Phoronix

The Zhouyi AI accelerator was developed by Arm China and is found in some SoCs so far. An open-source Linux kernel driver is being worked on for it but unfortunately for now at least any mainline ambitions are immediately stalled over the lack of an open-source user-space/client...

Well known open-source Linux graphics expert David Airlie of Red Hat has recently been working on early Vulkan Video support for Mesa's Radeon "RADV" and Intel "ANV" drivers. As part of that effort and in part due to lack of software making use of Vulkan Video extensions right now, he has started exploring the feasibility of implementing the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) atop Vulkan Video...

An effort recently restarted that originally dates back many years is the "pvUSB" front-end driver for Linux to allow physical USB devices to be used within Xen domains...

The latest Linux kernel patches confirm that next-gen AMD Zen processors are capable of featuring up to twelve CCDs...

Out today is Vulkan 1.2.200 as the newest spec revision to the Vulkan graphics/compute API...

Given current memory pricing and extremely limited availability of DDR5 memory modules, many Phoronix readers have been requesting DDR4 vs. DDR5 memory benchmarks for Alder Lake on Linux. After picking up a DDR4 Z690 motherboard, here are some reference benchmarks between DDR4 and DDR5 when testing with the Core i5 12600K on Ubuntu Linux in a variety of real-world workloads.

Intel just released IGC 1.0.9289 as a huge update to their open-source Graphics Compiler used on Linux currently by their OpenCL/oneAPI Level Zero compute stack and also by Windows with their official driver...

Arcan as an open-source display server stack originally built atop a game engine and embracing VR/XR, and pushing forward on other new technologies is out with a new version...

Last week I wrote about a big TCP performance optimization having been queued up into net-next for Linux 5.17. That optimization can yield significant TCP throughput improvements especially with today's high-end 100Gb+ network hardware. There is now another separate juicy optimization to benefit the Linux network performance in the next kernel cycle...

Wayland Protocols 1.24 is out today as the latest revision to this official collection of the Wayland protocols/specifications. Notable with the 1.24 revision is the introduction of wp_linux_dmabuf_feedback...

While OpenPrinting is now leading development of the CUPS print server, PAPPL continues to be developed by CUPS founder Michael Sweet as a modern open-source printer application framework. PAPPL 1.1 as a big feature release is on the way...

Amazon Web Services has made Amazon Linux 2022 now publicly available in preview form as the newest version of their Linux distribution...

Libreboot 20211122 has been released as the downstream fork of Coreboot on providing fully free software boot firmware support...

British Linux PC vendor Star Labs now has support for their StarBook Mk V laptop upstreamed into Coreboot, which marks their second product having this achievement...

Last year with Intel "Tiger Lake" was the introduction of Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) for helping fend off return/jump-oriented attacks and as part of CET is hardware Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) support. There have been patch series working to implement CET's IBT support but after having gone through 30 rounds of review and not being merged, a new take on it was submitted today...

For those looking to assemble your own AMD EPYC 7002/7003 series 2P server or workstation, the ASRock Rack ROME2D16-2T we have been testing out for the past quarter and it's been holding up well across our daily benchmarking and other Linux and BSD tasks. The board has been working out very well and is currently available from retailers like NewEgg.

Microsoft's latest work in the area of open-source graphics drivers with the Mesa stack is for adding Direct3D 12 video acceleration support...

Going back two years already ASpeed developers have been working on prepping AST2600 support for Linux, their seventh generation server management processor / BMC. The latest open-source driver activity points to the AST2600 having DisplayPort support...

The Linux kernel continues to see improvements around ASUS laptop support on Linux, but the contributions have not been coming directly from the company but rather the community and sometimes after reverse-engineering...

IWD as the Intel-developed iNet Wireless Daemon that can serve as a replacement to the likes of WPA_Supplicant while integrating nicely with NetworkManager / systemd-networkd / ConnMan is out with a new version...