Phoronix

While there is still two months to go until the Ubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri" release, since the feature freeze has now begun I've started some early testing of this next Ubuntu release. So far things are looking good as a nice upgrade over Ubuntu 21.04 and prior. Here is the first round of Ubuntu 21.04 vs. 21.10 development tests using an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X with Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics.

The Haiku open-source operating system project that continues advancing as the virtual successor to BeOS has been enjoying a successful summer...

DebConf21 officially got underway this morning with being a second year of this annual Debian conference being held exclusively online due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic...

Shortly after Intel's TDX whitepaper was made public last year for better protecting virtual machines, Intel open-source engineers began posting support patches for bringing up Trust Domain Extensions under Linux. That work remains ongoing and now further Linux kernel infrastructure work is pending to better deal with the notion of guest private memory afforded by TDX...

Made public on Monday was CVE-2021-35465 as a new security vulnerability affecting various Arm products. For unmitigated (ARMv8-M) hardware, Arm has posted a series of GCC compiler patches for working around the issue...

Announced back in April of 2020 was Micron's HSE as an open-source storage engine optimized for solid-state drives and persistent memory. After quickly crossing the v1.0 milestone and working its way up to HSE 1.9 at the end of last year, there hasn't been any updates since. Fortunately, the project is still alive and HSE 2.0 is on the way...

One of the areas where AMD's long-standing "PRO" OpenGL driver has generally held an advantage over RadeonSI Gallium3D has been around workstation software but that has been changing...

One year ago to the day Intel announced OSPray Studio as a scene graph application for rendering glTF assets and other 3D models. OSPray Studio is built off their OSPray ray-tracing engine that they've been working on for years. These Intel efforts are all part of their oneAPI initiative and today happens to mark a shiny new feature release...

AMDVLK 2021.Q3.5 is out as the newest snapshot for this open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver...

The GNOME 41 beta is now available ahead of next month's official half-year update to this open-source desktop environment...

With the Linux 5.15 kernel merge window likely opening next week, Matthew Wilcox of Oracle has already sent in a prominent pull request to Linus Torvalds: the initial work around landing of the memory folios patches...

Last month I wrote about the proposed reflink support for Wine that would provide significant space savings for those having multiple Windows games/applications on Linux installed where Wine and derivatives like Crossover and Steam Play (Proton) generally maintain a separate "prefix" per software installation. Fortunately, that reflink support continues to be worked on for Wine where it can lead to savings up to several hundred megabytes per Wine prefix...

GTK 4.4 is out as the latest stable update to the GTK4 open-source toolkit...

Zink as an OpenGL-over-Vulkan API implementation living within Mesa merged its sub-allocator code that could deliver 10x the performance for some games. Plus it also landed OpenGL compatibility context support for getting more games working now with this open-source GL-on-VLK solution. Given the progress made in Mesa Git over the past week, here are some fresh benchmarks now for how the performance stands across various games and benchmarks.

Going on three years now there have been proposed patches for allowing per-client GPU engine statistics for being able to show on a per-game/application level how many resources across 3D/blitting/video engines are being consumed. The patches continue to be revised but sadly will be missing out on the imminent Linux 5.15 kernel merge window...

While Habana Labs has been known for their open-source and upstream Linux kernel driver for their AI training/inference accelerators with that code they had been working on as a start-up even before being acquired by Intel, it's continued to cause friction that they rely in user-space on closed-source components like their compiler. That in turn is again causing problems for changes that the Habana Labs kernel driver planned to land with the upcoming Linux 5.15 cycle...

While Linux 5.14 stable is expected next weekend, the Reiser4 (and experimental Reiser5) file-system driver code has been finally updated for compatibility with the Linux 5.13 kernel series...

Running Linux on the Apple M1 with various out-of-tree patches is now capable of booting to a GNOME desktop albeit lacking any OpenGL/graphics acceleration...

The Linux 5.14 cycle is playing out smoothly and will likely lead to the Linux 5.14 stable kernel release happening next weekend...

Since the start of July we've seen Intel beginning Linux support patches for their DG2 graphics card that is now known by the "Alchemist" codename. There's been several rounds of DG2 patches since they started publicly pushing out the code -- including some notable work like DisplayPort 2.0 bring-up -- while sent out this Sunday is another important piece of the puzzle: getting the device memory (the dedicated vRAM) actually working with the open-source driver...