 kernel merge window...

While Habana Labs has been known for their open-source and upstream Linux kernel driver for their AI training/inference accelerators with that code they had been working on as a start-up even before being acquired by Intel, it's continued to cause friction that they rely in user-space on closed-source components like their compiler. That in turn is again causing problems for changes that the Habana Labs kernel driver planned to land with the upcoming Linux 5.15 cycle...

Running Linux on the Apple M1 with various out-of-tree patches is now capable of booting to a GNOME desktop albeit lacking any OpenGL/graphics acceleration...

While Linux 5.14 stable is expected next weekend, the Reiser4 (and experimental Reiser5) file-system driver code has been finally updated for compatibility with the Linux 5.13 kernel series...

The Linux 5.14 cycle is playing out smoothly and will likely lead to the Linux 5.14 stable kernel release happening next weekend...

Since the start of July we've seen Intel beginning Linux support patches for their DG2 graphics card that is now known by the "Alchemist" codename. There's been several rounds of DG2 patches since they started publicly pushing out the code -- including some notable work like DisplayPort 2.0 bring-up -- while sent out this Sunday is another important piece of the puzzle: getting the device memory (the dedicated vRAM) actually working with the open-source driver...

While it was busy on the hardware side of the house with Intel talking up all of their forthcoming hardware, Intel's open-source software engineers remain very busy working not only to enable their next-generation hardware but other open-source efforts they've invested in like the iNet wireless daemon...

Red Hat's Hans de Goede continues doing a commendable job improving the Linux support for various laptops with key improvements. One of the latest efforts by this longtime kernel developer has been about getting DisplayPort over USB Type-C connections working for more Intel hardware...

While Intel is normally very punctual in providing support for major new CPU features under Linux and often landing them well in advance of general hardware availability, their work around Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) has taken a long longer than normal and is still going through new rounds of code review to get accepted into the mainline Linux kernel...

Due to the growing threat posed by file-less malware attacks where malware code is executed from anonymous executable memory pages that aren't backed by data on the file-system, the "NAX" Linux security module has been seeing work recently for helping to protect against such scenarios...

It's been another busy week in KDE land with the seemingly never ending improvements to the Plasma Wayland session as well as introducing some new features like a new Overview Effect...