Phoronix

Running the past two days was the annual OpenZFS Developer Summit. One of the most interesting presentations from this virtual event was on the status of DirectIO (O_DIRECT) support for the OpenZFS file-system and the performance boost it can offer in relevant areas...

While there is already LLVMpipe Gallium3D for software acceleration of OpenGL on CPUs within Mesa, if wanting to increase the layers of abstraction you could also use Zink for OpenGL over Vulkan and by way of Lavapipe have that software accelerated on the CPU. With Mesa 22.0-devel, that route of Zink on CPUs is now faster...

Merged last week into the Linux 5.16 kernel is improved Retpoline "return trampoline" code...

HP announced today that select upcoming HP workstations will begin seeing Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) pre-installed...

Recently I ran benchmarks showing how Ubuntu 21.10 performance has improved for AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" even compared to just six months ago with Ubuntu 21.04. In this article is a broader look at AMD EPYC Milan on the autumn 2021 Linux distributions with firing up not only Ubuntu 21.10 but Fedora Server 35, Clear Linux 35150, CentOS Stream, and AlmaLinux 8.4 as other common alternatives in the Linux server space.

Xen para-virtualized guests booting on the Linux 5.16 kernel should see noticeably quicker boot times...

Intel's open-source Linux engineers continue to be quite busy bringing up CXL interconnect support within the mainline kernel. For the in-development Linux 5.16 is another batch of code landing...

As of this morning the GCC 12 compiler has landed support for -march=armv9-a for targeting the forthcoming Armv9-A ISA...

A new version of the Ncurses text-based user interface library is now available and most notable is a new but experimental driver for supporting the Windows Terminal...

Being worked on for more than a year by Intel and other kernel developers has been FGKASLR to enhance kernel security. While the Linux kernel has long supported Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) to make memory addresses less predictable, FGKASLR ups the security much more by placing that randomization at the function level. It's looking like FGKASLR could be mainlined soon...

NVIDIA used their GTC event today to announce OptiX 7.4 as the latest version of their ray-tracing engine/framework for use with their GPUs...

NVIDIA used their virtual GTC event to announce Jetson AGX Orin as the latest addition to their Jetson family. With Jetson AGX Orin they are advertising it as "the world's smallest, most powerful and energy-efficient AI supercomputer" for small form factor and low-power environments like robotics and edge computing applications...

The platform-drivers-x86 pull is exciting as usual for the in-development Linux 5.16 kernel...

AMD this morning hosted their Accelerated Data Center Premiere virtual event where they introduced Milan-X as well as the Instinct MI200. With Milan-X there is now 3D V-Cache introduced for the current generation and still-very-impressive EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors. I can personally attest to Milan-X being very exciting for HPC workloads and beyond with impressive gains to performance.

In addition to announcing Milan-X processors at the virtual Accelerated Data Center Premiere event, AMD just provided some new public details concerning next-generation Zen 4 processors...

Raspberry Pi OS as the official operating system for the Raspberry Pi single board computers has been updated against Debian 11 "Bullseye"...

While just a point release, XWayland 21.1.3 that is out this morning is exciting in that it adds support for using NVIDIA's new proprietary driver that supports the GBM API for enhancing its Wayland support...

Last week the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) feature patches were sent out and subsequently merged for Linux 5.16...

It's been a while since last having any major progress to report on Etnaviv, the open-source Mesa Gallium3D driver supporting Vivante graphics IP. But a rather fundamental change was made this past week in that Etnaviv is now (finally) using NIR by default...

Linux 5.16 is an action-packed kernel with a ton of exciting additions and improvements. Adding to the growing list of changes to look forward to with v5.16 is mainline support for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4...