Phoronix

While working on my usual Linux kernel feature overview that summarizes the many articles over the past two weeks outlining all of the new features and changes merged, one area that particularly stands out for Linux 5.15 are all of AMD's upstream contributions that happened to make it in this kernel. There is a lot of new enablement on the AMD side -- both for CPUs and Radeon graphics -- but also improving existing hardware support...

The Apache Software Foundation recently published their FY2021 report for their year-ended 30 April. Even with the ongoing pandemic, the Apache Software Foundation managed to raise more than $3M USD and enjoyed a host of software successes...

We are now down to the last day of the Linux 5.15 merge window and one of the patch series we have been waiting to see if it would land during this two week period was the "folios" code -- or that also was recently renamed to "pagesets" to address some concerns over the name...

In addition to the RISC-V changes merged last week for the Linux 5.15 kernel, a second batch of patches was merged this weekend...

A change first proposed last year to the Linux kernel's Spectre mitigation defaults looks like it will soon be sent in for the mainline kernel...

While the Rust programming language support for usage within the kernel isn't landing for the Linux 5.15 merge window ending this weekend, that effort remains ongoing. A status update on the effort was shared this week about Rust usage for the Linux kernel...

Another batch of minor optimizations were merged to Mesa 21.3 for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

While much of Intel's next-gen Alder Lake processor support appears to be in good shape for Linux 5.14, some remaining items are landing for the current Linux 5.15 cycle. The latest Alder Lake support hitting the kernel is for Intel's TCC cooling driver...

CoreCtrl 1.2 was released this week as the open-source, independently-developed application for exposing more sensor support on Linux and offering various controls aroudnd over/under-clocking and other tuning. At the moment CoreCtrl is primarily focused on making the most use of AMD Radeon GPUs under Linux with some options not otherwise readily available on the platform...

Released in August was the big OpenShot 2.6 video editor update while this weekend has been succeeded by its first point release...

It's been a busy start to September for the KDE project and is now under its soft feature freeze for Plasma 5.23...

Wine 6.17 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release as we move closer towards the Wine 7.0 release around the start of the new year...

While last week was the main "char/misc" pull request for the Linux 5.15 merge window, the Habana Labs driver changes were previously reverted from there due to opposition from the upstream kernel developers in the Direct Rendering Manager space. The concerning patches around DMA-BUF have now been removed and a new pull request submitted with updates to this AI driver for Linux 5.15...

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...