Phoronix

The enablement work for supporting Apple's M1 SoC under Linux continues and with the v5.17 kernel next year will be yet more additions...

Last Friday Mesa classic drivers were removed from the mainline code-base and punted off to an "Amber" code branch where they will receive whatever attention moving forward. With that classic Mesa code removed, more code cleaning is now happening on top of the tens of thousands of lines of code already removed. Intel's OpenSWR driver has also now been removed from mainline...

The Panfrost Gallium3D OpenGL driver and PanVK open-source drivers in Mesa have come a long way via reverse-engineering for Arm Mali graphics support. However, to this point the focus has been on Arm's "Midgard" and "Bifrost" architectures while the newer "Valhall" architecture has been around the past two years. The Panfrost effort for bringing up Valhall is now getting underway...

With Imagination Technologies having sold off what was MIPS Technologies several years ago and that CPU architecture having been abandoned now, Imagination today announced "Catapult" as their new family of RISC-V processor IP...

While the performance of LLVM/Clang has improved a lot over the years and for x86_64 and AArch64 can be neck-and-neck with the GCC compiler, the fierce performance battle is not over. With LLVM/Clang 14.0 due out in the early months of 2022 will be more performance work with one recent commit in particular showing a lot of promise...

In 2022 we will very likely see the experimental Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel mainlined. Sent out this morning were the updated patches introducing the initial support and infrastructure around handling of Rust within the kernel...

Last week marked the debut of the highly anticipated Blender 3.0 open-source 3D modeling software. Since then I have been very busy putting Blender 3.0 through its paces with a lot of performance benchmarking across various CPUs and GPUs.

Mozilla Firefox 95.0 is now available for download ahead of its official release tomorrow. Making this new version interesting is the RLBox integration...

AMD is preparing updates to their SMCA (Scalable Machine Check Architecture) driver code for future CPUs and points to processors having different bank layouts between CPU cores on the package...

Landing in Mesa 22.0 on Sunday night was the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" support for the recently introduced VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering extension...

It's been a number of months since GRVK 0.4 as the open-source project re-implementing AMD's defunct Mantle API over the modern Vulkan API that was originally based on the former. With Sunday's release of GRVK 0.5, this Mantle-on-Vulkan translation layer is now capable of correctly rendering Battlefield 4...

OpenIndiana as the open-source operating system forked from what was Sun's OpenSolaris and now based on Illumos is out with its latest half-year update...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.16-rc4 as the latest weekly release candidate for Linux 5.16 that will debut as stable in early 2022...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers continue making their driver preparations for being able to accommodate Vulkan ray-tracing with upcoming Xe HPG graphics having ray-tracing hardware capabilities...

This week's set of "x86/urgent" changes for the Linux 5.16-rc4 kernel due out later today has some Spectre V1 fixes after kernel commits last year ended up partially messing things up around its SWAPGS handling. These fixes in turn will also likely be back-ported to relevant stable kernel series...

A year after Arm processors began mitigating straight-line speculation, Linux developers have been working on similar straight-line speculation mitigations for x86/x86_64 processors...

XWayland is increasingly great shape especially when it comes to fulfilling the needs of gamers with simply running games lacking native Wayland support with great speed. But when it comes to other use-cases there are occasionally gaps and areas not yet fulfilled by XWayland versus the conventional X.Org Server. One of the latest examples of a feature now correctly wired up is touchpad gesture handling...

While RHEL9 is just in beta form right now, due to CentOS Stream 9 now having launched and that effectively serving as the bleeding-edge of the RHEL9 upstream, EPEL 9 has already launched...

Genode OS as the interesting open-source operating system framework is out with its v21.11 release this week and delivers on many hardware improvements and other features...

Added to the in-development Linux 5.16 kernel was cluster-aware scheduling designed to enhance system performance where groups of CPU cores may share caches or similar and thus the scheduler could benefit from knowing that information for making more optimal task placement. But as I pointed out early on with Linux 5.16, this cluster scheduling is hurting the Intel Alder Lake performance on the new kernel. Intel is now working to correct this by making the cluster scheduling configurable and disabling this functionality by default for hybrid CPUs such as Alder Lake...