Phoronix

With less than one month out from the official release of Microsoft Windows 11, I was curious to run some fresh benchmarks of the latest Windows 11 Insider Preview build against Windows 10 21H1 to see how the performance is looking. Of course, also to see how Windows 11 is shaping up against Ubuntu 21.10 also due for release in October.

Intel-owned Habana Labs now has the most open software stack among AI accelerators! While Habana Labs has long provided an open-source, upstream kernel driver for their Gaudi AI training and Goya AI inference accelerators, the user-space portions including their code compiler and run-time library have been closed-source. This has been a thorn for upstream kernel developers and their standards, but now Habana Labs has open-sourced their user-space components too...

Last week a number of patches were merged in the quest to provide the kernel with comprehensive compile-time and run-time detection of buffer overflows. Another patch series was sent out today while still for this cycle they are expected to enable the compiler warnings around array-bounds and zero-length-bounds...

While Vulkan is quickly taking over as the dominant graphics API for Linux gamers especially with the likes of DXVK and VKD3D-Proton mapping Direct3D atop Vulkan, OpenGL remains widely used by workstation software. It's also for workstation software where AMD's "PRO" closed-source OpenGL Linux driver has traditionally competed well (and outperformed) the open-source Mesa driver. But with all the recent changes, that's either a matter of the past or close to not being relevant with the latest Mesa enhancements...

Over the past two years we have seen work around bringing up privacy screen support on Linux whereby an increasing number of laptops can reduce the amount of visible light when viewed at wide angles to try to block the screen contents from anyone potentially snooping at the screen. Ready to go now is the DRM/KMS user-space interface and the Intel graphics driver support now that there is a user-space "client" ready...

At the moment when running the X.Org Server in a multi-monitor configuration with displays of different refresh rates, it can lead to a poor experience with a variety of visual deficiencies when running an unredirected full-screen window with page-flipping for DRI3/Present. There is now a change that was merged into the X.Org Server with a new "AsyncFlipSecondaries" to improve that experience when running multiple displays of varying refresh rates...

While now into September, Microsoft just published its "August 2021" update to their CBL-Mariner Linux distribution with a variety of changes...

The Intel-led open-source Cloud-Hypervisor project building off Linux's KVM (and also supporting Microsoft MSHV) and being cloud-focused and leveraging the Rust programming language for greater security is out with its newest major release...

Akin to FUSE for file-systems in user-space, VDUSE is set to be merged for Linux 5.15 in adding support for vDPA devices in user-space...

At last! AMD has posted the Linux kernel driver patches for their new "AMD-PSTATE" driver! This driver with modern AMD Zen CPUs (initially limited to Zen 3) to achieve greater performance per Watt / power efficiency on Linux than the conventional ACPI CPUFreq driver...

AMDVLK 2021.Q3.6 is out as the latest routine open-source code drop for this official AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver...

A new kernel patch series was posted this morning working on AMD Branch Sampling "BRS" support...

Going back to September 2019 was work on the AMD PTDMA driver for supporting this controller found on modern AMD processors for high bandwidth memory-to-memory and I/O copy operations. With the Linux 5.15 cycle the AMD PTDMA driver is finally being merged to the mainline kernel...

One of the nice low-level improvements we've seen with Linux 5.15 is a number of pieces falling into place in the quest of upstreaming the real-time (RT) patches for Linux. The latest merge makes SLUB RT-compatible...

Ahead of the official GNOME 41 release later this month, the release candidate is now available to facilitate more testing...

The DAMON kernel functionality developed by Amazon engineers has successfully landed in the Linux 5.15 tree...

For those wondering how the upcoming Ubuntu 21.10 release is looking for Intel "Rocket Lake" owners, here are some Ubuntu 21.04 versus 21.10 development benchmarks across dozens of different tests...

Since last year AMD has been working to get its s2idle / suspend-to-idle S0ix sleep state code in order for supporting this lowest power platform idle state on newer AMD laptops and there has also been other AMD suspend/resume improvements in recent times. Now with the Linux 5.15 kernel cycle is an important fix for the AMD s2idle code...

Power E1080 server as their first in a new family of servers based on the IBM POWER10 processor. Sadly though not all of the POWER10 firmware is open-source...

OverlayFS continues to be used by Linux IoT/embedded devices and other use-cases as a union mount file-system. With Linux 5.15 the OverlayFS file-system continues to improve...