Phoronix

One of the NVMe specification additions that was ratified this year is the "simple copy" command that allows for copying multiple contiguous ranges to a single destination. That simple copy operation is offloaded to the SSD controller. The Linux kernel support for NVMe simple copy is now being prepared...

Vulkan 1.2.164 is out today with the usual assortment of documentation fixes/clarifications plus two new extensions...

While most hardware vendors don't support Linux to the extent that any products with configurable RGB lighting controls will officially be supported, OpenRGB has been one of the successful community projects for allowing many different devices to enjoy configurable, cross-vendor. and open-source RGB lighting controls...

For those that may find their hands on an Intel Tiger Lake laptop this holiday season with the "Gen12" Xe Graphics, here are some Linux OpenGL/Vulkan benchmarks in varying driver configurations if you are left wondering whether it makes sense upgrading your kernel or Mesa for better performance...

The Webboot project has been in development now for more than one year as an easy means of booting Linux ISO images from the web. From this minimal boot environment users can configure their network connection and download a new ISO or use a pre-existing ISO. From there Webboot allows kexec'ing into that ISO for booting it up...

Back in October there were engineers from Tencent proposing DMEMFS as the "Direct Memory File-System" for Linux. DMEMFS is about reserving some RAM that is not managed by the kernel to avoid that overhead and in turn expose it directly to virtual machines in the cloud. Those initial DMEMFS kernel patches have now been updated by Tencent as they continue working to get this functionality into the Linux kernel...

With my testing of the Radeon RX 6800 series graphics cards last month it's been off Linux 5.10 (aside from when using the Radeon Software for Linux package driver) due to the Linux Git state often offering the best performance and features particularly for brand new hardware. As mentioned in the launch day article for the RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT, there was also an issue being encountered on Linux 5.9. Fortunately, that bug is indeed fixed with the recently released Linux 5.9.12 kernel...

The Valve-backed ACO shader compiler for Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver has been an enormous success story where this year it's been the default as opposed to AMD's officially supported AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end as pretty much for all major Linux gaming workloads is delivering superior performance. RADV+ACO performance has been so great that gamers have been eager to see the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver also adapted to see ACO as an option to the same AMDGPU LLVM back-end. Well, experimental patches have finally materialized...

While for a while the Linux 5.10 development was trending concerningly high on changes late in the cycle, 5.10-rc7 is out today and Linus Torvalds appears comfortable in planning to release the 5.10 kernel next weekend...

While the Debian 11 "Bullseye" freezes don't get started until January, the Debian Installer for Bullseye has been in alpha for just over a year. Today marks the third alpha release of the Debian Installer for Bullseye...

Given all the headaches and concerns from the early days of UEFI SecureBoot, for longtime Linux users hearing Microsoft is working on another firmware-level standard in the name of security may raise concerns... Microsoft in conjunction with Intel has been spearheading the Platform Runtime Mechanism (PRM) that is about moving more code out of the System Management Mode (SMM) and executing it within the OS/VMM context. PRM remains a work-in-progress but the Windows support is already ready within Windows Insiders builds while the Linux support will come after the ACPI specification around it has been finalized...

Following last month's Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 Milestone 1 development release that brought many improvements to our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software a second development release is now available...

One of the surprises this year in the Linux kernel world was Paragon Software wanting to upstream their "NTFS3" kernel driver that supports read-write operations on Microsoft NTFS file-systems and is much more full-featured than the existing read-focused NTFS kernel driver or the user-space NTFS FUSE driver. The driver hasn't yet been mainlined but continues to be updated in preparing for that milestone...

Dell's Linux engineers continue working on improving the Linux kernel's handling around S0ix ACPI sub-states for greater energy savings...

Better support for Microsoft Surface laptops on Linux is slowly coming to the mainline kernel...

PureLiFi, one of the leaders when it comes to Li-Fi for high-speed, light-based wireless technology, has been spending the past few months bringing up their open-source Linux driver to the mainline kernel for their devices...

Well before Intel bought out AI startup Habana Labs this company with their compelling AI training and inference accelerators has been maintaining an open-source kernel driver in the Linux kernel. That has fortunately continued under Intel's ownership to no surprise and coming up with the Linux 5.11 cycle are more improvements to this accelerator driver for both the Gaudi AI Training and Goya AI Inference products...

After a long run and being one of the early boutique Linux PC vendors, California-based laptop/desktop/server vendor ZaReason is the latest casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic...

Debian 11 is starting its release dance next month with the initial transition and essentials freeze while the actual stable release should make it out later in the year. For now Debian 10 remains the current stable series and this weekend marks the debut of Debian GNU/Linux 10.7...

Coming to the Linux 5.11 is the Auxiliary Bus infrastructure that allows creating an auxiliary device and binding an auxiliary driver to it. This is for a new core driver feature around increasingly complex devices that rely upon several drivers for support/operation...

Earlier this week I looked at the Spectre mitigation performance impact on AMD Zen+ / Zen 2 / Zen 3 processors given the recent launch of the Ryzen 5000 series and those newest CPUs still requiring some mitigation handling. Questions were raised about the Spectre mitigation handling on Windows, so I ran some quick tests there as I happened to have a Windows 10 install on the Ryzen 9 5900X test box at the moment for some unrelated Windows vs. Linux gaming...

A few days ago AMD finally sent out the initial AMD Zen 3 "znver3" support to the GCC compiler with the LLVM Clang support to follow. That initial "-march=znver3" targeting support has now been merged for GCC 11...

Following yesterday's release of Wine 6.0-RC1 that is kicking off the release process for this annual release of Wine, the Wine-Staging experimental/testing blend of Wine is also updated...

