Phoronix

With Wine 7.0 gearing up for release in January, since last week we have been under a feature freeze and weekly release candidates. Wine 7.0-rc2 is out now with more fixes in battening up this next open-source release for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux / macOS / BSDs...

After the open-source NVIDIA Tegra DRM driver changes intended for Linux 5.16 weren't pulled due to timing, they are back around for Linux 5.17 with most notably the open-source Tegra driver feature pull request introducing NVDEC video decoding...

It's been a while since last comparing the Apple macOS performance to Linux since in part because the newer Apple Silicon (M1) hardware isn't yet in good enough shape for performance tests on Linux. But for those wondering about the Intel-powered Macs and how the performance of the latest Linux distributions compare to that of macOS 12 Monterey, here are some benchmarks of the new macOS 12.1 up against Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 21.10, and Intel's own Clear Linux.

Following the Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q4 Windows driver that released earlier in the month, this week brought the similar quarterly enterprise graphics driver update to Linux...

Since early 2020 Micron went public with HSE as an open-source storage engine for SSDs and persistent memory. The HSE key-value store proved to be extremely performant with the likes of a MongoDB implementation but required changes to the Linux kernel that made it initially a higher barrier for entry. HSE 2.0 shipped in October that no longer required those kernel changes while still offering blistering fast performance. Now to round out the year they have HSE 2.1...

After being more than ten years in the making after being started by Fujitsu engineers in 2008 but never going through all the steps for upstreaming, thanks to a SUSE engineer the Linux 5.17 kernel will finally have the Xen USB virtual host driver...

Not only is Loongson working on bringing up LoongArch ISA support for the GCC compiler and related GNU toolchain components, but the Chinese company has now laid out their plans for LoongArch on LLVM...

After introducing a lot of new AMDGPU feature code in prior weeks to DRM-Next for introduction with Linux 5.17, AMD developers have shifted their DRM-Next focus now onto driver fixes ahead of this next kernel cycle...

Following the Richard Stallman situation, board members leaving, projects seeking greater transparency from the FSF, and other issues within the Free Software Foundation the past two years, the FSF has finally adopted a new governance framework for board members...

Already a lot of DRM display/graphics driver changes have been queued into DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.17 merge window while now is the latest weekly batch of drm-misc-next material. DRM-Misc maintainer Thomas Zimmermann of SUSE commented, "every single patchset in this [pull request] is awesome."..

When it comes to the Radeon ROCm GPU software support AMD only officially supports it on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, RHEL / CentOS, and Ubuntu LTS releases. But Arch Linux already makes it fairly easy to deploy with their third-party packages and now Fedora and Debian have developers also eyeing possible packaging of the Radeon Open eCosystem software for more easily deploying on those distributions...

AMD has made public the AMD Accelerator Cloud. No, they aren't getting into the cloud game per se, but rather allowing a place for customers to try out new EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators running with the latest ROCm software components...

Earlier this month marked the general availability of CentOS Stream 9 as the bleeding-edge of Red hat Enterprise Linux 9 development. Since then I've been running benchmarks of CentOS Stream 9 and with modern hardware it's been offering some nice performance upgrades over CentOS Stream 8 / RHEL8 especially with modern hardware platforms like Intel Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" and AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" servers. Here are benchmarks of CentOS Stream8, CentOS Stream 9, Intel's Clear Linux, Fedora Server 35, Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, and Ubuntu 21.10 on both AMD and Intel servers.

GNOME-focused Ubuntu desktop developer Daniel Van Vugt of Canonical has proposed an optimization that could help with running NVIDIA graphics on high refresh rate displays...

Adding to the growing list of Mesa 22.0 features are more Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver improvements to help with gaming performance...

Resizable BAR support (also known as ReBAR / AMD Smart Access Memory) has been popular with gamers for supported configurations for being able to improve GPU performance. Intel is now working on enabling the Linux kernel to support Resizable BAR when in the context of I/O Virtualization...

While CUPS 2.4 was recently released as the first big update in years and since OpenPrinting took over upstream development, CUPS founder Michael Sweet continues concurrently developing PAPPL as a modern, open-source printer appication framework. Wednesday marked the release of PAPPL 1.1...

Glibc 2.35 is introducing the new tunable glibc.malloc.hugetlb that can help with improving system performance for some workloads making use of this tunable, depending upon your kernel's hugepages configuration...

Valve yesterday introduced experimental Vulkan support for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as an alternative to the long-standing OpenGL path for running CS:GO on Linux. Curious about the performance implications of CS:GO with Vulkan, here are some benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux with a variety of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Intel's CM Compiler for their "C for Metal" programming language has been updated for various new GPU targets, including not only Xe HPC "Ponte Vecchio" but also a Ponte Vecchio XT variant...