Phoronix

The T2 Linux distribution, or "System Development Environment" (SDE) as it refers to itself, is up to version 21.4 and with it is now supporting fifteen different CPU architectures for this barebones Linux-based operating system...

The installer for the forthcoming Debian 11.0 "Bullseye release is now up to its release candidate phase for testing...

It's looking like the OpenZFS 2.1 open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems will soon be ready for release...

Following last week's release of Chrome 90, Google on Thursday debuted their beta of next month's Chrome 91 web browser...

Just ahead of the Fedora Workstation 34 release where it will be the first major Linux distribution using PipeWire as a modern alternative to PulseAudio and JACK, PipeWire 0.3.26 is now available as the newest big feature release for this audio/video stream server for the modern Linux desktop...

Earlier this week was a surprising Linux kernel networking commit that removed an IBM engineer as one of the driver maintainers for the IBM Power SR-IOV Virtual NIC driver. Seemingly at issue with this VNIC driver work was the developer using his personal email address in working on the driver in his off-hours. IBM has now clarified their stance on such work...

VKD3D-Proton 2.3 is now available as the latest release of this Steam Play (Proton) component for running Direct3D 12 games over Vulkan...

The P-State and CPUFreq "performance" governors on Linux with desktop Intel/AMD processors can be of help for gaming and other select workloads by tending to keep the CPU clock frequencies higher than the default ondemand (CPUFreq) or powersave (P-State) governors used by nearly all Linux distributions. But with Intel's new Core i9 11900K "Rocket Lake" is a dramatic difference in power and performance between the Intel P-State performance and powersave governors than what we have seen over the years with prior generations of Intel Core processors.

Ubuntu 21.04 "Hirsute Hippo" is now available...

Since the SD card specification v4.0 there has been the notion of extension registers initially for power management features that in the SD v6.0 specification also is now used for performance features. The Linux kernel is finally beginning to work towards making use of those SD extension registers...

The past few months there has been work by Google's Chrome OS engineers on Restricted DMA functionality for the Linux kernel to protect systems lacking an IOMMU...

The Samsung-led CIFSD as an in-kernel SMB3 file-sharing server continues on its trajectory toward the mainline Linux kernel...

Godot 3.3 is out today as the newest feature release for this increasingly used open-source, cross-platform game engine that is beginning to rival the capabilities of commercial game engines...

Whether you are a stable Mesa user or living more on the bleeding-edge with Git or development snapshots, there are new updates out today for this collection of open-source Linux GPU drivers...

After announcing last year that they would be supporting GUI applications with Windows Subsystem for Linux, today Microsoft published their "WSLg" preview for this feature to run Linux GUI applications atop Windows 10...

As a surprise and big disappointment, the "amd_energy" driver that exposes AMD EPYC server CPU energy monitoring metrics under Linux for being able to calculate the per-core and package power consumption and more is now set to be removed from the mainline Linux kernel...

Tomorrow's release of Ubuntu 21.04 is exciting on the desktop for Wayland by default in supported configurations and many other package updates and enhancements. But even for being a non-LTS release if you are interested in running Ubuntu Server there are some performance improvements to enjoy with newer platforms. Here is a look at the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" performance across Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, 20.10, and 21.04 with an AMD EPYC 7763 Supermicro server.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has banned a US university from trying to mainline Linux kernel patches over intentionally submitting questionable code with security implications and other "experiments" in the name of research...

HiSilicon engineers continue working on a cluster scheduler that could help the performance of certain x86 and ARM platforms on Linux...

While AMD's Mantle graphics API development has been suspended for more than a half-decade already with the Vulkan API successfully taking off, the open-source GRVK project continues to let Mantle unofficially live on by re-implementing its interfaces over Vulkan...

Succeeding January's release of GraalVM 21.0 is now GraalVM 21.1 with many performance improvements and other new features...

With Firefox 88 released yesterday, the Firefox 89 beta is now available for testing. Notable this time around is refining of the web browser's user interface...

With today's Radeon Software for Linux 21.10 packaged driver release is the first time Vulkan ray-tracing is being exposed on Linux for AMD Radeon graphics cards with any of the multiple driver options. Here are some initial benchmarks looking at how the Radeon RX 6000 series Vulkan ray-tracing performance is on Linux compared to NVIDIA's Vulkan ray-tracing support with the existing RTX 20/30 series hardware.

The release candidate to GCC 11.1 as the first stable release of GCC 11 is now available for testing. If all goes well GCC 11.1.0 will officially debut next week while GCC 12 is now in development with their latest Git code...

Blender has an exciting year still ahead with a road-map they just published that does include Vulkan API support...

