Phoronix

It was just four years ago the AMDGPU kernel driver was nearly one million lines of code and earlier this year began nearing three million lines. Now with Linux 5.14-rc1 released this week it is at over 3.3 million lines for this kernel graphics driver...

Matthew Wilcox of Oracle has sent out his 14th revision to the memory "folios" patch-set for this new struct that aims to improve Linux's memory management code and ultimately better performance...

Patches have been posted for wiring up Display Stream Compression (DSC) support for the Qualcomm MSM Direct Rendering Manager driver...

Landing into "hwmon-next" just after the Linux 5.14-rc1 tagging that marks the formal end to feature work for the current cycle was the k10temp driver adding support for AMD Zen 3 APU temperature monitoring under Linux...

Mesa 21.2 feature development is now over and the first release candidate issued for this next quarterly feature release to these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan Linux drivers...

The UBports folks have released Ubuntu Touch OTA-18 as their latest over-the-air update for this mobile Linux platform. Notable with this release is what isn't there - the Ubuntu 20.04 base. Ubuntu Touch OTA-18 continues using now the five year old Ubuntu 16.04 LTS base while the migration to 20.04 is still in progress...

It's well known that the Linux desktop can be quite unbearable when under heavy memory pressure as has been showcased over the years and more attention these days turning to the likes of OOMD/systemd-oomd and other alternatives to better deal with Linux low/out-of-memory scenarios especially with today's desktop software and web browsers consuming increasing amounts of memory. Another effort coming to fruition for helping this scenario is the "le9" Linux kernel patches...

Mesa's open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has landed support for Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) culling support as ultimately what should provide another performance win for some workloads...

Now that the DG1 graphics support is beginning to get squared away and with Linux 5.15 will likely be able to boot to an accelerated desktop, bring-up on the DG2 graphics card has begun along with the Xe_HP software development vehicle...

The "Linux Random Number Generator" (LRNG) effort as a new drop-in replacement for /dev/random is now up to its 41st revision and in development for more than five years...

For going along with the newly added support in the MSM DRM kernel driver, Mesa's Freedreno Gallium3D OpenGL and Turnip Vulkan drivers have landed support for the Adreno 660 and Adreno 635 graphics processors...

One of the patch series I have been looking forward to see land going back to 2018 has been the per-process GPU load statistics or as it's known officially the "per client engine busyness" series. The work didn't land for Linux 5.14 but at least this week the latest revision was posted...

Valve today pushed out their newest stable update to the Steam client for Windows, macOS, and Linux...

For those making use of VirtualBox virtualization and rely on the shared folder functionality via the mainline "VBOXSF" driver for exchanging files between VMs and the host, the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel has an important fix/improvement...

Thanks to one of VMware's Linux engineers there are improvements pending to the AMD IOMMU support code to help with performance...

LibreOffice 7.2 is expected for release before the end of August while today marks the availability of the first release candidate...

With having hands on with a Dell XPS 13 9310 (Dell 0DXP1F) with the Core i7 1185G7 Tiger Lake processor (compared to prior Linux tests with the i7-1165G7), here is a fresh look at the performance of Microsoft Windows 10 Pro as shipped by Dell with all available stable updates versus a clean install of Ubuntu 21.04 Linux.

Mozilla has officially released Firefox 90.0 as the latest monthly update to their cross-platform web browser...

Being worked on for quite a while now by longtime kernel developer Matthew Wilcox of Oracle is memory folios to improve Linux's memory management and allow for greater efficiency. Benchmarks with memory folios have shown for example kernel builds can be up to 7% faster. It's looking like there is a desire to see at least some of this folios code land for Linux 5.15...

For several years already the AMDGPU kernel driver has supported virtual display functionality for cases like headless GPUs, pre-silicon hardware bring-up, GPUs/accelerators that lack physical display outputs, and other similar use-cases. That virtual display code is now being overhauled by re-using the existing VKMS DRM driver...