Phoronix

Today's release of Linux 5.12-rc5 is "bigger than average" for this stage of kernel development and if that keeps up is likely to result in an extra week's worth of testing / an -rc8 release ahead of Linux 5.12 final, but it's too early to call at this stage...

While Godot receives much of the - well deserved - attention when it comes to open-source, cross-platform game engines, another deserving contender is the Flax Engine that just reached v1.0 last year after going public in 2018...

This month saw many new and updated test profiles for the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org for carrying out fully-automated, reproducible cross-platform benchmarking...

An interesting open-source project that has been brought up now a few times by Phoronix readers is Box86 for allowing 32-bit x86 programs to run unmodified on non-x86 Linux systems like ARM...

Two weeks ago Wine-Staging 6.4 was at nearly 700 patches while this weekend's release of Wine-Staging 6.5 lowers that to 661 patches thanks to a number of them being upstreamed...

Mesa developers are currently discussing the raising of the default compiler baseline for Mesa drivers moving forward, which would raise the base CPU requirements for these open-source Mesa drivers unless overriding the compiler flags. However, only the very oldest systems would be negatively impacted...

While Debian 11.0 is brewing and currently under a hard freeze, Debian 10.9 is out this weekend as the latest stable update to Debian 10 "Buster"...

Standard mouse functionality of Apple's Magic Mouse 2 works currently under Linux but the "hid-magicmouse" mainline driver might finally be extended to fully support the Magic Mouse 2...

In addition to AMD Zen 3 "znver3" seeing a lot of last minute tuning/optimization work ahead of the GCC 11 compiler being released as stable in the weeks ahead, Arm has also been getting some last minute work into this open-source compiler as it pertains to the Neoverse V1 support...

Last year we wrote how the X.Org/FreeDesktop.org cloud hosting costs were getting out of control so much so that they would either need to start finding sponsors and/or cut the continuous integration (CI) services offered to the hosted open-source projects, among other measures, as the costs were ballooning greatly. Thanks to a number of improvements to their hosting configuration, that is becoming a more manageable amount...

KDE developers are finishing the month of March strong with a number of new features and bug fixes for their open-source desktop stack...

Earlier this month I mentioned Loongson 2K1000 Linux patches were published with an effort now to upstream them some four years after these 40nm dual-core MIPS-based hardware launched. That Loongson-2K1000 support is now queued in MIPS-next ahead of the Linux 5.13 cycle...

Released on Friday was Cloud-Hypervisor 0.14, the Intel-led open-source effort creating a Rust-based and cloud-focused multi-platform hypervisor...

Wine 6.5 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot of this software for running Windows applications and games under Linux and macOS...

Last week we noted how a kernel driver for NZXT's Kraken AIO liquid cooling devices was under review for the mainline kernel. Shortly after that point the driver did get successfully picked up for hwmon-next and thus should be appearing in the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle...

Earlier this month Samsung announced the 980 (non-PRO) NVMe solid-state driver offering a combination of speed and affordability for consumers. Many Linux readers have been curious about this Samsung 980 DRAM-less SSD so here are some initial benchmarks of it. Overall, it's been working out well under Linux.

Two fixes were queued this week into the Linux kernel's power management "linux-next" branch that could help improve the power management behavior for some devices as up to now the Linux kernel was not properly following the ACPI specification...

A small but measurable and seemingly widespread performance optimization is currently being buttoned up for Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa to benefit latest-generation Gen12/Xe Graphics...

For those running Linux MD RAID10 arrays you may have found the performance around discard requests such as when running MKFS and FSTRIM operations to be rather slow... Well, with Linux 5.13 it will be lightning fast...

Google's open-source SwiftShader has been supporting a software-based Vulkan implementation for some time, building off its prior OpenGL / GLES and D3D9 support. While SwiftShader's Vulkan implementation has received heavy investment and attention from Google, it turns out Mesa's Lavapipe software implementation is beginning to pull ahead...

Intel's latest addition to Mesa 21.1 with their "ANV" Vulkan driver is... A null hardware layer...

Besides Valheim, there hasn't been much in the way of native Linux game releases recently to really get excited about with much of the activity these days being through Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux. But in April there will be at least two high profile native Linux game releases...

This week marked the hard feature freeze for QEMU 6.0 along with the tagging of QEMU 6.0-rc0. The QEMU 6.0 release should happen around the end of April for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Launched last week with the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors was the AOCC 3.0 code compiler as AMD's downstream of LLVM Clang with various patches now catering to optimized for Zen 3. Last week some preliminary benchmarks of AOCC 3.0 on the Ryzen 9 5950X were carried out to good results. Since then I have begun putting AOCC 3.0 through its paces on a AMD EPYC 7003 series server to overall great results.

Panfrost has been the Gallium3D driver providing open-source OpenGL for Arm Mali Bifrost and Midgard GPus while now "PanVK" is in development as an open-source Vulkan driver...

