Phoronix

After last week sharing some Intel Tiger Lake benchmarks on Linux 5.10, the tables have turned and here are some similar tests when running Linux 5.10 on an AMD Ryzen 4000 series "Renoir" notebook...

A proposal and set of patches have been sent out around the Linux kernel's Page Table Isolation (PTI/KPTI) implementation to defer switching from the user page-table to kernel page-table until later in the kernel entry sequence. There are possible performance benefits and code improvements that would stem from this change...

In addition to the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub (SFH) driver coming with Linux 5.11 for improving Ryzen laptop support, the AMD SoC PMC driver is also under review for landing in this next kernel release...

Valve's open-source developers responsible for DXVK and VKD3D-Proton are working on a new Vulkan extension to help in their porting/layering effort of Direct3D on top of the Vulkan API...

Mesa 20.3 was branched this evening in marking the end of feature development for this Q4-2020 Mesa3D release that should debut as stable in December. This also means that Mesa 21.0 is now open for development...

Making use of "-march=tigerlake" for building optimized binaries catering to Intel's latest-generation processors is well worth it on the likes of GCC 11. Out of the new instruction set extensions on Tiger Lake is more uplift than we have seen out of recent Intel generations and comparing the different "-march=" targets shows significant performance benefits if you don't mind compiling your own software from source.

ASUS has been evaluating the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for distributing firmware updates to their Linux customers for flashing in turn via Fwupd. Their first motherboard firmware update has now been volleyed onto this open-source platform for easing firmware updates on Linux...

Announced by Arm back in September was the Neoverse V1 "Zeus" platform with 50%+ performance uplift over the Neoverse N1. Neoverse V1 also supports Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) and other features in catering the platform for machine learning, cloud, HPC, and similar use-cases...

Among the many open-source graphics driver improvements being worked on recently by Red Hat's David Airlie from Lavapipe to OpenCL 3.0 Clover work, another recent effort has been around TTM "multihop" as an improvement for this memory management infrastructure used by the likes of the AMDGPU kernel driver...

Ubuntu maker Canonical Holdings Limited recently submitted their UK financial report for their fiscal year ending 31 December 2019. During the pre-COVID times they generated around 22% more revenue than 2018 but still operated at a loss albeit more narrowly than in prior years...

Vulkan 1.2.160 is out this morning as the newest revision to the Vulkan graphics/compute API...

Intel is contributing a new driver to the Linux kernel for determining whether Thunderbolt / USB4 ports are functional...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.10-rc3 as the newest test release ahead of stable Linux 5.10 that will be minted in December...

Debian developers are two months out from the transition and essentials freeze for Debian 11 "Bullseye" that in turn should debut as stable later in 2021...

Version 2.9 of OpenRazer is now available as the independently-developed solution for configuring and monitoring various Razer peripherals on Linux like not only their keyboards and mice but also headsets and other hardware...

Currently when directly assigning I/O devices to virtual machines the guest memory needs to be statically pinned unless using a vIOMMU setup in which case it does not but there are performance implications there as well. Intel engineers though have been working on a virtual IOMMU implementation with DMA buffer tracking to overcome these limitations...

Intel didn't manage to get their Software Guard Extensions (SGX) support merged for the current Linux 5.10 LTS kernel cycle and it's still up in the air if it will be pulled in the near-term for providing the mainline kernel with SGX enclaves support...

The first week of November brought numerous improvements to the KDE stack...

The recently proposed new TTM memory management page allocator that can yield 3~5x faster page allocation as tested with the AMDGPU kernel driver will be coming for Linux 5.11...

A set of Linux kernel patches posted on friday allow peer-to-peer DMA (P2PDMA) transfers between NVMe drives using existing O_DIRECT operations or the NVMe pass-through interface from user-space...