Phoronix

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.16-rc5 and while things are looking normal at this stage, he announced that this 5.16 cycle will drag on longer due to the Christmas / New Year's holidays...

OpenRazer as the open-source, community-maintained collection of Razer peripheral support for Linux is out with a new release...

One of the Intel patch series we have been waiting to see mainlined since all the way back in 2018 is around per-client GPU metrics reporting for being able to show various GPU engine activity on a per-process basis. Every once in a while the patches have been revived but have yet to reach mainline. They recently were revved once again, leaving us hope that in 2022 we might finally see this standardized per-client/process GPU statistics reporting land in the mainline kernel...

This year there has been a lot of Linux kernel work around improving the handling of tiered memory servers, namely those with traditional system RAM augmented by Intel Optane DC persistent memory. There has been work to demote pages during reclamation to the slower persistent memory, improving NUMA balancing around such systems to optimize memory placement, transparent page placement and related work around tiered memory Linux servers...

Coming with future Intel CPUs is Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) to further enhance the security of virtual machines (VMs) and it's sounded a lot like AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) in many regards and in fact now for the Linux kernel Intel is looking at leveraging some of that SEV code to allow for more code sharing between these CPU features to improve virtualization security...

Aside from the separate work around experimental Vulkan Video decode support, thanks to Intel recently there have been a number of Vulkan improvements to the FFmpeg code around new accelerated filters...

One year after Apple introduced the M1 SoC and the effort began to bring-up this Apple Silicon under Linux, the effort remains ongoing and more code is inching closer to the mainline kernel...

The recent activity around x86 (x86_64 included) straight-line speculation mitigation handling is set to culminate with this security feature being set for mainline with the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle...

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS isn't expected to run on aging IBM POWER8 hardware as Canonical is shifting its PPC64EL architecture baseline to POWER9 for building packages...

SeaBIOS as the open-source x86 BIOS implementation commonly used by QEMU as well as a Coreboot payload is out with a new release...

Even with the holidays quickly approaching, KDE developers remain very busy in landing fixes -- especially crash fixes -- and fixing up Plasma's Wayland session for ensuring it is very polished for 2022...

The highly anticipated Godot 4.0 game engine release continues moving closer and should soon see an official alpha release...

Following last week's Wine 6.23 development release, Wine 7.0-rc1 was just declared in marking the end of feature development and beginning preparations for issuing Wine 7.0.0 stable in January...

The open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver work covered yesterday about a big optimization by leveraging NIR and going through that intermediate representation and relying on common NIR optimizations has now been merged into Mesa 22.0. This is a step-up from the existing open-source OpenGL driver support for old Radeon 9500 through Radeon X1000 series (R500) graphics processors. A similar conversion is also planned for the old Nouveau driver handling NVIDIA "NV30" era graphics processors too...

While it won't make it for the upcoming Wine 7.0, the Wayland driver for natively supporting this X11 successor continues maturing and in the not too distant future will hopefully begin receiving more widespread testing via Wine-Staging...

It's been a while since last having a hearty BSD benchmark comparison on Phoronix in part due to the latest hardware platforms generally lagging behind with how well supported they are by the various BSDs. But stemming from a Phoronix Premium supporter recently requesting some fresh BSD benchmarks, here is a look at how DragonFlyBSD 6.0.1, FreeBSD 13.0, NetBSD 9.2, and OpenBSD 7.0 are competing against various Linux distributions like CentOS, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu.

With Intel's Atom x6000E "Elkhart Lake" SoCs there is a new block called the Programmable Services Engine (PSE) that is an Arm Cortex-M7 companion core that handles various tasks. Unfortunately, with the PSE it means a new binary-only firmware module. With the Programmable Services Engine likely to come with future Intel platforms too, Coreboot developers and open-source enthusiasts are calling on Intel to now open-source this firmware to avoid having this extra binary blob and further complicating future open-source firmware efforts...

Back in 2018 for the Linux 4.18 kernel was introducing the Restartable Sequences system call for allowing faster user-space operations on per-CPU data. By avoiding atomic operations in cases like incrementing per-CPU counters, modifying per-CPU spinlocks, reading/writing to per-CPU ring buffers, and similar, Restartable Sequences can provide a performance advantage. The GNU C Library is landing its revised support for making use of this system call...

Sent to DRM-Next this week for queuing until the Linux 5.17 merge window in January is the latest batch of drm-intel-gt-next updates, which has hang fixes and more preparations for Intel discrete graphics...

It's been over one month since the release of AMDVLK 2021.Q4.1 as the latest open-source AMD Vulkan driver update, which is off the wagon compared to the prior weekly/bi-weekly release cadence. But today thankfully it's been succeeded by AMDVLK 2021.Q4.2 as the newest driver release...