Phoronix

Following yesterday's release of the Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card and the updated Radeon Software for Linux 20.50 driver, AMD has now released AMDVLK 2021.Q1.6 as their updated open-source Vulkan driver with Navi 22 / RX 6700 XT support...

While Intel upstreamed their forthcoming "Ice Lake" Xeon processor support long ago and has been focused on next-gen Sapphire Rapids enablement now for the better part of the past year, there still are some Ice Lake Xeon tweaks taking place here and there. This week a new bleeding-edge patch is in testing for tweaking the power/performance behavior of Ice Lake Xeon with Intel's idle driver...

It looks like the Linux 5.13 kernel will be supporting an interesting RISC-V feature this spring...

It's been a while since hearing much about Wayland efforts on FreeBSD, but it turns out the Sway i3-inspired Wayland compositor can run on this BSD after a number of setup steps. However, the likes of KDE Plasma on Wayland still aren't working well outside of Linux...

While NZXT does not provide any official Linux software support for their products like their all-in-one liquid coolers, the open-source community for years has worked to fill that void thanks to reverse-engineering. The latest work when it comes to the NZXT Kraken AIO liquid coolers is a proposed HWMON driver for the mainline kernel...

Mike Blumenkrantz who has been working under contract for Valve as part of their Linux graphics driver initiatives has provided a fresh status report on Zink as the Mesa Gallium3D effort for implementing OpenGL APIs atop Vulkan...

With the Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards having gone up for sale today (albeit in incredibly short supply), AMD published an updated Radeon Software for Linux driver comprising its AMDGPU-PRO and AMDGPU-Open driver stacks with support for this new Navi RDNA2 graphics card...

For those looking at Arch Linux powered distributions that provide a quick and easy desktop experience, Manjaro 21.0-rc1 is out today as the newest test release for this popular option...

While we are very eager to see the NVIDIA 470 series Linux driver for at least having Wayland / DMA-BUF support improvements and OpenCL 3.0 support, for now the NVIDIA 460 series is the latest public stable series and today was updated to v460.67...

On Monday, the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" launch day, we finally got to see some serious tuning begin for the Zen 3 "Znver3" CPU target in the GCC compiler after that initial code landed at the end of last year. Yesterday a second Zen 3 tuning patch was published and then today a third tuning patch has made it out...

This week alongside the EPYC 7003 series launch was the introduction of AOCC 3.0 as AMD's Zen-optimized LLVM/Clang downstream. We have started putting this updated compiler through its paces to see what it means for AMD Zen 3 performance.

Samsung for some time now has been working on an in-kernel SMB3 protocol implementation for file sharing across the network with "CIFSD" and it's now been queued into Linux-Next meaning it will likely go for mainline in a coming cycle...

Google has released libaom 3.0.0-rc1 as the AOMedia AV1 Codec Library...

As part of planning for Ubuntu 21.04 to use Wayland by default when running on the default GNOME Shell desktop, Ubuntu developers were going to evaluate the standalone XWayland work being pursued by Red Hat initially for Fedora in order to ship newer XWayland code without resorting to releasing a new X.Org Server. That standalone XWayland package is now on its way to the Ubuntu archive...

Just weeks ahead of the GCC 11 stable release we saw Znver3 tuning work out of SUSE for allowing the GNU Compiler Collection to better cater towards the AMD Zen 3 microarchitecture. That tuning work follows the initial patch at the end of last year that introduced "Znver3" and flipped on the new instructions. Now another patch working on the Zen 3 tuning for GCC has been posted and already merged...

OpenBLAS 0.3.14 is out today as the newest version of this open-source BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) library that continues to work on maximizing the performance for x86_64 and other architectures...

Audacity 3.0 is out today as a big update to this popular, longtime open-source digital audio editor...

With no one willing to step up and manage the X.Org Server 1.21 release and see it through for maintenance, Red Hat engineers who often managed those xorg-server releases are now moving ahead with standalone XWayland releases with that code pulled out of doing a full X.Org Server release and instead isolated to the XWayland bits for handling of X11 clients under Wayland. Today marks the inaugural release with XWayland 21.1.0...

With still no sign of BUS1 on the horizon for the mainline kernel or any other successor to BUS1 or KDBUS for in-kernel IPC, Dbus-Broker remains the best bet currently in 2021 for a more performant D-Bus implementation while retaining compatibility with the D-Bus reference implementation...

At the start of March AMD announced the Radeon RX 6700 XT as their new RDNA2 graphics card starting out at $479 USD. Tomorrow the RX 6700 XT is going on sale while today marks the embargo lift on reviews. We have been testing the Radeon RX 6700 XT over the past two weeks and have up our initial Linux support experience and gaming benchmark results to share.

The developers working on the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Mesa are relentless in their quest for delivering optimal performance. Hitting Mesa 21.1 today were another set of patches for enhancing the MSAA anti-aliasing performance for GFX10 (Navi 1x / Navi 2x) graphics cards...

It was less than one month ago that Valve developers added a new "single file" cache option for Mesa as an alternative to its existing multi-file cache. Valve now with their latest Steam for Linux beta is supporting this new single-file cache for faster performance...

Coincidentally on the same day as formally announcing Rocket Lake S, Intel's open-source driver engineers have sent in their next-gen "Rocket Lake S" enablement code to DRM-Next for landing this spring in the Linux 5.13 merge window...

