Phoronix

With GTK4 out and stabilizing well, more GNOME components are working to migrate to this updated toolkit as part of the GNOME 40 development cycle...

Clang LTO for the Linux kernel to provide link-time optimizations for yielding more performant kernel binaries (plus Clang CFI support) looks like it will land for Linux 5.12. With that compiler optimization feature appearing squared away, Google engineers are also working on Clang PGO support for the Linux kernel to exploit profile guided optimizations for further enhancing the kernel performance...

GCC 11 is slated to enter "Stage 4" development at the end of this weekend after which only regression and documentation fixes will be permitted. The first GCC 11 stable release should be out in 2~3 months, but at the moment there is an increasing number of P1 regressions that are of the highest priority...

Flatpak 1.10 is out this morning as the stable release following the Flatpak 1.9 development series for this Linux app sandboxing / distribution technology...

Rav1e 0.4 was released on Wednesday as the latest version of this Rust-written AV1 video encoder. The rav1e 0.4 release represents a speed-up for the encoder but depending upon the preset level can still be at fractions of a frame per second...

A new compute code path has been merged into Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan and "iris" Gallium3D drivers for the forthcoming Xe HP graphics hardware...

Following the very active discussions the past several days over the Linux kernel potentially dropping a number of old CPU targets/architectures, an updated list of planned ARM platforms for removal has been published now that some have been saved thanks to expressed interest...

The Debian 11 "Bullseye" build-essential freeze is now in effect with the release team no longer entertaining transition requests. Meanwhile, architecture support for Debian 12 is in early stages of discussion with a possible reduction in i386 support for that follow-on release...

For those with TPM2 security chips in your system or various hardware security tokens like YubiKeys, the upcoming systemd 248 will make it much easier to use then for unlocking your encrypted LUKS2 volumes...

While normally the feature branching and first release candidate for new Mesa3D quarterly releases doesn't begin until around the end of the first month of a new quarter, this time around with Mesa 21.0 it has begun today -- half-way through the month of January. This should at least ensure Mesa 21.0 stable ships in February rather than March. Mesa 20.3.3 was also released today as the newest stable version for the time being...

For those wondering how the open-source Radeon Vulkan drivers of Mesa's RADV and AMD's official AMDVLK are competing as we start the new year, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance for various Linux games (native and via Steam Play with DXVK) as well as Vulkan compute tests.

While Bob Swan has been the interim and then permanent CEO for less than three years at Intel, following much speculation heating up in recent weeks, Bob Swan is out and returning to Intel is Pat Gelsinger who will now lead as CEO...

NUVIA, the startup focused on making new high performance ARM CPUs for the data center that has talked up big performance capabilities and big performance-per-Watt advantages, is being acquired by Qualcomm...

The Khronos Group and LunarG have announced an updated Vulkan SDK that includes now formally providing support for Apple platforms, including Apple Silicon systems via Universal Binaries...

At the start of the month Intel sent out their initial graphics driver changes targeting Linux 5.12 while now a secondary set of changes have been sent to DRM-Next...

Ubuntu 21.04 will do away with the existing practice on Ubuntu Linux systems of making new user home directories world-readable...

The AMD Radeon "AMDGPU" open-source Linux kernel driver is tacking on another new feature: Secure Display TA...

While the i3 window manager has been around for more than a decade, it's taken until now for an i3 window manager spin of Fedora to be solicited and approved...

Finally in 2021 with the GNOME 40 release is the ability of GNOME's Nautilus file manager to show and sort by file creation times.....

In addition to pursuing many technical changes for its Linux distribution like systemd-oomd by default, Btrfs Zstd compression, and standalone XWayland releases, the Fedora project is also looking to overhaul its community outreach this year...

As one step below the existing GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, NVIDIA announced the RTX 3060 from the virtual CES event...

Following Intel's product announcements yesterday, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su providing her virtual keynote this morning for the virtual CES 2021. Here are the highlights for how AMD is aiming to make 2021 even more exciting than their prior stellar year...

So far for the virtual CES this week there hasn't been any big CXL 2.0 announcements since the Compute Express Link 2.0 specification was finalized back in November, but the Linux kernel support for this CPU-to-device interconnect continues coming together and will be hopefully mainlined in a coming release...

The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Gallium3D code within Mesa has wired up DRM shim support for basically faking the support in the absence of real hardware. This is mainly useful for testing the Nouveau OpenGL shader compiler code path without any actual code execution...

Following last month's release of the big GTK 4.0 toolkit, GTK 4.0.1 is out as the first stable point release for this free software toolkit...

Adding to the changes abound at CentOS beyond CentOS 8 going EOL at year's end to focus instead on CentOS Stream feeding into the future RHEL, the likes of Facebook and Twitter are now proposing a Hyperscale special interest group for this RHEL-based platform...

