Phoronix

Those reading Phoronix over the years likely know the X.Org Server has had an increasing number of vulnerabilities come to light in recent times and statements by security researchers like the security being even worse than it looks. Given the age of the X.Org/X11 codebase and many components being rather unmaintained these days, the security situation isn't that great combined with a lack of manpower. The security topic was under the spotlight today at the XDC2021 conference...

Following the big OpenZFS 2.1 release from July that brought Distributed SPARE RAID, a compatibility property for pools, and other new features, OpenZFS 2.1.1 is available today as a follow-up release for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems...

Prominent Intel open-source Vulkan Linux driver developer Jason Ekstrand presented at today's X.Org Developers Conference (XDC2021) about their work on enabling Vulkan ray-tracing support...

It was in October of 1996 that the KDE desktop environment was founded and as such with marking twenty-five years since its creation, the forthcoming Plasma 5.23 is being advertised as the "25th Anniversary Edition" for the desktop...

As usual when the Linux 5.15 merge window began wrapping up, I set out to dive into its performance to see what is in store for this next version of the kernel and whether there was any regressions or other performance changes worth noting. Linux 5.15 overall has been in good shape for the "-rc1" state except noticing that code compilation workloads were taking longer on multiple Linux 5.15-rc1-running systems than Linux 5.14 or prior. Seeing it across multiple systems and a very real-world regression, it was worth bisecting and looking closer so here are the details.

With the Linux 5.15 merge window out of the way, the first drm-misc-next pull request has been sent in to DRM-Next for staging until the Linux 5.16 merge window opens up about two months from now...

The latest work landing for Mesa 21.3 is supporting FP16 within the LLVM-based software driver code namely for the LLVMpipe Gallium3D OpenGL and Lavapipe Vulkan drivers...

It's been known that Google has been using the open-source "MSM" DRM/KMS driver on Qualcomm-powered devices that originally started out as a reverse-engineered driver project separate from the company. Now it's also been confirmed how Google is successfully using the open-source Mesa Freedreno OpenGL and TURNIP Vulkan drivers on Qualcomm-powered Chromebooks too...

The latest area where BPF is looking to expand within the Linux kernel is its CFS scheduler...

While Microsoft has long had WGL as an API analogous to EGL for residing between OpenGL and the Windows interfaces, Microsoft has now wired up an EGL implementation for Mesa that works on Windows...

Alyssa Rosenzweig spoke today at the virtual X.Org Developers Conference about the ongoing work for bringing up Linux display and graphics support on the Apple M1 graphics processor...

AMD today released their quarterly update to the Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise graphics driver package, which includes an updated Linux build as well...

A small but important step forward is seeing AMD recently publishing their binary firmware files in advance of new GPU/APU launches for rounding out their Linux driver support stack...

Iago Toral of Igalia kicked off the first day of the virtual XDC2021 developer conference today by sharing a status update on V3DV as the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver most notably used for Raspberry Pi 4 and newer...

French telecommunications giant Orange has published "BMC" as the (e)BPF Memory Cache providing a cache focused on memcached usage within the Linux kernel...

HP's higher-end "OMEN" laptop series is set to see better support with the next kernel cycle...

The GNU Compiler Collection has already supported Intel's Tremont cores as used by the low-power Jasper Lake platform. Now though coming to GCC are some optimizations to further enhance the performance when targeting the Tremont micro-architecture...

Following portions of the merge request landing, the rest of the RadeonSI CPU-overhead-lowering work was just merged to Mesa 21.3...

Intel has released a new version of their loader for oneAPI Level Zero for loading the Level Zero software driver components...

Java 17 has made it to general availability status today with a number of improvements...