Phoronix

AMD published a security whitepaper this week looking at their Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) feature that is new to Zen 3 series processors. AMD is going to allow customers to disable this performance feature as they think it may be vulnerable to a Spectre-like attack...

For those wondering about the state of speculative execution vulnerabilities and what software-based mitigations are required for Intel's new Rocket Lake processors, here is the rundown along with benchmarks when disabling those present Linux kernel mitigations.

Another round of AMDGPU kernel driver updates were sent out on Thursday to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.13 merge window opening in a few weeks...

While GCC 11 is seeing its first stable release in the form of GCC 11.1 in just a few short weeks, GCC 10.3 is imminent as the latest point release for those on the current GCC 10 stable series...

Mesa 21.1 is looking to be another exciting release to be introduced later this quarter while going into feature freeze around mid-April. The latest work to land is threaded context support for Zink, which means faster performance for this OpenGL-over-Vulkan implementation...

With the start of the new month comes updated Steam Survey figures for the month prior...

The beta of Ubuntu as well as its various flavors/derivatives is out ahead of the official "Hirsute Hippo" launch later this month...

To kick off a new month of Linux gaming, Valve today released Proton 6.3-1 as the latest version of their Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver now supports the Vulkan EXT_conservative_rasterization extension that is most notably used by DXVK for translating Direct3D atop this graphics API and work is also pending too for VKD3D...

Intel's open-source developers have released a new version of IGC, the Intel Graphics Compiler that is used by their open-source Linux compute stack, recently was transitioned for use by their Windows driver too, and might eventually be piped into their Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers...

In the past few weeks since the introduction of the EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors there has finally been AMD Zen 3 "Znver3" tuning work that's been hurried into the GCC 11 compiler code-base ahead of its stable release in the coming weeks. That initial Zen 3 tuning work has also now been back-ported to the GCC 10 branch ahead of its next point release...

The past several weeks have seen a few rounds of Intel graphics driver changes sent in to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.13 cycle. This Linux 5.13 Intel graphics driver work has included Alder Lake S enablement and other feature changes. A final batch of "feature" work was sent out this morning for targeting the Intel kernel graphics driver in Linux 5.13...

LLVM 12.0 was supposed to be out around the end of February but blocker bugs have resulted in additional release candidates as the developers work to button up this open-source compiler stack release...

There was a lot to get excited about over the course of the past month when it comes to our open-source and Linux area of focus...

While Fedora 34 isn't releasing until the end of April or so, there is already feature planning that has continued for Fedora 35 that will come in the autumn...

Oracle continues advancing their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" as the company's modified Linux kernel build offered to Oracle Linux users as an alternative to its Red Hat Compatible Kernel for their RHEL-based OS. Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 Update 2 is out to end Q1'2021 with various new features...

GIMP 3.0 still isn't out yet but the GIMP 2.10 stable series continues seeing new point releases with additional feature work until that GTK3 version of this image editor / Photoshop alternative is ready...

Following last week's release of the Fedora 34 beta I've begun trying out this latest Fedora Linux build on a variety of test systems. Here are some preliminary figures of Fedora 34 against Fedora 33 stock and updated configurations when running on an AMD Ryzen 5000 series system with Radeon graphics.

Red Hat is ending out the quarter by issuing their first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4...

Canonical today announced the release of the "Ubuntu on Windows Community Preview" as a specialized build of Ubuntu catering to Microsoft's WSL2...

At the start of the year CloudLinux announced AlmaLinux as a 1:1 fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In ending out Q1, as promised this CentOS alternative is now available for download...

While Qt 6.1 is aiming to release around the end of April, for now the Qt 6.0 series continues marching forward and is out today with the Qt 6.0.3 point release providing another few dozen bug fixes...

Along with our Intel Core i5 11600K + Core i9 11900K Linux review from yesterday with 22 pages of benchmarks, even more performance data is now published and continues to flow in via OpenBenchmarking.org for looking at the Intel Rocket Lake performance across hundreds of benchmarks and compared to many other processors we have tested and that of the community...

GNOME 41 this autumn will be shipping with libadwaita, the successor and GTK4 port to GNOME's libhandy that will help to define the visual language and user experience for GNOME applications...

Well known GNOME developer Georges Stavracas has been working to make OBS Studio fully-working under Wayland and today that reality has been achieved with native Wayland support and the ability to capture monitors and windows on Wayland compositors...

Patches back in 2013 were proposed for "PRAM" as persistent over-kexec memory storage to allow saving of memory pages across kernel reboots via kexec or when hitting a new kernel via kexec. Nearly one year ago Oracle retook up the effort and sent out PKRAM as their "preserved-over-Kexec" RAM and now finally a second iteration of PKRAM has been published...

With AMD's busy Q1 of introducing the Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card, introducing the Ryzen 5000 mobile series, the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" series launch, and continuing to advance their open-source/Linux software efforts, it was another busy quarter. Here is a look back from the Linux/open-source perspective of what interested readers the most...

