Phoronix

As we have been expecting, as of a few minutes ago in Mesa 20.2-devel Git, the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver has enabled the Valve-backed ACO shader compiler by default rather than AMD's official AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end...

After covering the Linux patches for FSGSBASE for years, it's looking like Linux 5.9 will finally land the support for this CPU capability present since Ivy Bridge on the Intel side and more recently on AMD CPUs with Bulldozer and Zen. Here are benchmarks looking at some of the performance benefits the Linux FSGSBASE patches can provide for an Intel Xeon Cascade Lake Refresh server.

The Linux 5.9 kernel is slated to begin introducing new restrictions on allowing writes to CPU model specific registers (MSRs) from user-space...

While Intel has been providing daily snapshots of the oneAPI Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) open-source compiler, today marks the latest monthly feature compiler release to their cross-architecture language for direct programming that is based on C++ while leveraging SYCL, LLVM/Clang, and other open-source technologies for exploiting the potential of hardware from CPUs to GPUs and FPGAs...

Longtime KDE developer David Edmundson has issued a call for help in porting work for Plasma 6.0...

Intel's open-source Linux developers have got the Tiger Lake and Gen12 graphics support largely squared away at this point, but a few remaining features remain. One of the features new to Tigerlake/Gen12+ on the graphics side is HOBL, or "Hours of Battery Life", while the Linux support there is still being tidied up...

The first release candidate of the Sway 1.5 Wayland compositor is now available for testing that continues to be inspired by the i3 design while being at the forefront of Wayland capabilities...

While Mesa 20.2 is the exciting development version in the works for release next quarter, those of you on the current Mesa 20.1 series now have the second point release available...

A Google engineer has posted patches for review so that the mainline Linux kernel can be built with Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) by the LLVM Clang code compiler...

Taking place this week is the virtual Perl + Raku "Conference in the Cloud" as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic causing the event to go virtual. A big announcement out of it is Perl 7...

Flatpak 1.8 stable is out today as this leading open-source Linux application sandboxing and distribution technology...

Earlier this month a NVIDIA 450 Linux beta driver popped out as part of the CUDA 11.0 release candidate. Today though is the first public and generally available NVIDIA 450 series Linux driver beta for all users...

Earlier this month was a look at the Windows 10 May 2020 Update performance for WSL/WSL2 with many benchmarks and testing on an Intel Core i9 10900K. Here is a follow-up round of testing this time with HEDT performance in the form of running an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X and running even more benchmarks up to 172 in total for this comparison of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS against WSL and WSL2 performance on this newest Microsoft Windows 10 update.

As of today in Mesa 20.2-devel Git, the Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) with the ACO back-end is now effectively at feature-parity to the default AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end...

Building off Phoronix Test Suite 9.8 M1 from the start of June, the second development "milestone" release is now available for our cross-platform, open-source automated benchmarking software...

AMDVLK 2020.Q2.5 is out today as the newest snapshot of this open-source official AMD Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems...

It should hardly come as a surprise if you regularly follow the Mesa quarterly release cadence for these open-source Vulkan/OpenGL drivers, but a release schedule has now been committed for next quarter's Mesa 20.2...

Intel's P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for Linux systems has been seeing a number of refinements lately including some major changes like shifting towards the "Schedutil" scheduler utilization governor by default. Further tuning with new/changed knobs is also on the way for giving users more control over their CPU power / performance preferences...

Microsoft has posted their initial patch implementing a Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for the synthetic video device exposed by their Hyper-V virtualization stack...

One of many high profile features that didn't make it in time for Linux 5.8 is FGKASLR, Function Granular Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization...

At the start of 2020 well known KDE developer Nate Graham who publishes the weekly status reports on their desktop environment posted a 2020 KDE roadmap of sorts. Now being half-way through the year, here is a look at how that roadmap is looking with what items have been completed, what is still being tackled, and what is looking less likely to be accomplished...

NVIDIA today released a new Vulkan beta driver for Linux systems at version 440.66.17...

Back in March Ampere Computing detailed their next-gen Altra ARM-based server CPU with up to 80 cores per socket. Today the company is revealing more roadmap details including the forthcoming Altra Max that offers 128 cores per socket.

Dell is announcing this morning that their latest XPS Developer Edition laptops are beginning to ship with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS as the latest version of the popular desktop Linux distribution...

Mesa's TURNIP Vulkan driver for open-source Qualcomm Adreno support took another big step forward this week with the mainlining of tessellation shader support...

