Phoronix

Upstream LLVM has added the compiler CPU targets for the Apple M2, A15, and A16 SoCs...

The NTFS3 kernel driver providing read/write Microsoft NTFS file-system support on Linux, thanks to the code being open-sourced by Paragon Software, continues to see new improvements...

Up on the review block today is the Solidigm P41 Plus as a value-focused solid-state drive. Solidigm is the US company formed when SK Hynix acquired Intel's NAND/SSD business. Since forming Solidigm at the end of last year they have continued to sell products from Intel's existing SSD product line-up while last month they announced the P41 Plus as their first consumer solid-state drive of their own design. Recently I've been testing out the Solidigm P41 Plus 1TB and 2TB drives under Linux for seeing how these affordable QLC drives perform.

After the persistent work by developer Gert Wollny with a desire to improve the aging "R600g" driver that provides open-source OpenGL support for Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics cards, this Gallium3D driver in Mesa 22.3 will now use the NIR back-end by default...

Just a friendly reminder that if you wish to show your support for Phoronix this autumn season and help in allowing me to continue Linux hardware testing and the like, the annual Phoronix Premium sale is currently taking place...

Restartable Sequences "RSEQ" has been one of the nice additions to the Linux kernel in recent years and can allow for faster user-space operations on per-CPU data by providing a shared data structure ABI between each user-space thread and the kernel. RSEQ has been in the process of being extended to provide even more performance benefits...

A final batch of drm-misc-next feature changes intended for the Linux 6.1 Linux kernel has been submitted to DRM-Next. This pull consists of some core DRM code improvements as well as updates to the smaller DRM/KMS drivers...

As part of getting their Vulkan ray-tracing support into good shape, a handful of patches were merged today for Mesa 22.3 in fixing up the ANV driver's ray query code...

From two weeks back you may recall the small patches that led to increasing Intel's Vulkan driver draw throughput by ~60%+. Well, as of yesterday the refined version of that work has landed within Mesa 22.3...

Weston, the reference compositor to Wayland, is out today with a big feature update. Most exciting is preparation work for better supporting HDR monitors moving forward as well as preparing for multi-GPU and multi-back-end use-cases...

Earlier this month Blender 3.3 released and in addition to introducing an Intel oneAPI back-end, it's notable for bringing improvements to the AMD HIP back-end for Radeon GPUs. Significant on the AMD side is extending GPU support back to GFX9/Vega. Thus it's a good time for a fresh round of benchmarking for showing how the AMD Radeon HIP performance against that of NVIDIA's existing CUDA and OptiX back-ends.

Fwupd 1.8.5 is out today for continuing to improve the firmware updating experience on Linux systems in conjunction with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS)...

While Intel's Compute-Runtime stack is fully open-source and already provides OpenCL 3.0 support for recent generations of Intel graphics under Linux, it looks like the recently-merged "Rusticl" Rust OpenCL implementation in Mesa will soon be working too on Intel graphics hardware as an alternative OpenCL 3.0 implementation...

A Microsoft engineer has landed an improvement to the Mesa Gallium3D Video Acceleration "VA" state tracker that can allow for faster video processing times and greater GPU utilization...

Google engineers on Wednesday released AOM-AV1 3.5 as the newest version of their open-source AV1 video encoder. With AOM-AV1 3.5 comes yet more performance improvements as well as memory optimizations...

The first alpha release of the Debian Installer to be used by Debian 12 "Bookworm" is now available for early testing...

Turnip as the Mesa Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics is now able to support Vulkan 1.3...

Back in August I wrote about AMD developers looking at OpenGL threading by default for their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. One month later that change has now landed for next quarter's Mesa 22.3 -- barring any issues coming up that would lead to it being reverted...

Microsoft and Canonical jointly announced today that systemd now works within Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2)...

GNOME 43 is out today as the newest version of this popular open-source desktop environment used by Fedora Workstation, Ubuntu, and many other Linux distributions...