Phoronix

AMD's Linux graphics driver engineers have been working on the driver support for new graphics processors and now the patches are at the earliest stages of publishing. However, due to driver handling changes, it's sharply different this time around where in the past they volleyed a big set of patches under some colorful fishy codename in an effort to conceal their hardware enablement work...

While AMD EPYC processors already deliver great performance under Linux, with the Linux 5.18 kernel this spring is a scheduler improvement that can provide measurable speed-ups for various workloads on processors where there are multiple last level caches (LLCs) per node, such as with the case of EPYC...

Building off Intel graphics driver code already staged for the upcoming Linux 5.18 merge window, another round of feature changes were sent in this week to DRM-Next for adding to the queue ahead of this next kernel cycle...

While the X.Org Foundation didn't participate in Google Summer of Code last year amid GSoC project changes, with this year's GSoC design having incorporate feedback from last year's changes, X.Org is hoping to once again participate in this summer initiative that sees student developers contribute to and engage with open-source projects. So far under the X.Org umbrella there is one project idea being solicited that has willing mentors and that is for improving the unit testing coverage of the AMDGPU kernel driver...

Red Hat's David Airlie continues carrying out almost magical work on the open-source Linux graphics stack. Reviving some work he originally started a while back, patches pending for Mesa allow speeding up the software-based LLVMpipe OpenGL driver for vertex and fragment shader processing...

Google in cooperation with AOMedia this week released the AOM-AV1 v3.3 encoder for this royalty-free video codec...

In addition to the road-map update for Arc Graphics and Sapphire Rapids along with announcing Falcon Shores as a server CPU/APU/XPU pulling in Xe Graphics, Intel's 2022 Investor Meeting also made other updates and some new disclosures...

The Clutter toolkit -- as the OpenGL-based graphics library for rendering UIs that dates back more than one decade to OpenedHand that was then acquired by Intel and notably used during the Moblin/MeeGo era -- is finally being officially retired...

Thanks to Google engineers there is Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support being worked on for the open-source Coreboot...

As part of Intel's Investor Meeting today, the company provided an updated technical roadmap with some interesting bits of information...

Last year Amazon launched the EC2 M6a instances powered by AMD EPYC 7003 series while this week they have expanded their range of AMD Zen 3 offerings by launching the EC2 C6a series. The EC2 C6a instances are designed for compute-intensive workloads (hence the "C" series) and AWS is promoting it as offering up to 15% improvement in price-performance over prior-generation C5a instances and up to 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances. I've run some benchmarks of the new EC2 C6a instances looking at how they perform over the prior 2nd Gen EPYC C5a based instances, against the Intel Ice Lake competition over in the M6i stack, and also how the C6a competes with Amazon's own Graviton2-based C6g type.

Intel has released a new version of their open-source, interactive visualization software OSPray Studio that is built atop their OSPray ray-tracing rendering engine...

PipeWire continues with its rapid sequence of releases in continuing to fine-tune this audio/video stream server for the Linux desktop so it can successfully address the roles long-served by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK...

Long before the likes of VA-API and VDPAU for GPU video playback acceleration on Linux, there was X-Video and X-Video Motion Compensation (XvMC). Finally in 2022 the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library has decided to drop that XvMC hardware acceleration code...

Last week marked the release of the big AMD ROCm 5.0 update to the Radeon open-source GPU compute stack. Out already is now ROCM 5.0.1 with documentation updates as well as initiating the change around the hipcc and hipconfig commands moving forward...

With OpenBMC 2.10 never having materialized beyond a release candidate, the release of OpenBMC 2.11 today is a big one with roughly a year's worth of changes since OpenBMC 2.9. OpenBMC 2.11 brings many improvements for this Linux distribution intended for baseboard management controllers (BMCs) on servers and other management controllers...

The NVIDIA GeForce FX "NV30" graphics cards are nearly two decades old while via the open-source, community-driven Nouveau project even these old GPUs still see occasional Linux graphics driver improvements. Hitting Mesa 22.1-devel today is the most notable driver work we've seen in years for the open-source NV30 and NV40 (GeForce 6 / 7 series) graphics cards...

XWayland 22.1 is out today as the newest standalone feature release for this XWayland code issued separately from the X.Org Server. XWayland continues in very robust shape for allowing X11 clients whether it be games or applications to run atop capable Wayland compositors...

As with most modern SoCs/processors, proper CPU frequency scaling / performance state management is absolutely critical for achieving good performance out of the hardware either for ensuring the CPU is hitting its capable performance states and also to reduce power consumption / heat when not needed in order to avoid thermal throttling and prolonging battery life. Fortunately, a proper CPUFreq driver for the Apple M1 is in development for Linux and is allowing for a combination of enticing performance and good battery life for this community-driven, open-source support around the Apple Silicon...

Back in January I wrote how Valve is working on dynamic Variable Rate Shading (VRS) for the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" to dynamically control the shading performance to help with battery life. That work has now successfully been merged into Mesa 22.1 for the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack...