Phoronix

Since the Linux 5.13 merge window began settling down and especially now with 5.13-rc1 out the door, I've been ramping up performance testing of the Linux 5.13 kernel. So far I've been seeing one area where the kernel is regression and stems from the scheduler changes this cycle...

Intel today is announcing their 11th Gen Core H-Series "Tiger Lake H" mobile processors that features SKUs clocking up to a 5.0GHz turbo frequency and twenty lanes of PCI Express Gen 4...

With Linux 5.13 AMD began enabling ASPM by default in the AMDGPU DRM driver for Navi 1x, Vega, and Polaris GPUs. Looking ahead to potentially 5.14, AMD appears to be ready to flip on this power-savings feature for the Radeon RX 6000 series (Navi 2x) along with older pre-Polaris GPUs too...

Ahead of this week's LibreOffice 7.2 Alpha and the feature freeze / branching next month, initial GTK4 toolkit support code has begun landing in this open-source office suite...

eBPF has been one of the greatest Linux kernel innovations of the past decade and now Microsoft has decided to bring this "revolutionary technology" to Windows Server and Windows 10...

The Daemon engine that has been in development for many years as part of the Unvanquished open-source game project released their long-awaited 0.52 beta ahead of the game's next beta later in the week. Daemon was originally based on the open-source id Tech 3 game engine but in 2021 continues pushing ahead working on features like WebAssembly support and renderer enhancements...

Two weeks have passed since OpenZFS 2.1-rc4 while today a fifth release candidate was issued for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems...

It's been a half-year already since Coreboot 4.13 was released so out now is Coreboot 4.14 that is represented by over thirty six hundred new commits adding dozens of new motherboards now supported...

DragonFlyBSD 6.0 has officially launched today as the newest version of this popular BSD operating system...

Following the recent RTX 30 series Linux gaming benchmarks and RTX 30 compute comparison, I was curious how the Linux performance for the flagship GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card compares to the Windows 10 performance in various GPU compute workloads. Well, here are those benchmarks for those wondering about Vulkan / OpenCL / CUDA / OptiX compute performance between Windows and Linux with the very latest NVIDIA drivers.

The OpenPOWER Foundation today announced LibreBMC as a POWER-based, open-source BMC...

Today's Vulkan 1.2.178 specification update notes a rather peculiar vendor extension in the works: VK_NVX_binary_import...

AMD has published a set of patches refactoring their MCE kernel driver, making various machine check architecture (MCA) address translation updates in preparing for "future systems" while at the same time finally introducing Data Fabric 3 support for EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors and newer...

The Illumos project born out of the former Sun Microsystems OpenSolaris codebase has decided to end support for SPARC hardware...

Linus Torvalds just issued Linux 5.13-rc1 as a Mother's Day kernel test release that also marks the closure of the merge window for the cycle...

Following the two week merge window, feature development on the Linux 5.13 kernel is slated to end today with the release of Linux 5.13-rc1. Here is a look at some of the most interesting new features and improvements for this kernel that in turn should debut as stable around the end of June.

The Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) in cooperation with the Chinese openEuler Linux distribution have been working on their own project akin to Google Summer of Code and Outreachy for paying university-aged students to become involved in open-source software development...

Linux 5.10 as the latest Long Term Support release when announced was only going to be maintained until the end of 2022 but following enough companies stepping up to help with testing, Linux 5.10 LTS will now be maintained until the end of year 2026...

Oracle engineers have continued working on the "Maple Tree" data structure for the Linux kernel as an RCU-safe, range-based B-tree designed to make efficient use of modern processor caches...

In addition to work like Linux 5.13 addressing some network overhead caused by Retpolines, this next kernel's return trampoline implementation itself is seeing a simplification...

The Linux 5.13 kernel has initial support for dealing with SPI one-time programmable (OTP) flash memory regions...

This week happened to see new releases of two prominent open-source AV1 video encoders...

Support for the Loongson 2K1000 is finally mainline with the forthcoming Linux 5.13 kernel...

Outside of the i915 kernel graphics driver one of the areas Linux 5.13 is seeing more discrete graphics card bring-up work is within their PMT driver for enabling platform monitoring / telemetry support with this inaugural Intel PCIe graphics card...

The PowerPC architecture pull request for the Linux 5.13 cycle brings some improvements to its 32-bit support and other enhancements...

GIMP 2.99.6 is out today as the latest development release of this popular open-source image manipulation program...

KDE developers remain very active polishing up the KDE desktop and addressing various bugs ahead of next month's Plasma 5.22 feature release...