For fans of Sway as the i3-inspired Wayland compositor the v1.6 update is coming soon while out today is the release candidate...

Zlib-ng 2.0 is out today as the first stable release of this zlib fork focused on "next generation" systems with speedier performance and a more modern API, among other changes...

Red Hat is in the process of building out an "infotainment" team to work on low-level Linux infrastructure work around their growing automotive efforts...

Going back to last December System76 had been teasing a new Pangolin laptop that would be AMD powered. Finally their new laptop has launched with Ryzen 4000 series mobile processors and making use of the integrated Radeon graphics...

Intel today is publicly detailing their 11th Gen "Rocket Lake S" processors. Here is what you need to know about Rocket Lake S although we cannot yet share any Linux performance figures until that later Rocket Lake S review embargo lift date.

Java 16 is out today in the form of the OpenJDK 16 general availability release...

Igalia has outlined some of the recent V3D compiler work they've been engaging in to help with the Vulkan driver performance on the Raspberry Pi 4 while the compiler back-end work also benefits the Mesa OpenGL driver too...

While recently Arch Linux developers and stakeholders were discussing the possibility of raising the x86-64 base requirements for this Linux distribution to the "x86-64-v2" micro-architecture feature level that roughly correlates to Intel Nehalem and newer, now the discussion has shifted to keeping the same x86-64 base level while potentially offering a "x86-64-v3" port for those with newer Intel/AMD CPUs...

Siemens has recently been engaging directly with the upstream Linux kernel developers in aiming to mainline various drivers for benefiting their industrial PC platforms...

GNOME developers remain very busy as they approach the finish line for GNOME 40...

UBports released Ubuntu Touch OTA-16 as their largest update since the days of OTA-4 when the transition happened from an Ubuntu 15.04 base to 16.04 LTS...

Fedora 34 due out in April is shaping up to be a very exciting feature release as usual with this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution continuing to live on the bleeding-edge of the open-source software ecosystem. Fedora Workstation 34 in particular is heavy on updates and new features, led by the GNOME 40 desktop...

Complementing today's AMD EPYC 7003 series review with the initial testing on the EPYC 7F53, 7713, and 7763 processors, here are some additional raw data points in full for those interested in an even more diverse look at the performance...

Git 2.31 is out today as the newest version of this distributed revision control system...

Towards the end of last year FreeBSD imported a WireGuard kernel module. That initial WireGuard port to FreeBSD was found to be of poor code quality and made without much involvement from upstream WireGuard developers. That FreeBSD WireGuard kernel code is now in the process of being replaced by a much better implementation...

With today's AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" launch there is also the public availability of AOCC 3.0 as their LLVM/Clang downstream now carrying patches for optimized Zen 3 support...

It's been one and a half years already since the EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors launched. It's hard to think it's been that long due not only to the pandemic but the incredible performance of these Zen 2 server processors. The EPYC 7002 series continues to largely outperform Intel's Xeon Scalable processors and while Ice Lake is coming soon, for now AMD is expanding their lead with today's EPYC 7003 "Milan" processor launch. We have begun our testing of AMD EPYC Milan processors in recent weeks under Linux and have preliminary performance figures to share today as well as more information on these next-gen server/HPC processors.

GCC is in the process of seeing better support for AMD Zen 3 processors with its znver3 target...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 6.4 is now Wine-Staging 6.4 with an extra 686 patches atop this code-base for allowing Windows games and applications to run on Linux...

One of the great Linux hardware milestones of 2020 was Lenovo beginning to offer Linux pre-loads on their desktops/laptops with the likes of Fedora and Ubuntu. But it's been great just not for having another major OEM offering Linux pre-loads but because they have also been engaging directly on Linux support improvements both through their engineers and at partners like Red Hat. That upstream support work has continued nicely...

Added for Linux 5.11 was an independently-developed, reverse-engineered Corsair power supply driver for the company's desktop PSUs supporting their USB-based "LINK" interface for exposing voltage, temperature, current, and Wattage under Linux. This open-source "corsair-psu" driver has continued maturing as well since being mainlined...

Following the emergency Linux 5.12-rc2 kernel release nine days ago, the Linux 5.12-rc3 is out today as a more pleasant release candidate that is back on the usual Sunday release regiment...

This week marked Intel sending out initial Linux driver enablement patches for Alder Lake P mobile support to complement the existing Alder Lake S desktop support that has been coming together in recent months. In addition to the Linux kernel code for ADL-P, the Intel open-source Media Driver code was also updated for video acceleration on this Intel hybrid chip...

In addition to recent commits improving Mesa's Gallium3D Direct3D 9 "Nine" state tracker and addressing memory issues with 32-bit games, this D3D9 state tracker is now enjoying another performance optimization helping some games...

GRVK is the open-source project implementing AMD's Mantle API on Vulkan. Mantle was the precursor to the Vulkan industry standard and while it's no longer in use by AMD, there still are some games out there that allow making use of it...

Now that Clang LTO support was merged into Linux 5.12 for x86_64 and ARM64, Google engineers have sent out their patches enabling Clang Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) support for the Linux kernel...

Google engineer Yu Zhao sent out patches proposing a "multigenerational LRU" implementation for the Linux kernel's least recently used (LRU) handling for memory page replacement...