Phoronix

Mesa Gallium3D is close to seeing a major change in their intermediate representation path for drivers consuming Gallium's TGSI rather than NIR directly. Eric Anholt has been working on a NIR-to-TGSI path so that drivers still relying on TGSI can benefit from the NIR optimization paths and improvements while ultimately hoping to eliminate the existing GLSL-to-TGSI code-path currently relied upon by these drivers...

While NVIDIA's desktop graphics drivers may not be open-source, there are other open-source projects maintained by NVIDIA that we have covered over the years particularly in the high performance computing and visual design space, among other interesting bits. Dirk Van Gelder who is NVIDIA's Direct of Software Development gave a talk this week about some of the open-source efforts engaged in by the company...

At this week's Linux Plumbers Conference there were DigitalOcean engineers providing an update on their CoreScheduling work in the era of vulnerabilities affecting Hyper Threading. Oracle meanwhile presented today at LPC2020 on their Kernel Address Space Isolation (ASI) functionality for dealing with Hyper Threading data leakage in a different manner, but the performance costs are still being evaluated...

Microsoft announced on Tuesday that the .NET 5.0 release is now "feature complete" for this major overhaul of .NET that breaks compatibility with prior versions. Microsoft .NET 5.0 has many changes to its libraries and runtimes, introduces WebAssembly support, support for single file applications/executables, new APIs, better performance, and much more...

Ahead of the official GNOME 3.38 launch in September, the second GNOME 3.38 beta (v3.35.91) is now available for testing,..

One of the many interesting discussions for this week's virtual Linux Plumbers Conference is on planning code obsolescence moving forward. While this is about kernel features too, it's also about the steps and when to phase out old hardware support...

The Qt Company has released version 4.13 of Qt Creator as their Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment that also supports Python and other languages via the Language Server Protocol...

In 2019 there were kernel developers talking at conferences that the remaining "PREEMPT_RT" patches for a real-time kernel should be mainlined in early 2020. That didn't happen for the long ongoing work around the "RT" patches while at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC 2020) is that the work should finally be close to merging to mainline...

Sporting AGP, fabbed on a 350nm process, making use of a 64-bit memory interface, and clocking to nearly 100MHz, the Matrox G200 desktop graphics cards are set to see mainline open-source support come Linux 5.10...

With no one stepping up to manage the X.Org Server 1.21 release, the two year old X.Org Server 1.20 series continues seeing new point releases, particularly with 1.21 being out of the scope already for having the chance to appear in the major H2'2020 Linux distribution releases. X.Org Server 1.20.9 is the newest point release out today in shipping fixes...

Following the recent layoffs at Mozilla and some projects seemingly at risk moving forward, one that we have been worried about is GFX-RS as the interesting Rust-based library implementing the Vulkan Portability Initiative using GFX-HAL...

The first release candidate of the forthcoming OpenZFS 2.0 is now available for testing on both Linux and BSD systems...

Covered back in February was work for Nouveau's NVC0 Gallium3D driver to finalle make use of the Mesa on-disk shader cache functionality for speeding up game load times by allowing previously compiled GLSL shaders to be cached to disk. That work by Red Hat has finally been mainlined in Mesa 20.3...

As we frequently cover, making use of compiler PGO (Profile Guided Optimizations) can mean some sizable performance wins, assuming the generated usage profile is accurate. With the imminent Chrome 85 availability, Google is now making use of PGO with their default LLVM Clang compiler toolchain for squeezing out around 10% better performance...

A single patch coming in at nearly three thousand lines was merged on Monday for the Linux 5.9 kernel that make the use of the "fallthrough" macro more widespread throughout the kernel...

Not even one month passed since the previous libX11 security vulnerabilities were made public while today a new security advisory was issued along with releasing version 1.6.12 of this key X11 library...

Now that the default graphics driver stack of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is a few months old, here is a look at the AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance of Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS out-of-the-box compared to upgrading against Linux 5.9 Git and Mesa 20.3-devel for seeing if the performance advantages are worthwhile in making the leap to the newer RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers paired with the very latest kernel.

Vladimir Makarov of Red Hat spoke at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference during the GNU Tools Track on lightweight JIT compilers and the effectiveness (or not) of GCC's JIT implementation as well as LLVM's JIT in the context of just-in-time support for Ruby. But following those shortcomings with GCC/LLVM JIT, he's been working on MIR as a lightweight JIT compiler...

Last month the German Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers launched the PULSE 15 with AMD Ryzen "Renoir" processors. Today they launched a new model also featuring the very popular AMD Renoir parts...

Following ongoing work for over a year on moving to OpenZFS for FreeBSD's ZFS file-system support, FreeBSD HEAD overnight has imported the OpenZFS code-base...

Queued now in the "x86/cpu" development branch ahead of the Linux 5.10 kernel later this year is the change to make use of Intel's new "SERIALIZE" instruction within the kernel's "sync_core" code that is used for stopping the speculative execution and prefetching of modified code...

Firefox 80.0 is now available. There isn't too much to get excited about with Firefox 80, but at least some changes on the developer front...

With vulnerabilities like L1TF and Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) prominently showing the insecurities of Intel Hyper Threading, DigitalOcean and other organizations continue spearheading a core scheduling implementation for Linux that could allow HT to remain enabled but with reducing the security risk...

