Phoronix

Valve's VKD3D-Proton continues speeding along as their downstream of VKD3D for mapping Direct3D 12 over Vulkan. VKD3D-Proton 2.1 was just released and besides enhancing the GPU-bound performance there are more prominent DX12 games now working with this translation layer...

Linux's Cedrus media driver that provides video decoding on various Allwinner SoCs is finally seeing support added for VP8. But given this addition for Linux 5.11 won't be out as stable until well into 2021 and most of the world has moved onto VP9, it may not be too beneficial at this stage...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on the proposal for defaulting to PipeWire with Fedora 34 due out next spring...

As expected, Linus Torvalds today officially released Linux 5.10. Besides being the last kernel release of 2020, this is a significant milestone in that it's also a Long Term Support (LTS) kernel to be maintained for at least the next five years and also is a huge kernel update in general with many new features...

While there are a lot of driver improvements throughout, as usual those on Intel HD/UHD/Iris/Xe Graphics and AMD Radeon graphics with their first-rate open-source graphics drivers have a lot of grand improvements to find with the forthcoming Linux 5.11 cycle...

Following Mesa 21.0 beginning to see AMD Smart Access Memory optimizations, I ran some benchmarks looking at the current state of S.A.M. / Resizable BAR support on Linux with Radeon graphics...

Adding to the Linux 5.11 changes and set of new drivers is "lcd2s" as a driver for supporting a 20x4 LCD character display connected via SPI/I2C and with this support can serve as a kernel console output device...

Mageia 8 Beta 1 came all the way back in August while ahead of Christmas that has now been succeeded by a second beta release for this Mandriva/Mandrake-derived Linux distribution...

Earlier this year we covered Zrythm as an open-source digital audio workstation that is cross-platform, supports a wide variety of plug-ins, and built atop GTK3. Back then it was on the pre-1.0 version numbering while this weekend marks the release of 1.0 Alpha 6...

There are a lot of changes coming with Linux 5.11 and on the AMD side includes the likes of VanGogh and Dimgrey Cavefish graphics support, AMD EPYC Zen 3 support in the AMD_Energy driver, AMD RAPL Zen1/Zen2/Zen3 PowerCap support, an AMD SoC PMC driver, and the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub driver for Ryzen laptops is finally being mainlined... Another new addition was queued up this weekend by way of hwmon-next and that's the AMD SB-TSI sensor driver...

In light of this week's major bombshell that CentOS 8 is being EOL'ed next year and CentOS focusing on "CentOS Stream" as the upstream to RHEL, Oracle is hoping at least some of those frustrated CentOS users will transition to Oracle Linux...

OpenBLAS 0.3.13 was released today as the newest update to this leading open-source BLAS (and LAPACK) implementation...

Adding to the new features coming for Linux 5.11, the Intel "RFIM" driver has been queued up as the company's latest open-source driver. The RFIM driver tweaks the DDR memory rates and fully integrated voltage regulator stemming if believed to be causing WiFi/5G interference...

Last week there was the release of AOCC 2.3 as AMD's LLVM Clang downstream focused on Zen-optimized support. Meanwhile on the graphics side of the house, this week ushered in AOMP 11.12 as their LLVM Clang downstream focused on Radeon OpenMP GPU offloading...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary highlighting the desktop project's changes for the week. WebRTC support with the screencast code in Plasma now works on Wayland, but the Plasma Wayland changes are lighter than we've seen in recent weeks. Instead the emphasis this week seems to have been on enhancing KDE's usability...

For over the past year there has been work on the new "Maple Tree" data structure led by Oracle for the Linux kernel and this week marked the patches being sent out in "request for comments" (RFC) form with the aim still on helping the kernel performance...

Announced earlier this year by Micron was the HSE open-source storage engine aimed for low-latency, speed-performance on modern SSD storage and ideal for powering the likes of NoSQL databases. In squeezing out one more major release before year's end, HSE 1.9 was released on Friday...

Following last week's Wine 6.0-RC1 release that marked the feature freeze and start of the release process for the annual stable Wine release, Wine 6.0-RC2 is out today with the latest assortment of fixes...

Just one week shy of one year since CUPS founder Michael Sweet left Apple, which in turn seemingly led to the downfall of CUPS, PAPPL 1.0 has been released as his modern alternative printer application framework...

For those curious how the AMD Zen 3 performance is looking between Windows and Linux, here are the first round of benchmarks with a Ryzen 9 5900X system.

KDE Plasma users will hopefully be seeing the KWin Wayland compositor perform better and more reliably in 2021...

The Linux 5.10 kernel is expected to be released this Sunday that will in turn start the Linux 5.11 merge window. Based on the material queued so far into the various "-next" branches, here is a look at what should be on the table for this next major kernel release and come February will be the first major kernel release of 2021...

While working on some core Mesa cleaning/improvements, Eric Anholt has retired the classic OSMesa support in next quarter's Mesa 21.0...

Following the recent OpenZFS 2.0 release, a new feature that has landed in the latest OpenZFS development code is the ability to respond to CPU and memory hot-plugging...

Intel's INT340X thermal code that is used by the likes of the Intel Thermal Daemon "Thermald" for thermal/power management with their modern SoCs will now be able to accept workload hints for making more informed thermal decisions...

