Phoronix

The Linux 5.11 merge window continues being very active this week with Linus Torvalds hoping kernel maintainers will get in all of their new feature code well before Christmas...

At the start of the month AMD released AOCC 2.3 as the newest version of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler. AOCC is one of several LLVM/Clang downstream versions maintained by the company with this one being about delivering flagship AMD Zen family compiler support. From an AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" series processor I recently wrapped up fresh benchmarks of AOCC 2.3 against the current GCC 10 and Clang 11 compiler releases.

As part of the areas of the kernel overseen by Greg Kroah-Hartman is the USB subsystem. The USB (and Thunderbolt) updates are now in mainline as part of the ongoing Linux 5.11 merge window...

A new feature release of POCL is now available that is the "Portable Computing Language" offering OpenCL execution atop CPUs and other devices like NVIDIA CUDA that have an LLVM back-end...

The latest hardware enablement around Intel's Alder Lake for the Linux kernel is audio support...

The ARM64 architecture updates were sent in already for Linux 5.11 along with the various ARM SoC additions, DeviceTree additions for new hardware support, and similar changes. There is a lot of new hardware support as always being brought up by the mainline kernel...

Wayland 1.18 came back in February while until now there wasn't much talk about a "Wayland 1.19" since at this stage the core functionality of Wayland is quite mature and stable. But now work is underway on Wayland 1.19 with aims to likely ship it in January...

The input subsystem changes for the Linux 5.11 kernel have now been submitted and merged. Along related lines, the HID subsystem changes were also submitted with notable updates as well...

Mesa 20.3 shipped earlier this month while those waiting for the first point release to upgrade to this quarterly series can now safely make the shift as Mesa 20.3.1 was released today...

The previously reported on work for frequency invariance calculations for AMD CPUs with a focus on the AMD EPYC 7002 series has been merged for Linux 5.11 as part of the "sched/core" material...

GTK 4.0 has been officially released as the latest major iteration of this open-source toolkit...

UBports developers and the open-source community continue to push along Ubuntu Touch for smartphones/tablets. Ubuntu Touch still hasn't yet been able to complete the transition from Ubuntu 16.04 to a 20.04 base, but they have made other improvements and new device support with today's Ubuntu Touch OTA-15 release...

Last week we looked at the Windows vs. Linux performance on the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X where there was some very friendly competition and much closer results than we are used to seeing for modern, high-end x86_64 processors between the two operating systems. As a follow-up to that testing, here are results of Windows 10 October 2020 Update with Windows Subsystem for Linux (both WSL1 and WSL2) compared to the performance in turn off bare metal Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS and Ubuntu 20.10 on the same system.

The latest Mesa 21.0 improvement is support for building Microsoft's Direct3D 12 Gallium3D driver code for Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2)...

The cryptography subsystem within the Linux kernel is constantly seeing new hardware drivers and other improvements with the current Linux 5.11 cycle being no different...

With openSUSE Jump progressing as a closer marriage of SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE Leap, for those on the openSUSE Leap 15 stable series the first alpha builds of 15.3 are now available for testing...

The x86-platform-drivers area of the kernel has a lot of prominent additions with Linux 5.11 for benefiting a variety of AMD and Intel laptops...

With the PCI subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.11 kernel is the ability to report whether a device is making use of the 64 GT/s link speed allowed by PCI Express 6.0...

In addition to the NVIDIA 460 series Linux beta driver being released this week, CUDA 11.2 has also made its debut for Windows and Linux...

While the talk in recent weeks has been about the performance of Apple's M1 ARM chip and then rumors there might be a 32 core chip in the pipe, there is already something much stronger: Ampere Altra has begun shipping and its flagship 80-core SoC with up to two sockets per server can easily take on the AMD EPYC 7742 "Rome" and Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 "Cascade Lake" performance across a variety of workloads. Here is our initial look at the Ampere Altra performance on Linux in our independent performance benchmarks.

Initially found with "Elkhart Lake" SoCs and likely to be found on further future Intel client SoCs is the integrated memory controller supporting in-band ECC (IBECC). Coming with Linux 5.11 is the "IGEN6" EDAC driver for handling this error detection and correction on Intel SoCs sporting IBECC...

The Linux 5.11 kernel cycle continues to prove to be very exciting. The latest are SECCOMP filters for this secure computing mode yielding a nice speed-up...

On top of the many other improvements for the soon-to-be-released GTK4 toolkit, there is now better support for Apple's macOS...

Alexandros Frantzis has announced the creation of a Wayland driver for Wine. This driver allows Windows GDI/OpenGL applications to run on Wayland compositors without any use of X11/XWayland...

Timed with the expanded Vulkan ray-tracing resources available today, NVIDIA has released their first Linux driver beta in the R460 series as the eventual successor to the current 455.xx series...

Vulkan 1.2.162 was released at the end of November with the ratified Vulkan ray-tracing extension for multi-vendor use. The Khronos Group today is announcing the updated Vulkan SDK, tooling, code samples, and developer guide today with ray-tracing coverage included...

