Phoronix

AMD open-source driver developers today merged another big set of patches providing various micro-optimizations and other enhancements to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

While the Linux kernel still hasn't added any formal control yet for AMD Predictive Store Forwarding to disable it short of also toggling Spectre V4 / SSBD, with the Linux 5.16 kernel the AMD PSF bit will now be exposed to KVM guest virtual machines so that they -- either with a patched/future kernel or for other operating systems -- may choose to toggle explicitly disable this AMD CPU feature...

After seeing some initial release challenges, Fedora 35 Beta was released today across the Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, and Fedora IoT flavors as well as their other versions...

Vulkan 1.2.194 is out as the latest spec revision to this high performance graphics and compute API...

The past month we have started our testing of Ampere's Altra Max M128-30, the company's new 128 core server processor, and in this article today are our initial benchmarks of this promising chip for high core count servers in both 1P and 2P configurations tested.

While Keith Packard is known for his work on X11/X.Org, the past few years he has also been developing Picolibc as a C library intended for embedded systems. He also recently jumped from SiFive to Amazon and appears at the ecommerce giant to be working on Picolibc in an official capacity, presumably for use on Amazon's growing hardware devices...

The open-source Solaris/Illumos ecosystem certainly isn't vibrant these days like back during the Sun Microsystems times with OpenSolaris, but OmniOS continues progressing as one of the few still-active and useful Solaris/Illumos-powered platforms...

While many years ago Fedora's Java support was in great shape with quickly integrating OpenJDK going back to IcedTea, these days Fedora's Java packages are barely maintained and largely fallen into disrepair...

Since July we've seen AMD open-source driver engineers posting code for "Cyan Skillfish" as an APU with Navi 1x graphics. While initial support for Cyan Skillfish was merged for Linux 5.15, it turns out the display code isn't yet wired up due to being a different DCN2 variant for its display block...

A batch of feature updates was submitted today for DRM-Next of early feature work slated to come to the next version of the Linux kernel...

There has been talk of Intel moving to offer more license-able/opt-in features for hardware capabilities found within a given processor as an upgrade and now we are seeing the Linux signs of that support coming with a driver for "Intel Software Defined Silicon" to allow for the secure activation of such features baked into the processor's silicon but only available as an up-charge option...

With the in-development Linux 5.15 kernel there is now support for ACPI Platform Profiles on supported ASUS laptops. This ASUS laptop platform profile support joins the likes of HP, Dell, and Lenovo laptops already having this support exposed under Linux that allows users to control their power/performance preference. Here are some tests with the ASUS ROG Strix G15 AMD Advantage laptop with the platform profile options under Linux 5.15.

It's been a while since having any news to report on Bcachefs as the promising open-source file-system born out of the Linux kernel's block cache code. However, Kent Overstreet continues working tirelessly on it and has now merged Bcachefs' snapshot support...

The Linux kernel support around the Nintendo Wii and Wii U game console hardware continues to improve and now a new Nintendo crypto driver is being tackled based on reverse-engineered documentation...

Adding to the growing list of Mesa 21.3 features for next quarter's feature release is Lavapipe now supporting Vulkan 1.2...

The nanoMIPS architecture that was announced by MIPS in 2018 for embedded devices to lower power consumption and yield smaller code footprints was announced for the MIPS I7200 but since then there hasn't been much of nanoMIPS. However, MediaTek is now looking to contribute upstream the compiler support for this processor ISA into GCC...

Linus Torvalds has now issued the third weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 5.15 kernel...

Given last week's release of Chrome 94, here are some fresh browser benchmarks looking at Firefox 92 stable against Chrome 94 running on Ubuntu Linux...

GNU Wget2 2.0 has been released for this successor to GNU Wget. There are many improvements to this GPLv3+ licensed program. Over the original GNU Wget, Wget2 is faster, supports more protocols especially around HTTP/2 and compression, supports multi-threading / parallel connections, and other improvements...

Earlier this month AMD published their "amd-pstate" Linux driver that leverages ACPI CPPC data to make more informed CPU frequency scaling decisions with an aim to boost the performance-per-Watt for Zen 3 (and eventually Zen 2) processors on Linux. The second spin of that "amd-pstate" Linux kernel driver is now available for testing...