Phoronix

It's been one year now since Intel launched Tiger Lake mobile processors and since then we've been running routine benchmarks of the Core i7 1165G7 on Linux. Tiger Lake at launch was performing well under Linux but its performance has continued evolving nicely since on Linux, especially as it pertains to the Xe Graphics with the open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers. With Ubuntu 21.10 due out later this month, there is another performance boost to enjoy.

Mesa 21.3 recently landed RADV ray-tracing support for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver with RDNA2 graphics processors. Now the software-based/emulated Vulkan ray-tracing support has been merged for handling pre-RDNA2 GPUs...

The Lumina Desktop Environment as the BSD-3 licensed desktop originally spearheaded for TrueOS/PC-BSD but found supported as well by other BSDs and Linux distributions is out with a rare new release...

In recent weeks the AVX-512 FP16 support has been landing within the GNU Compiler Collection codebase for next year's GCC 12 release...

Since the launch of AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors earlier this year there has been support for SEV-SNP as the latest evolution of Secure Encrypted Virtualization. The mainline Linux kernel still isn't yet supporting SEV Secure Nested Paging from the upstream kernel, but the out-of-tree patches continue to be available for those interested and development work continues in getting that code ready for mainline as well as ironing out other features...

Linus Torvalds has declared Linux 5.15-rc4 as the latest weekly release candidate of the maturing Linux 5.15 codebase...

The Linux kernel is trying again to enhance the low-latency playback mode of its USB audio driver...

While Intel Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" processors with Advanced Matrix Extensions are set for a Q2'22 ramp in production, one of the key new features that has yet to be properly plumbed in the mainline Linux kernel is for supporting AMX...

Announced this week was the Fairphone 4 as the latest iteration of this smartphone focused on being "sustainable and ethical" and now the initial patches have been sent out for providing mainline Linux kernel support...

Intel's newest weekly Compute-Runtime update providing open-source OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support for their graphics hardware is now reader with broader support for upcoming Alder Lake S processors...

OpenBLAS 0.3.18 is out today as the latest feature update to this widely-used, open-source BLAS implementation...

Intel on Friday formally released their oneAPI Toolkits 2021.4 release as the latest collection of their various software components for a multi-vendor, multi-architecture software platform across CPUs and XPUs (GPUs / accelerators)...

Version 0.6 of helloSystem is now available as the FreeBSD-based open-source operating system project taking design cues from Apple's macOS...

Facebook this week announced the open-sourcing of CompilerGym as their effort to improve compiler performance by leveraging machine learning to tackle optimization work...

Plasma 5.23 stable is due to be released in two weeks while until then KDE developers are scurrying to land more fixes in this next desktop update...

While earlier this year AMD shifted their Radeon Software driver focus to only supporting Polaris / GCN 1.4 and newer, when it comes to the open-source driver support on Linux there still is occasional activity going back to the ATI Radeon R300 days from nearly two decades ago...

PipeWire from the start was designed around handling the needs of both audio and video streams on Linux. While PipeWire is already in use for screencasting/recording under Wayland and working with Flatpak'ed applications, recently much of PipeWire's focus has been on addressing the use-cases of JACK and PulseAudio on the sound side. Now that the audio support is in quite good shape, Red Hat engineers are back to focusing on improvements to the video support...

Given this week's release of Fedora 35 Beta I have begun my benchmarking to look at how this next installment of Fedora Linux is shaping up given that it tends to be at the forefront of open-source innovations given Red Hat's investments. For our initial F35 benchmarking is looking at the Fedora Server 35 Beta performance compared to Fedora 35 on a dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 server.

LLVM 13.0 was tagged overnight as the latest half-year update to this widely-used, very powerful open-source compiler stack...

The first release candidate of the forthcoming PoCL 1.8 "Portable Computing Language" implementation is now available for testing...