Phoronix

The MSM DRM driver changes have been submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.14 cycle for improving this open-source Qualcomm Adreno kernel graphics/display driver...

While this week's landing of the Crocus Gallium3D driver for Intel Gen4 through Gen7 graphics (i965 through Haswell) in Mesa is exciting for Linux users that are still running aging Intel systems, going back even further has been the i915g Gallium3D driver and there this week there happens to be a big improvement too...

The Modula-2 programming language developed from the late 70's to 80's might finally see mainline GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) support in 2021...

The OpenSSL project today shipped their OpenSSL 3.0 Beta, which is their equivalent to a release candidate ahead of the planned official 3.0.0 release next quarter...

Back in March NVIDIA announced they would be supporting the GeForce RTX 30 series with Resizable BAR support via a video BIOS update for supported systems. Recently I've been looking at the performance of a GeForce RTX 3080 once flashing the graphics card under Linux with Resizable BAR support and the performance is quite compelling for Vulkan-based games where this functionality is working.

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is dropping support for older x86_64 CPUs by raising the baseline requirement to "x86_64-v2" that roughly correlates to Intel Nehalem era processors and newer, so far Fedora has not changed its default. There was a proposal shot down last year for raising the x86_64 microarchitecture feature level while now that discussion has been restarted or alternatively making use of Glibc's HWCAPS facility for allowing run-time detection and loading of optimized libraries...

Google wants to see Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel so much so that they have contracted the lead developer working on "Rust for Linux" as the work aims to get mainlined...

The W3C has promoted the Web Audio API to now being an official standard as a JavaScript API for creating and manipulating audio content directly within web browsers...

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) with Fwupd has been serving on average around 40k~50k firmware updates per daay to Linux users relying on this cross-vendor, open-source firmware distribution service with FWUPD for applying firmware updates under Linux. But yesterday its usage just skyrocketed with more than 100,000 firmware updates in a single day... That's great for adoption but the motivation for the mass firmware updates may be something rough on the horizon...

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...