Phoronix

Subscribe to Phoronix feed
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 43 min 12 sec ago

Linux 5.15 To Allow Reading From The Nintendo OTP Memory Area

Fri, 08/13/2021 - 19:31
For hobbyists that enjoy tinkering around with Linux running on the Nintendo Wii or Wii U game consoles, a new driver coming for Linux 5.15 allows accessing the specialized OTP read-only memory area that contains the encryption/decryption keys and other data...

Arm Working On Clang C++ For OpenCL 2021 (OpenCL 3.0 Compatible)

Fri, 08/13/2021 - 18:24
With LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler front-end squaring away its OpenCL C 3.0 language support, Arm engineers are now working on the C++ equivalent support...

Linux 5.15 To Add Graphics Support For Qualcomm Adreno 680, 7c3

Fri, 08/13/2021 - 15:00
The MSM DRM kernel updates to this open-source Qualcomm Adreno driver have been sent in to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.15 merge window...

AV1 VA-API Acceleration Coming For AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series Linux Users

Fri, 08/13/2021 - 08:15
With AMD RDNA2 GPUs such as the Radeon RX 6000 series there is hardware support for AV1 decoding while the Linux support has been slow to materialize. Fortunately, that's now changing...

An Early Look At LLVM Clang 13 Performance On AMD Zen 3

Fri, 08/13/2021 - 02:47
With LLVM/Clang 13 feature development having ended last week and the 13.0 release candidate being tagged, in starting off the benchmarking cycle first up I was looking at how well this new compiler is performing compared to LLVM Clang 12 stable on an AMD EPYC 7543 (Zen 3) Linux server.

Microsoft & Others Form The eBPF Foundation

Fri, 08/13/2021 - 01:11
One of the most exciting Linux kernel innovations in recent years has been eBPF for an in-kernel virtual machine allowing sandboxed programs running within the Linux kernel. The Linux Foundation along with Microsoft and other partners are now forming the eBPF Foundation...

Intel Appears Ready To Advertise Its DG1 Graphics Card Support On Linux

Thu, 08/12/2021 - 21:20
As I have covered in many Phoronix articles over the past number of months, it's been a lengthy road bringing up the DG1 graphics support on Linux with the Intel open-source engineers having to re-architect their "i915" kernel graphics driver to support device local memory, getting the GuC support into good shape, scheduler changes, beginning to make use of TTM for memory management, user-space API changes, and a ton of other changes in expanding the driver's scope from just catering to integrated graphics. But now it looks like the DG1 Linux support is about to be officially advertised...

AMD Van Gogh Firmware Published, Other Radeon GPU Firmware Updated

Thu, 08/12/2021 - 20:45
AMD has upstreamed the Van Gogh binary-only firmware files necessary for the RDNA2 graphics to be initialized by the open-source driver on this forthcoming APU.'..

Btrfs Set To Land Support For IDMAPPED Mounts In Linux 5.15

Thu, 08/12/2021 - 18:48
Introduced to the Linux kernel earlier this year with Linux 5.12 was IDMAPPED mounts that allow for different mounts to expose the same file or directory with different ownership. IDMAPPED mounts was designed with use-cases ranging from containers to systemd-homed and more as outlined in the earlier article. Btrfs is now ready to begin supporting IDMAPPED mounts...

Firefox 92 Beta Takes Flight With AVIF Image Support

Thu, 08/12/2021 - 18:03
With this week's release of Firefox 91, like clockwork the beta for Firefox 92 is now available to facilitate wider testing of this next browser release to debut in September...

Qt Creator 5.0 Nears With New Features

Thu, 08/12/2021 - 17:51
Qt Creator as the Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment from The Qt Company is preparing to release version 5.0 as it prepares to switch to semantic versioning...

The Linux Kernel Begins Preparing For AV1 Decode Support

Thu, 08/12/2021 - 15:00
The number of hardware platforms providing accelerated AV1 coding is still quite limited for now but with more hardware coming to market supporting encode/decode of this royalty-free video codec, the Linux kernel's media subsystem is getting ready...

Thunderbird 91 Released With Big Improvements For This Open-Source Mail Client

Thu, 08/12/2021 - 08:06
Thunderbird 91 is now available as the first major update in a year for this Mozilla mail client that is succeeding the Thunderbird 78 series...

Radeon RX 6600/6700/6800 XT: RADV vs. PRO Vulkan Driver Performance

Thu, 08/12/2021 - 02:30
With yesterday's launch day Radeon RX 6600 XT Linux review the benchmarks were conducted using the popular Mesa RADV open-source driver used by many Linux gamers considering it's the driver Valve has been relentlessly optimizing and is the default on most (or all) Linux distributions. For those wondering how the performance of RADV is comparing to that of AMD's closed-source "PRO" Vulkan driver distributed as part of the "Radeon Software for Linux" package, here are some benchmarks exploring that difference.

DXVK-Native Sees First Release For Easing Direct3D-To-Vulkan Game Porting On Linux

Wed, 08/11/2021 - 21:26
DXVK has proven to be a huge success for improving the experience of running Windows Direct3D 9/10/11 games on Linux by translating those D3D calls to Vulkan. DXVK-Native meanwhile is the newer spin-off effort around providing a DXVK-based build native for Linux to help in game ports that still can then rely on their Direct3D renderer path...

Raspberry Pi V3DV Driver Nearing Vulkan 1.1 Support

Wed, 08/11/2021 - 21:13
The open-source V3DV driver living within Mesa for providing Vulkan API support for modern Broadcom VideoCore graphics -- most notably found in the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer -- is nearing Vulkan 1.1 compliance...

Intel Preparing Linux Kernel Support For "Unaccepted Memory"

Wed, 08/11/2021 - 20:30
The latest patch series from Intel engineers worth noting for the Linux kernel is around implementing support for on-demand "unaccepted memory". Unaccepted memory is supported by the latest-generation AMD EPYC processors but not yet supported under Linux for on-demand/as-needed handling while Intel is preparing the kernel support for their next-gen Xeon CPUs having this capability...

AMDVLK 2021.Q3.4 Driver Fixes "Horrifically Broken" Switchable Graphics Layer

Wed, 08/11/2021 - 18:05
It's been less than one week since the AMDVLK 2021.Q3.3 update for this official open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver while today AMD has issued its latest update...

Polychromatic 0.7 Released With Improved UI For Configuring Gaming Keyboards, Mice

Wed, 08/11/2021 - 17:42
Polychromatic as the long-running, third-party, open-source project to allow Razer's gaming peripherals like mice and keyboard to be configured under Linux is out with a major update...

Libre-SoC Pursuing New Crypto Primitives & Instructions For OpenPOWER

Wed, 08/11/2021 - 15:00
While Libre-SoC began as "Libre RISC-V" envisioned as a low-power graphics/Vulkan accelerator, it has morphed into a hybrid CPU/GPU design built on OpenPOWER and in very early form seeing test fabrication on a TSMC 180nm process. The latest funding received is now working on adding cryptographic improvements to it and/or the upstream OpenPOWER ISA...

Pages