Phoronix

The "memfd_secret" system call is being added to the Linux 5.14 kernel to provide the ability to create memory areas that are visible only in the context of the owning process and these "secret" memory regions are not mapped by other processes or the kernel page tables...

The CentOS Board of Directors has approved the formation of the CentOS Kmods special interest group for expanding the selection of kernel modules available to this distribution...

The VirtIO-IOMMU driver now works on x86/x86_64 hardware with the Linux 5.14 kernel...

For over one year now since Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) was first disclosed as a future feature with Xeon "Sapphire Rapids", Intel engineers have been posting AMX patches for enabling the new support for changes needed from the kernel to code compiler stacks. The Linux kernel support for AMX hasn't yet landed but has now been revised its seventh time for public review...

Going back to 2017 was work on firmware-based power management for Intel graphics with its GuC implementation. That work didn't advance with the time but now with Intel renewing their work around GuC and with future hardware may mandate this binary-only firmware, they are again revisiting the GuC power management...

Linux 5.14 has re-landed support for improvements to lower the latency of its USB audio driver...

Back in April was the release of Vulkan Video extensions for GPU-accelerated video encode/decode using this cross-platform API. NVIDIA was quick to publish a beta driver with Vulkan Video support while adoption beyond that by drivers or multimedia software has been rather limited so far. Fortunately, the popular GStreamer multimedia framework for Linux users is working in the direction of supporting Vulkan Video...

Arriving late for the Linux 5.14 merge window that is closing this weekend are all of the Arm SoC and platform changes for this next kernel version...

The RISC-V architecture code supports more functionality with the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel...

The latest achievement for Mesa's generic OpenGL implementation atop Vulkan is being able to handle OpenGL ES 3.2...

Since last year AMD has been working on VanGogh APU support for Linux initially with their graphics driver support and that has spread to other areas. It also turns out now that with VanGogh APUs will be a new Linux audio driver...

Shortly after OpenCL 3.0 was finalized last year it was enabled for Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack (and even earlier with their Tiger Lake enablement). But since last year that OpenCL 3.0 support was marked as "beta" while last week was quietly promoted to being "production" grade...

XWayland 21.1.2 is out today and while it may seem like "just a point release", it's quite an exciting one at that since it does bring NVIDIA hardware acceleration for XWayland when paired with their new NVIDIA 470 series driver...

AMD has published its first code drop of the quarter for their open-source "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver that is derived from their official driver sources but making use of the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end rather than their proprietary shader compiler...

Fixes to the Plasma Wayland session continue to be quite steady work in the KDE camp even with the support becoming quite mature and good enough for day-to-day use...

The Linux 5.14 char/misc updates landed this week in the kernel. The "char/misc" area continues to serve as a growing catch-all portion of the code-base not jiving well elsewhere in other subsystems...

LLVM 12.0.1 is available today as the only planned point release to this spring's release of LLVM 12...

FUTEX2 continues to be worked on by Collabora as part of their work with Valve on enhancing Linux gaming support. With FUTEX2 the work is driven about enhancing the support for Windows games running on Linux with the likes of Steam Play...

Since 2013 Google has been working on Fibers as a promising user-space scheduling framework. Fibers has been in use at Google and delivering great results while recently they began work on open-sourcing this framework for Linux and as part of that working on the new "UMCG" code...

AMD engineers and their partners continue work towards upstreaming Secure Encrypted Virtualization's Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) support for the mainline Linux kernel...