Phoronix

Last week marked the end of feature work for the AMDGPU driver (and other DRM drivers) for the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle. Sent out today though were the first set of AMDGPU fixes targeting Linux 5.14 that does include a recently talked about throttler status feature...

Intel's Speed Select Technology introduced since Cascade Lake for providing more granular power/performance controls was done in the name of performance but it turns out an ISST Linux driver inefficiency could lead to a 10%+ performance hit for some HPC benchmarks...

In conjunction with supported Lenovo systems, a new "Think-LMI" driver is on its way to the mainline Linux kernel for allowing some BIOS/firmware settings to be accessed and configured within Linux...

The Zink component to Mesa that provides a generic OpenGL implementation built atop the Vulkan API recently hit another "massively improved performance" milestone by Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz...

The wildly successful Blender 3D open-source modeling software has been working hard towards its Blender 3.0 release but will likely now be proactively delayed to allow developers more time to relax with COVID-19 lockdowns/restrictions loosening, the possibility of developer meetups pre-3.0, and letting more changes flow into this big feature release...

Going along with a number of other recent WebAssembly interpreter/run-time releases, Wasmer 2.0 has been released as this popular WebAssembly WASI and EmScripten run-time...

Since the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" series launch back in March we have carried out many benchmarks with their flagship processors like the EPYC 7763 and 7713 processors and some of the frequency optimized SKUs, but what about the performance lower down the product stack? Up for benchmarking today is a look at the AMD EPYC 7343 and 7743 processors in 1P and 2P configurations against other AMD EPYC Milan processors as well as Intel's Xeon Platinum 8380 Ice Lake processors.

Last month plans were published for Fedora Cloud 35 to use the Btrfs file-system by default, similar to Fedora Workstation using Btrfs by default for several releases. That plan has now been signed off on by FESCo allowing for this change to happen...

In addition to the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed looking at HWCAPS / x86-64 feature levels for being able to provide greater out-of-the-box performance by selectively loading more tuned libraries depending upon the CPU in use, SUSE Linux Enterprise / openSUSE Leap are also looking at offering similar functionality that may turn up in time for the next point release / service pack...

There has been a number of new VirtIO driver additions recently to the Linux kernel like for sound and Bluetooth for the expanding VirtIO specification while one still in the works for mainlining is the GPIO guest driver...

The GNU C Library (Glibc) saw another batch of Year 2038 "Y2038" preparations on Tuesday for the Unix timestamp for when the time since 1 January 1970 can no longer be stored in a signed 32-bit integer...

The first release candidate of systemd 249 is now available for testing with yet more new and improved features...

A new version of Alpine Linux is now available for this distribution that's popular for container use and other environments requiring a small footprint or those simply preferring its Busybox + Musl libc usage...

Intel's "Gen12" Xe Graphics should be performing marginally better with next quarter's Mesa 21.2 feature release for its open-source ANV Vulkan driver...

Similar to Portal 2 getting Vulkan rendering support earlier this year by leveraging DXVK to convert Direct3D calls to Vulkan, Valve's Left 4 Dead 2 has now received similar treatment alongside a big update out today...

A new release of DXVK is available for running Direct3D 9/10/11 games over the Vulkan API that is most notably used by Steam Play (Proton) for allowing many Windows games to run gracefully on Linux...

Given the success and popularity of their Jetson AGX developer board, NVIDIA has now launched the Jetson AGX Xavier Industrial Module that is a rugged, module-based version of the AGX Xavier intended for various industrial / manufacturing / construction use-cases...

Landing this week in Mesa 21.2's development code is Crocus Gallium3D providing a new Intel OpenGL driver for i964 "Gem4" through Haswell "Gen7" graphics. While even Haswell graphics are showing their age these days, I couldn't help but to fire up a few benchmarks seeing how this new Crocus open-source OpenGL driver performs against the existing "i965" classic open-source driver for Linux systems.

There's a new, cross-platform, cross-API graphics benchmark out there that is free to download and focused on delivering maximum GPU acceleration support when rendering hundreds of thousands of objects...

For those that have been wanting to build a passively cooled PC or at least keeping the number of fans to a minimum, Noctua just officially announced the NH-P1 as their high-end passive cooler. It's a massive heatsink but aims to be able to cool higher-end AMD and Intel desktop processors...