Phoronix

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...

The Framework Laptop has proven to be very popular with enthusiasts thanks to its focus on the ability for users to make repairs and upgrades to their laptop. Google has even taken notice and they in cooperation with Framework Computer Inc have launched a Chromebook Edition laptop...

Over the summer Google announced Tau T2A as the first Google Cloud Compute Engine VM to run on Arm. The T2A series is powered by Ampere Altra processors and complement the Tau T2D series powered by AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors that launched last year. I have been trying out the Tau T2A series for the past several weeks and have some initial benchmarks to share today for showing how the Ampere Altra Arm VMs can perform against the existing T2D series.

In addition to a ~10% performance boost seen yesterday for RADV ray-tracing performance with Quake II RTX, another merge request also made it to Mesa 22.3 for much more significantly bolstering the RADV ray-tracing performance. With all of the recent RADV ray-tracing work, we are finally reaching a point where it's becoming viable for Linux gamers on this open-source driver...