For those making use of the Firefox web browser, Mozilla has an early Christmas present with today's release of Firefox 84. Most significant with Firefox 84 is for Linux users that WebRender is finally getting flipped on by default for select system configurations...

While a "core/entry" pull request may not seem that exciting, this time around for the Linux 5.11 kernel there are two prominent additions...

AMD has released the newest open-source snapshot of their official AMD Vulkan "AMDVLK" driver for Linux systems...

HWMON maintainer Guenter Roeck has sent in all of the hardware monitoring changes destined for the Linux 5.11 kernel...

The latest Vulkan extension now supported by Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is support for the new VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate...

The Linux kernel this year has seen new safeguards and efforts aiming to have user-space reduce their arbitrary poking of CPU machine specific registers (MSRs) in the name of security and other handling concerns. That effort has continued on with the Linux 5.11 cycle...

The initial test release of Git 2.30 is now available for evaluation of this distributed revision control system...

It was just yesterday evening -- less than 24 hours ago -- that Linux 5.10 LTS was released but already the first point release has arrived due to bugs in the storage code...

The first set of major file-system material submitted for the newly opened Linux 5.11 merge window are the Btrfs updates...

Back in October Intel announced Iris Xe MAX as discrete graphics for laptops. The overall Linux state for Xe MAX hasn't been too clear and we haven't had any hardware access to this Intel laptop discrete graphics hardware to report our own findings, but their developers have now cleared up the situation. The good news is the Xe MAX graphics can be used for a GPU-accelerated Linux virtual machine. The bad news is the Xe MAX support doesn't yet allow for dGPU usage by the host outside of a virtual machine context as it needs "two different [Linux] kernels" for operation in conjunction with the integrated graphics...

Earlier this year work began on preparing SD Express card/host support for Linux and now with the Linux 5.11 kernel that will debut in early 2021 is this preliminary support...

Project Halium for the past several years has allowed various Linux distributions to build atop the likes of libhybris and other abstractions for running on hardware with Android pre-installed. This abstraction layer has been popular from KDE Plasma Mobile to UBports to Sailfish OS while now Plasma Mobile is discontinuing their support...

Following yesterday's release of the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel the GNU folks have released their "GNU Linux-libre 5.10-gnu" downstream that is the Linux kernel but without support for loading proprietary modules as well as preventing closed-source firmware binaries from being loaded on the system and related steps in the name of free software...

Assuming Linus Torvalds has no last minute objections, the long-in-development Intel SGX support will be merged into the mainline Linux kernel...

Valve's VKD3D-Proton continues speeding along as their downstream of VKD3D for mapping Direct3D 12 over Vulkan. VKD3D-Proton 2.1 was just released and besides enhancing the GPU-bound performance there are more prominent DX12 games now working with this translation layer...

Linux's Cedrus media driver that provides video decoding on various Allwinner SoCs is finally seeing support added for VP8. But given this addition for Linux 5.11 won't be out as stable until well into 2021 and most of the world has moved onto VP9, it may not be too beneficial at this stage...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on the proposal for defaulting to PipeWire with Fedora 34 due out next spring...

As expected, Linus Torvalds today officially released Linux 5.10. Besides being the last kernel release of 2020, this is a significant milestone in that it's also a Long Term Support (LTS) kernel to be maintained for at least the next five years and also is a huge kernel update in general with many new features...

While there are a lot of driver improvements throughout, as usual those on Intel HD/UHD/Iris/Xe Graphics and AMD Radeon graphics with their first-rate open-source graphics drivers have a lot of grand improvements to find with the forthcoming Linux 5.11 cycle...

Following Mesa 21.0 beginning to see AMD Smart Access Memory optimizations, I ran some benchmarks looking at the current state of S.A.M. / Resizable BAR support on Linux with Radeon graphics...

Adding to the Linux 5.11 changes and set of new drivers is "lcd2s" as a driver for supporting a 20x4 LCD character display connected via SPI/I2C and with this support can serve as a kernel console output device...

Mageia 8 Beta 1 came all the way back in August while ahead of Christmas that has now been succeeded by a second beta release for this Mandriva/Mandrake-derived Linux distribution...

Earlier this year we covered Zrythm as an open-source digital audio workstation that is cross-platform, supports a wide variety of plug-ins, and built atop GTK3. Back then it was on the pre-1.0 version numbering while this weekend marks the release of 1.0 Alpha 6...

There are a lot of changes coming with Linux 5.11 and on the AMD side includes the likes of VanGogh and Dimgrey Cavefish graphics support, AMD EPYC Zen 3 support in the AMD_Energy driver, AMD RAPL Zen1/Zen2/Zen3 PowerCap support, an AMD SoC PMC driver, and the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub driver for Ryzen laptops is finally being mainlined... Another new addition was queued up this weekend by way of hwmon-next and that's the AMD SB-TSI sensor driver...