Phoronix

While the Mesa 22.1 feature release will hopefully be out in about two weeks, out today is Mesa 22.0.2 as the newest point release for the current Mesa stable series. With this release slipping an extra week, there are even more bug-fixes than usual back-ported into this version...

NVIDIA by way of their GPU compute / CUDA Fortran interests and having acquired the PGI compiler company nearly a decade ago has been active contributors to the LLVM Fortran scene. NVIDIA spearheaded the work on the modern LLVM Fortran compiler support and worked with other vendors and the open-source ecosystem on the since-upstreamed FLANG compiler. NVIDIA had been maintaining a "fir-dev" downstream for their latest Fortran compiler patches while now moving forward they will be focused on upstream LLVM contributions...

Proton 7.0-2 is out today as the newest version of this Wine downstream that powers Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux / SteamOS...

One of the less talked about features with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" is Canonical offering up a "beta" of a real-time Linux kernel image for use with this long-term support release. In doing so, Canonical is expanding their aim for Ubuntu Linux within industrial and other use-cases demanding real-time needs...

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" is now available for download...

OpenBSD 7.1 is out this morning as the newest version of this popular, security-minded BSD operating system...

Longtime Linux users especially those that frequented Linux conferences/events in pre-COVID times are likely familiar with Dirk Hohndel. Dirk has a well known track record with Linux going back to the 90's, good friend and diving buddy with Linus Torvalds, and now somewhat surprisingly has moved on to promoting a blockchain effort...

At the end of last year you may recall the talked about Linux kernel patches for booting systems faster by allowing the parallel bring-up of secondary CPU cores. It's been a while since hearing much about that effort but seems to have hit a snag in that the code is running into problems on early Zen CPUs and older...

Along with the Raptor Lake P Linux kernel graphics driver support that should work its way to mainline for the v5.19 cycle, merged to Mesa 22.2 today is the Raptor Lake P bits for the Intel OpenGL / Vulkan drivers...

Chris Lord at Igalia has recently been looking at the WebKit browser engine performance as it concerns embedded devices. From this work he found that WebKit with its WPE port for embedded devices was found to be performing rather poorly on Wayland. Patches are now pending to address two uncovered issues...

While GCC 12 (GCC 12.1 stable) will be out in the coming weeks, GCC 11.3 is out today as the latest stable release in the current GCC 11 series...

Mesa 22.1-rc2 is now available as the second weekly release candidate for this quarter's Mesa3D feature release of this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan graphics drivers...

There is some exciting progress around Zink as the OpenGL 4.6 implementation built atop Vulkan APIs for generally quite performant OpenGL-on-Vulkan acceleration... Zink with the recently-merged Kopper code is even beginning to work on Windows and Laminar Research is hoping to use Zink for the next major X-Plane release!..

Merged as part of Linux 5.18 is Intel's Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) support as part of CET (Control Flow Enforcement) technology. Indirect Branch Tracking is intended to help protect against JUMP/CALL oriented attacks as part of CET's control-flow integrity protections. Meanwhile still being worked on is "FineIBT" as a more compiler-hardened version built atop Intel CET/IBT...

For those making use of the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel such as Ubuntu 22.04 with using this long-term support kernel by default, Linux 5.15.35 is out today and is a notable point release for back-porting an Intel P-State driver fix for Intel Alder Lake systems that leads to much better performance in properly deciding between P and E core selection. Here are some benchmarks on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with Linux 5.15.35 against other kernel options.

A project more than one year in the making by Emma Anholt is about to mark its completion with GLSL-to-TGSI set to be removed from Mesa whereby Gallium3D will always go through the NIR intermediate representation while older drivers still dependent upon TGSI will make use of the NIR-To-TGSI pass. Using NIR means better performance and getting rid of the GLSL-to-TGSI code path means freeing up more than twenty thousand lines of code...

The long in-development work by Intel, The Khronos Group, and other organizations on a proper SPIR-V back-end for LLVM is finally seeing code in mainline. As of last night the initial pieces have landed for the LLVM SPIR-V back-end for this Khronos open standard IR used most notably by Vulkan but for OpenCL and OpenGL as well...

QEMU 7.0 is out today as the newest version of this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

As part of the long ongoing work to improve Linux's printk() code, there has been work to allow for threaded console printing and allowing consoles to run at full-speed. That work is still ongoing but Tuesday saw the third iteration of those printk patches posted...

Back in 2020 the University of Illinois released HPVM as a heterogeneous parallel systems compiler. This compiler for CPUs / GPUs / FPGAs / other accelerators reached version 1.0 and this week HPVM 2.0 has been announced by the university research crew...