Phoronix

Another round of Intel graphics driver changes were submitted last week to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of next month's Linux 5.11 merge window...

AMDVLK 2020.Q4.4 is out this morning as the newest source snapshot of this official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver...

The Linux kernel's stateless video decoder interface is used for video decoding where no state needs to be kept between processed video frames and allows for independently decoding each video frame. The H.264 stateless decode interface for the Linux kernel has been in the works for a few years and is now deemed ready and stable for dealing with modern stateless codecs...

While Intel is normally very punctual with their Linux hardware support and ensure that the full capabilities of the hardware are exposed under Linux, especially when it comes to server and workstation hardware, occasionally oversights are made...

It's still short of the full OpenCL 3.0 implementation, but more of the CL 3.0 enablement patches for Gallium3D's "Clover" OpenCL state tracker have now been merged into Mesa 20.1-devel..

As was expected, formal feature development is now over for GCC 11 and it's time for bug fixing...

AMD is marking the SC20 virtual conference this week by launching the AMD Instinct MI100 accelerator, which is based on their CDNA architecture. Also notable and coinciding with the MI100 launch is the Radeon Open eCosystem 4.0 (ROCm 4.0) Linux release.

But can't tell you yet how it performs.....

It's been a while since having any major break-through changes to talk about for GNOME contributed by Canonical's prolific developer Daniel Van Vugt, but he's been at the grind making progress on some big ticket items...

The work reported on back in October for RAPL PowerCap patches for AMD Zen CPUs from Zen 1 through Zen 3 are set to arrive with Linux 5.11 in early 2021...

Longtime Linux users still likely cringe when hearing "Poulsbo" as Intel's first-generation Atom processors that featured "GMA 500" graphics that were based on Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX IP. The Linux driver support was just awful and now as we prepare for 2021 the Intel Linux kernel driver might just drop its 2D acceleration support for Poulsbo and the short-lived Moorestown platform...

Traditionally we should be past the half-way point of the release cycle at the fourth weekly release candidate, but with today's RC4 release of Linux 5.10 the activity hasn't calmed down at all...

Google engineers are already working on WebP2 as the next-generation version of their still image file format...

Coming as a late addition to the Linux 5.10 kernel is Thunderbolt support for Tiger Lake H...

KDE Plasma Mobile continues working its way into increasing polished form and with deployments on the likes of the PinePhone have shown it can be quite a capable open-source mobile Linux contender...

For those looking to experiment with some BSD desktop operating systems this weekend, FreeBSD-based MidnightBSD 2.0 is out along with NetBSD-based os108 9.1...

The open-source, cross-platform LuxCoreRender physically based renderer is closing in on its version 2.5 release and most noticeable is supporting NVIDIA's OptiX library for faster acceleration on NVIDIA RTX GPUs...

Stemming from a GRUB bootloader inquiry and discussion that started over one year ago, a new specification is being proposed for possible adoption by the Linux kernel in being able to pass bootloader or system firmware logs to the operating system kernel for in turn exposing them to user-space...

Fedora Media Writer is the project's cross-platform utility for deploying Fedora install images to USB drives in an easy-to-user manner and for selecting from the various Fedora spins. One of Red Hat's engineers has recently been working on some modernization improvements to this Fedora image writer...

The 2020 Linux App Summit just concluded as a conference focused on the Linux user-space/applications. Given the pandemic, it was a virtual conference and the video recordings are now available...

Four years ago I chronicled building a massive L-shaped desk for a better workflow, more monitors and space. For those that may be wanting to procure a new computer desk if you are working from home or eyeing L-shaped desk options, here is a new build I recently finished up as an improvement over my original design

Back during the summer LLVM developers began devising plans for a new default branch name in Git for fostering the development of the open-source compiler stack. Like a growing number of open-source software projects, they have been working to move away from Git's current default of "master" as the main development branch. Beginning next month, that should now be a reality...

It's been another busy week of bug fixing in the KDE space along with other feature work, including on the Plasma Wayland front...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers have begun preparing support for a new feature previously not talked about publicly: Intel PXP or the "Protected Xe Path"...

For the Supercomputing SC20 week there is the release of the OpenMP 5.1 specification with some exciting additions...

The newly-opened Mesa 21.0 development window has merged support for EGL_EXT_platform_xcb...

