Phoronix

Plasma 5.23 stable is due to be released in two weeks while until then KDE developers are scurrying to land more fixes in this next desktop update...

While earlier this year AMD shifted their Radeon Software driver focus to only supporting Polaris / GCN 1.4 and newer, when it comes to the open-source driver support on Linux there still is occasional activity going back to the ATI Radeon R300 days from nearly two decades ago...

PipeWire from the start was designed around handling the needs of both audio and video streams on Linux. While PipeWire is already in use for screencasting/recording under Wayland and working with Flatpak'ed applications, recently much of PipeWire's focus has been on addressing the use-cases of JACK and PulseAudio on the sound side. Now that the audio support is in quite good shape, Red Hat engineers are back to focusing on improvements to the video support...

Given this week's release of Fedora 35 Beta I have begun my benchmarking to look at how this next installment of Fedora Linux is shaping up given that it tends to be at the forefront of open-source innovations given Red Hat's investments. For our initial F35 benchmarking is looking at the Fedora Server 35 Beta performance compared to Fedora 35 on a dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 server.

LLVM 13.0 was tagged overnight as the latest half-year update to this widely-used, very powerful open-source compiler stack...

The first release candidate of the forthcoming PoCL 1.8 "Portable Computing Language" implementation is now available for testing...

Arm engineers have begun landing their Armv9 enablement work in the GNU compiler toolchain...

Valve published new versions of Proton and Proton Experimental last night...

That's a wrap for September with 229 original news articles and another 13 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles, all written by your's truly. It was another eventful month with Linux 5.15 moving forward, a lot of driver activity by AMD and Intel, and other open-source milestones like the release of GNOME 41 and the shipping of the Ubuntu 21.10 and Fedora 35 beta releases...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are evaluating possible improvements to the Linux kernel for accommodating CPU and GPU synchronized priority scheduling...

In addition to Linux 5.15 adding a new AMD audio driver for "Van Gogh" APUs such as found in the forthcoming Steam Deck, AMD's open-source Linux driver engineers have also been working on other audio improvements -- this time on the Chromebook front...

Intel has some new announcements around their neuromorphic computing research...

Linux kernel developers have been working tirelessly to squeeze more performance out of IO_uring and the block / I/O code in general. IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe who also serves as the Linux block subsystem's maintainer (among other roles and major contributions over the years) has used his system as a baseline for evaluating such kernel improvements. He's now moved to using AMD Zen 3 while sticking to Intel Optane storage and is seeing a mighty speed boost out of AMD's latest processors...

PostgreSQL 14.0 is now officially available as the latest version of this widely-used, open-source SQL server...

Google's work on the VirtIO DRM kernel driver around the notion of "context types" and being able to initialize different types of contexts is set to be merged for Linux 5.16 in opening up more use-cases for this driver that is an important part of the open-source virtualization graphics stack for graphics...

Qt 6.2 LTS is out today as the first long-term support release in the Qt6 series and also with all of the major modules now ported over from Qt5 in aiming to make this a suitable point to transition from Qt 5.15 LTS...

AMD has pushed out one more code drop of their AMDVLK official open-source Vulkan driver before ending out the quarter...

From our Ampere Altra Max M128-30 Linux performance preview earlier this week, one of the questions a number of readers were wondering about and a question I also still had open was on the Altra Max pricing... I've now received the current price list and actually comes in much lower than expected for a 128-core CPU in 2021...

Succeeding Mesa 21.2.2 from earlier this month that was a much delayed and in turn very large release, Mesa 21.2.3 is out today and it's on the quieter side...

A new kernel option was proposed today called "pkill_on_warn" that would kill all threads in a process if that process provoked a kernel warning...