Phoronix

Earlier this week when posting Ubuntu 20.04 LTS / 20.10 / 21.04 benchmarks on the new Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" server processors, one of the first questions that came up was about how well these new 10nm server CPUs perform with Intel's own Clear Linux distribution. While Clear Linux releases have become much less frequent and far less to communicate these days on new improvements/optimizations among other ongoing shifts with that Intel open-source project, it is still performing very strongly with 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable hardware. CentOS in these tests also had a strong showing with the increasing performance focus on that front.

NVIDIA Linux users have been looking forward to the upcoming 470 driver series for better Wayland support but for those running GeForce GTX 600/700 series graphics cards, it will mean the end of the line for new feature driver releases with their proprietary driver stack...

One month ago the University of Minnesota was banned from contributing to the Linux kernel when it was revealed the university researchers were trying to intentionally submit bugs into the kernel via new patches as "hypocrite commits" as part of a questionable research paper. Linux kernel developers have finally finished reviewing all UMN.edu patches to address problematic merges to the kernel and also cleaning up / fixing their questionable patches...

AMD submitted another set of feature changes to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of this summer's Linux 5.14 cycle...

ARM server vendor Ampere Computing has been working on an SSIF BMC-side driver for the Aspeed ASTC2500 baseboard management controller that they are looking to upstream in the Linux kernel...

Intel's open-source team maintaining their graphics compiler (IGC) have issued a big update this week...

PipeWire continues to be on an upward trajectory for managing Linux audio/video streams and becoming a viable replacement now to PulseAudio and JACK on the Linux desktop...

Red Hat is already one of the leading employers of open-source graphics driver developers and other engineers working on the upstream Linux desktop graphics stack while they are adding even more...

PostgreSQL developers continue working on juicing the maximum performance possible out of this popular open-source SQL database server...

Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks looking at the compiler performance of GCC 11 vs. LLVM Clang 12 on the Intel Core i9 11900K "Rocket Lake" processor while in this article the same tests and same software are being carried out on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X "Zen 3" desktop. With these AMD Linux tests the Clang 12 compiler not only yielded the fastest binaries at -O2 but carried through in the more optimized configurations as well.

A few weeks ago we wrote about Mesa 21.x drivers with OpenGL threading causing issues for the "Trust Factor" within the popular game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Thanks to possible intervention by Gabe Newell, this trust factor issue seems now resolved for allowing these Linux gamers with open-source graphics drivers to play on the more competitive CS:GO servers...

A new patch series has been posted implementing Runtime Verification (RV) for the Linux kernel...

To no surprise at all, the X.Org Developers' Conference 2021 will be carried out virtually similar to last year given the COVID-19 pandemic. The free XDC2021 registration and call for presentations has now been issued...

One of the interesting performance-related kernel patch series to come about so far this year has been Google's multi-generational LRU framework that is promising to offer much better performance in addressing the kernel's expensive page reclaimation handling...

With the Linux 5.13 merge window past, Intel's open-source graphics driver developers have submitted their initial queue of new patches to DRM-Next of material they have ready ahead of the Linux 5.14 kernel cycle this summer...

For those that wait until the first point release of a new quarterly Mesa 3D driver stack feature release before upgrading, now is the time to move to the Mesa 21.1.1 series...

Seemingly by the minute today there are more free software projects leaving the Freenode IRC network and moving to alternative IRC networks or other chat platforms...

Mozilla detailed today how their year-long effort so far aiming to improve the stability of the Firefox web browser on Linux is paying off...

Ampere is going public today with a strategy and road-map update where they have now publicly acknowledged they are developing their own in-house server CPU cores.

While there is more to consider when choosing a Linux distribution than just the out-of-the-box performance, for those curious about the performance of recent Ubuntu releases for running with Intel's new 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" processors, here are some benchmarks showing how the performance has improved from Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS to Ubuntu 20.10 and now the recent Ubuntu 21.04 Linux release.