When the Zink Gallium3D driver running OpenGL over Vulkan was first introduced in 2018 and since one of the main blockers besides the performance overhead has been the limited OpenGL 2/3 support. The GL3/GL4 support has been improving with time for Zink and when making use of the latest out-of-tree patches is even possible to get OpenGL 4.6 running over Vulkan with Zink!..

As part of the virtual SIGGRAPH20, Intel is using the opportunity to talk up their ray-tracing efforts...

Proposed last summer by Valve and Collabora developers were extending the Linux kernel's futex system call to allow for more optimal thread pool synchronization and paired with Wine/Proton work to better match the semantics of Windows. That then spun into creating a new system call, futex2. With the recently closed Linux 5.9 merge window the new futex2 system call didn't land, but the work is still being pursued...

For a number of years the GNU Compiler Collection has shipped experimental support for the DWARF 5 debugging data format while finally for next year's GCC 11 release it might be deemed stable and used by default...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has seen an initial trap handler implementation for helping to more easily catch and diagnose various issues stemming from Vulkan shaders...

The hipSYCL effort has been about supporting the Khronos SYCL single-source language built on C++ across any CPU with OpenMP as well as AMD Radeon GPUs via ROCm and NVIDIA GPUs via CUDA. The hipSYCL effort has a new "Lite" experimental runtime under development...

One of many performance optimization projects being pursued by Canonical's Daniel van Vugt in the GNOME space has been working to lower the latency when using NVIDIA's proprietary driver to address high latency spikes in certain situations as well as stuttering on the desktop. The Ubuntu developer has had patches under testing for months while this past week a latest revision was made available...

The "first real user" of the BPF user mode driver facility is on the way for Linux 5.10...

Red Hat's Adam Jackson has been working on "GLX Delay" as a means of offering accelerated GLX with OpenGL for XWayland when using the NVIDIA proprietary driver. The proposed code is going through Mesa even though it's for the proprietary NVIDIA driver benefit and also requires a change to the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (libglvnd)...

It's been one week already since feature work ended on Linux 5.9 and that means it's time for the 5.9-rc2 kernel. Like clockwork, Linux Torvalds has shipped Linux 5.9-rc2 with the initial batch of bug/regression fixes as well as some late changes for the cycle...

Cachy is a Linux CPU scheduler that has been generating some attention over the past month that aims for optimal CPU cache usage and based on a Highest Response Ration Next (HRRN) policy...

We previously reported on F2FS "ATGC" functionality for increasing the garbage collection efficiency for the Flash-Friendly File-System. Those patches are now queued up in F2FS' "dev" branch meaning we could see the functionality in place for Linux 5.10...

The virtual DebConf 20 is happening now through 29 August. Due to COVID-19, the annual Debian Conference is happening exclusively as a virtual event for those wanting to watch a number of interesting Debian/Linux/FLOSS-related talks...

For a while now a Mozilla software project that's been an "unsung hero" has been DeepSpeech as their speech-to-text engine. Sadly, following the recent major layoffs at Mozilla and restructuring along with a shift to focusing more on their profitable activities, DeepSpeech for now has an uncertain future...

Back in April the folks at Micron announced the "HSE" open-source storage engine optimized for SSDs and persistent memory. Version 1.8 of HSE was released on Friday as the first major update since going public earlier this year...

One of the early changes queued in the USB area for the Linux 5.10 cycle later this summer is a "reset-raspberrypi" driver set for introduction as another upstream improvement for the current-generation Raspberry Pi 4 single board computer...

Unity Tech is the latest high profile company joining the Blender Development Fund for assisting this leading open-source 3D modeling software...

Adding to the list of software projects embracing Zstd for its very efficient compression abilities, OpenZFS is now supporting the Facebook-developed Zstandard as its latest file-system compression support...

Last year Wine itself added emulation for some CPU instructions now blocked by UMIP, the User-Mode Instruction Prevention functionality found in the latest Intel and AMD processors. Now slated for Linux 5.10 is the emulation/spoofing of two of those instructions by the kernel as another attempt to help a small number of Windows programs relying on those instructions...

KDE applications finally have the ability to keeping their window positions preserved when closed and then re-launched...

With all the Linux 5.9 kernel changes you may have noticed no major EXT4 file-system pull request was submitted during the kernel merge window the prior two weeks. Fortunately, the EXT4 work has now been sent out and Linus Torvalds honored the late changes for this widely-used Linux file-system...

GStreamer 1.18 is gearing up for release in the very near future while for right now a release candidate is available for testing this widely-used open-source multimedia framework...

The Linux IO_uring interface for driving some major efficiency improvements in the Linux I/O stack is really screaming when paired with Intel's next-gen Ice Lake Xeon server platforms and the Intel Gen2 "Alder Stream" Optane solid-state drives...

Along with this week marking the release of oneAPI Level Zero 1.0, the oneAPI Data Parallel C++ compiler has seen its newest tagged release...

Coming as a surprise last week was word of Paragon Software wanting to mainline their NTFS read-write driver as a significant improvement over the existing NTFS Linux kernel driver. An updated patch series for that much improved NTFS Linux kernel driver is now available...

AMD engineers responsible for their official Vulkan driver code-base have issued their first updated open-source snapshot in two weeks for AMDVLK fans...

With Linux 5.9 comes the ability to compress the Linux kernel image / initrd with Zstd for yielding faster boot speeds but at a compression ratio between Gzip and XZ/LZMA. Being proposed next with the widespread adoption of Facebook's Zstd is compressing the kernel microcode/firmware files...