Phoronix

A big patch series out of Red Hat is now queued into the XFS file-system development Git branch that is part of the new material for the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle...

Recently the mainline Linux kernel has seen a lot of improvements to its feature set when compiling it under LLVM's Clang rather than GCC as traditionally the only supported compiler. The most recent feature being brought to the Linux kernel when using Clang is finally allowing the use of compiler profile guided optimizations (PGO) for squeezing even greater performance out of the system by letting the compiler leverage the real-world profiles/metrics collected to make more informed code generation / optimization decisions...

One of the most promising BSD-based desktop distributions in recent times has been helloSystem that wants to be the macOS of BSDs with a polished desktop experience. helloSystem has been making good progress towards their goals in recent months and this weekend now issued version 0.5...

On Friday afternoon Intel released a new version of their ISPC compiler, the Implicit SPMD Program Compiler, that supports a variant of the C programming language with extensions around single-program, multiple-data programming for CPU and GPU execution. Not only does this release prepare support for upcoming Intel CPUs but also adds support now for Apple's Arm processors...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) saw queued into its "dev" tree this week the new compress_cache mount option ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle...

KDE developers didn't spend much time basking over their Plasma 5.22 release this week as they have already begun lining up changes for the first point release, new feature work for Plasma 5.23, and other improvements to this open-source desktop environment...

The Linux kernel's RISC-V support continues picking up remaining features not yet wired up beyond the base architecture support. The latest is transparent hugepages (THP) to be supported for RISC-V with Linux 5.14...

Last month we reported on CUDA documentation pointing to the NVIDIA 470 driver series to be the last supporting GeForce GTX 600/700 Kepler GPUs and that has now been summed up more formally with new guidance out of NVIDIA...

Intel's Linux engineers continue squaring away the next-generation Alder Lake hybrid processor support. In addition to continued graphics driver work and other platform device IDs being added for the upcoming Linux 5.14 kernel, it looks like ADL's Thunderbolt/USB4 support will be merged too...

Last year Intel's updated ISA extensions reference guide was updated with references to Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" having High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) given new HBM-related error codes. Now it's even more clear there are Xeon CPUs coming to market with onboard HBM memory as Intel has begun submitting Linux kernel driver changes...

With last week's launch of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and this week's launch of the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti there have been plenty of Linux gaming benchmarks on Phoronix. But for those interested in these new RTX 30 Ampere graphics cards for GPU compute or rendering workloads, in this article are many benchmarks on that front compared to various RTX 20 and RTX 30 series graphics cards.

While there was kernel talk of merging the PREEMPT_RT code in 2020 for this real-time functionality for the Linux kernel, among other times in the past that has yet to happen. These "RT" patches have long been maintained out-of-tree but it turns out that while in the past it was seemingly close for merging, that effort has stalled for lack of funding...

The seventh release candidate of OpenZFS 2.1 is now available for testing while it looks like soon it will cross the finish line as the latest feature release for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems...

Following the last AMDVLK update at the end of May, AMD has released AMDVLK 2021.Q2.4 as their newest open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver release...

Following the bump in April from Cloud-Hypervisor v0.14.x to v15, Cloud-Hypervisor 16.0 was released on Thursday for this Intel-led open-source hypervisor that is leveraging Rust and focused on cloud and security use-cases...

Earlier this year was talk of Linux finally removing its legacy IDE subsystem that has been deprecated for years in favor of just maintaining the still-supported libata code for IDE support. The libata path is much better supported and matured for nearly two decades, but one of the holdouts was some Motorola 68000 series hardware -- like early Macintosh computers -- not being supported outside of the legacy context. That is finally set to change with Linux 5.14 so in turn the legacy IDE code will likely be able to be removed soon...

Linus Torvalds is known primarily in the past for his colorful scripture on the Linux kernel mailing list while today he does have a passionate and important read on the LKML around vaccinations for COVID-19...

Back in March during the announcement of Intel Foundry Services it was mentioned that SiFive and Intel were working together to allow RISC-V chips to be fabbed within Intel's facilities. Additionally, Intel Capital previously invested in SiFive during prior funding rounds. Now it turns out Intel is reportedly positioning to potentially acquire SiFive...

Merged today into Mesa 21.2-devel is OpenGL ES 3.1 support being exposed for the Panfrost Gallium3D driver that provides open-source Arm Mali graphics...

Last month System76 launched their Launch Configurable Keyboard. They sent over this new open-source keyboard for some brief testing and I must say the build quality has been top notch and while this is their first keyboard they are bringing to market, with their US manufacturing expertise that began with their Thelio computer cases, it has carried forward with their Launch keyboard. This keyboard is beautifully crafted and among the most durable (and heaviest) keyboards I've used in the past two decades. It reminds me of the IBM Model M from a quality perspective but with its own unique advantages.