Phoronix

Intel engineers have been working on "Vdmabuf" as a VirtIO-based DMA-BUF driver for the Linux kernel. This driver is intended for their growing multi-GPU use-cases and also in cases of GPU virtualization where wanting to transfer contents seamlessly to the host for display purposes...

On top of Godot 4.0 having a Vulkan renderer, native Wayland bits, and other graphics improvements, it's also seeing significant CPU and GPU optimizations...

Intel's Embree open-source ray-tracing library has won an Academy Award in the form of a Scientific and Technical Achievement Award...

Lenovo continues working on a number of contributions to the upstream kernel thanks to their work on preloading various Linux distributions on a number of different devices. In cooperation with Red Hat engineers over the past year we have seen a lot of Lenovo related improvements and the latest set to come with the Linux 5.12 cycle is ACPI platform profile support for their laptops...

Fedora 34 is planning to switch to using Intel's modern Sound Open Firmware audio driver as it should be in good shape now and superior to the existing sound driver. This is ahead of Intel likely switching to the Intel SOF driver code path by default in the upstream kernel once this change has first been vetted by Fedora users...

Given the daily progress and changes made to the open-source AMDGPU Linux kernel driver and the Mesa drivers providing the open-source OpenGL (RadeonSI) and Vulkan (RADV) support, here is a look at how the Radeon RX 6800 series performance is currently for the latest Linux graphics driver code compared to the performance seen back on the November launch day for the Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT graphics cards.

Canonical today is shipping Ubuntu Core 20 as their minimal, containerized version of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS focused on IoT and embedded uses...

Mesa 21.1 has merged a common dispatch framework for use by Vulkan drivers to allow for better code sharing and the possibility of some Vulkan extensions to be more easily supported across all drivers...

Released last month was Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 while now it's been succeeded by Phoronix Test Suite 10.2.1 as a point release to this quarter's stable series...

For the better part of a year now we've seen patches for Intel's kernel graphics driver working on fair low-latency scheduling that in part has been inspired by the design of BFS/MuQSS. While it's too late for seeing the work land with Linux 5.12, the latest batch of 57 patches were sent out this week...

A combination of new year updates and updating benchmarks ahead of Ice Lake Xeon / Rocket Lake / Ryzen 5000 series mobile / EPYC 7003 Milan has led to a number of new and updated test profiles being available via the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org...

The user interface changes for GNOME 40 are quickly nearing the finish line with just two weeks to go until the UI freeze...

With the start of the new month comes the Steam Survey figures out of Valve for the month prior. For January 2021 there is an increase in the Linux gaming percentage as it gets back to flirting with the 1% mark...

Microsoft's Extensible Storage Engine that has been in use for more than a quarter century and present since Windows NT 3.51 and Microsoft Exchange 4.0 is now open-source...

OpenZFS 2.0.2 is out today as the latest version of this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently supported on Linux and FreeBSD systems...

Canonical has been working on developing a new desktop installer built around Google's Flutter toolkit and they aim to introduce it later this year in Ubuntu 21.10...

The GNU C Library 2.33 release is out today as expected. Exciting with this libc update is HWCAPS in making it easier to load optimized libraries for modern CPUs...

With Ubuntu 21.04 planning to use Wayland by default with GNOME aside from when running on NVIDIA graphics, you may be wondering about the current performance delta between running GNOME Shell on the X.Org session for Linux gaming versus its quite solid Wayland support. Or, rather, in the case of most games still - piped through XWayland. Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the GNOME X.Org vs. Wayland performance on Ubuntu with the Radeon RX 6800 XT.

While Qt 6.0 wasn't even released a full two months ago, the Qt 6.1 feature freeze went into effect this morning in trying to get out this next update sooner...

In the works over the past year for the GNOME desktop environment is dynamic triple buffering when the GPU is running behind in rendering the desktop. In doing so, the GPU utilization should increase and the GPU clock frequencies in turn should ramp up to meet the demand - thereby ideally getting the rendering back on track if prior frames were running late. That triple buffering support has been re-based to the GNOME 40 code-base but still is unlikely to land until the next cycle with GNOME 42...

Two years ago patches were posted in working on Wine support for IBM POWER / OpenPOWER hardware. The aim with that enablement has been to run Windows programs on POWER 64-bit hardware via Wine with the related "Hangover" project for handling the cross-architecture difference. The Wine patches for PPC64 have now been revived with hopes of mainlining them now that Wine 6.0 has passed...

For those wondering how say AVX heavy a particular program is being benchmarked or if a given program/benchmark supports making use of new instruction set extensions such as Vector AES or forthcoming AVX VNNI or AMX, the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org can now provide that insight on a per-test basis with common CPU instruction set extensions...

From Linux 5.11 adventures to the AMD CES keynote to many open-source software advancements, there was a lot of activity during the month of January to take one's mind off the pandemic...

Linux 5.11-rc6 is out ahead of the stable release of Linux 5.11 coming in February...

Taiwins debuted last year as a compact Wayland compositor and focused on being modular with Wayland scripting support. Up to now Taiwins relied upon the WLROOTS effort born out of the Sway project for doing much of the Wayland heavy-lifting but the developer has now replaced it with its own Wayland support library...

Immediately following the CXL 2.0 specification being made public in November, Intel developers began posting Linux enablement patches for CXL 2.0 with an initial focus on type-3 memory device support. It's looking like that CXL 2.0 enablement work is now closer to being mainlined in the Linux kernel...

