Phoronix

French telecommunications giant Orange has published "BMC" as the (e)BPF Memory Cache providing a cache focused on memcached usage within the Linux kernel...

HP's higher-end "OMEN" laptop series is set to see better support with the next kernel cycle...

The GNU Compiler Collection has already supported Intel's Tremont cores as used by the low-power Jasper Lake platform. Now though coming to GCC are some optimizations to further enhance the performance when targeting the Tremont micro-architecture...

Following portions of the merge request landing, the rest of the RadeonSI CPU-overhead-lowering work was just merged to Mesa 21.3...

Intel has released a new version of their loader for oneAPI Level Zero for loading the Level Zero software driver components...

Java 17 has made it to general availability status today with a number of improvements...

While NVIDIA has been supporting Resizable BAR for a while now with their GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards, for those exclusively using Linux it remains more of a challenge due to AIB partners generally not releasing any vBIOS updates for ReBAR support that can be easily applied under Linux. But if you do carry out an update -- such as under Windows -- the performance uplift can be worthwhile if using a game that can benefit from the support.

"Intel Seamless Update" is a forthcoming feature for Intel platforms seemingly first being exposed by their new Linux kernel patches working on the functionality... Intel is working on being able to carry out system firmware upates such as UEFI updates but doing so at run-time and being able to avoid the reboot in the process...

Libinput 1.19 is now available as the newest version of this Linux input handling library commonly used these days by both X.Org and Wayland desktops...

While Linux 5.15-rc1 was released on Sunday with its many changes, landing on Monday was a late change to raise the baseline GCC version requirement for building the Linux kernel...

Mesa 21.3 today landed a debug option that can help with the XWayland-based gaming performance around latency and for power management as well...

In addition to the big Advanced Matrix Extensions support still being in flux and the kernel-side AMX code not yet being merged, another feature of next year's Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" that we are only now seeing in early published form for the Linux kernel is handling of x86 user interrupts...

While Linux 5.15 has many new features and improvements, one of the patch series we have been eager to see land is the work introducing the new FUTEX2 system call. FUTEX2 can help improve the performance of newer Windows games running on Linux via Wine / Steam Play's Proton by better matching the Windows kernel behavior, but while it didn't land for Linux 5.15, at least a new version of the patches were posted...

After last month landing the Zink sub-allocator code for improved performance and also enabling OpenGL ES 3.2 support for Zink, lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz at Valve has been spending time this month working to get more games running on this OpenGL-over-Vulkan Mesa driver...

GDB 11.1 is now available as the latest feature update to the GNU Debugger...

Feature development is over on the Linux 5.15 kernel with Linux 5.15-rc1 being issued. It's now on to testing and bug fixing over the next two months before the kernel is christened as stable. Here is our original Linux 5.15 feature overview about all of the big changes in this next kernel version.

While Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS shipped one year ago as the last planned point release to the "Bionic Beaver", an emergency issue is leading to Ubuntu 18.04.6 now being prepared...

Of all the great stuff for AMD in Linux 5.15, one of the patches still not having yet been mainlined is the control support around Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) with Zen 3 processors. It's been six months since AMD published their security whitepaper around PSF while the Linux patch has yet to be mainlined while now it seems will be updated for a reduced focus on KVM usage...

On and off for years has been talk of an accelerator subsystem for the Linux kernel considering that for now most AI training/inference accelerator drivers end up lodged within the "char/misc" area of the kernel. That accelerator subsystem discussion has been restarted with talks of having such a subsystem or moving those drivers within the GPU/DRM subsystem space...

As expected this evening the Linux 5.15-rc1 kernel was released to top off the two week merge window that saw many changes to the kernel...