Phoronix

The media subsystem updates were sent out this week for the Linux 5.13 merge window and already merged. A notable driver addition this time around is for NXP i.MX8 users...

University of Virginia and University of California San Diego researchers have discovered multiple new variants of Spectre attacks that are not protected by existing Spectre mitigations and could yield both Intel and AMD CPUs leaking data via micro-op caches...

The past month was quite exciting in the Linux/open-source world with Linux 5.12 having been released and 5.13 off to a great start, shiny new hardware for benchmarking, and also the drama around the FSF and UMN's "hypocrite commits" research...

KDE developers certainly closed out April on a high note with some big ticket additions...

Following the recent FreeBSD 13.0 release and jumping ahead of the imminent DragonFlyBSD 6.0 release is now OpenBSD 6.9 to kick off May...

In addition to the Btrfs changes, EXT4, exFAT, and XFS are among the file-systems seeing noteworthy improvements with the in-development Linux 5.13...

As the first announcement of a newly-certified product by the Free Software Foundation since early 2020 as "Respect Your Freedom" compliant, the FSF is backing another 802.11n WiFi adapter...

With recently receiving the rest of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" line-up we had no access to previously for testing, the past few weeks were busy with testing/re-testing these new graphics cards as well as prior GeForce RTX 20 series hardware and relevant AMD Radeon graphics cards for offering a current look at the 1440p and 4K Linux gaming performance.

The Rust-written Cloud-Hypervisor project led by open-source Intel engineers as a VMM designed for cloud workloads has broke well past the "1.0" milestone. Following a series of 0.x releases, Cloud-Hypervisor 15 was released this week...

Along with this week's release of QEMU 6.0, exciting on the Linux virtualization front are the KVM changes that are ready to go with the 5.13 kernel...

One of the areas of Linux desktop display support that isn't as well supported compared to Windows is high dynamic range (HDR) displays. There have been various vendors and developers over the years working towards Linux desktop HDR improvements but still it hasn't been a fast-advancing area in the open-source ecosystem. At least now AMD Radeon graphics driver developers do appear to be working on HDR improvements...

Now that Clang LTO support landed in Linux 5.12 and cleared the blocker on CFI support, that LLVM Clang control-flow integrity (CFI) capability is now upstream for Linux 5.13...

It was just earlier this month that FreeBSD 13.0 released while already GhostBSD has issued a new release of this desktop-oriented operating system re-based against the new FreeBSD 13.0 base...

When it comes to Apple hardware support in the Linux 5.13 kernel not only is support for the Apple M1 SoCs added but the Magic Mouse 2 is also finally being supported in full by the mainline kernel. Plus there are other various interesting HID subsystem updates too this kernel cycle...

The previously announced Total War: Rome Remastered that was announced by Feral Interactive is now released...

QEMU 6.0 is out today as the newest feature release for this processor/machine emulator and virtualizer that serves as an important part of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

One of the most significant underlying changes with the recent release of Ubuntu 21.04 is the default GNOME Shell desktop environment is running the Wayland-based session by default rather than the traditional X.Org Server session. But what does this mean for the Linux gaming performance on Ubuntu 21.04? Here are some (X)Wayland vs. X.Org benchmarks.

In recent months there has finally been more open-source projects traditionally focused on NVIDIA GPU compute beginning to offer mainline Radeon support using the open-source ROCm stack. Following the recent PyTorch 1.8 with ROCm support, CuPy 9.0 was released last week with that traditionally CUDA focused library now supporting AMD's ROCm stack...

NVIDIA today released their 465.27 Linux driver as the newest stable build in this current driver series...

While a lot of new features and improvements have been accumulating for the Linux 5.13 kernel with the ongoing merge window, one of the unfortunate aspects of this new kernel is that the AMD Zen CPU energy driver "amd_energy" is indeed being removed...

Taking place virtually this week has been the International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL) and SYCLcon. From these events are a lot of interesting presentations for those interested in GPU compute, heterogeneous programming, and industry API efforts...

Users of the Btrfs file-system can enjoy a number of improvements with the in-development Linux 5.13 kernel...

Linux 5.13's x86 memory management work is bringing a minor performance optimization that is particularly beneficial in light of the CPU security mitigations in recent years that have an impact on the TLB...