While the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) allows selecting between your choice of optional compression algorithms like LZO, LZ4, and Zstd -- plus even specifying specific file extensions to optionally limit the transparent file-system compression to -- it doesn't allow easily specifying a compression level. That is fortunately set to change with the Linux 5.12 kernel this spring...

Intel's virtual CES press conference took place today. Here are the highlights from 10nm Pentium Silver and Celeron processors to a preview of Rocket Lake and forthcoming 11th Gen Core H processors.

The support for Clang LTO of the Linux kernel for link-time optimizations when using that GCC alternative compiler looks like it will land with Linux 5.12...

Last year with Fedora 33 zRAM was switched on by default. The setup was that using a compressed zRAM drive for swap space leads to better performance and in turn a better user experience. Some spins of Fedora have been using swap-on-zRAM by default going back many releases while since F33 it's been used for all spins. Now with Fedora 34 the configuration is being further refined...

Here is a look at how the performance of Intel's Clear Linux compares for the end of 2020 against the end of 2019 and 2018 on the same hardware platform for looking at the Intel performance optimizations made to this open-source Linux distribution. This was another year of Intel engineers making more headway on out-of-the-box Linux performance even though they have been less vocal about the project over the past year.

AMD is back on track publishing more Zen 3 compiler support patches for the LLVM compiler stack...

Adding to the growing list of Mesa 21.0 features is spare memory support for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver...

The newest platform working on Vulkan API support is... Blackberry's QNX...

Mesa 21.0 is bringing some overdue improvements for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver with the game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive...

The POWER10 architecture is adding several new instructions to help prevent return-oriented programming exploits...

While Linux 5.11-rc2 was tiny due to the holidays, with developers and testers returning to work the Linux 5.11-rc3 release that was just issued is much bigger...

Several months back you may recall that Linux 5.9 kernel regression we noted that in turn was bisected to code introduced by Linus Torvalds around page lock fairness. That was ultimately worked out in time with allowing a control over the page lock (un)fairness to address the regressed workloads while being fair enough to satisfy his original change. But now this week for Linux 5.11, Linus Torvalds has again altered the behavior. It then ended up causing a PostgreSQL database server performance regression but fortunately any impact should be very minimal and hopefully not appearing in any real-world situation...

With Linux 5.10 having shipped as the latest Long Term Support (LTS) release to be maintained for at least the next five years, a discussion has begun over dropping a number of old and obsolete CPU platform support currently found within the mainline kernel. For many of the architectures being considered for removal they haven't seen any new commits in years but as is the case once proposals are made for them to be removed there are often passionate users wanting the support to be kept...

BeOS-inspired Haiku OS can now run with Mesa 21.0 well using the latest development code...

With this week's R460 driver release also comes a number of security updates. Several security issues have been patched in both the NVIDIA Windows and Linux graphics driver components...

While Fedora has been well known for years in always shipping the very latest packages in its distribution as of release even if it means using the likes of a near-final GCC compiler pre-release, developers have decided to postpone the shipping of PHP 8.0 until the autumn with their Fedora 35 release...

As part of Intel's lengthy "Keem Bay" upstreaming for Linux as their latest-generation Movidius VPU offering, now that much of the core infrastructure bits are all mainlined, the latest focus has been on their Vision Processing Unit enablement...

Stemming from the renewed attention this week of Haswell GT1 graphics being broken for the past half-year under Linux with the latest versions of the kernel, a revised patch was sent out to restore that graphics support for low-end Haswell Celeron/Pentium processors. As part of that, a new option is being introduced to allow disabling security mitigations of the Intel graphics driver...

This week AMD engineers published their initial code for the AMDGPU/AMDKFD Linux kernel driver for providing a Heterogeneous Memory Management based Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) memory manager that ultimately will be used by their ROCm compute stack...

Alibaba developers released an updated version of their "blazing fast" lightweight deep learning framework MNN, or the Mobile Neural Network...

With last week's release of dav1d 0.8 for CPU-based AV1 video decoding we provided a number of x86_64 benchmarks while questions were raised around the ARM64 and POWER9 performance. Here are such benchmarks for those wondering about the AV1 video decoding speed on those architectures...

KDE's KWin window manager / compositor has seen a "near total rewrite" of its compositing code that should sharply improve the desktop...

Building off yesterday's Wine 6.0-RC6 release is an updated Wine-Staging build...

With Linux 5.11 the Intel Linux graphics driver is bringing async page-flipping for Gen9/Skylake and newer. However, patches pending for a future release (potentially 5.12) would extend that performance benefiting feature now all the way back to the Ironlake days...