A new tunable for the RADV driver is to disable bounds checking for dynamic buffer descriptors. The initial beneficiary of this driver workaround is for satisfying the Path of Exile role playing game running under Wine / Proton (Steam Play)...

It wasn't even twenty four hours ago that Apple disclosed their plans for transitioning to in-house chips for future laptops and desktops and with that macOS 11. Already we are seeing the first of the LLVM compiler patches being upstreamed in preparing for the wild new Apple future...

Intel has landed their Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver support for their "DG1" discrete graphics card!..

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has renewed their attacks against the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and software patents in general, this time in relation to the COVID-19 / coronavirus crisis...

Apple finally confirmed the log-running rumor that their future laptops and desktop computers will be using in-house silicon with their custom designed Arm-based chips...

The newest TOP500 supercomputer list was published today. The newest TOP500 list includes more positions for AMD EPYC supercomputers but to some surprise the Arm-based Fujitsu A64FX-powered supercomputer has topped the list...

Going back to the end of 2018 was initial open-source "Nouveau" driver work on RTX 2000 / Turing GPUs as of Linux 5.0. But due to the lack of signed firmware images at the time, there was no actual hardware acceleration but just display/modesetting. The accelerated Turing support has come together recent so now here are benchmarks showing the open-source GeForce RTX 2060 and RTX 2080 performance of this open-source driver compared to the proprietary official driver.

LibreOffice 7.0 is aiming for release in early August but for that release to be a success they need help in testing...

While GNOME 3.0 didn't debut until early 2011, GNOME 3.0 and GNOME Shell have now been in development for a decade. While GNOME Shell has come a long way over the past ten years, the UI/UX folks are still eyeing further enhancements to this widely used Linux desktop...

It turns out for the GNOME 3.34 and 3.36 series, Mutter's window rendering culling code was broken and that led to extra rendering of windows not even visible... A fix is in the works and can lead to the performance doubling or more...

New OmniOS Community Edition releases for this open-source Solaris/Illumos-based operating system are now available that principally bring updated Intel CPU microcode for mitigating the CrossTalk / SRBDS vulnerability...

After announcing the NVIDIA Ampere architecture at last month's virtual keynote, beginning today the NVIDIA A100 PCI Express accelerator is now shipping in GPU compute servers...

Linus Torvalds as the father of the Linux kernel marked Father's Day 2020 with the release of Linux 5.8-rc2, right on schedule following last week's big 5.8-rc1 kernel with this cycle being one of the largest ever for this open-source kernel...

Following WireGuard being merged into Linux 5.6, the attention turned in recent months by WireGuard developers onto seeing their kernel port upstreamed in OpenBSD. As of this weekend, the WireGuard upstreaming in OpenBSD is their latest accomplishment...

Perl is out this weekend with Perl 5.32 as the latest version of this interpreted programming language...

For those trying to carry out AV1 video decoding on a 32-bit Arm environment, the new dav1d 0.7.1 decoder should be a heck of a lot faster...

More than one month ago we reported on AMDGPU patches proposed for better hot unplug handling, mainly for the use-case of external GPU solutions if disconnecting them while the system is still running to avoid a range of show-stopping problems. It's been a quiet few weeks but that work has now seen a new revision...

There have been a few Vulkan spec updates without any new extensions introduced but this weekend's Vulkan 1.2.145 revision does bring new functionality...

In addition to changing the acceptable language within the LLVM project, another topic this week sure to be interesting is on the establishing of an "incubator" process similar to that of Apache Incubator projects...

A few days ago I mentioned that it looked like the FSGSBASE patches could finally land for Linux 5.9 and indeed this performance-sensitive x86_64 feature is on track for premiering the next kernel cycle. But additional testing is encouraged...

Two weeks after ROCm 3.5, the AMD Radeon team has now issued a patch update to this Radeon Open Compute stack...

The Raspberry Pi 1 through Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and even the Raspberry Pi Zero can now see Vulkan support via a new unofficial "RPi-VK-Driver" that is offering even better performance than the Broadcom OpenGL driver...

The Pascal programming language is 50 years old this year. The Free Pascal Compiler for Pascal / Object Pascal is out with version 3.2 to celebrate, five years since FPC's previous 3.0 stable series. Somewhat amusing. this FPC 3.2 compiler update adds a Windows 16-bit target support for building Pascal code for Windows 3.0+...

KDE developers continue making much progress on enhancing their desktop through this pandemic and the nice summer weather...

Wine-Staging has traditionally been around 800~850 patches over upstream while with Wine-Staging 5.11 this experimental/testing flavor of Wine has ticked down to just a 702 patch delta...