While Intel is well known and loved for their generally very timely open-source hardware enablement under Linux, occasionally there are exceptions to that long-standing tradition of having the support squared away ahead of product launches. One of the areas where Intel has been slow at enabling their open-source Linux support is around their Gaussian and Neural Accelerator (GNA) but that driver is now coming together for being mainlined hopefully in the near future...

Besides Linux kernel developers still working to optimize code due to Retpolines overhead three years after Spectre rocked the ecosystem, another area kernel developers have still been actively working on is core scheduling for controlling the behavior of what software can share CPU resources or run on the sibling thread of a CPU core. That core scheduling work is finally closer to the mainline Linux kernel...

The Generic USB Display Driver "GUD" has just been sent in as part of the latest DRM-Misc-Next material to DRM-Next which in turn will land for Linux 5.13. The Generic USB Display Driver is nifty and allows for opening up possibilities like turning a Raspberry Pi Zero into a USB to HDMI display adapter among other fun use-cases...

When it comes to open-source Arm Mali graphics on Linux, the Panfrost Gallium3D driver is what's talked about the most given that it's for supporting newer generations of Mali graphics hardware. But the Lima Gallium3D driver effort remains ongoing for supporting older Mali 400/450 series hardware...

Last week there were a few round of Zen 3 compiler patches published and quickly merged into the GCC 11 compiler code-base ahead of its imminent release, This week there is some new activity albeit fixes for this new "Znver3" target...

For those that tend to wait until at least the first point release before moving to a new Mesa feature release, Mesa 21.0.1 is out today while Mesa 20.3.5 was also released as the last of that Q4'2020 driver series...

Announced nearly three years ago by NVIDIA as one of their open-source projects was the DALI library for GPU-accelerated data augmentation and image loading. The DALI library today reached the v1.0.0 milestone...

Intel's VA-API library (libVA) is out with a new end-of-quarter release for this open-source Linux video acceleration interface...

In addition to AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors offering fantastic performance, another important highlight for these new Zen 3 server processors is SEV-SNP for upping the Secure Encrypted Virtualization capabilities. AMD has been offering SEV "Secure Nested Paging" patches via a GitHub repository while now they are working towards mainlining this feature for the Linux kernel...

While the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source OpenGL driver for Linux systems is very well received and generally outperforming the proprietary AMD OpenGL driver on Linux/Windows and performing very strong against NVIDIA's proprietary OpenGL driver too, it's not game over for this older graphics API and AMD is still working to lower the CPU overhead even further for this open-source code...

The big GNOME 40 desktop update is now available...

AMD today released their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q1 driver packages for Windows and Linux systems...

Raised during the recent discussion over looking at removing Mesa's classic drivers from the mainline tree this year is that there still exists an effort trying to create an Intel Gallium3D driver for older pre-Broadwell graphics currently only served by the i965 classic driver. That Crocus effort continues to be worked on but isn't yet mainline...

AOMedia libaom 3.0.0 was released on Tuesday by Google engineers as this reference AV1 video encoder...

While Microsoft often likes to proclaim their "love" for Linux, it's been independent open-source developer Maximilian Luz that has been spearheading improvements for Microsoft Surface devices on Linux. With Linux 5.13 his latest work on better handling Microsoft Surface device detachment handling should land...

Right now when it comes to Motorola 68000 "m68k" emulation with Linux the most powerful target is the Quadra 800 that is limited to just 1GB of RAM and specific interfaces. But on the way is the new "Virtual M68k Machine" that is much more powerful...

ROCm 4.0 released back in December with "CDNA" GPU support while now ROCm 4.1 has been released as the newest quarterly feature release to this open-source Radeon compute stack focused primarily on HPC/data-center needs...

Nokia Bell Labs announced today that the copyright to the Plan 9 operating system software has been transferred to the Plan 9 Foundation for all future development of this novel distributed operating system that originated in the 80's...

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is hosting a webcast to provide an update on the company's manufacturing and other engineering efforts...

Manjaro 21.0 is out today as the newest feature release to this popular desktop Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux...

Now that Xfce 4.16 has been out for a while after successfully hitting its one-year release cycle goal and some maintenance updates to Xfce 4.16 have been made, planning for Xfce 4.18 is beginning...

Mozilla Firefox 87.0 is out today as the newest release of this open-source, cross-platform web browser...

Consulting firm Igalia continues working on the open-source Broadcom V3DV Mesa Vulkan driver that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and later SBCs. Since reaching Vulkan conformance they have continued working on further enhancing the performance of this driver...

Fedora 34 Beta is out today as the march is on towards this latest installment of this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution...

Published back in January was the initial work on a HMM-based SVM memory manager for the open-source Radeon compute stack. A second version of that work is now available as it continues working towards the mainline kernel...