Phoronix

While Intel upstreamed their forthcoming "Ice Lake" Xeon processor support long ago and has been focused on next-gen Sapphire Rapids enablement now for the better part of the past year, there still are some Ice Lake Xeon tweaks taking place here and there. This week a new bleeding-edge patch is in testing for tweaking the power/performance behavior of Ice Lake Xeon with Intel's idle driver...

It looks like the Linux 5.13 kernel will be supporting an interesting RISC-V feature this spring...

It's been a while since hearing much about Wayland efforts on FreeBSD, but it turns out the Sway i3-inspired Wayland compositor can run on this BSD after a number of setup steps. However, the likes of KDE Plasma on Wayland still aren't working well outside of Linux...

While NZXT does not provide any official Linux software support for their products like their all-in-one liquid coolers, the open-source community for years has worked to fill that void thanks to reverse-engineering. The latest work when it comes to the NZXT Kraken AIO liquid coolers is a proposed HWMON driver for the mainline kernel...

Mike Blumenkrantz who has been working under contract for Valve as part of their Linux graphics driver initiatives has provided a fresh status report on Zink as the Mesa Gallium3D effort for implementing OpenGL APIs atop Vulkan...

With the Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards having gone up for sale today (albeit in incredibly short supply), AMD published an updated Radeon Software for Linux driver comprising its AMDGPU-PRO and AMDGPU-Open driver stacks with support for this new Navi RDNA2 graphics card...

For those looking at Arch Linux powered distributions that provide a quick and easy desktop experience, Manjaro 21.0-rc1 is out today as the newest test release for this popular option...

While we are very eager to see the NVIDIA 470 series Linux driver for at least having Wayland / DMA-BUF support improvements and OpenGL 3.0 support, for now the NVIDIA 460 series is the latest public stable series and today was updated to v460.67...

On Monday, the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" launch day, we finally got to see some serious tuning begin for the Zen 3 "Znver3" CPU target in the GCC compiler after that initial code landed at the end of last year. Yesterday a second Zen 3 tuning patch was published and then today a third tuning patch has made it out...

This week alongside the EPYC 7003 series launch was the introduction of AOCC 3.0 as AMD's Zen-optimized LLVM/Clang downstream. We have started putting this updated compiler through its paces to see what it means for AMD Zen 3 performance.

Samsung for some time now has been working on an in-kernel SMB3 protocol implementation for file sharing across the network with "CIFSD" and it's now been queued into Linux-Next meaning it will likely go for mainline in a coming cycle...

Google has released libaom 3.0.0-rc1 as the AOMedia AV1 Codec Library...

As part of planning for Ubuntu 21.04 to use Wayland by default when running on the default GNOME Shell desktop, Ubuntu developers were going to evaluate the standalone XWayland work being pursued by Red Hat initially for Fedora in order to ship newer XWayland code without resorting to releasing a new X.Org Server. That standalone XWayland package is now on its way to the Ubuntu archive...

Just weeks ahead of the GCC 11 stable release we saw Znver3 tuning work out of SUSE for allowing the GNU Compiler Collection to better cater towards the AMD Zen 3 microarchitecture. That tuning work follows the initial patch at the end of last year that introduced "Znver3" and flipped on the new instructions. Now another patch working on the Zen 3 tuning for GCC has been posted and already merged...

OpenBLAS 0.3.14 is out today as the newest version of this open-source BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) library that continues to work on maximizing the performance for x86_64 and other architectures...

Audacity 3.0 is out today as a big update to this popular, longtime open-source digital audio editor...

With no one willing to step up and manage the X.Org Server 1.21 release and see it through for maintenance, Red Hat engineers who often managed those xorg-server releases are now moving ahead with standalone XWayland releases with that code pulled out of doing a full X.Org Server release and instead isolated to the XWayland bits for handling of X11 clients under Wayland. Today marks the inaugural release with XWayland 21.1.0...

With still no sign of BUS1 on the horizon for the mainline kernel or any other successor to BUS1 or KDBUS for in-kernel IPC, Dbus-Broker remains the best bet currently in 2021 for a more performant D-Bus implementation while retaining compatibility with the D-Bus reference implementation...

At the start of March AMD announced the Radeon RX 6700 XT as their new RDNA2 graphics card starting out at $479 USD. Tomorrow the RX 6700 XT is going on sale while today marks the embargo lift on reviews. We have been testing the Radeon RX 6700 XT over the past two weeks and have up our initial Linux support experience and gaming benchmark results to share.

The developers working on the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Mesa are relentless in their quest for delivering optimal performance. Hitting Mesa 21.1 today were another set of patches for enhancing the MSAA anti-aliasing performance for GFX10 (Navi 1x / Navi 2x) graphics cards...