Phoronix

As part of the curiosity-driven benchmarks and areas of technical interest now that we've gotten some of our initial Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" benchmarks out of the way has been looking into the performance of Linux's P-State CPU frequency scaling driver on the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable server. Benchmarked for the latesting testing was the power/efficiency out-of-the-box with P-State powersave as used by default with many Linux distributions against the P-State "performance" mode as well as putting P-State into passive mode to be able to via intel_cpufreq to try the Schedutil governor that relies on the kernel's scheduler utilization data for making frequency scaling decisions. Here is a number of power/performance governor benchmarks with the dual Xeon Platinum 8380 server in these varying kernel configurations.

Sadly there isn't much to report on at this time around improved open-source "Nouveau" driver support for the recent GeForce RTX 20 and RTX 30 series while even the GTX 900 and GTX 1000 series graphics processors are in poor shape for this unofficial river. But when it comes to the aging GeForce 200 series, select models there are finally seeing OpenGL ES 3.1 supported by this open-source driver...

Mesa's Direct3D 12 driver maintained by Microsoft as part of their WSL and Windows OpenGL-over-D3D12 efforts has added a means of being able to select between multiple GPUs/adapters...

While Qt 6.1 released just one month ago, Qt 6.2 as of today is already into its feature freeze. This quicker than normal time to feature freeze comes due to this year's Qt releases being tightened up following the Qt 6.0 debut at the end of last year. Qt 6.2 will be the first Long Term Support (LTS) release of the Qt6 series...

Queued up now into the EXT4 file-system's "dev" tree is the recent work on a journal checkpoint ioctl (EXT4_IOC_CHECKPOINT) and optional support for TRIM/discard or zero-out support on journal flushes. This is the work that came about in recent months in working to ensure the privacy of deleted file names from the system...

Vulkan 1.2.180 is out as the latest revision to this graphics/compute interface. Vulkan 1.2.180 comes with a number of fixes/clarifications to the spec plus the addition of two more extensions...

Linux's RAW driver (RAW_DRIVER) for providing direct I/O access to block devices is finally set to be removed with the Linux 5.14 kernel this summer since its deprecation all the way back in the mid 2000s and its use has been discouraged even longer...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.13-rc5 ahead of Linux 5.13 potentially releasing later this month but depending upon how the rest of the cycle plays out could end up in early July...

The latest updates to Valve's Proton Experimental build for Steam Play should be offering lower input latency...

Version 2.32 of the Git distributed revision control system is now available with a variety of improvements from performance optimizations to usability enhancements and a whole lot of bug fixes...

The Linux x86/x86_64 kernel code already had logic in place for reserving portions of the first 1MB of RAM to avoid the BIOS or kernel potentially clobbering that space among other reasons while now Linux 5.13 is doing away with that "wankery" and will just unconditionally always reserve the first 1MB of RAM...

In addition to getting Intel's Alder Lake hybrid processors ready for the Linux kernel and other areas of the operating system stack, Intel's open-source engineers have continued their trend in recent weeks of upstreaming more Alder Lake work into Coreboot...

Robert McQueen, the President of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, wrote a post this week ultimately about the GNOME project's need to broaden its focus in order to attract more new users and ultimately to be able to raise funds from new organizations outside of their traditional reach. If they aren't able to find new funding sources, they may need to scale back in some of their efforts but still have a sufficient safety net...

For two years now we have seen various open-source patches around ENQCMD instructions for the code compilers and the Linux kernel. This Enqueue Stores support is part of Intel's Data Streaming Accelerator coming with Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids". But even with Sapphire Rapids not launching until later this year, the already merged Linux kernel code is force-disabling the ENQCMD instructions support as the current kernel support is deemed "broken beyond repair" and will need to be reworked...

A few months ago you may recall word of Crocus as a new Mesa Gallium3D driver for supporting Intel Gen7 Haswell graphics and older back through the i965 class hardware. That Gallium3D driver for the aging class of Intel graphics is nearing mainline Mesa with the work-in-progress merge request now pending as of this week...

GNU Poke debuted earlier this year as a new GNU project providing an interactive editor and integrated, interactive programming language for dealing with binary data. Poke makes it easier to analyze binary data and their data structures as well as manipulating said binary data...

Adding to other networking changes queuing up for the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle, NVMeTCP Offload has begun landing into "net-next" ahead of this next kernel merge window...

Due to not too old versions of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) possibly generating bad code with the "-O3" compiler optimization level and sometimes there not being performance benefits, Linus Torvalds remains against using this optimization flag when compiling the Linux kernel...

It's been a few releases since there has been much in the way of new additions to Wine-Staging worth talking about. This staging/experimental version of Wine has at some points carried 700+ patches over upstream Wine but with not many new patches introduced recently while the flow of patches from staging to upstream Wine continuing, at this point its down to "only" 571 patches. With today's Wine-Staging 6.10 there are also some new improvements incorporated into this build...

Next week will mark the release of the Plasma 5.22 desktop with its Wayland support now much more mature alongside various performance improvements and a variety of other enhancements. Plasma 5.22 is a big step forward while already some feature work is going into Plasma 5.23 and the next round of KDE application updates...