Phoronix

For those wondering the outcome of last month's Debian 11 "Bullseye" artwork voting, a new default theme for this 2021 GNU/Linux distribution release has been decided...

The Translation Table Maps (TTM) video memory management code used within the Linux kernel by DRM drivers such as Nouveau and Radeon/AMDGPU is seeing some improvements with the forthcoming Linux 5.11 kernel cycle...

Following last month's systemd 247-RC1 release that was headlined by the systemd-oomd service being merged for better low memory / out-of-memory handling and many other changes, a second release candidate is now available...

Fedora stakeholders and the folks at Red Hat have been discussing the idea of having a "lightly maintained" package repository (or some RPM metadata otherwise to indicate such light maintenance) for packages that are either very new, not receiving much packaging attention, or simply used as a build dependency for other packages...

PAPPL as the printer application framework created by the CUPS founder is approaching the v1.0 release...

Just a day after the CXL 2.0 specification was published, the initial Linux kernel support for this updated Compute Express Link revision was sent out for review...

Following the news today of Intel sharing ~60% of their GPU driver code-base between Windows and Linux and working to bring the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) to Mesa in 2021, not everyone is enthusiastic about those prospects...

Adding to the growing list of changes for the next FFmpeg release is now AV1 video decoding with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards...

Intel today is announcing their Server GPU for the data center based on their Xe-LP microarchitecture with an initial focus on high-density, low-latency Android cloud gaming and media streaming. For as exciting as the Intel Server GPU is, some exciting Intel Linux graphics driver details were also disclosed.

AMD and IBM are this morning announcing a multi-year, joint development agreement focused on "building upon open-source software, open standards, and open system architectures to drive Confidential Computing in the cloud and support a broad range of accelerators across high-performance computing (HPC), and enterprise critical capabilities such as virtualization and encryption."..

GCC 11 feature development is ending very shortly but landing in time are the patches last month for adding AVX-VNNI support...

Following the Mesa 20.3 branching on Monday and subsequent opening of Mesa 21.0 for development, the first release candidate of Mesa 20.3 is now available for testing...

Intel on Tuesday evening released their 20201110 CPU microcode package as their first collection of updated CPU microcode binaries since June and it's a big update...

Microsoft on Tuesday released .NET 5.0 as their latest work on unifying their .NET stack and continuing along with support for Linux and other non-Windows platforms...

Last week Valve added Sony PlayStation 5 controller support to SDL2 while today there is launch-day support for the Xbox Series X controller for this cross-platform abstraction layer popular with games...

As was widely expected for today's Apple event, the Cupertino company just announced their first three Macs powered by Apple Silicon...

As part of Intel's monthly security disclosures the company is today releasing forty new security advisories today...

Now that the Samsung-contributed open-source exFAT file-system kernel driver has matured quite nicely since being merged earlier this year as a replacement to the short-lived staging exFAT driver based on an older code-base, here is a look at how exFAT is performing on the Linux 5.9 kernel compared to EXT4 and F2FS as well as the existing exFAT FUSE file-system implementation.

Mesa 21.0 will allow running OpenCL and OpenGL on top of Gallium3D for any hardware on Windows 10 supporting Direct3D 12 acceleration...

Just a year after the Compute Express Link 1.0 and 1.1 interconnect specifications were published, CXL 2.0 is being announced this morning for this high-speed, data center minded specification built atop the PCI Express interface...

For those on the Qt 5.12 LTS series the Qt 5.12.10 point release is out today with 30 new bug fixes. But for those looking ahead to Qt 6 also out today is Qt 6.0 Beta 4...

After last week sharing some Intel Tiger Lake benchmarks on Linux 5.10, the tables have turned and here are some similar tests when running Linux 5.10 on an AMD Ryzen 4000 series "Renoir" notebook...

A proposal and set of patches have been sent out around the Linux kernel's Page Table Isolation (PTI/KPTI) implementation to defer switching from the user page-table to kernel page-table until later in the kernel entry sequence. There are possible performance benefits and code improvements that would stem from this change...

In addition to the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub (SFH) driver coming with Linux 5.11 for improving Ryzen laptop support, the AMD SoC PMC driver is also under review for landing in this next kernel release...

Valve's open-source developers responsible for DXVK and VKD3D-Proton are working on a new Vulkan extension to help in their porting/layering effort of Direct3D on top of the Vulkan API...

