Phoronix

NVIDIA today released the 460.32.03 Linux graphics driver as their first stable release in the 460 driver series...

The Intel-developed IWD Linux wireless daemon is out with its first feature release of 2021...

Surprisingly it has taken until 2021 but the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver now supports using the company's own Radeon GPU Profiler...

NVIDIA's Wayland support is finally coming together albeit long overdue with DMA-BUF passing support and now patches pending against XWayland for supporting OpenGL and Vulkan hardware acceleration with their proprietary driver...

The release of Fedora 34 this spring is now cleared to enable systemd-oomd by default for all spins in an effort to enhance the out-of-memory / memory pressure experience on Linux...

It was just at the end of December that the Mesa 21.0 development code enabled OpenGL 3.2 support for Freedreno, the open-source Gallium3D driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware. Now in time for Mesa 21.0 still, OpenGL 3.3 support has been achieved...

Linux 5.10.5 LTS is out today with at least one rather interesting addition...

With this week marking three years since Spectre and Meltdown were made public in ushering in a wave of CPU security disclosures that followed and mitigations that often resulted in measurable performance hits, here is a look at how the performance costs stand today with various new and older Intel CPUs as well as AMD processors too. This article is looking at the current performance costs under Linux with the default mitigations and then the run-time disabling of the relevant mitigations for each of the processors under test while using an up-to-date Ubuntu 20.10 paired with the new Linux 5.10 LTS kernel.

AMD has begun staging their new open-source driver code ahead of the next AMDVLK driver release that will likely occur this week or next. With this latest AMDVLK code dump, there is easy run-time switching support between the AMDVLK and RADV Vulkan drivers...

Released at the end of November was the much anticipated OpenZFS 2.0 open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems. Today that has been succeeded by OpenZFS 2.0.1 with support for newer Linux kernels and many bug fixes...

Yet another big change being eyed for Fedora 34 is to sign individual files within shipped RPM packages. The signatures will use the Linux Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) and in turn can be used to enforce run-time policies around only allowing the execution of trusted files...

With Linux 5.12 the Broadcom BCM2711 SoC used by the Raspberry Pi 4 will see 10 and 12-bit color support with the VC4 Direct Rendering Manager driver...

Google engineers continue working on the Linux kernel around "Restricted DMA" for helping to protect systems that lack DMA access control for hardware without an IOMMU...

While LLVM 12.0 should be out around March as the next half-year feature update to this innovative and widely-used open-source compiler stack, LLVM 11.0.1 is now being christened as the only planned stable point release to LLVM 11...

It's been recently elaborated why the likes of FreeSync support over HDMI aren't coming to the open-source drivers, at least not yet... It stems from the decision by the HDMI Forum to prevent public access to the HDMI specification, which in turn is hurting open-source graphics drivers...

Adding to the long list of changes for Mesa 21.0 is the Panfrost Gallium3D driver that provides open-source OpenGL for Arm Mali graphics hardware now supporting Arm Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC) for Bifrost GPUs...

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...