After the release candidate phase kicked off last month, systemd 248 is now officially available as the newest feature release for this dominant Linux init system and service manager...

GTK 4.2 is out today as the newest stable release of this open-source toolkit and incorporates bug fixes and other improvements as a result of feedback from developers working on transitioning from GTK3 to GTK4...

Arm today announced the ARMv9 architecture (or Armv9 as it's officially styled) with a focus on performance, machine learning, digital signal processing, and security...

Along with today's NVIDIA 465 series Linux beta an exciting shift at the company is they are now supporting accelerated GPU access by VMs with their GeForce consumer GPUs...

Today's the day that we can finally talk about the performance of Intel's "Rocket Lake" processors under Linux. The past several weeks we have been extensively testing the Core i5 11600K and Core i9 11900K processors under Linux. Here is a look at the very exciting Gen12 Xe Graphics performance out of these new desktop CPUs, the Linux gaming performance, and then over 300 other benchmarks looking at the CPU/system performance of the i5-11600K / i9-11900K processors against the prior generation Comet Lake parts and the AMD Ryzen 5000 series competition.

While looking forward to the NVIDIA 470 series Linux driver for Wayland support improvements, before getting there NVIDIA is first introducing the 465 driver series. Today marks the first publicly available NVIDIA 465 Linux driver beta...

For longer than the past year Intel engineers have been working on wiring up the Linux kernel support to handle split lock detection and bus lock detection. Back in Linux 5.7 the split lock detection landed for warning or even killing the offending software should a split lock occur due to the significant performance impact and possible denial of service. Now it's looking like the bus lock detection code could be ready for mainline...

The quest of improving the Microsoft Surface laptop support under Linux continues. With Linux 5.13 there is going to be not only the Surface DTX driver but another new Surface driver queued up is "surface-hid" that will allow supporting the keyboard and touchpad on newer Surface devices...

The Intel IGC network driver (not to be confused with their other IGC, the Intel Graphics Compiler) that supports their Gigabit/2.5G Ethernet devices has support for the Express Data Path (XDP) with the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle...

The first release candidate of the forthcoming OpenZFS 2.1 file-system for Linux and FreeBSD systems is now available for testing...

Last week saw FreeBSD 13.0-RC3 released as an "extra" build due to the fallout from the last minute WireGuard situation. Due to other bugs, FreeBSD 13.0-RC4 was issued today rather than going for the final release...

Mesa this quarter saw the release of Mesa 21.0 with many OpenGL and Vulkan improvements, a lot of work continues building up around the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation, Lavapipe continued advancing for software-based Vulkan, Intel and AMD continued with their stellar open-source hardware support, and performance optimizations in Mesa and lower down the stack are seemingly never-ending...

NVIDIA has proposed a merge request to Mesa that would lay the infrastructure for allowing alternative GBM (Generic Buffer Manager) back-ends to be loaded, such as for NVIDIA's proprietary driver should it presumably implement GBM in the future...

For those that happen to be running FSP/3Y-Power hot-swappable power supplies, a Linux driver is en route...

With Intel set to announce 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" CPUs next week, it's a good time for looking back to see how the Linux performance has evolved since the introduction of 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable "Cascade Lake" processors back in 2019. In this article is a look at the Xeon Platinum 8280 performance back at launch under both Ubuntu and Clear Linux compared to the current state of both distributions on the same hardware. There are also additional tests with those latest Linux images seeing how Ubuntu 21.04 is shaping up against Intel's own performance-optimized Clear Linux.

The PHP programming language's self-hosted Git server was compromised on Sunday and two malicious commits introduced...

Today's release of Linux 5.12-rc5 is "bigger than average" for this stage of kernel development and if that keeps up is likely to result in an extra week's worth of testing / an -rc8 release ahead of Linux 5.12 final, but it's too early to call at this stage...

While Godot receives much of the - well deserved - attention when it comes to open-source, cross-platform game engines, another deserving contender is the Flax Engine that just reached v1.0 last year after going public in 2018...

This month saw many new and updated test profiles for the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org for carrying out fully-automated, reproducible cross-platform benchmarking...

An interesting open-source project that has been brought up now a few times by Phoronix readers is Box86 for allowing 32-bit x86 programs to run unmodified on non-x86 Linux systems like ARM...

Two weeks ago Wine-Staging 6.4 was at nearly 700 patches while this weekend's release of Wine-Staging 6.5 lowers that to 661 patches thanks to a number of them being upstreamed...

Mesa developers are currently discussing the raising of the default compiler baseline for Mesa drivers moving forward, which would raise the base CPU requirements for these open-source Mesa drivers unless overriding the compiler flags. However, only the very oldest systems would be negatively impacted...

While Debian 11.0 is brewing and currently under a hard freeze, Debian 10.9 is out this weekend as the latest stable update to Debian 10 "Buster"...