Phoronix

The UBports folks have released Ubuntu Touch OTA-18 as their latest over-the-air update for this mobile Linux platform. Notable with this release is what isn't there - the Ubuntu 20.04 base. Ubuntu Touch OTA-18 continues using now the five year old Ubuntu 16.04 LTS base while the migration to 20.04 is still in progress...

It's well known that the Linux desktop can be quite unbearable when under heavy memory pressure as has been showcased over the years and more attention these days turning to the likes of OOMD/systemd-oomd and other alternatives to better deal with Linux low/out-of-memory scenarios especially with today's desktop software and web browsers consuming increasing amounts of memory. Another effort coming to fruition for helping this scenario is the "le9" Linux kernel patches...

Mesa's open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has landed support for Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) culling support as ultimately what should provide another performance win for some workloads...

Now that the DG1 graphics support is beginning to get squared away and with Linux 5.15 will likely be able to boot to an accelerated desktop, bring-up on the DG2 graphics card has begun along with the Xe_HP software development vehicle...

The "Linux Random Number Generator" (LRNG) effort as a new drop-in replacement for /dev/random is now up to its 41st revision and in development for more than five years...

For going along with the newly added support in the MSM DRM kernel driver, Mesa's Freedreno Gallium3D OpenGL and Turnip Vulkan drivers have landed support for the Adreno 660 and Adreno 635 graphics processors...

One of the patch series I have been looking forward to see land going back to 2018 has been the per-process GPU load statistics or as it's known officially the "per client engine busyness" series. The work didn't land for Linux 5.14 but at least this week the latest revision was posted...

Valve today pushed out their newest stable update to the Steam client for Windows, macOS, and Linux...

For those making use of VirtualBox virtualization and rely on the shared folder functionality via the mainline "VBOXSF" driver for exchanging files between VMs and the host, the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel has an important fix/improvement...

Thanks to one of VMware's Linux engineers there are improvements pending to the AMD IOMMU support code to help with performance...

LibreOffice 7.2 is expected for release before the end of August while today marks the availability of the first release candidate...

With having hands on with a Dell XPS 13 9310 (Dell 0DXP1F) with the Core i7 1185G7 Tiger Lake processor (compared to prior Linux tests with the i7-1165G7), here is a fresh look at the performance of Microsoft Windows 10 Pro as shipped by Dell with all available stable updates versus a clean install of Ubuntu 21.04 Linux.

Mozilla has officially released Firefox 90.0 as the latest monthly update to their cross-platform web browser...

Being worked on for quite a while now by longtime kernel developer Matthew Wilcox of Oracle is memory folios to improve Linux's memory management and allow for greater efficiency. Benchmarks with memory folios have shown for example kernel builds can be up to 7% faster. It's looking like there is a desire to see at least some of this folios code land for Linux 5.15...

For several years already the AMDGPU kernel driver has supported virtual display functionality for cases like headless GPUs, pre-silicon hardware bring-up, GPUs/accelerators that lack physical display outputs, and other similar use-cases. That virtual display code is now being overhauled by re-using the existing VKMS DRM driver...

Long running work by Ivan Molodetskikh to reduce the input latency for GNOME's Mutter compositor was merged today...

Mesa's independent Crocus Gallium3D driver providing a modern OpenGL driver alternative for Haswell and older graphics hardware continues seeing improvements following its recent mainlining...

Intel open-source engineers are back around with a new take on introducing a PECI subsystem for the Linux kernel to ultimately make their Xeon servers more attractive and friendly for OpenBMC usage...

The Khronos Group recently released a new minor point release to the OpenCL 3.0 specification...

With last night's release of Linux 5.14-rc1 the merge window is officially over for this next version of the Linux kernel. With that, here is a look at the highlights for the forthcoming Linux 5.14 kernel based upon our original reporting during the merge window.

DigiKam as the popular open-source image organizer is out with its version 7.3 feature release...

OpenBLAS as the popular open-source high performance BLAS/LAPACK implementation has seen a new release with more CPU/architecture specific work as well as some new common optimizations...

Triple buffering and deep color support are two of the features still being worked on for GNOME by Ubuntu maker Canonical...

Mesa's V3DV Vulkan driver for newer Broadcom VideoCore graphics IP that is most notably used by the newer Raspberry Pi single board computers now has support for geometry shaders as its latest feature...