In time for the weekend Linux gamers is an updated Proton release from Valve and CodeWeavers for powering Steam Play to enjoy the latest Windows games on Linux...

"The road to get Mageia 8 is winding, slow but steady," begins the project's latest status update...

Back in September Firefox Nightly enabled the JavaScript "Warp" code for SpiderMonkey and now for next week's Firefox 83.0 release it is remaining on by default for this web browser update...

Over the past week we have published our Linux performance reviews of the Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 7 5800X, and Ryzen 9 5900X + 5950X "Zen 3" processors. For as much data that has been available in those reviews, here is even more data accumulating thanks to the open-source Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. Thousands of data points are building up for these very exciting AMD Zen 3 desktop processors...

Oracle has released Oracle Linux 8 Update 3 as the newest version of their RHEL8-based operating system...

Red Hat engineers are working on a "big block mode" for the VirtIO-MEM code and could land for the Linux 5.11 cycle...

The long-standing patches by Bas Nieuwenhuizen on implementing DMA-BUF modifier support for the RadeonSI code within Mesa has now been merged for next quarter's Mesa 21.0 feature release...

A new Linux I/O scheduler has been proposed that is optimized for batching such as for MMC and TCP-based/remote storage...

A late notable change for the Linux 5.10 kernel that was merged today as a "fix" is DPTF support for Intel Alder Lake hardware...

Just one week after OpenZFS 2.0-RC5, a sixth release candidate is now available for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently geared for Linux and FreeBSD systems...

After announcing Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 back in March as their modified kernel based currently on the Linux 5.4 source tree while adding and back-porting extra features, UEK R6U1 was released today as their first major update to this kernel that can be found on the likes of Oracle Linux and powering the Oracle Cloud...

Over the past week we have looked at the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X Linux performance as well as that of the lower-end -- but still very powerful -- Ryzen 5 5600X. Today we are striking in the middle in looking at the last Zen 3 CPU model for the moment: the Ryzen 7 5800X. The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X is a $449 USD processor that is packing eight cores / sixteen threads, a 3.8GHz base clock. 4.7GHz boost clock, 32MB L3 cache, and has a 105 Watt TDP.

For those wondering the outcome of last month's Debian 11 "Bullseye" artwork voting, a new default theme for this 2021 GNU/Linux distribution release has been decided...

The Translation Table Maps (TTM) video memory management code used within the Linux kernel by DRM drivers such as Nouveau and Radeon/AMDGPU is seeing some improvements with the forthcoming Linux 5.11 kernel cycle...

Following last month's systemd 247-RC1 release that was headlined by the systemd-oomd service being merged for better low memory / out-of-memory handling and many other changes, a second release candidate is now available...

Fedora stakeholders and the folks at Red Hat have been discussing the idea of having a "lightly maintained" package repository (or some RPM metadata otherwise to indicate such light maintenance) for packages that are either very new, not receiving much packaging attention, or simply used as a build dependency for other packages...

PAPPL as the printer application framework created by the CUPS founder is approaching the v1.0 release...

Just a day after the CXL 2.0 specification was published, the initial Linux kernel support for this updated Compute Express Link revision was sent out for review...

Following the news today of Intel sharing ~60% of their GPU driver code-base between Windows and Linux and working to bring the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) to Mesa in 2021, not everyone is enthusiastic about those prospects...

Adding to the growing list of changes for the next FFmpeg release is now AV1 video decoding with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards...

Intel today is announcing their Server GPU for the data center based on their Xe-LP microarchitecture with an initial focus on high-density, low-latency Android cloud gaming and media streaming. For as exciting as the Intel Server GPU is, some exciting Intel Linux graphics driver details were also disclosed.

AMD and IBM are this morning announcing a multi-year, joint development agreement focused on "building upon open-source software, open standards, and open system architectures to drive Confidential Computing in the cloud and support a broad range of accelerators across high-performance computing (HPC), and enterprise critical capabilities such as virtualization and encryption."..

GCC 11 feature development is ending very shortly but landing in time are the patches last month for adding AVX-VNNI support...

Following the Mesa 20.3 branching on Monday and subsequent opening of Mesa 21.0 for development, the first release candidate of Mesa 20.3 is now available for testing...