Phoronix

While it won't make it for the upcoming Wine 7.0, the Wayland driver for natively supporting this X11 successor continues maturing and in the not too distant future will hopefully begin receiving more widespread testing via Wine-Staging...

It's been a while since last having a hearty BSD benchmark comparison on Phoronix in part due to the latest hardware platforms generally lagging behind with how well supported they are by the various BSDs. But stemming from a Phoronix Premium supporter recently requesting some fresh BSD benchmarks, here is a look at how DragonFlyBSD 6.0.1, FreeBSD 13.0, NetBSD 9.2, and OpenBSD 7.0 are competing against various Linux distributions like CentOS, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu.

With Intel's Atom x6000E "Elkhart Lake" SoCs there is a new block called the Programmable Services Engine (PSE) that is an Arm Cortex-M7 companion core that handles various tasks. Unfortunately, with the PSE it means a new binary-only firmware module. With the Programmable Services Engine likely to come with future Intel platforms too, Coreboot developers and open-source enthusiasts are calling on Intel to now open-source this firmware to avoid having this extra binary blob and further complicating future open-source firmware efforts...

Back in 2018 for the Linux 4.18 kernel was introducing the Restartable Sequences system call for allowing faster user-space operations on per-CPU data. By avoiding atomic operations in cases like incrementing per-CPU counters, modifying per-CPU spinlocks, reading/writing to per-CPU ring buffers, and similar, Restartable Sequences can provide a performance advantage. The GNU C Library is landing its revised support for making use of this system call...

Sent to DRM-Next this week for queuing until the Linux 5.17 merge window in January is the latest batch of drm-intel-gt-next updates, which has hang fixes and more preparations for Intel discrete graphics...

It's been over one month since the release of AMDVLK 2021.Q4.1 as the latest open-source AMD Vulkan driver update, which is off the wagon compared to the prior weekly/bi-weekly release cadence. But today thankfully it's been succeeded by AMDVLK 2021.Q4.2 as the newest driver release...

Patches started earlier this year for allowing the parallel bring-up of secondary CPU cores for x86_64 processors have gotten back to being worked on and were sent out on Thursday for review...

While earlier this year AMD dropped pre-Polaris support from their mainline Radeon Software Windows driver, under Linux with open-source software older GPUs can live on much longer with superior driver support... Pending for Mesa 22.0 and as a surprise Christmas gift for those with nearly two decade old GPUs, a big optimization is pending for those with ATI Radeon R300/R400/R500 series graphics cards still in operation...

Systemd 250 is gearing up for release this month and today marked the availability of the first release candidate (and RC2 as a brown paper bag update). Systemd 250 is packing a rather large number of new features and changes across the board for this dominant Linux init system and service manager...

An exciting new development for GNOME 42 is allowing input events to happen at their full input device rate, which is great news for high refresh rate Linux gamers, input tablets, and similar use-cases...

Wayland 1.20 is out today as the latest version of the reference Wayland library/support code and core protocol...

At the end of October came the pleasant surprise of the introduction of the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. This drop-in replacement to the original Raspberry Pi Zero features a more powerful 1.0GHz quad-core Cortex-A53 compared to the miniscule 1GHz single-core design of the original Pi Zero while boasting 512MB of LPDDR2 RAM. Here are some initial benchmarks of the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W for those curious about its performance.

In addition to the LLVM SPIR-V back-end appearing ready for merging, also working through the final steps for being mainlined in the LLVM compiler stack is also Facebook's BOLT project for optimizing the performance of binaries...

Taking place in San Francisco from Monday through yesterday evening was the RISC-V Summit for discussions around this dominant open-source processor ISA. For those that were did not make it to the event, many of the slide decks are available...

It is not too often getting to talk about performance optimizations for Mesa's Virgl code that along with in conjunction with related "Virgil" components allows for hardware-accelerated 3D/OpenGL running within virtual machines. Hitting Mesa 22.0 this week though is some Virgl code improvements for allowing lower memory use within virtual machines...

Intel's oneDNN Deep Neural Network Library that is part of their oneAPI toolkit is out with version 2.5 and brings RISC-V CPU support among other updates...

Engineers from Intel and Arm in cooperation with The Khronos Group feel ready now to begin landing their SPIR-V back-end within the upstream LLVM source tree! This SPIR-V back-end for LLVM would ultimately allow LLVM front-ends for different languages to more easily target this industry-standard shader representation so that it could be ingested by Vulkan / OpenCL drivers...

While Ubuntu switched from LZ4 to Zstd for compressing its initramfs, they now are finding they were too aggressive in defaulting to Zstd with the highest compression level of 19. Due to speed and memory consumption concerns, they are looking at lowering their Zstd compression level...

AMD's Linux engineers continue preparing for next-gen EPYC server processors based on Zen 4 and supporting DDR5 memory...

The Cloud-Hypervisor open-source project started by Intel a few years ago as a Rust-written VMM focused on cloud workloads is now going to be hosted by the Linux Foundation...