Phoronix

Intel "Crocus" Gallium3D Now Part Of Mesa's Default Drivers To Build

Wed, 09/01/2021 - 21:15

Intel's i965 classic DRI driver is still the default within Mesa for i965 through Haswell generations of Intel integrated graphics, but the new "Crocus" Gallium3D driver has been added to the default driver build list so it's now at least building by default on x86/x86_64 systems and thus trivial after that to override...

Linux 5.15 Hardware Monitoring Is Big But Overdue For AMD

Wed, 09/01/2021 - 21:00

The Linux 5.15 hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem changes were sent out and now merged for this next kernel version. Particularly notable this cycle is AMD catching up on some of their sensors support...

RadeonSI Enables DCC Stores For RDNA2 APUs To Squeeze Out More Performance

Wed, 09/01/2021 - 19:56

RadeonSI Gallium3D as the official AMD OpenGL Linux driver has mirrored the unofficial RADV Vulkan driver in enabling DCC stores support for RDNA2 APUs in the name of greater performance...

Wayland Protocols 1.22 Released With DRM Object Leasing Support For VR HMDs

Wed, 09/01/2021 - 18:56

Designed with VR headsets in mind, Wayland-Protocols 1.22 was released today and adds the DRM leasing protocol to its staging area...

XFS & EROFS File-Systems Have Big Changes For Linux 5.15

Wed, 09/01/2021 - 18:07

In addition to Btrfs sporting new features with Linux 5.15, the XFS and EROFS file-systems also have some shiny new features and improvements for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Linux 5.15 Power Management Changes Merged

Wed, 09/01/2021 - 17:55

The ACPI and power management changes have landed for the Linux 5.15 merge window...

BPF Timers To Intel Additions Lead The Networking Changes With Linux 5.15

Wed, 09/01/2021 - 13:00

The networking subsystem updates for the recently opened Linux 5.15 merge window have landed...

Debian 11, Valve Happenings, Linux 5.14 & More Excitement From August

Wed, 09/01/2021 - 12:00

For being a summer month, August was much busier than usual with a slew of exciting hardware and Linux/open-source software announcements. From releasing Linux 5.14 in marking 30 years of the Linux kernel to the debut of Debian 11 to Valve Steam Deck related work to their exciting sponsorship of Zink work, August was quite an exciting month for Linux enthusiasts...

Chrome 93 Released With WebOTP Cross-Device Support, CSS Module Scripts

Wed, 09/01/2021 - 06:40

Google is shipping Chrome 93 today as the latest stable version of their web browser...

Zink Now Achieves OpenGL ES 3.2 Atop Vulkan

Wed, 09/01/2021 - 04:30

Mike Blumenkrantz in addition to addressing that big performance problem with Tesseract and other Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan improvements in recent days has now landed OpenGL ES 3.2 support...

Btrfs Adds Degenerate RAID Support, Performance Improvements With Linux 5.15

Wed, 09/01/2021 - 03:08

The Btrfs file-system updates have landed now in Linux 5.15 mainline with some exciting new features and improvements...

KSMBD As An In-Kernel SMB3 File Server Merged For Linux 5.15

Wed, 09/01/2021 - 01:52

One of the earliest pull requests sent in for the now-open Linux 5.15 cycle was proposing KSMBD land as the in-kernel SMB3 file server as an alternative on Linux systems to running Samba in user-space. At the time it wasn't clear if Linus Torvalds would pull in this file server code to the Linux kernel but now he has indeed landed it...

GNU Linux-libre Was Mistakenly Including Non-Free Code, So Releases Now Re-Spun + 5.14

Wed, 09/01/2021 - 01:17

GNU Linux-libre 5.14-gnu was released today as the project's re-base on the recently released Linux 5.14 upstream kernel. But prior supported GNU Linux-libre releases also had to be re-spun as it turned out this "100% free software" kernel was mistakenly leaving in some non-free kernel bits...

GCC 11 PGO With The AMD Ryzen 9 5950X For Faster Performance

Tue, 08/31/2021 - 21:16

It's been a while since last running benchmarks evaluating the performance of GCC's profile guided optimizations (PGO) for helping to optimize the performance. But stemming from the discussions around PGO'ing the Linux kernel (though that effort is stalled for now), several Phoronix readers inquired about seeing some fresh PGO figures with GCC 11. So here are such benchmarks of GCC 11 with the upcoming Ubuntu 21.10 running on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X desktop.

Linux 5.15 Adds Another Knob To Harden Against Side Channel Attacks

Tue, 08/31/2021 - 20:30

With the Linux 5.15 kernel is a new build-time option to further harden the kernel around side channel attacks and information leakage. Enabling this option can have some (small) performance cost and a slightly larger kernel...

Con Kolivas Contemplates Ending Kernel Development, Retiring MuQSS & -ck Patches

Tue, 08/31/2021 - 18:30

Con Kolivas has worked on many patches for the Linux kernel over the past two decades and particularly focused on innovations around desktop performance/interactivity. For over a decade now he's primarily been focused on maintaining his work out-of-tree and not catering to mainline acceptance but now he is thinking of bowing out once more and ending his kernel development effort...