Phoronix

Out this weekend is Phoronix Test Suite 10.2-Harstad Milestone 1 as the first development snapshot of this next quarterly feature update to our cross-platform, open-source benchmarking software...

Within Intel's vast open-source software ecosystem and much of the attention being on oneAPI as their preferred programming model for developers these days and there being multiple different open-source Intel graphics compiler back-ends, one that is often forgotten about is the Intel C for Metal Compiler that on Friday saw a new release...

In addition to squaring away the Radeon RX 6000 series RDNA 2 support and promoting the Arcturus support for the new GPU found within the AMD MI100 accelerator, this month AMD open-source Linux driver developers have been devoting a fair amount of work towards power optimizations...

Ahead of the holidays the KDE development work is as busy as ever from Plasma 5.21 to its large desktop application set...

Google engineers have sent out their latest patches for allowing the mainline Linux kernel to be built with LLVM Clang link-time optimizations (LTO) for greater performance and possibly size benefits...

It's been seven years since the release of libX11 1.6.0 for this central X11 library while on Friday was replaced by the libX11 1.7 series. The release is primarily made up of fixes but leading to the version bump is a new API that allows for applications to recover from I/O error conditions rather than being forced to exit...

We should be getting near the end of the Wine 5.xx development releases with the timed Wine 6.0 release likely to come in early 2021, but for now Wine 5.22 is out with the latest feature work for running Windows programs and games on Linux and macOS...

Coreboot 4.13 is out today as the latest tagged version of this open-source firmware platform supporting a wide range of hardware...

For those curious about the hardware potential out of Apple's in-house M1 processor powering new Mac Book Pros and Mac Mini, for the past week we have been running benchmarks of this ARM-based processor and have a number of benchmarks to share today looking at how the performance compares to prior Intel-powered Macs along with the Rosetta 2.0 performance for running x86_64 binaries on ARMv8.

Xfce 4.16 had been aiming to release in October~November as part of their new timed release approach but that has now slipped into the December~January time-frame but today saw the availability of the second pre-release...

CVE-2020-4788 is now public and it's not good for IBM and their POWER9 processors... This new vulnerability means these IBM processors need to be flushing their L1 data cache between privilege boundaries, similar to other recent CPU nightmares...

Being sent in as a "fix" this week to the Linux 5.10 kernel is removing the experimental flag for the Arcturus GPU, days after AMD announced the MI100 accelerator at SC20...

Two months ago Qt 5.15.1 released with over 400 bug fixes and today the second point release of Qt 5.15 LTS is out with another nearly two hundred fixes...

Well this will be interesting to see what NVIDIA use-case pans out... NVIDIA engineers are working on a Vulkan extension for making use of RDMA memory...

The fallout should be minimal and hopefully not impact any Phoronix readers, but as Mesa rolls into 2021 it is looking to drop support for loading DRI1 graphics drivers...

This summer Intel disabled frame-buffer compression for Gen12 Tiger Lake graphics. While FBC helps conserve memory bandwidth and can be beneficial to power-savings, under-run issues and related problems resorted Intel to disabling this common feature for Tiger Lake...

Earlier this year we reported on Linux kernel work for better handling Windows games/apps that make system call instructions that bypass the Windows API. Directly making the system calls without going through the WinAPI has become an increasingly common occurrence for modern Windows games, likely as part of their Digital Rights Management schemes. Syscall User Dispatch is now the latest take on that effort...

The second release candidate of Mesa 20.3 is now available for testing ahead of its likely stable debut in early December...

Announced during the summer was Intel's Maple Ridge controller in the form of the Intel JHL8540 / JHL8340 chips as their first discrete Thunderbolt / USB4 controllers. Linux support for the Intel Maple Ridge controller is now on the way...

The last piece of the puzzle to the open-source AMD Radeon RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT driver support is now upstream in its respective location...