While there are the likes of OOMD / systemd-oomd gaining acceptance as a daemon for Linux systems to deal with killing off processes and other behavior under system memory (RAM) pressure, there still is an issue of the time it takes until the memory is reclaimed by those dying processes. Google engineers at the end of June proposed "process_reap" as a new system call to help in that memory recovery...

Besides Azure Cloud Switch as a Linux platform created by Microsoft, the Windows company has also been developing CBL-Mariner (Common Base Linux) as their own internal albeit public and open-source Linux distribution...

Following the two-week long merge window, the first release candidate to Linux 5.14 is now available with all the shiny new features to be found in this next kernel release...

Back in May we wrote about China launching an alternative to Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. This global open-source program hosted by the Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences is running "Summer 2021" for encouraging university-aged students regardless of gender or nationality to get involved in open-source development...

Last week marked a X.Org Server 21.1 development snapshot being released. While that snapshot noted there will "most likely be no proper release", there is discussion now over creating such a X.Org-Server-Without-XWayland release...

The "memfd_secret" system call is being added to the Linux 5.14 kernel to provide the ability to create memory areas that are visible only in the context of the owning process and these "secret" memory regions are not mapped by other processes or the kernel page tables...

The Haiku open-source operating system building off the inspiration and work of BeOS is continuing strong over the summer months...

The CentOS Board of Directors has approved the formation of the CentOS Kmods special interest group for expanding the selection of kernel modules available to this distribution...

The VirtIO-IOMMU driver now works on x86/x86_64 hardware with the Linux 5.14 kernel...

For over one year now since Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) was first disclosed as a future feature with Xeon "Sapphire Rapids", Intel engineers have been posting AMX patches for enabling the new support for changes needed from the kernel to code compiler stacks. The Linux kernel support for AMX hasn't yet landed but has now been revised its seventh time for public review...

Going back to 2017 was work on firmware-based power management for Intel graphics with its GuC implementation. That work didn't advance with the time but now with Intel renewing their work around GuC and with future hardware may mandate this binary-only firmware, they are again revisiting the GuC power management...

Linux 5.14 has re-landed support for improvements to lower the latency of its USB audio driver...

Back in April was the release of Vulkan Video extensions for GPU-accelerated video encode/decode using this cross-platform API. NVIDIA was quick to publish a beta driver with Vulkan Video support while adoption beyond that by drivers or multimedia software has been rather limited so far. Fortunately, the popular GStreamer multimedia framework for Linux users is working in the direction of supporting Vulkan Video...

Arriving late for the Linux 5.14 merge window that is closing this weekend are all of the Arm SoC and platform changes for this next kernel version...

The RISC-V architecture code supports more functionality with the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel...

The latest achievement for Mesa's generic OpenGL implementation atop Vulkan is being able to handle OpenGL ES 3.2...

Since last year AMD has been working on VanGogh APU support for Linux initially with their graphics driver support and that has spread to other areas. It also turns out now that with VanGogh APUs will be a new Linux audio driver...

Shortly after OpenCL 3.0 was finalized last year it was enabled for Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack (and even earlier with their Tiger Lake enablement). But since last year that OpenCL 3.0 support was marked as "beta" while last week was quietly promoted to being "production" grade...

XWayland 21.1.2 is out today and while it may seem like "just a point release", it's quite an exciting one at that since it does bring NVIDIA hardware acceleration for XWayland when paired with their new NVIDIA 470 series driver...

AMD has published its first code drop of the quarter for their open-source "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver that is derived from their official driver sources but making use of the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end rather than their proprietary shader compiler...

Fixes to the Plasma Wayland session continue to be quite steady work in the KDE camp even with the support becoming quite mature and good enough for day-to-day use...

The Linux 5.14 char/misc updates landed this week in the kernel. The "char/misc" area continues to serve as a growing catch-all portion of the code-base not jiving well elsewhere in other subsystems...

LLVM 12.0.1 is available today as the only planned point release to this spring's release of LLVM 12...

FUTEX2 continues to be worked on by Collabora as part of their work with Valve on enhancing Linux gaming support. With FUTEX2 the work is driven about enhancing the support for Windows games running on Linux with the likes of Steam Play...

Since 2013 Google has been working on Fibers as a promising user-space scheduling framework. Fibers has been in use at Google and delivering great results while recently they began work on open-sourcing this framework for Linux and as part of that working on the new "UMCG" code...

AMD engineers and their partners continue work towards upstreaming Secure Encrypted Virtualization's Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) support for the mainline Linux kernel...