Phoronix

The GCC compiler has long had a requirement that all contributors assign their copyright to the Free Software Foundation. Recently GCC dropped that copyright assignment policy and now the GNU C Library is looking at making a similar move...

In addition to a lot of movement right now within the Intel kernel graphics driver around memory management handling for local memory / discrete GPUs, another big and ongoing area is improving the job submission and workload scheduling by making proper use of its GuC firmware capabilities and also integrating the DRM scheduler...

The second release candidate of the Debian Installer for the upcoming 11.0 "Bullseye" release is now available for testing...

Matthew Wilcox of Oracle today sent out his latest patch series implementing the new "memory folios" type for the Linux kernel in an effort to improve Linux memory management and allow for better efficiency that ultimately translates into measurable performance gains...

As part of Intel's new M.2 modem push for EVO laptops and Chromebooks, open-source Intel engineers have been working on "IOSM" as their new M.2 modem driver and this code which has been in the works for months is set to see its debut with the Linux 5.14 cycle...

Intel today went public with their vision and early work around a "Infrastructure Processing Unit" (IPU) as their newest ware for data centers and cloud providers...

A new feature point release is available for FWUPD for handling of system/component firmware and BIOS updating on Linux and other platforms...

At the end of 2019 "Ubuntu Pro" was announced as Ubuntu for Amazon's EC2 cloud with ten years of package updates/security, kernel livepatching, Canonical Landscape integration, and more. Google and Canonical are announcing today that Ubuntu Pro is now coming to Google Cloud...

Given the recent forum discussion stemming from the -O3 optimization level still too unsafe for the Linux kernel (in part due to older, buggy compilers) and some users wondering about the current -O2 versus -O3 compiler optimization level impact, here is a fresh round of reference benchmarks using GCC 11.1 on Fedora Workstation 33 looking at various optimization levels and optimizations tested on dozens of different application benchmarks to see the overall impact on performance.

Platform Runtime Mechanism was incorporated into the ACPI 6.4 specification earlier this year and allows moving some system management interrupt (SMI) handlers out of the system management mode (SMM) "black box" and into the OS/VMM execution context. With Linux 5.14 initial work on ACPI Platform Runtime Mechanism is set to land...

While Intel engineers have been working on Alder Lake support for Coreboot as with other recent CPU generations that open-source firmware/BIOS support remains focused on their reference boards with a particular focus on meeting necessary requirements for Google Chromebook devices. Sadly, there is not much or any in the way of consumer retail motherboard support at this point. For those looking for retail desktop motherboard support for Coreboot, aside from the open-source POWER9 systems out of Raptor Computing, on the x86_64 front it largely means using aging Intel and AMD platforms...

Launched last November was the Raspberry Pi 400 as a Raspberry Pi Keyboard Computer with effectively a Raspberry Pi 4 SBC embedded within the keyboard and attached to a large aluminum block for cooling. It's a great little device and beginning with Linux 5.14 looks like it should be playing fine with the mainline kernel...

Last year Intel detailed Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) as a new means of better protecting virtual machines with hardware-assisted isolation between VMs as well as from the VMM/hypervisor. Shortly after that Intel began posting TDX enablement patches and that work has continued while is still ongoing...

The independently-developed "Crocus" driver providing a Mesa Gallium3D implementation for Intel Gen4 "i965" through Gen7 "Haswell" graphics has now been merged into Mesa 21.2 for ultimately aiming to improve the open-source OpenGL support for these aging Intel integrated graphics generations...

After several weeks worth of 5.13-rc releases where there were more changes than Linus Torvalds would like to see, Linux 5.13-rc6 is out now and it's on the smaller side while panning out nicely for this later stage of kernel development...

Announced last year was KWinFT as a fork of KDE's KWin to focus on improving the Wayland support more rapidly and incorporating other modern technologies. KWinFT has been making progress on advancing its code-base while in recent months it was seemingly more quiet. However, it turns out KWinFT is alive and well and has been going through some code refactoring while preparing for the next wave of feature work...

While a decade ago Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers resisted TTM at the time and instead devised the Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) for kernel graphics memory management needs in its place, now with discrete graphics cards and dedicated video memory, Intel has been working on making use of TTM memory management for those purposes. With Linux 5.14 the initial bits are going to be there for using TTM by the Intel driver when running with discrete graphics having local memory...

As a quick follow-up to last year's L-shaped desk build for accommodating plenty of displays, laptops, and more, it's still working out very well...

In addition to the recent WebAssembly project releases of Wasmer 2.0-rc and WASM3 v0.5, the Bytecode Alliance that is made up of Intel and Mozilla and other organizations has announced Wasmtime 0.28...

A number of Intel's open-source projects have been seeing new released this week presumably for making Q2/H1-2021 goals, including two of the networking projects maintained by the company: the ConnMan connection manager and IWD wireless daemon...