Phoronix

While AV1 adoption is still taking off and finally seeing desktop hardware with AV1 decode, given the time it takes to develop a new high-end video codec it shouldn't come as too much surprise that "AV2" is already being explored...

Intel's open-source SVT-AV1 encoder that is now being used as the basis for the AV1 Software Working Group and used by Netflix and other organizations for being one of the most performant CPU-based AV1 encoders is out with a new release...

Vulkan 1.2.153 doesn't come with any new extensions or major changes aside from an important fundamental change if you are interacting with their Git repository...

Gentoo's Portage 3.0 package manager has been stabilized and ready to shine...

Linus Torvalds took some time out of his US Labor Day weekend to issue the fourth weekly release candidate of the Linux 5.9 kernel...

A few days ago I published a deep dive into the CPU and GPU performance with Blender 2.90 as a major update to this open-source 3D modeling software. Following that I kept on testing more and older NVIDIA GPUs with the CUDA and OptiX back-end targets to now have an 18-way comparison from Maxwell to Turing with the new Blender 2.90...

Queued up in char-misc-next ahead of the Linux 5.10 cycle is a speed-up for reading from /dev/zero.....

Patches were posted on Friday for introducing the Intel Security Manager class driver to the Linux kernel...

On Saturday the ISO/IEC 14882:2020 standards draft was approved as the latest major update to the C++ programming language...

Following a summer quest for figuring out a pesky thread issue with Rust, a fix has been merged into the BeOS-inspired Haiku kernel for one less patch to worry about with getting this popular programming language running well...

In preparation for "future AMD systems", which is likely AMD EPYC Zen 3 "Milan" server processors, there will be more banks for the Machine Check Exception handling...

While Chrome 86 entered beta with many features, Chrome 87 in development has re-enabled the Wayland+X11 Ozone support as another attempt at improving the Wayland support experience off the single binary...

Intel's iNet Wireless Daemon (IWD) is out with a new feature release with this daemon continuing to see new usage and possibly on Ubuntu moving forward...

KDE has kicked off the new month with some interesting improvements...

Less than one year after joining NUVIA as VP of Software, longtime Linux proponent Jon Masters is leaving the company and returning to his previous position at Red Hat...

Oracle has put out another VirtualBox 6.1 point release though making it notable this time around is support for the upstream Linux 5.8 kernel...

PipeWire as the Red Hat led project for better audio/video stream management server on the Linux desktop is getting into increasingly great shape. This forward-looking solution that handles PulseAudio/JACK use-cases as well as pleasant integration with the likes of Wayland and Flatpak is ready to take on more user testing...

AMD's open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver developers have sent in their first round of updates to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.10 kernel merge window kicking off in October...

Dbus-Broker as the high performance, D-Bus compatible implementation with BUS1 not panning out yet for high-performance, in-kernel IPC has seen a new release...

Weston 9.0 is out as the latest feature update to this Wayland reference compositor...

The virtual DebConf20 concluded last week as the annual main conference for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Recently elected Debian Project Leader Jonathan Carter gave his talk at the event as an overview of where the project is at today as well as some of the problems they are facing today...

Google engineers have posted a new revision of their work from earlier this summer for allowing the Linux kernel to be LTO-optimized using Clang...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) announced on Thursday that they are funding improvements to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) around GPU compute offloading...

While Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 is the latest and greatest series for Oracle's kernel spin derived from upstream Linux 5.4 as an alternative on Oracle Linux to their "Red Hat Compatible Kernel", for those still making use of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5, a new update was issued today...

Building off the recent release of Chrome 85, Google has now released the beta of Chrome 86 with a number of goodies introduced and promotions for some existing functionality...

The fourth and likely last release candidate of Mesa 20.2 is now available for testing while the formal release should happen next week...

Just over one month ago was the GTK 3.99 release and now that has been succeeded by GTK 3.99.1 in getting quite close to the long-awaited GTK 4.0 tool-kit release...

Following the debut of the big Blender 2.90 release and subsequently updating it for the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org, here is a deep dive into the Blender 2.90 performance... A number of areas are being looked at with the initial Blender 2.90 benchmarks from how the performance is on various CPUs and GPUs to the performance of the Blender 2.82 vs. 2.90 to looking at the Windows vs. Linux performance for Blender 2.90 with various means of acceleration.