The crypto subsystem updates have landed in the Linux 5.13 kernel...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver changes have been submitted and merged for the ongoing Linux 5.13 kernel merge window and it brings with it many changes, especially for these open-source Intel and AMD Radeon drivers...

Following last week's release of Ubuntu 21.04 "Hirsute Hippo", the Ubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri" cycle has now begun...

One of the new security features in Linux 5.13 is the ability to randomize kernel stack offsets at each system call. This optional feature is now mainlined...

The release candidate phase has begun for openSUSE's upcoming Leap 15.3 Linux distribution release...

The printk() function dates all the way back to the original Linux kernel release and even with Linux turning thirty years old this week, work on printk is not over...

AMD engineers today published AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2 as their latest open-source public code drop of their official Linux Vulkan driver...

The Linux 5.13 development kernel is introducing a new "misc" cgroup controller. The misc cgroup controller is to be used for resources that are controlled by simply counting / limiting the number of resource instances in a scalar manner...

It's been several months since the last round of FUTEX2 patches for this system call to address the shortcomings of the current FUTEX system call. FUTEX2, which is designed in part with Wine/Proton in mind for better matching Windows semantics, has now seen a third iteration of the patches...

Intel's code for Linux kernel bus lock detection that works in conjunction with newer Intel CPUs has landed in the Linux kernel...

With Qt 6.1 being released next month, The Qt Company has published their 2021 road-map outlining some of their plans for the remainder of the calendar year...

It's Fedora 34 day! Fedora 34 is now officially available and it's quite exciting on the feature front especially with the changes to be enjoyed in Fedora Workstation 34...

GCC 11.1 is out today as the first stable release of the GNU Compiler Collection 11...

Arm published today a set of blog posts outlining more power/performance and feature details of their forthcoming Neoverse N2 and Neoverse V1 platforms...

While Fedora Workstation has been moving along with its Btrfs file-system usage and beginning to make greater use of its functionality, Red Hat does continue investing heavily in Stratis-Storage as their path forward for next-generation Linux storage with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Today marks the release of Stratis 2.4...

The "char/misc" continues to be the random catch-all subsystem for the Linux kernel for drivers and buses not fitting well into other areas of the Linux kernel. Increasingly char/misc is hosting various accelerator/offload devices with the kernel still not yet introducing its own formal accelerator subsystem. With Linux 5.13 the "char/misc" pull continues to be heavy on a wide assortment of changes...

While Zink implements OpenGL 4 and is running an increasing number of games with good performance, one of the simple "demos" it hasn't been able to render correctly in recent years has been glxgears. But that milestone is now crossed once again with the latest Mesa code...

The EROFS read-only file-system developed by Huawei is seeing some new feature work with the in-development Linux 5.13 kernel...

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the big batch of USB and Thunderbolt subsystem updates on Monday for the in-development Linux 5.13 kernel...

Working on the Linux power management code is a never-ending and increasingly important task. The ACPI and power management updates were sent in today for the Linux 5.13 merge window though this isn't as exciting as some of the recent kernels heavy on CPUFreq and P-State changes...

As expected, support for the initial Apple M1 SoC support and 2020 Apple Silicon devices (Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air) has landed into the Linux 5.13 kernel...

Over the past month we have been quite impressed by the performance of the EPYC 7003 series Milan processors when looking at the top-tier parts, but how does Zen 3 do for lower-tier server CPUs? Recently we were supplied with two EPYC 72F3 processors from AMD for these 8-core high performance SKUs. In our initial look at the EPYC 72F3 Linux performance is seeing how they compare to the similar previous-generation EPYC 7F32 processor.

Linux 5.11 brought mainline support for Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) after a lengthy mainlining process. Building off that SGX enclaves support in the mainline kernel more recently has been support for SGX with KVM virtualization and now for mainline Linux 5.13 that guest-side support is landing for KVM guests...

The Khronos Group used the International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL 2021) to release OpenCL 3.0.7 as the latest OpenCL 3 revision that brings with it some new extensions...

Freshly re-based against yesterday's Linux 5.12 kernel, GNU Linux-Libre 5.12-gnu is now available as the latest version of this GNU cleansed kernel now carrying a codename of "Freedo Misses Tasha"...

Flatpak 1.11.1 is out this morning as the first development step towards the eventual Flatpak 1.12 stable release...

Version 1.6 of FWUPD is now available for firmware updating of motherboard BIOS and other device firmware under Linux...