Phoronix

Last month Google engineers proposed multi-generational LRU for Linux to enhance the kernel performance and today the work has advanced to a second version...

Vulkan 1.2.175 is now public as the latest Vulkan API specification and it's bringing with it many new extensions...

AOMP 13.0 is out today as the first update to AMD's Radeon OpenMP offloading compiler since AOMP 11.0 last December...

Back in February Slackware 15.0 went into alpha, nine years since Slackware 14.0 made its debut or even five years since Slackware 14.2. Now Slackware 15.0 is up to its beta phase...

In development for more than one year has been the ability to create secret memory areas on Linux that would be visible only to the owning process and is not mapped for other processes or the kernel page tables. That "memfd_secret" system call has finally materialized in Linux-Next and looking like it could be ready for mainline...

Arcan, the long running open-source display server built atop a game engine that has embraced technologies like XR/VR and Wayland and claims feature parity with X.Org this week announced their new Pipeworld project...

Google engineers are responsible for a number of programming languages like Go, Kotlin, and Dart while their newest one to be made public is Logica...

NVIDIA announced today in kicking off GTC21 the "Grace" high performance Arm processor for AI and high performance computing workloads. But before getting too excited, this high performance Arm chip isn't expected to be ready until 2023...

Landing in Mesa 21.1 on Friday was a variable rate shading (VRS) override for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver for providing significant performance boosts by effectively rendering less. This feature is limited to RDNA2 graphics processors while here are some benchmarks on what it means for 4K gaming with the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards on Linux.

More KDE KWin Wayland improvements are coming down the pipe...

While these kernel patches aren't expected to land until the Linux 5.14 kernel cycle later in the summer, a set of 19 patches published on Monday morning begin allowing a test system to boot with the DG1 graphics card...

The MSM DRM driver changes have been sent to DRM-Next for this Freedreno aligned project providing open-source graphics/display driver support for Qualcomm SoCs...

While Intel is often very proactive in adding new CPU families to the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers where it tends to land a year or more in advance of the processors actually shipping, occasionally there are slipups. Today in fact the "Rocket Lake" support finally was merged into GCC 11 days ahead of that compiler release and after the CPUs were already launched at the end of March...

The Linux 5.12 stable kernel release is quickly approaching but may be challenged by an extra release candidate...

Following the PLATYPUS discovery last year that CPU energy information could be used for possible side channel attacks, the Intel RAPL counters were not only restricted to root but the "amd_energy" driver for exposing CPU energy information on supported Zen series CPUs was also dialed back to root-only in the name of security. Linux 5.13 is introducing a new mechanism so AMD CPUs will be able to still read the energy counters even if not operating as root...

Announced in March by Dynatron was their A38 CPU cooler for AMD Ryzen Threadripper and EPYC processors. This heatsink fan is rated for cooling up to 280 Watt SP3/sTRX4/TR4 processors making it capable of cooling even the newest high-end EPYC "Milan" processors with the EPYC 75F3 and 7763 processors. Here are some initial benchmarks of this cooler with the AMD EPYC 7763 server processor.

Arguably the most interesting RISC-V board announced to date is SiFive's HiFive Unmatched with the FU740 RISC-V SoC that features four U74-MC cores and one S7 embedded core. The HiFive Unmatched also has 16GB of RAM, USB 3.2 Gen 1, one PCI Express x16 slot (operating at x8 speeds), an NVMe slot, and Gigabit Ethernet. The upstream kernel support for the HiFive Unmatched and the FU740 SoC continues...

While EXT4 supports both case-folding for optional case insensitive filenames and does support file-system encryption, at the moment those features are mutually exclusive. But it looks like the upcoming Linux 5.13 kernel will allow casefolding and encryption to be active at the same time...

The LuxCoreRender open-source physically based rendering (PBR) software is out with its latest major feature release that now offers NVIDIA OptiX/RTX acceleration support alongside the existing CPU, NVIDIA CUDA, and OpenCL rendering paths...

It's been another week of fixes and feature work for the KDE desktop as the march continues toward the Plasma 5.22 release this summer...