Phoronix

With Mesa 22.1 having been branched and working its way towards release in early to mid May, it's a good time to deliver some fresh Linux gaming benchmarks on the latest GPU drivers. In this article are some reference benchmark results of various AMD Radeon graphics cards on Mesa 22.1-rc1 as of branching paired with Linux 5.17 and then benchmarked against NVIDIA's latest driver and various GeForce RTX GPUs.

Last year open-source developers called on Intel to open-source their "PSE" firmware. The Programmable Services Engine (PSE) introduced with Elkhart Lake is an Arm Cortex-M7 companion core responsible for various tasks and is programmed by a binary-only firmware module. While it started out as a proprietary, binary blob, the PSE firmware has now been open-sourced!..

Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media has done on a terrific job on the development of SVT-AV1 for open-source, high performance CPU-based AV1 video encoding. This morning marks the release of SVT-AV1 1.0...

While to date no major hardware vendors are focusing on their open-source Mesa-based drivers for running on Windows (though there has been independent work like building RADV on Windows), other Mesa code is seeing interest and usage under Windows...

Laid out earlier this month was a change proposal for removing legacy X.Org drivers with the Fedora 37 release later this year...

Back in February was the interesting work laid out by Red Hat engineers for their looking at using eBPF within the kernel's HID subsystem. A new patch series attempting this innovative use of the in-kernel JIT virtual machine has been published...

While the Mesa 22.1 feature release will hopefully be out in about two weeks, out today is Mesa 22.0.2 as the newest point release for the current Mesa stable series. With this release slipping an extra week, there are even more bug-fixes than usual back-ported into this version...

NVIDIA by way of their GPU compute / CUDA Fortran interests and having acquired the PGI compiler company nearly a decade ago has been active contributors to the LLVM Fortran scene. NVIDIA spearheaded the work on the modern LLVM Fortran compiler support and worked with other vendors and the open-source ecosystem on the since-upstreamed FLANG compiler. NVIDIA had been maintaining a "fir-dev" downstream for their latest Fortran compiler patches while now moving forward they will be focused on upstream LLVM contributions...

Proton 7.0-2 is out today as the newest version of this Wine downstream that powers Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux / SteamOS...

One of the less talked about features with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" is Canonical offering up a "beta" of a real-time Linux kernel image for use with this long-term support release. In doing so, Canonical is expanding their aim for Ubuntu Linux within industrial and other use-cases demanding real-time needs...

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" is now available for download...

OpenBSD 7.1 is out this morning as the newest version of this popular, security-minded BSD operating system...

Longtime Linux users especially those that frequented Linux conferences/events in pre-COVID times are likely familiar with Dirk Hohndel. Dirk has a well known track record with Linux going back to the 90's, good friend and diving buddy with Linus Torvalds, and now somewhat surprisingly has moved on to promoting a blockchain effort...

At the end of last year you may recall the talked about Linux kernel patches for booting systems faster by allowing the parallel bring-up of secondary CPU cores. It's been a while since hearing much about that effort but seems to have hit a snag in that the code is running into problems on early Zen CPUs and older...

Along with the Raptor Lake P Linux kernel graphics driver support that should work its way to mainline for the v5.19 cycle, merged to Mesa 22.2 today is the Raptor Lake P bits for the Intel OpenGL / Vulkan drivers...

Chris Lord at Igalia has recently been looking at the WebKit browser engine performance as it concerns embedded devices. From this work he found that WebKit with its WPE port for embedded devices was found to be performing rather poorly on Wayland. Patches are now pending to address two uncovered issues...

While GCC 12 (GCC 12.1 stable) will be out in the coming weeks, GCC 11.3 is out today as the latest stable release in the current GCC 11 series...

Mesa 22.1-rc2 is now available as the second weekly release candidate for this quarter's Mesa3D feature release of this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan graphics drivers...

There is some exciting progress around Zink as the OpenGL 4.6 implementation built atop Vulkan APIs for generally quite performant OpenGL-on-Vulkan acceleration... Zink with the recently-merged Kopper code is even beginning to work on Windows and Laminar Research is hoping to use Zink for the next major X-Plane release!..

Merged as part of Linux 5.18 is Intel's Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) support as part of CET (Control Flow Enforcement) technology. Indirect Branch Tracking is intended to help protect against JUMP/CALL oriented attacks as part of CET's control-flow integrity protections. Meanwhile still being worked on is "FineIBT" as a more compiler-hardened version built atop Intel CET/IBT...