Phoronix

It's been another week of fixes and feature work for the KDE desktop as the march continues toward the Plasma 5.22 release this summer...

If your current Vulkan-based Radeon Linux gaming performance isn't cutting it and a new GPU is out of your budget or you have been unable to find a desired GPU upgrade in stock, the Mesa RADV driver has added an option likely of interest to you... Well, at least moving forward with this feature being limited to RDNA2 GPUs for now...

Wine 6.6 is out as the open-source project's first release of April for running Windows games and applications primarily on Linux and macOS platforms. With Wine 6.6 comes more feature work that will ultimately be incorporated into the Wine 7.0 release due out in early 2022...

The NVIDIA-led work to allow XWayland OpenGL and Vulkan acceleration with their proprietary driver has just been merged into X.Org Server Git...

Following last month's launch of the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" series prominent motherboard vendors have been fairly quick to enable Milan support for capable motherboards originally launched for the prior EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors. For those in the market for a 1P ATX motherboard that will work with these exciting new server processors, the Supermicro H12SSL-i is a nice entry-level motherboard that gets the job done and with its BIOS v2.0 release is working well for the new Zen 3 server CPUs.

The upcoming release of Fedora 34 will make it the first major Linux distribution to have sevctl available, an open-source utility for managing AMD EPYC systems with Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV)...

The latest open-source compiler infrastructure effort seeking to target a wide spectrum of devices from CPUs through GPUs, FPGAs, and accelerators is HPVM. The HPVM project today celebrated its 1.0 milestone...

FFmpeg 4.4 is out today as a large update to this widely-used multimedia library and with it comes many new features including new demuxers, AV1 support improvements, and other enhancements...

The ability to randomize the kernel stack offset at each system call looks like it will land for the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle. This optional feature makes it much more difficult to carry out stack-based attacks on the Linux kernel...

Toward the end of March was the AMD ROCm 4.1 release with a few new features. Released today is ROCm 4.1.1 with seemingly no real code changes but just to clarify two items around ROCm's HIP...

It was just a few days ago was the talking of the VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver looking to be upstreamed into Mesa and now this Google "Venus" project has indeed landed...

It was just a few days ago was the talking of the VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver looking to be upstreamed into Mesa and now this Google "Venus" project has indeed landed...

While the independent effort to get the Apple M1 ARM-based SoC working under Linux has just been happening for a few months, with the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle the very preliminary support for Apple's M1 and initial M1-powered devices looks to land...

Out today is version 4.15 of the open-source Xen hypervisor. The focus of Xen 4.15 is on "broader accessibility, performance and security" with a number of noteworthy additions...

Werner Koch announced the availability today of GnuPG 2.3 as the start of the (fairly stable, effectively production ready) test releases leading up to the GnuPG 2.4 stable update...

GCC 10.3 is out today as the latest stable release of the GNU Compiler Collection, weeks ahead of the GCC 11.1 feature release as the first stable version of GCC 11...

AMD engineers have a patch pending to improve the idle power consumption for Radeon RX 5000 "Navi 1x" GPUs on Linux...

Red Hat engineers spearheaded the work on Debuginfod for being able to fetch debuginfo/sources from centralized servers for a project to cut-down on manually having to install the relevant debug packages manually on a system as well as that occupying extra disk space and just being a hassle. The Fedora project is now getting their Debuginfod server off the ground and for Fedora Linux 35 are planning to make use of it by default...

XScreenSaver as the open-source screensaver solution for Linux as well as macOS systems this last week reached version 6.0. With XScreenSaver 6.0 comes increased security and other enhancements...

Normally we don't see the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system ported to new Linux kernel releases until after the inaugural stable release, but this time around Reiser4 has seen an early port to the near-final Linux 5.12 kernel...

LLVM 12.0 was supposed to ship at the start of March but now more than one month later and some 6,660+ commits to LLVM 13.0 already, LLVM 12.0 has not yet shipped but on Wednesday 12.0.0-rc5 was issued...

At the end of March the release candidate phase began for the upcoming OpenZFS 2.1 open-source ZFS file-system on Linux and FreeBSD systems. The second release candidate is now available for this noteworthy OpenZFS update...

This quarter's Mesa 21.1 feature release will continue to offer more improvements for Lavapipe, the CPU-based software Vulkan implementation. The latest today is Vulkan 1.1 now being advertised...

Sway 1.6 is official today as the newest version of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor...

Mesa 21.0.2 is out today as the latest bi-weekly point release to the Mesa3D open-source Vulkan/OpenGL drivers...

Here is a look at the AVX / AVX2 / AVX-512 performance on the Intel Core i9 11900K "Rocket Lake" when building a set of relevant open-source benchmarks limited to AVX, AVX2, and AVX-512 caps each time while also monitoring the CPU package power consumption during the tests for looking at the performance-per-Watt in providing some fresh reference metrics over AVX-512 on Linux with the latest Intel "Rocket Lake" processors.

Not only is the Linux kernel moving to allow Rust code to be optionally used within the kernel, but Google is now allowing Rust code to be used for system programming work on Android's low-level operating system components too...

