Phoronix

There's the next chapter to the unfortunately rather sad state of the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub (SFH) driver support under Linux...

Since Crocus was merged into mainline Mesa last week we have been looking at benchmarks of this new open-source Intel Gallium3D driver designed exclusively for older Intel graphics hardware (i965 Gen4 through Haswell Gen7, plus Cherrvyiew and experimental Gen8 Broadwell) compared to the existing open-source i965 classic driver. Prior articles have looked at the quite good performance with Haswell while Sandy Bridge is in somewhat rough shape. Today's testing is going in the middle and looking at the Crocus vs. i965 OpenGL driver performance for Ivy Bridge with the once great Core i7 3770K.

For those wondering about the recent skyrocketing in LVFS/FWUPD usage for Linux firmware updates, it appears to be attributed to Dell pushing out a massive number of updates with more than one hundred models impacted by newly-disclosed BIOS/UEFI vulnerabilities...

As expected this morning Microsoft officially lifted the curtain on Windows 11 as the latest evolutionary step to their operating system past Windows 10...

Amazon today launched AWS BugBust as a global coding challenge where they are hoping to see one million software bugs addressed and to reduce technical debt by over $100 million USD...

As part of Google's latest work on trying to enhance open-source software security, months after starting their own open-source vulnerability database they are now looking to push an open-source vulnerability interchange schema to make it easier to exchange information on vulnerabilities and making it easier for automated analysis...

With the latest mainline Git kernel as well as the newest stable point releases as of Wednesday, a Spectre issue with the kernel's BPF subsystem has been addressed...

Alibaba engineers are looking to mainline an x86_64 tuned version of the SM4 cipher that with making use of AVX and AES-NI can allow for a dramatic performance speed-up...

The OASIS standards organization has now officially approved of the ODF 1.3 revision of the OpenDocument Format as their newest ratified standard...

Valve's Dota 2 game is the latest adding support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution and the first time having a Linux-native game support FSR for enhanced image upscaling...

With the KVM code set to be merged in the coming weeks for the Linux 5.14 kernel, support for fast XMM hypercalls is coming for its Hyper-V guest support in allowing for some performance benefits...

It's been three months since AMD published a security whitepaper outlining the possibility of a side channel attack with PSF. The Predictive Store Forwarding functionality is new to AMD Zen 3 (Ryzen 5000 / EPYC 7003 series) processors and as part of their security analysis they are allowing users the ability to opt-out of using this feature in the name of greater security but the feature still hasn't been picked up for the mainline Linux kernel...

While Valve has been working on Vulkan-based rendering for Source Engine games by making use of DXVK for translating the game engine's native Direct3D calls to the Vulkan API, with some yet-to-be-merged Mesa patches around Gallium Nine there is much better performance to see with Gallium Nine at least for the RadeonSI driver...

Ubuntu maker Canonical has partnered up with the Blender Foundation to offer paid enterprise support around the long-term support versions of Blender...

The Qt Company has announced the debut of Qt 6.2 Alpha as it prepares for its September release with many more modules finally making the transition from Qt5 to Qt6...

Announced two years ago was the OpenPOWER Microwatt as an FPGA-based soft CPU core...

Last week Valve introduced Vulkan rendering support for Left 4 Dead 2. The L4D2 Vulkan support is similar to that of Portal 2 where DXVK is being leveraged for translating the Direct3D calls to Vulkan rather than relying on their OpenGL translations. For those wondering what this means for L4D2 performance on Linux with modern GPUs, here are some benchmarks of Left 4 Dead 2 when testing the OpenGL and Vulkan rendering options.

Landing in mainline Mesa 21.2 development code last week was the "Crocus" Gallium3D driver for old Intel hardware spanning from the Intel 965 chipset days "Gen4" up through Crocus supporting Haswell "Gen7" graphics. The i965 to Haswell span has been the focus since the official Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver already in Mesa supports the Broadwell "Gen8" up through all current Intel UHD/Xe Graphics. But now Crocus with the latest Mesa code has added Gen8 support...

Intel-owned Habana Labs has submitted their set of driver updates to char/misc ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.14 merge window...

Even though Vulkan ray-tracing support on Intel graphics hardware isn't coming until Xe HPG avaiability, Intel's Linux graphics driver developers have been preparing since last year. In preparation for the Xe HPG launch, Intel's open-source talent have for many months already been preparing the Vulkan ray-tracing functionality wither another batch of code being merged today...