The Intel-led, KVM-based, Rust-written Cloud-Hypervisor 0.12 released with continued contributions coming in from Microsoft and Arm...

AMD's HIP C++ Runtime API / Kernel Language for allowing portable, single-source applications on AMD and NVIDIA GPUs can now run on CPUs too...

At least under Linux AMD is currently working on a new and currently experimental video mode optimization for FreeSync...

Google as part of their involvement in the Open-Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) has devised the "Criticality Score" as a means of judging crucial open-source projects...

For those wondering how the open-source Radeon Linux graphics drivers compare to the Radeon Software Windows drivers for the recently released Radeon RX 6800 XT, here are some preliminary data points looking at the OpenGL / Vulkan performance between Windows and Linux for RDNA 2.

One of the big features to look forward to with Intel's Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" is the introduction of AMX as the Advanced Matrix Extensions. While Sapphire Rapids looks to be at least one year out still, the company's open-source compiler engineers have already been hard at work on the software infrastructure support...

The Linux 5.11 merge window is expected to open next week and while AMD has already queued several rounds of updates into DRM-Next ahead of that period, some last minute items were submitted overnight for this next Linux kernel version and what will be the first major kernel release of 2021...

Following the original, first-generation PowerPC CPU support being removed in the Linux 5.10 kernel, the original PowerPC 400 series is also looking like it will now be removed as well from the kernel...

Raspberry Pi's V3DV Vulkan driver is on quite a streak lately. The V3DV driver has seen inclusion in Mesa 20.3, Vulkan 1.0 conformance, and Wayland support, more performance work is being pursued with those initial milestones reached. Meanwhile the V3D OpenGL driver is also being improved upon still...

While Apple continues to drive their own Metal graphics/compute API, Vulkan support built atop Metal continues to mature thanks to the open-source MoltenVK project. With the MoltenVK's latest update is now support for Apple Silicon with the M1's new GPU...

Back in May was AMD's celebration of the GPUOpen re-launch and that included the introduction of the Radeon Memory Visualizer (RMV) as their newest tool at the time. But rather strange for being a "GPUOpen" development tool is that it was Windows-only and not actually open-source. Today that has now changed with Radeon Memory Visualizer going open-source...

The highly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 game will run on Linux on launch day by means of Steam Play!..

While AMD Smart Access Memory has already been supported under Linux for some time with its resizable BAR functionality, only now with all the excitement around the feature being promoted with the Ryzen 5000 series and Radeon RX 6000 series hardware is the Mesa driver code beginning to see some optimizations for it...

Last week AMD published their Zen 3 support for GCC code compiler. That initial support, which has already been merged into GCC 11, is the initial support flipping on newly supported instructions but not yet offering any tuned scheduler model or other optimizations compared to the existing Zen 2 path. In any case, here is a look at the performance changes with building the open-source benchmarks under test with "znver3" compared to the prior Zen 2 and Zen 1 targets along with generic x86_64 and then also looking at the performance if catering the compiler targets for Intel's Skylake and Haswell processors.

It's been just over one month since AMD launched the Ryzen 5000 series as the first processors part of the Zen 3 family. The Linux performance continues to be terrific with the Ryzen 5600X / 5800X / 5900X / 5950X parts in our continued benchmarking...

AMD has carried out a timely release of their RDNA 2 ISA documentation for those interested in working on any compiler support around these very latest graphics processors or working on other shader optimization approaches, etc...

A new SDL2 library release is being prepared for this widely-used, cross-platform abstraction layer popular with games for supporting a wide range of input devices / peripherals and other vast subsystem coverage in a portable manner...

There have been many workarounds and changes to the SDMA (System DMA) copy support within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver since the support was introduced years ago, but it's now been outright removed due to too many generations of AMD Radeon hardware having issues with it enabled...

QEMU 5.2 was released on Tuesday as the latest feature release for this open-source processor emulator that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Intel's Deep Neural Network Library currently known as oneDNN as part of the oneAPI suite (and formerly known as MKL-DNN and DNNL) has reached version 2.0 as an open-source project...

The open-source Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is currently used by their oneAPI Level Zero and OpenCL implementations but likely to see Intel driver Mesa usage in 2021 has a new feature dubbed "IMF LA" that aims to help with the performance and close the gap with Windows...

Four years after Google began developing the "Fuchsia" operating system complete with its own kernel, Google is now becoming more open with Fuchsia development and also accepting community code contributions...

Back in October RISC-V minded startup SiFive announced the HiFive Unmatched development board as the best RISC-V development board we've seen to date. But only having 8GB of RAM was one of the few critiques which the company is now addressing...

Well here is a surprise for those that have long used CentOS as the community-supported rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux... CentOS 8 will end in 2021 and moving forward CentOS 7 will remain supported until the end of its lifecycle but CentOS Stream will be the focus as the future upstream of RHEL...

After the Radeon RX 6800 series launched just under a month ago, the flagship AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is launching today. This is currently the most powerful RDNA 2 graphics card and should work under Linux with the open-source driver stack but the card is likely to be scarcer than even the RX 6800 series...