Separate from the Linux boot issue affecting AMD Ryzen 3000 (Zen 2) processors that has been attributed to RdRand, DragonFlyBSD is the first BSD at least we've seen getting a separate fix to be able to boot these new AMD processors...
Snow Ridge is the SoC Intel announced last December as a 10nm product intended for 5G products. With the in-development Linux 5.3 kernel is initial "perf" subsystem support for Snow Ridge...
AMD Zen 2 CPUs support ACPI's Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) for tuning the system to energy and/or performance requirements. AMD has now published a new CPUfreq driver for handling their CPPC implementation and the new controls found with their new processors...
In addition to better Wine support on NetBSD thanks to Google Summer of Code 2019, another student developer has been working on DRM ioctl support including when running their Linux emulation packages. Ultimately the hope is they can run the Steam Linux binary on NetBSD to enjoy gaming with DRM+Mesa...
Microsoft's exFAT file-system is more than one decade old and while there has been out-of-tree efforts, the mainline Linux kernel as of yet does not support the file-system even with it appearing on more SD cards and other devices. But there is now a renewed effort to get an exFAT driver into the Linux kernel...
Under the Fedora umbrella has been the "Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux" to complement the official RHEL packages with extra packages largely based on Fedora packages. While RHEL 8.0 launched in May, there hasn't been full support for EPEL-8 yet but it's being worked on...
It's just not the RADV Vulkan driver seeing lots of Navi activity but the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver and RadeonSI OpenGL Mesa driver are also off to the races in improving their newly-enabled Navi / Radeon RX 5700 series support...
After going through 9+ rounds of revisions for the Amlogic video decode driver, it's now been part of the media subsystem updates for the Linux 5.3 kernel...
Following the Radeon RX 5700 series launch, AMD has now open-sourced their Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) technology under FidelityFX on GPUOpen...
Genode continues advancing as an open-source operating system framework and with that their effort to develop Sculpt OS as a general purpose operating system has continued in-step. Out now is Sculpt OS 19.07 as their latest operating system release...
The power management changes for Linux 5.3 merge window don't offer any P-State changes or other prominent Intel changes this cycle but there is some other improvements as well as new CPUFreq drivers for CPU frequency scaling...
For those wondering if upgrading your RAM to higher frequency DIMMs is worthwhile when moving to AMD X570 and a new Zen 2 processor like the Ryzen 9 3900X, here are some reference benchmarks at different frequencies while maintaining the same timings.
ROCm 2.6 was released overnight and when initially seeing this new Radeon Open Compute support come right after the Radeon RX 5700/5700XT launch, I was hopeful it would bring Navi support but sadly there are no signs of it in this release. But at least ROCm 2.6 is bringing other features...
Bolt, the Red Hat led project for managing Thunderbolt devices on Linux and their security, is out with their version 0.8 update to introduce better security for the growing number of Thunderbolt devices...
Back on 7 July, the open-source Mesa RADV Vulkan driver managed to deliver launch-day Navi support for these new 7nm GPUs. That first-cut support for this "community" open-source driver was working but various optimizations and features lacking. The developers at Valve, Red Hat, and Google have continued refining this Navi/GFX10 support for RADV...
For those riding the Mesa 19.1 stable release train, Mesa 19.1.2 is now available as the second point release to this quarterly update to this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers for the Linux desktop...
After being delayed from earlier kernel cycles, Linux 5.3 will allow for tracking the last time a process made use of AVX-512 in order for user-space schedulers to provide better task placement...
LLVM's RISC-V CPU back-end has made immense progress over the past few years and now for the LLVM 9.0 release due out at the end of August or early September could become official...
During H1'2019 on Phoronix.com were 1,766 original news articles and 130 original Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark multi-page articles. Here is a look back at the most popular articles during the first half of the year on Phoronix...
Back in March 2019 when Intel announced Sound Open Firmware, they also announced ACRN as a small footprint hypervisor intended for real-time and safety-critical use-cases. Now with Linux 5.3 this IoT-focused hypervisor can handle Linux guests on the ACRN hypervisor...
