Phoronix

Mesa 21.1 is available today as the latest quarterly feature release to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. There are many features to show with this new release and it even managed to release on-schedule...

For a project as large and complex as the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) one would reasonably have assumed that it would have setup continuous integration / continuous delivery support years ago for helping to ensure the reliability of this widely-used open-source compiler and the GNU Toolchain at large. But that's actually only happening now in 2021...

The LinuxBoot project that works to replace some portions of modern Linux server firmware with the Linux kernel and other open-source components has now integrated support for the convenient netboot.xyz project...

The release candidate of the upcoming Inkscape 1.1 open-source vector graphics editor is now available for testing...

Linux 5.13 is introducing the "intel_tcc_cooling" driver for helping to cool newer Intel mobile/desktop CPUs by down-clocking the processor cores when crossing a lower threshold than is set by default...

As an additional security measure for the Linux kernel, Intel engineers are exploring making kernel page tables read-only and to then only allow writing on a per-CPU basis when they need to be modified. This would be handled using the PKS functionality found with future Intel processors...

While physical GPUs may be in short supply right now, VMware is preparing for "SVGA v3" as their next-gen virtual PCI graphics adapter for use within VMware virtual machines for graphics acceleration backed by the host...

The Qt Company today released Qt Creator 4.15 as the newest version of this open-source Qt and C++ focused integrated development environment...

The Turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree for reporting on CPU topology and various power/frequency metrics has some useful additions pending for the Linux 5.13 kernel...

For those wondering how the recent releases of the GCC 11 and LLVM 12 (Clang 12) open-source compilers are competing on AMD Zen 3, here are some recently conducted benchmarks looking at that showdown on an AMD EPYC 7763 1P server.

Linux's perf tooling for dealing with hardware performance counters and associated monitoring has seen a number of nice updates for the Linux 5.13 kernel cycle...

If you are still relying on Apache OpenOffice in 2021 you might want to really make it a goal this year to transition to the much more featureful LibreOffice, but in any case you'll want to move at least to OpenOffice 4.1.10...

Over the years there have been a number of rounds of patches published for speculative page faulting. The goal has been to support user-space page-faults without holding the memory management semaphores and to ultimately allow for better performance especially with threaded workloads. A fresh take on the speculative page faulting (SPF) functionality was recently volleyed on the kernel mailing list...

Going on for a few years now has been some Mesa optimizations for AMD Ryzen CPUs and in particular L3 cache optimizations. There is now a fix to re-enable this support after it was mistakenly broken earlier this year...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates for Linux 5.13 have been submitted in providing the latest features for this flash-optimized file-system...

Introduced last year was Taiwins as a compact Wayland compositor. While early on it began using Sway's WLROOTS library, it ended up writing its own Wayland compositor library (libtaiwins) and recently hit its version 0.3 milestone...

For those still having fond memories of the KDE 3.5 desktop, the Trinity Desktop Environment continues to be maintained in 2021 as a long-running fork from KDE 3.5 with security/maintenance fixes and other minor enhancements to the desktop environment...

Merged as part of the block subsystem changes for the Linux 5.13 were the usual assortment of enhancements to the exciting IO_uring. With this next kernel there is yet even better performance out of this morning Linux I/O interface...

Adding to the variety of places where the Linux kernel supports making use of Zstd compression, kernel modules moving forward can now enjoy size reductions with Zstd...

Released on Friday was a new version of Wayland-Protocols, the collection of protocol specifications for Wayland...

While Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor and their Azure cloud has largely been x86_64 focused, with the Linux 5.13 kernel they are moving further for supporting Linux as a ARM64 Hyper-V guest...

While last minute AMD Zen 3 "znver3" improvements managed to make it for GCC 11 that was recently released, the recent debut of LLVM 12.0 wasn't so lucky on the Zen 3 support front. There was the very basic enablement that landed in LLVM 12 but now the more complete support isn't expected until LLVM 13 this autumn...

Those moving to Mesa 21.x releases for the latest open-source GPU driver support on Linux are seemingly finding their Valve "Trust Factor" matchmaking system scores dropping for Counter-Strike: GO, leading to numerous upset Linux gamers with AMD Radeon GPUs...

Last week the big set of networking subsystem updates were submitted and merged for the ongoing Linux 5.13 merge window...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has finally merged support for the KHR_fragment_shading_rate extension...

Alyssa Rosenzweig has continued her work reverse engineering and understanding Apple's M1 GPU with the ultimate goal of writing open-source OpenGL and Vulkan support for the Apple M1 GPU on Linux...