Longtime NVIDIA engineer Thierry Reding who has been involved with the open-source Nouveau driver efforts largely from an embedded/mobile Tegra angle last week sent out the newest patch series...

Earlier this summer building off the latest Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 advancements by Microsoft, NVIDIA released early support for CUDA / GPU compute on WSL2. This week NVIDIA offered up a new version of their CUDA WSL support...

Going back a number of months have been patches for bringing up the Broadcom BCM2711 display pipeline as found with the Raspberry Pi 4 SBC. That work still hasn't been mainlined but a fifth round of patches has now been sent out for review...

Open-source consulting firm KDAB has released Hotspot 1.3 as their GUI utility for visualizing Linux perf reports...

One of the most interesting projects out of Google Summer of Code 2020 has been the ongoing work for allowing individual code files to be compiled in parallel, building off work last year in addressing GCC parallelization bottlenecks. The final report for GSoC 2020 on this work has been issued...

In addition to Intel talking a lot today in virtual briefings about the new 11th Gen "Tiger Lake" mobile processors, they were also talking at a higher level extensively on their second-generation "Project Athena" laptop innovation program and their new Intel Evo branding for premium laptops...

After a small dip in July, how did the Steam on Linux gaming marketshare end out for August prior to many gamers returning to school and others still being isolated at home? A small uptick but still under the 1% threshold...

While Mesa 20.2 will hopefully be out next week, Mesa 20.1.7 is out today as the newest stable release for this collection of open-source Linux graphics drivers...

NVIDIA software engineer Zi Yan who specializes in the Linux kernel memory management subsystem today sent out a set of patches proposing the addition of 1GB THP support for the Linux kernel...

Intel Tiger Lake will soon begin appearing in laptops with an upgraded CPU architecture, the all new Iris Xe (Gen12) graphics, new AI capabilities, Thunderbolt 4, PCI Express 4.0, WiFi 6, and other new functionality. The Gen12 graphics have me most excited but there should be healthy improvements as well on the CPU side and not to mention improved connectivity.

Upstream developers are looking at phasing out Intel MMX that was popular in the late 90's but has since long been succeeded by SSE and AVX instruction set extensions...

SHADERed has been available for a while now as a cross-platform, open-source shader editor and for debugging and writing of graphics shaders. SHADERed not only runs on Linux and Windows now but through any modern web browser as of the new v1.4 release...

It's not clear if AMD has provided the independent RADV Vulkan driver developers at the likes of Valve, Red Hat, and Google with any Navi 2 hardware yet, but they do seem to be making progress on this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver separate from their official AMDVLK open-source driver...

Even more optimizations have now been queued up for GNOME 3.38 launching this month...

While LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler was traditionally known for its faster build speeds than GCC, in recent releases of GCC the build speeds have improved and in some areas LLVM/Clang has slowed down with further optimization passes and other work added to its growing code-base. As it stands right now, GCC is faster than Clang at compiling the Linux kernel...

Just over twenty years after the Linux From Scratch project was started as a guide/book to building all of the software components manually from source, Linux From Scratch 10.0 has been released...

Earlier this year Amazon announced Bottlerocket as a Linux distribution for running containers. This week Bottlerocket crossed the general availability milestone...

Intel's open-source engineers today sent out their latest patches bringing up the Dynamic Load Balancer 2.0 for the next-gen PCIe device that offers load-balanced, prioritized scheduling of core-to-core communication...

One important bit not covered in today's GeForce RTX 3070/3080/3090 announcement but now detailed via the NVIDIA website is confirmation that the RTX 30 "Ampere" GPUs do in fact have dedicated AV1 hardware decode capabilities...

As widely expected amid a constant flow of rumors and leaks in recent weeks, NVIDIA just revealed their GeForce RTX 3000 "Ampere" series...

In addition to the new OpenBenchmarking.org now out in public "alpha", a number of new and updated test profiles were published in August for users of our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software...

With the soon to be released Mesa 20.2, the RADV Vulkan driver is using the ACO back-end by default that's been developed with funding by Valve as an alternative to AMD's official "AMDGPU" LLVM back-end. For those wondering how this shader compiler back-end compares and more intricate details of its design, some extensive documentation has finally been added to the Mesa tree...