Just one week after having published the provisional Vulkan Video extensions, The Khronos Group has another exciting announcement today in the form of ratifying KTX 2.0...

AMD Radeon graphics cards on Linux can finally enjoy Vulkan ray-tracing! AMD has published a new Radeon Software for Linux driver release that enables the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions for use with RDNA2 / Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards...

Well known open-source AMD Linux graphics driver developer Marek Olšák published an initial proposal this week as "a redesign of how Linux graphics drivers work."..

Last week 4A Games released Metro Exodus for Linux and while there were a few issues at launch, at least one of them is now resolved...

It's fairly common that many longtime Linux kernel developers use their personal email addresses for signing off on kernel patches or dealing with other patch work, especially when they are engaging with kernel development in their personal time too and occasionally jumping between employers over time while still sticking to interacting with the upstream kernel community, etc. There are also understandably some companies that mandate the use of their corporate email addresses for their official work/patches while now IBM seems to be taking things one step to the extreme...

It's been over one year already since the debut of DragonFlyBSD 5.8 while fortunately DragonFlyBSD 6.0 will be here soon for this popular BSD operating system...

Microsoft is preparing the Linux kernel for some yet-to-debut Azure network functionality...

Of the many new features coming with Linux 5.12 is KFence, short for the Kernel Electric Fence. KFence is a low-overhead memory safety error detector/validator for the kernel with lower expected overhead costs than say the Kernel Address Sanitizer. I just wrapped up some benchmarks looking out for any overhead impact of KFence on Linux 5.12 in its near-final state...

Google announced today that with Android 12.0 they will be deprecating their RenderScript APIs. Moving forward Android developers should primarily target the Vulkan API for high performance compute needs...

One of the exciting elements of last month's AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" series launch was having same-day availability in public clouds. Microsoft as one of AMD's cloud partners worked closely to deliver launch-day availability in their public cloud using EPYC 7003 series processors with the new "HBv3" instances focused on high performance computing (HPC) virtual machines. Here are some benchmarks of the Azure HPv3 instances compared to prior generation Microsoft Azure HPC instances available on-demand in their cloud.

Firefox 88.0 is out today as the latest version of Mozilla's web browser...

The first release candidate is up for version 1.7 of the Portable Computing Language, the portable OpenCL implementation that can run on CPUs and other accelerators. With POCL 1.7, OpenCL 3.0 is now being exposed and there is also improved support for SPIR-V binaries on CPUs...

It's been just one week since the release of Vulkan 1.2.175 that introduced the Vulkan Video extensions while out this morning is now the Vulkan 1.2.176 revision...

Red Hat graphics driver developer David Airlie has tried running the DOOM (2016) game on the CPU-based Lavapipe Vulkan driver... It works, but isn't fast and currently requires some hacks...

Alyssa Rosenzweig, known for her work on the Panfrost open-source driver for Arm Mali graphics, has published the latest findings around the Apple M1 graphics processor. In fact, enough understanding to get a shaded, spinning cube rendering on the Apple M1 using a simple demo so far while the open-source driver support is still the goal...

While normally after seven weekly release candidates the next stable Linux kernel release is declared, Linux 5.12 is one of those special kernels needing at least an eighth RC before going gold...

While Arch Linux now has its own convenient installer for quick and easy Arch installs, for those in search of an out-of-the-box, desktop-friendly Arch based Linux distribution Endeavour OS remains one of the leading options in 2021. This weekend marks the availability of Endeavour's April 2021 install media refresh...

Jonathan Carter who was initially elected as Debian Project Leader last year to succeed Sam Hartman has now been re-elected for another year serving in this role...

Released last week was the LuxCoreRender 2.5 open-source physically based renderer. Significant with this v2.5 update is OptiX/RTX acceleration support in addition to its existing CUDA, OpenCL, and CPU render paths. Given that, here are some fresh benchmarks of LuxCoreRender 2.5 across an assortment of NVIDIA graphics cards.

If all goes well Linux 5.12 will be released tomorrow and in turn will kick off the Linux 5.13 merge window (otherwise 5.12-rc8 will be issued and the stable then a week later). In any case once the Linux 5.13 merge window does open there are a lot of prominent changes expected...

Realtek has contributed support for the RTL8153C and RTL8156 Ethernet chipsets to their "r8152" USB network driver for the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle...

Hitting the Linux networking subsystem's "net-next" branch on Friday was the long in development WWAN subsystem/framework...

It's been another busy spring week in KDE land...

QUIC and HTTP/3 support is now appearing in Firefox Nightly and Beta build while it will begin its roll-out with the upcoming Firefox 88 stable release...

There still is much work left to be completed but Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has made its first baby steps towards ray-tracing support with Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA2" series hardware...