Phoronix

While Intel has Clear Linux as an aggressively optimized Linux distribution catering towards their hardware, there isn't a direct equivalent for optimally showcasing the performance potential of current AMD platforms. Clear Linux often offers leading performance on Zen CPUs but that is obviously not by design but just an artifact of a lot in common between the latest Intel and AMD microarchitecture features. One of the few distributions (or only notable one) offering specific AMD Zen optimized builds has been OpenMandriva. With the OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 release candidate shipping this week, I ran some fresh benchmarks looking at how OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 RC1 compares between its generic x86_64 image and that of the Zen optimized build as well as in turn how that performance compares to Clear Linux and Ubuntu 20.10.

As we have been expecting in recent weeks, Wasmer 1.0 has been released as the "universal WebAssembly runtime" for helping to accelerate WASM adoption and new use-cases outside of the web browser...

Fedora 34 remains under active feature development and another batch of features were unanimously approved of by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee...

While for months there have been experimental patches taking Zink to OpenGL 4.6 for this OpenGL-on-Vulkan translation layer integrated into Mesa, the upstreaming process around testing and code review is quite lengthy with up until today still only exposing OpenGL 3.3 with mainline Mesa. But with the latest Git commits, Zink is now up to OpenGL 4.1...

Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 is available today as the latest quarterly (Q1-2021) feature update to our open-source automated benchmarking framework for Linux, macOS, Solaris, Windows, and BSD platforms.

As we reported almost one year ago, Red Hat was looking at likely dropping older x86_64 CPU support from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and we now have a better idea of their plans in catering RHEL9 better to modern processors...

While many Linux users were excited when finding out the open-source AMD Radeon Linux drivers were allowing Smart Access Memory (Resizable BAR) support on older motherboards/CPUs and older Radeon GPUs rather than basically the very latest AMD products as seen on Windows, there is a change of course due to bugs. Now, officially, Mesa 21.0 is just enabling Smart Access Memory for systems with AMD Zen 3 processors and RDNA 2 graphics cards though if you have other hardware you can force-enable it...

Lutris as the open-source Linux game manager that makes it easy to install Wine game as well as various emulator games, Steam titles, and more, is out with an interesting update to kick off the new year...

PicoXcell, the ARM SoCs from PicoChip more than a decade ago before being bought out by MindSpeed and then Intel, are set to finally see their Linux support removed this year...

Keeping up with Fedora's tradition of offering the very latest open-source software packages, the straight-forward proposal was made this week to update its lightweight LXQt desktop packages against the new LXQt 0.16...

Now that more developers are returning from their holiday breaks, the first pull request to DRM-Next has been submitted of Intel kernel graphics driver material destined for Linux 5.12...

Last month we wrote about AMD engineers working on an experimental video mode optimization for FreeSync with the open-source AMDGPU Linux kernel driver. With AMD staff getting back to work following the holidays, an updated patch set was submitted today...

As part of their fundamental shift to restrict Qt LTS point releases to commercial customers, The Qt Company is closing the Qt 5.15 branch to the public tomorrow with future Qt 5.15 LTS point releases to be restricted to paying licensees...

Back on Christmas I wrote about Linux 5.11 regressing for AMD performance on Zen 2 and newer systems where the just-added CPU frequency invariance support was often hurting various workloads when using the default "Schedutil" scheduler utilization frequency scaling governor. Since then and through the holidays I have been carrying out many more benchmarks looking at the Linux 5.11 performance with a particular focus on the AMD desktop/server platforms.

Keem Bay, Intel's third-generation Movidius VPU (Vision Processing Unit), continues seeing more upstream open-source hardware support within the Linux kernel. Coming to the Linux 5.12 kernel in a couple months will be more support within the crypto subsystem...

Following RadeonSI seeing optimizations around AMD Smart Access Memory (Resizable BAR) support last month, the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" within Mesa 21.0 is also seeing similar treatment...

Another one of the features you won't find in the Linux 5.11 kernel is support for the recently ratified NVMe Simple Copy but work on supporting that feature continues...

The Ardour open-source, cross-platform digital audio workstation rung in 2021 by mainlining support for using Intel/AMD FMA functionality for greater performance...

The second weekly release candidate of Linux 5.11 is now available for testing...

There's nothing quite like some fun holiday-weekend reading as a fiery mailing list post by Linus Torvalds. The Linux creator is out with one of his classical messages, which this time is arguing over the importance of ECC memory and his opinion on how Intel's "bad policies" and market segmentation have made ECC memory less widespread...