Phoronix

Mesa 20.3 was branched this evening in marking the end of feature development for this Q4-2020 Mesa3D release that should debut as stable in December. This also means that Mesa 21.0 is now open for development...

Making use of "-march=tigerlake" for building optimized binaries catering to Intel's latest-generation processors is well worth it on the likes of GCC 11. Out of the new instruction set extensions on Tiger Lake is more uplift than we have seen out of recent Intel generations and comparing the different "-march=" targets shows significant performance benefits if you don't mind compiling your own software from source.

ASUS has been evaluating the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for distributing firmware updates to their Linux customers for flashing in turn via Fwupd. Their first motherboard firmware update has now been volleyed onto this open-source platform for easing firmware updates on Linux...

Announced by Arm back in September was the Neoverse V1 "Zeus" platform with 50%+ performance uplift over the Neoverse N1. Neoverse V1 also supports Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) and other features in catering the platform for machine learning, cloud, HPC, and similar use-cases...

Among the many open-source graphics driver improvements being worked on recently by Red Hat's David Airlie from Lavapipe to OpenCL 3.0 Clover work, another recent effort has been around TTM "multihop" as an improvement for this memory management infrastructure used by the likes of the AMDGPU kernel driver...

Ubuntu maker Canonical Holdings Limited recently submitted their UK financial report for their fiscal year ending 31 December 2019. During the pre-COVID times they generated around 22% more revenue than 2018 but still operated at a loss albeit more narrowly than in prior years...

Vulkan 1.2.160 is out this morning as the newest revision to the Vulkan graphics/compute API...

Intel is contributing a new driver to the Linux kernel for determining whether Thunderbolt / USB4 ports are functional...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.10-rc3 as the newest test release ahead of stable Linux 5.10 that will be minted in December...

Debian developers are two months out from the transition and essentials freeze for Debian 11 "Bullseye" that in turn should debut as stable later in 2021...

Version 2.9 of OpenRazer is now available as the independently-developed solution for configuring and monitoring various Razer peripherals on Linux like not only their keyboards and mice but also headsets and other hardware...

Currently when directly assigning I/O devices to virtual machines the guest memory needs to be statically pinned unless using a vIOMMU setup in which case it does not but there are performance implications there as well. Intel engineers though have been working on a virtual IOMMU implementation with DMA buffer tracking to overcome these limitations...

Intel didn't manage to get their Software Guard Extensions (SGX) support merged for the current Linux 5.10 LTS kernel cycle and it's still up in the air if it will be pulled in the near-term for providing the mainline kernel with SGX enclaves support...

The first week of November brought numerous improvements to the KDE stack...

The recently proposed new TTM memory management page allocator that can yield 3~5x faster page allocation as tested with the AMDGPU kernel driver will be coming for Linux 5.11...

A set of Linux kernel patches posted on friday allow peer-to-peer DMA (P2PDMA) transfers between NVMe drives using existing O_DIRECT operations or the NVMe pass-through interface from user-space...

For those sticking to stable releases of Mesa3D there is Mesa 20.2.2 now available as the latest point release...

Following yesterday's Wine 5.21 release is now an adjoining Wine-Staging update that carries over 700 patches on top of it for testing purposes...

New Wasmtime and Wasmer releases appeared this week for advancing WebAssembly on the desktop...

For fans of the Arch Linux distribution their Arch Conf 2020 virtual presentations have all been posted now for your enjoyment...

Following yesterday's launch-day AMD Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X benchmarks that showed the utter domination of Zen 3 carrying over just fine in the Linux realm, today we are looking at the performance of the Ryzen 5 5600X on Ubuntu against other Intel/AMD processors. The Ryzen 5 5600X is AMD's new $299 USD part that offers six cores / twelve threads and incredible uplift still over Zen 2 / Zen+ processors while outperforming Intel's Comet Lake competition.

Wine 5.21 was just released as one of the smaller bi-weekly updates this year...

Zink as the Mesa Gallium3D implementation putting OpenGL 3.x/4.x on top of the Vulkan API is now offering near-native performance...

GIMP 2.99.2 is finally available as their "first step" towards releasing GIMP 3.0 that most notably transitions from the GTK2 to GTK3 toolkit...

VKD3D-Proton as the Valve-backed fork of Wine's VKD3D for mapping the Direct3D 12 API atop Vulkan is now supporting more features with today's v2.0 release and thus handling more Windows games running on Linux with Steam Play...

