Phoronix

Towards the end of last year FreeBSD imported a WireGuard kernel module. That initial WireGuard port to FreeBSD was sponsored by firewall company Netgate but the code quality was found to be poor and made without much involvement from upstream WireGuard developers. That FreeBSD WireGuard kernel code is now in the process of being replaced by a much better implementation...

With today's AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" launch there is also the public availability of AOCC 3.0 as their LLVM/Clang downstream now carrying patches for optimized Zen 3 support...

It's been one and a half years already since the EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors launched. It's hard to think it's been that long due not only to the pandemic but the incredible performance of these Zen 2 server processors. The EPYC 7002 series continues to largely outperform Intel's Xeon Scalable processors and while Ice Lake is coming soon, for now AMD is expanding their lead with today's EPYC 7003 "Milan" processor launch. We have begun our testing of AMD EPYC Milan processors in recent weeks under Linux and have preliminary performance figures to share today as well as more information on these next-gen server/HPC processors.

GCC is in the process of seeing better support for AMD Zen 3 processors with its znver3 target...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 6.4 is now Wine-Staging 6.4 with an extra 686 patches atop this code-base for allowing Windows games and applications to run on Linux...

One of the great Linux hardware milestones of 2020 was Lenovo beginning to offer Linux pre-loads on their desktops/laptops with the likes of Fedora and Ubuntu. But it's been great just not for having another major OEM offering Linux pre-loads but because they have also been engaging directly on Linux support improvements both through their engineers and at partners like Red Hat. That upstream support work has continued nicely...

Added for Linux 5.11 was an independently-developed, reverse-engineered Corsair power supply driver for the company's desktop PSUs supporting their USB-based "LINK" interface for exposing voltage, temperature, current, and Wattage under Linux. This open-source "corsair-psu" driver has continued maturing as well since being mainlined...

Following the emergency Linux 5.12-rc2 kernel release nine days ago, the Linux 5.12-rc3 is out today as a more pleasant release candidate that is back on the usual Sunday release regiment...

This week marked Intel sending out initial Linux driver enablement patches for Alder Lake P mobile support to complement the existing Alder Lake S desktop support that has been coming together in recent months. In addition to the Linux kernel code for ADL-P, the Intel open-source Media Driver code was also updated for video acceleration on this Intel hybrid chip...

In addition to recent commits improving Mesa's Gallium3D Direct3D 9 "Nine" state tracker and addressing memory issues with 32-bit games, this D3D9 state tracker is now enjoying another performance optimization helping some games...

GRVK is the open-source project implementing AMD's Mantle API on Vulkan. Mantle was the precursor to the Vulkan industry standard and while it's no longer in use by AMD, there still are some games out there that allow making use of it...

Now that Clang LTO support was merged into Linux 5.12 for x86_64 and ARM64, Google engineers have sent out their patches enabling Clang Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) support for the Linux kernel...

Google engineer Yu Zhao sent out patches proposing a "multigenerational LRU" implementation for the Linux kernel's least recently used (LRU) handling for memory page replacement...

If all goes well FreeBSD 13.0 will be officially released before the end of the month while out this weekend is the second release candidate for testing...

Per reader requests, several software-defined radio (SDR) benchmarks have been added alongside the 640+ other distinct workloads available for benchmarking via the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org...

One year into the pandemic the KDE developers remain as busy as ever advancing their free software desktop solution...

GRUB 2.06 was originally anticipated for release in 2020 but then the BootHole security vulnerability foiled those plans. This long awaited bootloader update though is near with GRUB 2.06-RC1 being issued on Friday and plans to formally release it in about one month's time...

Binomial's Basis Universal GPU texture codec for highly-compressed textures is now even faster when ETC1S encoding to this intermediate format...

Wine 6.4 is out today as the newest bi-weekly point release for running your favorite Windows applications and games on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

Google has published their proof-of-concept code showing the practicality of Spectre exploits within modern web browsers' JavaScript engines. The code is out there and you can even try it for yourself on the leaky.page web-site...