The OrangeFS open-source parallel file-system designed for cluster computing has a huge performance improvement to its read speeds with Linux 5.13...

Since the publishing of the provisional Vulkan Video specification last month, the only driver on Linux to have exposed any early Vulkan Video support is NVIDIA's Vulkan beta Linux driver. But it would appear that Intel's open-source developers are working at least towards eventually handling this video acceleration API...

As part of recent and upcoming new CPU benchmarks on Phoronix and other Linux hardware review testing, April saw more new and updated test profiles for expanding more workloads tested...

While PipeWire continues garnering interest this year for improving Linux sound in user-space, the kernel's sound drivers continue to be improved upon as well and tacking on support for new devices...

Going back about a half-decade has been the Landlock Linux Security Module (LSM) as a means of allowing even unprivileged processes to create "powerful security" sandboxes. After a number of rounds of reviews and revisions over the year, Landlock has finally been mainlined for Linux 5.13!..

For those curious about the Steam on Linux gaming marketshare always as we begin a new month, Valve published their April 2021 figures overnight...

Open-source "Nouveau" driver developers have been working on at least partial support for OpenGL compute within the NV50 Gallium3D driver that is used by the NVIDIA GeForce 8 series through GeForce 300 series graphics cards...

As part of AMD's growing HPC focus and maturing of their Radeon Open eCosystem GPU compute stack, they ended out this week by making public a prototype implementation of CRIU support for ROCm...

While the popularity of Solaris may be waning, OpenIndiana continues ticking in 2021 as the open-source platform based on Illumos that was born out of the former OpenSolaris state...

The first release candidate of Rocky Linux 8.3 is out, the project's inaugural release as a new binary-compatible alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)...

The media subsystem updates were sent out this week for the Linux 5.13 merge window and already merged. A notable driver addition this time around is for NXP i.MX8 users...

University of Virginia and University of California San Diego researchers have discovered multiple new variants of Spectre attacks that are not protected by existing Spectre mitigations and could yield both Intel and AMD CPUs leaking data via micro-op caches...

The past month was quite exciting in the Linux/open-source world with Linux 5.12 having been released and 5.13 off to a great start, shiny new hardware for benchmarking, and also the drama around the FSF and UMN's "hypocrite commits" research...

KDE developers certainly closed out April on a high note with some big ticket additions...

Following the recent FreeBSD 13.0 release and jumping ahead of the imminent DragonFlyBSD 6.0 release is now OpenBSD 6.9 to kick off May...

In addition to the Btrfs changes, EXT4, exFAT, and XFS are among the file-systems seeing noteworthy improvements with the in-development Linux 5.13...

As the first announcement of a newly-certified product by the Free Software Foundation since early 2020 as "Respect Your Freedom" compliant, the FSF is backing another 802.11n WiFi adapter...

With recently receiving the rest of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" line-up we had no access to previously for testing, the past few weeks were busy with testing/re-testing these new graphics cards as well as prior GeForce RTX 20 series hardware and relevant AMD Radeon graphics cards for offering a current look at the 1440p and 4K Linux gaming performance.

The Rust-written Cloud-Hypervisor project led by open-source Intel engineers as a VMM designed for cloud workloads has broke well past the "1.0" milestone. Following a series of 0.x releases, Cloud-Hypervisor 15 was released this week...

Along with this week's release of QEMU 6.0, exciting on the Linux virtualization front are the KVM changes that are ready to go with the 5.13 kernel...

One of the areas of Linux desktop display support that isn't as well supported compared to Windows is high dynamic range (HDR) displays. There have been various vendors and developers over the years working towards Linux desktop HDR improvements but still it hasn't been a fast-advancing area in the open-source ecosystem. At least now AMD Radeon graphics driver developers do appear to be working on HDR improvements...

Now that Clang LTO support landed in Linux 5.12 and cleared the blocker on CFI support, that LLVM Clang control-flow integrity (CFI) capability is now upstream for Linux 5.13...

It was just earlier this month that FreeBSD 13.0 released while already GhostBSD has issued a new release of this desktop-oriented operating system re-based against the new FreeBSD 13.0 base...

When it comes to Apple hardware support in the Linux 5.13 kernel not only is support for the Apple M1 SoCs added but the Magic Mouse 2 is also finally being supported in full by the mainline kernel. Plus there are other various interesting HID subsystem updates too this kernel cycle...