Phoronix

A new feature for upcoming XeHPG graphics that was merged into Intel's open-source Linux OpenGL and Vulkan drivers today was for tessellation distribution and geometry distribution across the graphics hardware...

Mesa 21.3 feature development is now over with the code having been branched and the first release candidate issued...

The Linux kernel has supported Retpolines for over three years now as part of their Spectre Variant Two mitigations while now a patch series is proposed that rewrites Retpoline's rewrite logic...

Released back in May was the shiny DragonFlyBSD 6.0 release while today a point release for it has been issued...

Today AMD is officially launching the Radeon RX 6600 graphics card as a trimmed down model from the Radeon RX 6600 XT that launched back in August. This new (non-XT) model has a suggested price of $329 USD and here is a look at how well this RDNA2 graphics card is performing under Linux.

Arriving back in April were the initial Vulkan Video extensions that included support for video decode of H.264 and H.265 while the initial video encode support was limited to H.264. Out today with Vulkan 1.2.196 is the new extension allowing for H.265 encoding with this new industry-standard video API...

Landing in time for the imminent Mesa 21.3 feature freeze / code branching is support for the EGL_EXT_present_opaque extension on Wayland. While this EGL extension may not sound too exciting, for some OpenGL games on Wayland it will address some transparency issues...

Chinese vendor Loongson continues working on their Linux kernel patches enabling the LoongArch processor ISA as their fork from MIPS. While early on when copying existing MIPS open-source code they were quick to call their new ISA "not MIPS", in these later patch series they continue to refer to their ISA as "a bit like MIPS or RISC-V."..

One of many exciting additions with the forthcoming Linux 5.15 kernel is DAMON landed as a data access monitoring framework. DAMON opens up new possibilities around proactive reclamation of system memory and other interesting features. Currently though it's limited to monitoring the virtual address space of the kernel but a new set of patches out allow for physical address space monitoring as well...

Red Hat already employs numerous open-source graphics driver developers from DRM subsystem maintainer David Airlie to numerous others on his team working on areas from Mesa OpenCL support to Heterogeneous Memory Management to other user and kernel-space improvements for open-source Linux graphics. Red Hat has now put out a call to hire yet another experienced Linux GPU driver developer...

Intel has contributed AVX-512 optimizations to upstream Numpy. For those using Numpy as this leading Python library for numerical computing, newer Intel CPUs with AVX-512 capabilities can enjoy major speed-ups in the range of 14~32x faster...

GNOME developer Allan Day has provided an update on behalf of the GNOME design time around some of their recent platform design improvements and some of the changes they are talking about in the near future...

Linux block subsystem maintainer and lead IO_uring developer Jens Axboe had a goal of hitting 7M IOPS per-core performance this week. On Monday he managed to already hit 7.2M IOPS and today hit 7.4M IOPS with his latest work-in-progress kernel patches...

PoCL is the open-source project implementing OpenCL for CPU-based execution as well as multi-device support by getting its Portable Computing Language implementation working atop NVIDIA GPUs via CUDA, AMD GPUs via HSA, and other back-ends by way of LLVM. PoCL 1.8 is out today as the newest feature release...

Earlier this month were benchmarks looking at how Intel Tiger Lake performance has improved from Ubuntu 21.04 to Ubuntu 21.10, but how does Canonical's latest Linux offering compete with other autumn 2021 distributions? In this article from the Dell XPS Core i7-1165G7 Tiger Lake notebook are benchmarks of Ubuntu 21.10 going up against Arch Linux, Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation 35, and openSUSE Tumbleweed for getting an idea how the performance compares with this latest-generation Intel EVO notebook.

Intel Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) never really took off and the Linux support has been deprecated for a while with the code elsewhere in the stack already having been removed while with the upcoming Glibc 2.35 release that GNU C Library is also flushing away its support...

It's been one year now that Intel has been posting Linux kernel patches to enable AMX support for upcoming Sapphire Rapids processors. Over the past year their Linux kernel patches for enabling Advanced Matrix Extensions has gone through 11 rounds of review but that journey isn't over yet...

Lutris 0.5.9 is now available for this open-source Linux game manager program that has now added initial support for the Epic Games Store among other new options and enhancements in this new version...

Those running Microsoft's recently released Windows 11 will now be able to find the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) available from within the Microsoft Store for easier setting up of this Linux-based environment...

While Linux 5.15 brings very early bits around DG2/Alchemist graphics card support, further work is needed to bring it into usable shape for end-users. The latest new patch series to be posted came out today with more driver changes needed around local device memory handling for DG2...