Wasmer is one of the leading software solutions aiming to bring WebAssembly (WASM) to the desktop rather than largely isolated to the web browser as is the case now. Wasmer aims to allow WASM programs anywhere and on any client while quickly closing in on its 1.0 release...

KDE developers have been busy so far in December making improvements from seemingly never-ending Wayland improvements to new features like easier support for accented character input without having to remember key sequences or changing your keyboard layout...

While the Linux kernel has supported Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR) for a decade and a half in varying forms, it hasn't been supported for all hardware targets. Only in 2021 is the mainline Linux kernel seeing KASLR working for the MIPS-based Loongson64 platform...

As expected, the first release candidate of Wine 6.0 is now available for testing for this annual update to Wine for running Windows programs and games on Linux and other platforms...

Just in time for any holiday Raspberry Pi purchases, an updated Raspberry Pi OS is available today for the Debian-based Linux distribution optimized for these budget ARM SBCs...

Google today is announcing the open-sourcing of Atheris, a Python fuzzer they developed internally for automatically finding bugs within Python code and native extensions...

Last week I provided some benchmarks looking at the IBM POWER9 mitigation for the L1 data cache needing to be flushed upon entering the kernel and on user accesses due to a recently disclosed vulnerability. POWER9 allows speculatively operating on validated data in the L1 cache, but when it comes to incompletely validated data paired with other side channels it could lead to local users potentially obtaining improper access to data in the L1 data cache. When benchmarking the impact on a POWER9 4c/16t CPU the overall impact was fairly modest while since then I fired up some benchmarks as well on a large POWER9 server with 44 cores / 176 threads to see the performance impact of this default Linux kernel change.

For the "Video Core Next 2" hardware like Navi as well as Renoir APUs, HEVC "sample adaptive offset" support has landed in Mesa 21.0...

Pacman, the excellent package manager on Arch Linux, is working on becoming even more compelling with the in-development Pacman 6.0...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved a fresh batch of changes this week for Fedora 34 that is due out next spring...

In addition to AMD Zen 1/2/3 PowerCap RAPL support coming for the Linux 5.11 kernel, the hwmon-next Git branch has also queued initial support for Zen 3 processors within the AMD_Energy driver...

The Linux kernel's input subsystem is gaining a new "inhibited" property feature as a policy to temporarily block input from given devices, including not using any event from them as a possible wake-up source...

Ever since AMD has been on a stellar trajectory with their hardware, users have been begging System76 to release an AMD Linux laptop... That's now finally coming with their upcoming Pangolin launch...

Mesa 20.3 has been released as the Q4'2020 open-source graphics driver update, primarily around providing OpenGL and Vulkan support on the likes of Intel and AMD Radeon graphics along with the reverse-engineered Nouveau support, many smaller drivers especially in the embedded space, and the growing list of CPU-based implementations and other translation efforts...

Following last month's release of the Ryzen 5000 "Zen 3" processors, AMD has now begun publishing their official compiler support for this extremely compelling processor family...

While we are still waiting to see what AMD might do for returning to open-source AGESA or better supporting Coreboot and the like, they are making some inroads with open-source firmware support -- beyond the context of Chromebooks where they continue to engage due to Google's engineering requirements. AMD is working to "align with the industry direction of open-source firmware stacks" with their initial focus being on open-source OpenBMC firmware support for their server platforms...

Manjaro 20.2 is now available as the latest stable version of this Arch Linux derived distribution focused on providing a pleasant and easy-to-use desktop experience...

The Khronos Group's glTF specification that is a transmission format for 3D scenes and models continues picking up more impressive capabilities as its adoption by a growing range of software packages continue...

It was just in September that the C++20 standards draft was approved as a major update to the programming language over C++17. While compilers like GCC and LLVM Clang are still completing all of the changes for C++20 support, Clang is already moving ahead and has added support for the "-std=c++2b" option as it begins the endeavor of staging changes likely for C++23...

The BUS1 kernel code for providing an in-kernel, capability-based IPC mechanism hasn't seen much (or any?) activity in well over a year but at least the Dbus-Broker project continues ahead. Dbus-Broker continues ahead as this D-Bus compatible implementation focused on correctness while being optimized for performance...

In addition to OpenZFS 2.0 releasing and Bcachefs hitting up more performance optimizations, some further next-gen Linux storage news is Red Hat's Stratis Storage 2.3 being released...

POCL as the "Portable Computing Language" that implements OpenCL and allows it to function atop CPUs as well as CUDA-enabled NVIDIA GPUs, HSA-supported AMD GPUs, and other possible back-ends, is preparing for a new feature release...

While we have been looking out for Radeon ROCm 4.0 that was announced back at SC20 as well as an updated ROCm for providing the RDNA2 compute support only found currently in their packaged RX 6800 series Linux driver, ROCm 3.10 arrived on Wednesday as an unexpected twist...

In working towards the March release of GNOME 40, the Mutter compositor / window manager is out today with its 40 Alpha release...

For those wondering what the current cost is to the default Spectre mitigation protections on the new AMD Ryzen 5000 series "Zen 3" processors, here are a set of performance tests looking at that overhead with the still relevant mitigations applied by default and then if forcing them off. The Zen 3 mitigation overhead was compared then to similar AMD Zen 2 and Zen+ processors.

The Syscall User Dispatch support looks like it should be mainlined for the Linux 5.11 kernel. This functionality is important for modern Windows games running on Linux under Wine / Proton...

DXVK 1.7.3 is out as the latest stable update to this project implementing the Direct3D APIs atop Vulkan for accelerating the Linux gaming experience...