While it was just two days ago that AMDVLK 2020.Q4.4 was released, AMD has made good on their word to provide punctual AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver support for their new RDNA 2 "Big Navi" graphics cards and that has resulted in a new AMDVLK release...

Mir 2.2 is out this morning as the newest update to this Wayland compositor and display server...

The Inclusive Naming Initiative has been formed by various industry players to make "consistent, responsible choices to remove harmful language" from software...

In addition to AMD and Xilinx bringing ROCm to FPGAs, another interesting open-source/Linux milestone for the company being acquired by AMD is their publishing of the AI Engine open-source kernel driver with ambitions for upstreaming it...

Google engineer Joel Fernandes sent out the ninth version of their "core scheduling" patches for the Linux kernel that allows for allowing only trusted tasks to run concurrently on the same CPU core -- in cases where Hyper Threading is involved to safeguard the system against the possible security exploits...

Now here is some darn interesting software news from SC20... AMD, which is in the process of acquiring Xilinx, is bringing the Radeon Open eCosystem "ROCm" stack to Xilinx hardware...

While Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) support wasn't a focus for the initial Radeon RX 5000 "Navi" graphics cards by AMD engineers, that is fortunately changing for both the RX 5000/6000 series moving forward. With the Radeon RX 6800 series there is at-launch support available with working OpenCL provided by the "ROCr" (runtime) path in their packaged driver. Now that we have looked at the Radeon RX 6800 Linux gaming performance here are some initial OpenCL compute benchmarks between NVIDIA and AMD Radeon on Linux.

Radeon Software for Linux 20.45 is now available as the Radeon RX 6800 series launch driver for Linux systems...

Today is the big day: Big Navi is shipping! This also means we can talk at length finally about the Linux support and performance for the Radeon RX 6800 series and how well they perform for Linux gaming. Here is a look at the Linux driver state for these initial RDNA 2 graphics cards and their performance capabilities with the multiple different open-source driver stacks available.

The Qt Company has released their public beta of the forthcoming Qt Design Studio 2.0, their software for quickly and easily designing user interfaces with an emphasis on UI design for non-programmers...

More improvements are coming to Mesa 21.0 following last week's merging of the Direct3D 12 Gallium3D driver that is being used by Microsoft for supporting OpenGL/OpenCL-on-Direct3D 12...

For those trying to setup their Linux systems to be "Big Navi"-ready if purchasing one of the new graphics cards today, some more last minute fixes have landed within Mesa...

GraalVM continues its quest as the virtual machine not only supporting Java but also additional languages and execution modes with a focus on stellar performance and speedy startups. GraalVM CE 20.3 was released on Tuesday as the latest for this open-source package supporting Java, Node.js, an LLVM runtime, and more...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved the recent proposal for introducing a new spin that features the KDE Plasma desktop for 64-bit ARM (AArch64)...

Joshua Ashton, known for his work with Valve on D9VK and then DXVK for mapping Direct3D on top of Vulkan, is making more strides in their Direct3D 12 effort with VKD3D-Proton...

With Firefox 83 released, like clock-work Mozilla has released the beta of Firefox 84...

One day ahead of the Radeon RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT, AMD has merged support for AV1 decode support on these RDNA2 GPUs into Mesa...

In addition to the release of Firefox 83 today (along with word Servo is moving to the Linux Foundation), over in Google land they have shipped Chrome 87...

In soliciting for year-end donations, the GNOME Foundation shares some of how they plan to use generated funds over the next years...

Ever since the mass layoffs at Mozilla earlier this year and some Mozilla projects in jeopardy many have been wondering: what about Servo? Well, today it's heading off to the Linux Foundation...

Firefox 83.0 is now shipping as a notable update to the Mozilla web browser and this time around are some exciting changes...

Intel's SGX enclaves support patches for the Linux kernel have been through 40+ rounds of review at this point over the past many months as they try to get this security feature into the mainline Linux kernel. But SGX isn't the only Intel security feature that's been having a long process for mainlining: Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) is in a similar boat...

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.....