Phoronix

For AMD Navi "RDNA1" GPUs and newer having at least Video Core Next 2.0 (VCN2) for the video coding block, a new feature was merged today into Mesa 22.1-devel for the open-source AMD video acceleration stack...

Linux 5.17 will hopefully be released on Sunday and with that next kernel there are many exciting features in tow. But for as great as Linux 5.17 is, there are many features I am already eager for with Linux 5.18. Here is an early look at a number of the changes expected in this next kernel version...

In addition to releasing FreeBSD 13.1-BETA1, the FreeBSD project also published its Q4'2021 status report to recap all of the open-source activities achieved for this BSD operating system during the past quarter...

Back in 2019 that seems like an eternity ago with all that's gone on in the world, the Linux kernel deprecated a.out support. This executable / object code / shared library file format was used prior to the dominance of ELF but is seldom if ever used today. There have been pending patches to finally remove a.out from the kernel while the plan now is to stop building it on Alpha and Motorola 68000 targets to see if anyone notices/cares...

Out today is the first beta release of the upcoming FreeBSD 13.1 operating system update...

OpenZFS 2.1.3 is out today as the latest version of this open-source ZFS file-system implementation compatible with modern Linux and FreeBSD systems...

Made public on Tuesday was BHI / Spectre-BHB as the newest offshoot from Spectre V2. There were Linux patches immediately posted for affected Intel and Arm processors while also making adjustments to AMD CPUs around its Retpoline handling. The VUSec security researchers that discovered BHI are recommending Retpolines be enabled for newer processors even those with hardware mitigations against Spectre V2, but that's that performance cost? Here are some initial benchmarks.

AMD posted this morning a new Linux kernel patch series for enabling a new feature for "upcoming processors" that is almost definitively for Zen 4, continuing their work in recent weeks around more open-source patches in preparing for their next-generation processors...

When Linus Torvalds gets motivated and behind kernel changes, they tend to happen more quickly, with the latest example being the switching from the C89 language standard to C11 (GNU11). That change is now expected early on for the Linux 5.18 merge window...

Assuming nothing major comes up in the next few days, the Linux 5.17 kernel is expected to be released on Sunday. While we have been covering Linux 5.17 kernel activity already for a while prior to the merge window even getting going, here is a convenient look at some of the most interesting changes to find in this new release...

A set of 13 patches were posted overnight for improving the Intel Linux kernel graphics driver's handling of the power-savings feature Display Refresh Rate Switching (DRRS) for laptops...

MorphOS as the AmigaOS-like operating system now in development for more than two decades and targeting PowerPC hardware is out with version 3.16 as its first major release in over a year...

Mesa 22.0 is out today as the quarterly feature update to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers used widely by Linux systems...

Since the release at the end of February of Valve's Steam Deck there has been numerous Phoronix readers wondering about the CPU performance of the Steam Deck's AMD APU in non-gaming workloads and just how viable the Steam Deck could be for a converged device for desktop uses. Here is some commentary on that front and benchmark results.

Blender 3.1 is out today as the newest feature release to this incredibly powerful, open-source and cross-platform 3D modeling software...

As part of diversifying their supported range of Linux distributions since it was announced CentOS 8 would be going end-of-life, the popular cPanel commercial software package for easing the administration of Linux web server has added support for AlmaLinux and wit cPanel v102 is full support for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS...

Microsoft has laid out a proposal whereby they are hoping to contribute support for DirectX, the HLSL shading language, and Vulkan graphics support to the upstream LLVM/Clang compiler...

AMD continues recruiting more Linux engineers to join the company not only for their EPYC server processors given the dominance of Linux on the server/HPC front but also as part of their growing Linux client ambitions covering custom SoCs using Linux from Valve's Steam Deck to the Tesla in-vehicle infotainment system over to just running AMD Ryzen processors on Linux. This is good to see given AMD's traditionally much smaller Linux pool of talent compared to Intel's massive Linux/open-source engineering headcount...

One of many promising kernel patch series at the moment for enhancing Linux kernel performance is the multi-gen LRU framework (MGLRU) devised by Google engineers. They found the current Linux kernel page reclaim code is too expensive for CPU resources and can make poor eviction choices while MGLRU aims to yield better performance. These results are quite tantalizing and MGLRU is now up to its ninth revision...

Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) as part of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) is set to be supported as part of the upcoming Linux 5.18 kernel. Last night the IBT patch series has queued into TIP's x86/core ahead of the Linux 5.18 merge window...