Last week Valve formally announced their new Radeon shader compiler for AMD's open-source Linux graphics drivers. At this stage it's an out-of-tree solution providing generally faster performance to the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver over the current AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler but they also have ambitions of wiring it up to the RadeonSI OpenGL driver once mature too, assuming AMD's developers are willing to make use of this new compiler code. For those wondering about the Vulkan performance, here are our independent benchmarks of the current Mesa 19.2 RADV performance with the LLVM shader compiler compared to Valve's new "ACO" compiler back-end and then also using AMD's official AMDVLK reference driver that is also leveraging LLVM.
Following last night's Linux 5.2 kernel release, the GNU folks maintaining their GNU Linux-libre off-shoot that de-blobs the kernel of being able to load binary-only firmware/microcode files or the ability to load binary-only kernel modules is out with their re-based kernel...
As outlined yesterday, AMD's Ryzen 3000 processors are very fast but having issues booting newer Linux distributions. The exact issue causing that boot issue on 2019 Linux distribution releases doesn't appear to be firmly resolved yet but some are believing it is an RdRand instruction issue on these newer processors manifested by systemd...
The GPIO updates for the newly-opened Linux 5.3 kernel merge window is dropping the FMC subsystem as they deem it easier to re-start from scratch writing that code than to try to repair it, or "start over using the proper kernel subsystems than try to polish the rust shiny." Funny enough, this code is being used by the CERN's well known Large Hadron Collider...
The past several years Siemens and others have been working on Jailhouse as a Linux-based partitioning hypervisor for bare metal appliances. Their previous release was all the way back during last year's Oktoberfest and now with construction for this year's fest kicking off at the wiesn, the developers happen to be releasing their next version of Jailhouse...
It's 2019 and OpenGL 4.6 remains the latest version of this once predominant graphics API yet Mesa's Gallium3D LLVMpipe software rasterizer is still only exposing OpenGL 3.3...
While back in May we provided a Linux 5.2 feature overview following the closure of its merge window, given Sunday's release of the Linux 5.2 Bobtail Squid kernel, if you've lost track of what there is to get excited about in this new kernel, this article is for you...
Leading up to today's Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" series launch it was looking like there wouldn't be any support within Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver for this community-maintained open-source implementation. But the open-source developers at Valve managed to not only deliver Navi 10 support but also Navi 12 and Navi 14 are also supported with this new Mesa 19.2 code...
As a follow-up to this morning's Radeon RX 5700 / RX 5700 XT Linux benchmarks, AMD has now published a packaged launch-day Linux driver for those wanting to use these new RDNA/Navi graphics cards on Linux without building your own kernel/Mesa/libdrm/LLVM... Well, assuming you are on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS...
After weeks of anticipation, we can now share how the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X and Ryzen 9 3900X performance is under Linux. These first Zen 2 processors do indeed deliver a significant improvement over Zen/Zen+ processors and also battle Intel's latest 14nm CPUs but for Linux users there is one big, unfortunate issue right now.
While last month we could talk all about the specifications for the Radeon RX 5700 series, today the embargo has lifted concerning the Radeon RX 5700/5700XT graphics cards so we can finally talk about the actual (Linux) performance. The road is a bit rougher than we had hoped, but it's possible to drive these new Navi graphics cards today using their open-source graphics driver stack at least for OpenGL games/applications. Over the weeks ahead, the Linux driver support for Navi will continue to improve.
Now that Debian 10 "Buster" shipped, Debian developers are preparing already to kickoff the Debian 11 "Bullseye" development and begin with uploading new packages for this next major release of Debian GNU/Linux...
Wine's bi-weekly development snapshots do not normally see point releases, but this time around there's an immediate bug fix release to Friday's Wine 4.12...
In addition to the release of Debian 10.0 "Buster" this weekend, the team maintaining the Debian port to the GNU Hurd micro-kernel did their unofficial "2019" release...