Well known AMD open-source driver developer Marek Olšák continues squeezing Mesa for every bit of possible performance, which in recent months has been with a seemingly workstation focus...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 6.1 as the first development snapshot of the new series, Wine-Staging is out this morning with an updated release...

While it's sign-up time for open-source organizations hoping to participate in this year's Google Summer of Code, GSoC 2021 changes in the name of the pandemic are leading some organizations to debate whether it's still being involved with this student coding effort...

Bareflank is an open-source Linux hypervisor in development for several years and written around modern C++11/C++14 code and other modern functionality compared to longstanding virtualization hypervisors. Over the past few years it's been picking up many new features while this week Bareflank 2.1 released prior to a major overhaul coming with Bareflank 3.0 that will radically change the codebase...

Last year the Linux kernel began tightening up the ability to write to select CPU MSRs from user-space. That restricting of user-space access to select registers was done in the name of security as well as not wanting user-space to accidentally or maliciously poke some MSRs that could cause problems with kernel behavior. Now in kernel space there are some yet-to-be-merged patches that would place some new restrictions on kernel modules around poking certain registers or using select CPU instructions...

While the AMD Linux graphics driver for some time has been supporting FreeSync over DisplayPort connections, FreeSync displays connected via HDMI have not been supported. But now we are finally seeing the start of patches at least as far as HDMI pre-v2.1 support is concerned...

Added to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) last year was an integrated static analyzer via the "-fanalyzer" option for spotting potential code issues. For GCC 10 this integrated static analyzer operating off GCC's GIMPLE was in good shape for catching various bugs while for the upcoming GCC 11 it is now much more capable...

The Linux-friendly folks at OnLogic (nee Logic Supply) have launched a line of fanless, industrial-grade computers powered by Intel's Elkhart Lake...

As part of work on GNOME 40, the GNOME Shell is seeing some big refinements like shifting of its workspaces to be horizontally laid out, which has now been merged...

KDE Plasma 5.21 Beta released last week while the official Plasma 5.21 stable release is slated for 16 February. As such, KDE developers have been very busy working on fixes for this big desktop update bringing better Wayland support and other enhancements and new features...

For those continuing to rely on SATA 3.0 storage, last week Samsung introduced the 870 EVO as their latest solid-state drive in the very successful EVO line-up. For those curious about the Linux performance of the Samsung 870 EVO or wanting to run your own side-by-side benchmarks against the data in this article, here is a review looking at the Samsung 870 EVO 500GB SSD.

Following the release of Wine 6.0 stable earlier this month, Wine 6.1 is now available as the first bi-weekly development snapshot that will ultimately culminate with the Wine 7.0 stable release next year...

While most Linux users likely don't get excited when hearing of a new Glibc release, version 2.33 of the GNU C Library is due to be released next week and it's pretty darn interesting for having the new HWCAPS functionality in opening up for more optimized out-of-the-box Linux performance moving forward...

While Intel's large open-source Linux graphics driver team has been pushing a lot of code over the past number of months for bringing up their DG1 graphics and other current/forthcoming discrete graphics offerings, one area that is still in its infancy is around the multi-device handling. At least from the compute side, there is some recent progress being made for multi-device support...

On top of aiming to use Wayland by default, another high profile change being worked on for this spring's release of Ubuntu 21.04 is using link-time optimizations (LTO) for all 64-bit package builds...

For those Linux gamers and other desktop users of the open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers with some extra time this weekend, Mesa 21.0-RC3 is now available for testing as what might be the last release candidate before officially releasing Mesa 21.0 as soon as next week...

Following NVIDIA RTX 30 open-source mode-setting support in Linux 5.11, the batch of feature changes slated for the Linux 5.12 kernel have now been submitted to DRM-Next...

AMDVLK 2021.Q1.1 released near the beginning of the month with various "RDNA 2" optimizations while now AMDVLK 2021.Q1.2 is out in closing out the month and bringing more Big Navi optimizations...

Plans are moving forward for providing standalone XWayland packages that would ship the latest XWayland code for allowing X11 clients within Wayland environments, separate from X.Org Server releases as has been the bundling case to date...

Following last week's release of Google Chrome 88, the Chrome 89 beta is now available for testing...

For those looking at setting up a water-cooled rackmount server either for running high-end hardware like the new AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO hardware or just wanting a minimal noise environment for your studio or other environment, the SilverStone RM42-502 is a 4U rackmount chassis that can handle SSI-EEB motherboards and still provide enough room for supporting up to 240mm liquid cooling radiators. We've been testing out the SilverStone RM42-502 to great success for the past month in conjunction with the SilverStone IceGem 240P AIO water cooling setup.

Intel's open-source driver developers have begun posting patches for bringing up "Display13" as their next-gen display IP that looks like it will be introduced after the upcoming Rocket Lake / Alder Lake / DG1 platforms...

Just last week I wrote about Itanium IA-64 support in Linux kernel being broken for a month during the Linux 5.11 kernel cycle. That was fixed but since then another regression came to light that had been affecting all IA-64 hardware since a patch was merged back in October. A fix for that latest regression has landed while in the process now marking the Itanium architecture as orphaned...

Ubuntu is going to be trying to switch over to using Wayland by default for the current Ubuntu 21.04 cycle to allow sufficient time for widespread testing and evaluation ahead of next year's Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release...