Mesa 20.3 was branched this evening in marking the end of feature development for this Q4-2020 Mesa3D release that should debut as stable in December. This also means that Mesa 21.0 is now open for development...

Making use of "-march=tigerlake" for building optimized binaries catering to Intel's latest-generation processors is well worth it on the likes of GCC 11. Out of the new instruction set extensions on Tiger Lake is more uplift than we have seen out of recent Intel generations and comparing the different "-march=" targets shows significant performance benefits if you don't mind compiling your own software from source.

ASUS has been evaluating the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for distributing firmware updates to their Linux customers for flashing in turn via Fwupd. Their first motherboard firmware update has now been volleyed onto this open-source platform for easing firmware updates on Linux...

Announced by Arm back in September was the Neoverse V1 "Zeus" platform with 50%+ performance uplift over the Neoverse N1. Neoverse V1 also supports Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) and other features in catering the platform for machine learning, cloud, HPC, and similar use-cases...

Among the many open-source graphics driver improvements being worked on recently by Red Hat's David Airlie from Lavapipe to OpenCL 3.0 Clover work, another recent effort has been around TTM "multihop" as an improvement for this memory management infrastructure used by the likes of the AMDGPU kernel driver...

Ubuntu maker Canonical Holdings Limited recently submitted their UK financial report for their fiscal year ending 31 December 2019. During the pre-COVID times they generated around 22% more revenue than 2018 but still operated at a loss albeit more narrowly than in prior years...

Vulkan 1.2.160 is out this morning as the newest revision to the Vulkan graphics/compute API...

Intel is contributing a new driver to the Linux kernel for determining whether Thunderbolt / USB4 ports are functional...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.10-rc3 as the newest test release ahead of stable Linux 5.10 that will be minted in December...

Debian developers are two months out from the transition and essentials freeze for Debian 11 "Bullseye" that in turn should debut as stable later in 2021...

Version 2.9 of OpenRazer is now available as the independently-developed solution for configuring and monitoring various Razer peripherals on Linux like not only their keyboards and mice but also headsets and other hardware...

Currently when directly assigning I/O devices to virtual machines the guest memory needs to be statically pinned unless using a vIOMMU setup in which case it does not but there are performance implications there as well. Intel engineers though have been working on a virtual IOMMU implementation with DMA buffer tracking to overcome these limitations...

Intel didn't manage to get their Software Guard Extensions (SGX) support merged for the current Linux 5.10 LTS kernel cycle and it's still up in the air if it will be pulled in the near-term for providing the mainline kernel with SGX enclaves support...

The first week of November brought numerous improvements to the KDE stack...

The recently proposed new TTM memory management page allocator that can yield 3~5x faster page allocation as tested with the AMDGPU kernel driver will be coming for Linux 5.11...

A set of Linux kernel patches posted on friday allow peer-to-peer DMA (P2PDMA) transfers between NVMe drives using existing O_DIRECT operations or the NVMe pass-through interface from user-space...

For those sticking to stable releases of Mesa3D there is Mesa 20.2.2 now available as the latest point release...

Following yesterday's Wine 5.21 release is now an adjoining Wine-Staging update that carries over 700 patches on top of it for testing purposes...

New Wasmtime and Wasmer releases appeared this week for advancing WebAssembly on the desktop...

For fans of the Arch Linux distribution their Arch Conf 2020 virtual presentations have all been posted now for your enjoyment...

Following yesterday's launch-day AMD Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X benchmarks that showed the utter domination of Zen 3 carrying over just fine in the Linux realm, today we are looking at the performance of the Ryzen 5 5600X on Ubuntu against other Intel/AMD processors. The Ryzen 5 5600X is AMD's new $299 USD part that offers six cores / twelve threads and incredible uplift still over Zen 2 / Zen+ processors while outperforming Intel's Comet Lake competition.

Wine 5.21 was just released as one of the smaller bi-weekly updates this year...

Zink as the Mesa Gallium3D implementation putting OpenGL 3.x/4.x on top of the Vulkan API is now offering near-native performance...

GIMP 2.99.2 is finally available as their "first step" towards releasing GIMP 3.0 that most notably transitions from the GTK2 to GTK3 toolkit...

VKD3D-Proton as the Valve-backed fork of Wine's VKD3D for mapping the Direct3D 12 API atop Vulkan is now supporting more features with today's v2.0 release and thus handling more Windows games running on Linux with Steam Play...