Phoronix

The first of several batches of feature updates to the AMDGPU kernel driver were sent in on Friday for anticipation of the Linux 5.12 kernel merge window that should be opening up in February while the stable Linux 5.12 debut will happen likely by/around May. With this initial pull does come some new features and improvements around the recent AMD graphics processor support additions...

Wine 6.0-rc6 is out today as the latest weekly release candidate of Wine 6.0 that will be released in the near future. Either due to nearing the end of the release cycle and/or Wine developers having a post-holiday hangover, Wine 6.0-RC6 is coming in light on new fixes...

As noted before the holidays that Mozilla Firefox was ready to enable AVIF image decoding by default, now that the holidays have passed and developers back to their keyboards, Firefox today has re-enabled AVIF by default...

Last month we provided benchmarks of Ampere Altra against Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC with the Q80-33 CPUs in a 2P / 160 core configuration. From that article, reader questions were raised about how this high performance ARM server chip compares to Amazon's Graviton2 processors, so in this article today are such benchmarks. The Graviton2 via an AWS m6g.metal instance with 64 cores was compared to the Ampere Altra Q80-33 in its 2P 160 core configuration, 1P 80 core configuration, and then a 64 core configuration to match the Graviton2 by disabling the excess cores.

Another NVIDIA engineer has made his first contribution to Mesa in the rather interesting focus of fixing up Volta so atomic operations will work with OpenCL SVM...

Coming out in early 2020 were patches by an Amazon engineer to implement flushing the L1 data cache on context switching in the name of security given the various data sampling vulnerabilities. That work so far has been rejected from the mainline kernel but today was updated and makes it harder to enable and thus moving forward could stand chances to finally see the opt-in functionality merged to mainline...

Linux Mint 20.1 is out today as the latest version of this user-friendly, desktop-focused Linux distribution built off Ubuntu 20.04 LTS...

AMDVLK 2021.Q1.1 is out this morning as the first update of the year for the open-source official AMD Vulkan Linux driver and it's an exciting update...

A Linux fix is on the way for a new quirk to address an issue whereby some AMD Radeon graphics cards have an issue with the resizable BAR (AMD Smart Access Memory) handling that could lead to lower performance...

Proton Experimental 5.13-20210107 is out today as the first 2021 release of this Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Following last month's initial benchmarks of the AMD "znver3" support that landed in the GCC 11 compiler was a request by a premium supporter to see the AMD Zen 3 benchmarks at more compiler optimizations. Well, here are those numbers for those wanting to pursue aggressive compiler optimizations on a shiny AMD Ryzen 9 5950X.

While Intel is generally well regarded for their Linux development practices especially as it pertains to continuous integration and their test labs for vetting code prior to reaching the mainline Linux kernel to minimize the risk of regressions or other unintended side effects, those running older Haswell GT1 low-end graphics have seen the past several kernel versions going back a half-year yield a GPU hang at boot...

Intel has released their High Performance Computing Reference Stack 2.0 as the latest Docker image optimized for HPC/AI workloads...

Alyssa Rosenzweig who is known for her work on reverse-engineering Arm GPUs and in particular the multi-year effort so far working on the Panfrost open-source driver stack has taken up an interest in Apple's M1 graphics processor...

The GNOME Shell user experience improvements and other components continue in development at full-speed for the GNOME 40 release due out in March...

NVIDIA today released the 460.32.03 Linux graphics driver as their first stable release in the 460 driver series...

The Intel-developed IWD Linux wireless daemon is out with its first feature release of 2021...

Surprisingly it has taken until 2021 but the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver now supports using the company's own Radeon GPU Profiler...

NVIDIA's Wayland support is finally coming together albeit long overdue with DMA-BUF passing support and now patches pending against XWayland for supporting OpenGL and Vulkan hardware acceleration with their proprietary driver...

The release of Fedora 34 this spring is now cleared to enable systemd-oomd by default for all spins in an effort to enhance the out-of-memory / memory pressure experience on Linux...