Phoronix

Ahead of AMD's RDNA3 announcement for tomorrow, 3 November, the Mesa 22.3 open-source Radeon graphics driver code continues seeing more RDNA3/GFX11 enablement work landing...

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver that provides reverse-engineered, open-source OpenGL support for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs is now capable of OpenGL 4.5 with the Adreno 600 series graphics processors...

While initially leary of AMD Zen 4's "double pumped" approach for supporting AVX-512 using a 256-bit data path, it's proven to be very efficient for performance and yield great results without negative clock impairments or wreaking havoc on the power consumption. Back in September I delivered a detailed AVX-512 performance analysis on the Ryzen 9 7950X while in this article is a detailed benchmark look at the Core i9 11900K against the Ryzen 7 7700X. The Core i9 11900K being the currently last Intel desktop CPU officially supporting AVX-512 while the Ryzen 7 7700X was used for matching the core/thread count of that Rocket Lake processor for this AVX-512 on/off comparison.

Merged this morning into Mesa 22.3 are some adjustments to Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for delivering better Vulkan mesh shading performance with Arc Graphics hardware...

It looks like FineIBT as combining the best of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology and Control Flow Integrity as an enhanced, alternative control flow integrity (CFI) implementation could be ready for mainline with the upcoming Linux 6.2 cycle...

JEDEC recently outlined an extension to Universal Flash Storage (UFS) for File-Based Optimizations (FBO) to enhance the performance of UFS devices. A Xiaomi engineer sent out a set of Linux kernel patches for implementing UFS FBO in the name of better performance, but with almost immediate rejection by a veteran Linux kernel maintainer...

With the start of the new month comes updated Steam Survey numbers from Valve for the preceding month. Thanks to the continued growth of the Steam Deck and Valve continuing to ramp up their production, Steam on Linux enjoyed another tick up for October...

The Godot open-source game engine had been part of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) as many open-source projects utilize for handling fiscal sponsorship duties and the like while now the Godot Foundation has been established as its own legal entity...

Going back to late last year Intel began working on a new Linux driver for "Software Defined Silicon" as a means of activating licensed hardware features akin to what they tried a decade ago with the "Intel Upgrade Service" for unlocking extra CPU features. The SDSi driver was merged in Linux 5.18 while this afternoon they sent out a rather sizable update to this controversial driver / hardware feature...

It's been 3+ years that the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been working on NGG Stream-Out support for making use of the Next-Gen Geometry engine that is in workable shape for some RDNA GPUs. Finally with Mesa 22.3 releasing this quarter, a new environment variable option is allowing the NGG Streamout / Transform Feedback functionality to be flipped on with the RADV driver...

Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) is still being eyed for enabling as part of the default Linux x86_64 kernel configurations to provide better out-of-the-box security on supported processors. A patch sent out today continues the upstream discussion over flipping on this feature by default that is part of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) for helping to defend against jump/call oriented programming attacks...

Two high severity security vulnerabilities affecting OpenSSL were made public today, which were the issues that led to Fedora 37 being delayed to mid-November to allow the release images have mitigated OpenSSL packages...

SuperTuxKart 1.4 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source kart racing game originally inspired by Mario Kart...

Clément Lefèbvre has published the latest monthly status report for the Linux Mint distribution that is the popular desktop Linux distribution based on Ubuntu Linux...

Landing in "net-next" on Monday is wired networking support for the MotorComm YT8521 Ethernet Gigabit PHY. This network ASIC may not ring a bell for most folks, but is used so far by one notable RISC-V development board...

With the fifteen Linux hardware reviews and 245 original open-source/Linux news stories written by your's truly last month, here is a look back at what was exciting Phoronix readers the most from Google's new KataOS to the release of the speedy Python 3.11, Linux 6.1 taking shaping, and Intel releasing Arc Graphics A750 and A770 graphics cards...

Adding to the long list of Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver improvements coming with Mesa 22.3 this quarter is now a working Mesa front-end shader caching implementation...

OBS Studio as the leading open-source and cross-platform screencasting/streaming app that is popular with gamers and YouTubers is now out with version 28.1...

Wine 7.20 was released today as a rare Monday debut for this newest bi-weekly development snapshot. Wine continues inching close to its release candidate / feature freeze period for the Wine 8.0 release in early 2023...

Systemd developers are celebrating Halloween by releasing systemd 252...