The official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver, AMDVLK, is out today with its first update of the new quarter...

In the open-source world there can even be much fragmentation and multiple implementations around something as central as parsing of EDID blobs for monitor (display) information and that's only been made worse by the growing number of Wayland compositors...

The latest area being worked on with VirtIO for para-virtualized drivers for Linux with a focus on KVM is Bluetooth support...

For many years it's been possible to run Linux games on FreeBSD along with other Linux applications thanks to FreeBSD's "Linuxulator" Linux binary compatibility layer. With that more recently it's becoming possible to run even more recent games thanks to improvements to FreeBSD's graphics drivers, the Linux binary compatibility code, and other FreeBSD improvements -- Steam is even working out for more titles...

Back in February we covered Google's work on the Lyra voice/audio codec designed for fitting with very low bit-rate audio for speech compression in use-cases like WebRTC and video chatting even on the most limited Internet connections. Thanks to leveraging machine learning, Lyra can function at just 3kbps. The code to Lyra is now public...

AMD last week published a security whitepaper on Zen 3's Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) functionality introduced with Ryzen 5000 series and EPYC 7003 series processors. In the whitepaper they mentioned Linux patches were published for allowing this feature to be disabled if concerned about the security risk, well, today those patches were made public...

Intel today is introducing the 3rd Gen "Ice Lake" Xeon Scalable processors that top out with the Xeon Platinum 8380 offering 40 cores with a 2.3GHz base frequency and 3.0GHz all-core turbo while having a 270 Watt TDP and launching for ~$8099 USD. Here are more details on the Intel Ice Lake Xeon Scalable line-up.

Over the past two years we have seen a lot of Intel Linux kernel graphics driver work in preparing to support Intel discrete graphics cards. That work is still ongoing even for the DG1 graphics card that has been sampling to customers while Linux 5.13 will take things another step forward this summer...

While Skylake was introduced a half-decade ago already, Intel's open-source engineers aren't done relentlessly optimizing for it and subsequent 14nm processors. Hitting the GCC 11 open-source compiler today was an optimization for benefiting Skylake through the likes of Cascade Lake with some possible performance benefits...

Newer Gigabyte motherboards may soon enjoy a new Linux driver for exposing component temperatures...

The KDE project and the open-source Linux community has been in a sticky situation with The Qt Company having moved Qt 5.15 LTS to its commercial-only phase while most free software hasn't even been ported yet to Qt 6 let alone a number of modules and other features still missing from the Qt 6 tool-kit. So until the KDE project has fully transitioned to using the Qt 6 tool-kit, the project has taken up maintaining their own collection of Qt 5.15 patches...

The xf86-input-libinput driver that is used for leveraging the libinput input handling library on X.Org Server systems has reached the version 1.0 milestone...

While PipeWire is being increasingly looked at by desktop Linux distributions as the future of audio/video stream handling on the Linux desktop, aside from Fedora most Linux distributions are so far being cautious in replacing PulseAudio. In any event, PulseAudio is showing no signs of letting up and continues seeing new feature development...

For older Logitech keyboards that operate on a 27MHz radio frequency they may have a new lease on life as well as being more secure thanks to a new Linux utility...

The VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver is looking to be upstreamed in Mesa in allowing Vulkan support for virtualized guests that in turn is handled by the host's Vulkan driver/hardware...

While AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver developers have been working publicly on the "Acturus" GPU support going back to 2019 that was then introduced last year in the form of the Instinct MI100, finally today has the necessary binary firmware been upstreamed into linux-firmware.git for enabling the rest of the open-source AMD Linux driver stack...

Warzone 2100, the real-time strategy/tactics game that was originally released in 1999 as a proprietary commercial game only to then be made open-source several years later, is out this week with its version 4.0 milestone...

Approved at the start of the year was the CentOS Hyperscaler special interest group that is working to cater CentOS Stream so it's more suitable by the likes of Facebook and Twitter along with other modern enterprises. The SIG just issued their Q1'2021 report about what they accomplished in this first quarter of being an approved effort and what work remains on the table...

For those that managed to get their hands on Radeon RX 6000 series hardware and are habitual Mesa Git users, the newest Mesa 21.1-devel code for RADV has a new knob for performance testing...

The Intel "Crocus" Gallium3D driver in development for supporting old Intel i965 IGPs through Haswell continues making progress by the upstream, open-source Mesa3D community for hopefully one day replacing Intel's classic "i965" Mesa driver...

Linaro continues leading the effort on a Wireless WAN (WWAN) subsystem/framework for the Linux kernel...

Linus Torvalds put out Linux 5.12-rc6 on schedule even with the Easter holiday and it's a delightfully small update...

This past week AMD published a security analysis of AMD Zen 3's new Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) functionality. In there they did acknowledge there is the possibility where bad PSF functionality could lead to a side-channel attack albeit the real-world exposure would be quite low. In any case they are allowing interested users to disable the Predictive Store Forwarding functionality, but what they didn't comment on in that paper was what performance overhead to expect if disabling PSF. So my Easter weekend turned into AMD Zen 3 PSF benchmarking.