Phoronix

Vulkan 1.2.164 is out today with the usual assortment of documentation fixes/clarifications plus two new extensions...

While most hardware vendors don't support Linux to the extent that any products with configurable RGB lighting controls will officially be supported, OpenRGB has been one of the successful community projects for allowing many different devices to enjoy configurable, cross-vendor. and open-source RGB lighting controls...

For those that may find their hands on an Intel Tiger Lake laptop this holiday season with the "Gen12" Xe Graphics, here are some Linux OpenGL/Vulkan benchmarks in varying driver configurations if you are left wondering whether it makes sense upgrading your kernel or Mesa for better performance...

The Webboot project has been in development now for more than one year as an easy means of booting Linux ISO images from the web. From this minimal boot environment users can configure their network connection and download a new ISO or use a pre-existing ISO. From there Webboot allows kexec'ing into that ISO for booting it up...

Back in October there were engineers from Tencent proposing DMEMFS as the "Direct Memory File-System" for Linux. DMEMFS is about reserving some RAM that is not managed by the kernel to avoid that overhead and in turn expose it directly to virtual machines in the cloud. Those initial DMEMFS kernel patches have now been updated by Tencent as they continue working to get this functionality into the Linux kernel...

With my testing of the Radeon RX 6800 series graphics cards last month it's been off Linux 5.10 (aside from when using the Radeon Software for Linux package driver) due to the Linux Git state often offering the best performance and features particularly for brand new hardware. As mentioned in the launch day article for the RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT, there was also an issue being encountered on Linux 5.9. Fortunately, that bug is indeed fixed with the recently released Linux 5.9.12 kernel...

The Valve-backed ACO shader compiler for Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver has been an enormous success story where this year it's been the default as opposed to AMD's officially supported AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end as pretty much for all major Linux gaming workloads is delivering superior performance. RADV+ACO performance has been so great that gamers have been eager to see the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver also adapted to see ACO as an option to the same AMDGPU LLVM back-end. Well, experimental patches have finally materialized...

While for a while the Linux 5.10 development was trending concerningly high on changes late in the cycle, 5.10-rc7 is out today and Linus Torvalds appears comfortable in planning to release the 5.10 kernel next weekend...

While the Debian 11 "Bullseye" freezes don't get started until January, the Debian Installer for Bullseye has been in alpha for just over a year. Today marks the third alpha release of the Debian Installer for Bullseye...

Given all the headaches and concerns from the early days of UEFI SecureBoot, for longtime Linux users hearing Microsoft is working on another firmware-level standard in the name of security may raise concerns... Microsoft in conjunction with Intel has been spearheading the Platform Runtime Mechanism (PRM) that is about moving more code out of the System Management Mode (SMM) and executing it within the OS/VMM context. PRM remains a work-in-progress but the Windows support is already ready within Windows Insiders builds while the Linux support will come after the ACPI specification around it has been finalized...

Following last month's Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 Milestone 1 development release that brought many improvements to our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software a second development release is now available...

One of the surprises this year in the Linux kernel world was Paragon Software wanting to upstream their "NTFS3" kernel driver that supports read-write operations on Microsoft NTFS file-systems and is much more full-featured than the existing read-focused NTFS kernel driver or the user-space NTFS FUSE driver. The driver hasn't yet been mainlined but continues to be updated in preparing for that milestone...

Dell's Linux engineers continue working on improving the Linux kernel's handling around S0ix ACPI sub-states for greater energy savings...

Better support for Microsoft Surface laptops on Linux is slowly coming to the mainline kernel...

PureLiFi, one of the leaders when it comes to Li-Fi for high-speed, light-based wireless technology, has been spending the past few months bringing up their open-source Linux driver to the mainline kernel for their devices...

Well before Intel bought out AI startup Habana Labs this company with their compelling AI training and inference accelerators has been maintaining an open-source kernel driver in the Linux kernel. That has fortunately continued under Intel's ownership to no surprise and coming up with the Linux 5.11 cycle are more improvements to this accelerator driver for both the Gaudi AI Training and Goya AI Inference products...

After a long run and being one of the early boutique Linux PC vendors, California-based laptop/desktop/server vendor ZaReason is the latest casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic...

Debian 11 is starting its release dance next month with the initial transition and essentials freeze while the actual stable release should make it out later in the year. For now Debian 10 remains the current stable series and this weekend marks the debut of Debian GNU/Linux 10.7...

Coming to the Linux 5.11 is the Auxiliary Bus infrastructure that allows creating an auxiliary device and binding an an auxiliary driver to it. This is for a new core driver feature around increasingly complex devices that rely upon several drivers for support/operation...

Earlier this week I looked at the Spectre mitigation performance impact on AMD Zen+ / Zen 2 / Zen 3 processors given the recent launch of the Ryzen 5000 series and those newest CPUs still requiring some mitigation handling. Questions were raised about the Spectre mitigation handling on Windows, so I ran some quick tests there as I happened to have a Windows 10 install on the Ryzen 9 5900X test box at the moment for some unrelated Windows vs. Linux gaming...