Wine 6.8 was just released as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot providing the latest support for running the latest Windows games and applications under Linux, macOS, and BSD systems...

Last month when carrying out tests of Windows 10 vs. Linux on the Intel Core i9 11900K "Rocket Lake" processor we were very surprised to see Windows 10 frankly performing so well compared to Ubuntu and picking up more wins than usual. That unexpectedly strong showing for Windows 10 might be due to Intel's P-State behavior with Rocket Lake or other power management tuning or there the lack of on Linux at this time. But it led me to wondering if the latest Windows 10 updates spelled out anything different on the AMD Ryzen side... So here are some benchmarks of the latest Microsoft Windows 10 against Ubuntu 21.04 on the same AMD Ryzen 9 5900X system.

Intel's open-source graphics driver developers volleyed an initial set of nearly 100 experimental patches working on GuC submission support as they work towards integrating the DRM scheduler into their graphics driver...

The FreeBSD project published their Q1 status report yesterday that outlines the progress they made over the past quarter on advancing this leading open-source BSD operating system...

The VFIO changes for the Linux 5.13 kernel aren't particularly exciting this cycle but one of the changes does raise some eyebrows with the VFIO NVIDIA NVLink2 driver being removed. This driver is being removed as it shouldn't have been even added in the first place for lack of an open-source client/user exercising it...

Earlier this year with v21.02 Alpha, 7-Zip added initial Linux support upstream at long last. Out this week is now version 21.02 alpha that continues to refine the Linux support while also now punctually publishing the source code too...

The input subsystem updates were sent in today for the Linux 5.13 kernel and include support for the Amazon (Luna) Game Controller...

Merged into LibreOffice yesterday is initial support for an EmScripten-based cross-build and compiling to WebAssembly (WASM) for in-browser execution or potentially running on the desktop in a portable manner with the likes of Wasmer...

Not only does Red Hat continue investing heavily in GCC and the GNU toolchain but it turns out they are ramping up their LLVM compiler talent as well...

From bringing up the PolarFire ICICLE SoC to adding support for KProbes, FORTIFY_SOURCE, and other new kernel features for the RISC-V architecture, the Linux 5.13 kernel changes are exciting for this open-source processor ISA...

Qt 6.1 is out today as the second major feature release to Qt6 following its stable introduction at the end of last year. Ahead of Qt 6.2 being the first planned Long-Term Support release later this year, Qt 6.1 brings more Qt5 modules over and other improvements in making Qt6 more viable...

Turnip is the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver aligned with the Freedreno effort for Qualcomm Adreno support. Turnip has been in fairly good shape but fixes and other improvements keep flowing in as new Vulkan games/apps continue to be tested on this open-source Adreno Vulkan driver...

With the in-development Linux 5.13 kernel there are some notable AMD Radeon driver additions. But with the 5.13 merge window set to close this weekend, an initial batch of post-feature-work fixes was sent in overnight...

GNUstep as the free software / GNU implementation of the Apple's Cocoa Objective-C frameworks is out with a new version...

Adding to the growing list of changes for Linux 5.13 is the UBIFS file-system now using Zstd for file-system compression by default...

The kernel's Device Mapper (DM) code with Linux 5.13 has some improvements worth mentioning this cycle...

Pyston 2.2 is out today as the latest version of this performant Python implementation. Separately, Facebook has introduced Cinder as a new incubator project providing a speedy Python JIT implementation...

Mesa 21.1 is available today as the latest quarterly feature release to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. There are many features to show with this new release and it even managed to release on-schedule...

For a project as large and complex as the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) one would reasonably have assumed that it would have setup continuous integration / continuous delivery support years ago for helping to ensure the reliability of this widely-used open-source compiler and the GNU Toolchain at large. But that's actually only happening now in 2021...

The LinuxBoot project that works to replace some portions of modern Linux server firmware with the Linux kernel and other open-source components has now integrated support for the convenient netboot.xyz project...

The release candidate of the upcoming Inkscape 1.1 open-source vector graphics editor is now available for testing...

Linux 5.13 is introducing the "intel_tcc_cooling" driver for helping to cool newer Intel mobile/desktop CPUs by down-clocking the processor cores when crossing a lower threshold than is set by default...

As an additional security measure for the Linux kernel, Intel engineers are exploring making kernel page tables read-only and to then only allow writing on a per-CPU basis when they need to be modified. This would be handled using the PKS functionality found with future Intel processors...