Back in August we reported on Red Hat engineers developing Stalld as a new Linux service for detecting stalled threads and also allowing select threads to be boosted based on policy. In the months since Stalld continues to be developed and recently saw new releases...

FlightGear 2020.3 is out today as the newest feature update to this long-standing, open-source flight simulator software package...

It's not across the finish line at least yet but Mesa 20.3 just merged today the initial prep changes needed for exposing OpenCL 3.0 support within the Clover Gallium3D state tracker...

For the past several months there have been a number of Intel Linux DRM patch series around "big joiner" support and that is looking like it may soon be finished up for allowing support for driving 8K displays off a single port...

An initial round of predominantly AMDGPU kernel driver patches have been called upon for pulling into DRM-Next as new feature work for Linux 5.11...

Following the news that we were first to report last month on Intel starting open-source public patches for Vulkan ray-tracing in preparation for their forthcoming Xe HPG graphics card, the initial prep work for that Vulkan ray-tracing support has now been merged in time for Mesa 20.3...

While the Sony PlayStation 5 isn't beginning to ship until next week there is now support within the widely-used SDL2 library for its controllers...

Not only are AMD Ryzen 5000 series completely dominating in performance but they could soon see open-source Coreboot support as an alternative to the proprietary firmware/BIOS. Project X is an interesting effort around blob-free Coreboot/Oreboot support on AMD Zen...

The AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X are hands-down incredible winners. While processor company marketing claims are sometimes dubious and not necessarily relevant to Linux users and their open-source workloads/software, after testing the Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X the past several weeks the performance has been incredibly compelling with significant single and multi-threaded performance uplift over Zen 2 and easily thrashing Intel's current desktop offerings with over 200 benchmarks conducted for launch-day.

After just publishing the results of 200+ Linux benchmarks under many diverse workloads for the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X we see the 16~20% performance lift is very real and very broad from obscure open-source niche software through high profile programs... What about the Linux gaming performance? This article offers a first look at the Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X Linux gaming performance compared to Zen 2 and the Core i9 10900K while being the first of several Linux gaming performance articles coming out this month.

For those fond of the Sega Saturn video game console controllers from the mid-90s, the Linux 5.11 kernel has a fix so a common USB adapter for them will behave nicely...

The V3DV Vulkan driver that provides support for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer can now run the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan translation layer...

Upstream Linux kernel developers are looking at changing some of their Spectre mitigation defaults around what's applied to SECCOMP threads by default in part due to the performance hit as well as other reasons...

It was just a few days ago that AMD engineers released AMDVLK 2020.Q4.2 as their newest open-source Radeon Vulkan driver snapshot while that has already been succeeded by version 2020.Q4.3...

Fedora 33 was just released at the end of October but already a number of change proposals are building up for Fedora 34 due out next spring...

While the Linux 5.10 merge window passed a week and a half ago, similar to the Navi Blockchain SKU being added as a "fix", the Green Sardine enablement is also being submitted as a fix for this current kernel version...

In addition to Mesa 20.3 seeing RadeonSI support for EGL protected surfaces backed by the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver with Trusted Memory Zone support, AMD's graphics driver developers have now added support for secure/protected video acceleration playback to their Mesa driver code...

If the recent releases of KDE Plasma 5.20 and GNOME 3.38 didn't fulfill your wishes for a dream Linux desktop and are looking for something lightweight, LXQt 0.16 is out today...

With C++20 one of the major features added is that of modules as a modern alternative to that of conventional C++ header files for packages. The C++20 modules code for the GNU Compiler Collection that has been in the works for several years is now under review and could potentially still land for the GCC 11 release next year...

Beginning in Dell's 2021 laptop models they are providing hardware-based "privacy buttons" to disable microphone and camera support. In preparations for more Dell laptops coming to market with these buttons, a Dell privacy driver is being prepared for the Linux kernel...

One of the areas of the Qt 6.0 toolkit with the greatest number of improvements is on the Qt Quick 3D front...

There's still more than one month to go until the Linux 5.11 merge window kicks off but Intel open-source developers have already submitted their initial batch of kernel graphics driver updates to DRM-Next...

With Intel Gen12 Xe-LP / Tiger Lake supporting AV1 accelerated decoding, Intel has provided this support via their open-source media stack on Linux that is then exposed via the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). Intel has now landed their patches for supporting VA-API AV1 decode with FFmpeg...

In addition to OpenIndiana Hipster 2020.10 having just been released, OmniOS v11 r151036 as another operating system long ago derived from OpenSolaris is also out with a big new release...

The trek to OpenZFS 2.0 continues with the fifth release candidate now being outed...