Open-source News

Faster IO_uring, BFQ + BLK-MQ Improvements Among The I/O Fun For Linux 5.12

Phoronix - Mon, 02/22/2021 - 06:01
The block subsystem and related storage changes were merged today for the in-development Linux 5.12 kernel...

The State Of ROCm For HPC In Early 2021 With CUDA Porting Via HIP, Rewriting With OpenMP

Phoronix - Mon, 02/22/2021 - 01:10
Earlier this month at the virtual FOSDEM 2021 conference was an interesting presentation on how European developers are preparing for AMD-powered supercomputers and beginning to figure out the best approaches for converting existing NVIDIA CUDA GPU code to run on Radeon GPUs as well as whether writing new GPU-focused code with OpenMP device offload is worthwhile...

Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU30 Is The Biggest Update We've Seen In A While

Phoronix - Sun, 02/21/2021 - 23:15
Oracle continues maintaining Solaris 11.4 with monthly stable release updates but there still is no public sign of anything past 11.4 for this operating system that was once exciting during the Sun Microsystems days. But with this week's 11.4 SRU30 release, at least there are many package updates...

Intel eASIC N5X, Snapdragon 888 Support Land In Linux 5.12

Phoronix - Sun, 02/21/2021 - 20:16
There is a lot of new hardware enablement with the ARM platforms and DeviceTree additions for the Linux 5.12 kernel merge window...

Mesa Lands New Single File Cache To Help Steam's Pre-Compiled Shaders, Space Savings

Phoronix - Sun, 02/21/2021 - 19:22
Mesa's on-disk shader cache, which is used for speeding up game load times by avoiding the redundant recompiling of shaders on successive loads and also helping performance for software that compiles shaders on-the-fly, is seeing a big improvement with Mesa 21.1. Mesa 21.1-devel merged this weekend the new single file cache implementation...

Linux 5.12 Git Seeing New Code Land Following Winter Storm

Phoronix - Sun, 02/21/2021 - 19:08
While the first week of a new merge window is often one of the busiest times for Linus Torvalds in overseeing the Linux kernel, until last night there was no actual Linux 5.12 code being pushed into the Linux Git repository. Linus was offline most of the week due to winter storms preventing him from pushing to the Git repository and interacting much with the mailing list...

XFS File-System With Linux 5.12 Has "A Lot Going On This Time"

Phoronix - Sun, 02/21/2021 - 16:15
XFS maintainer Darrick Wong characterized the file-system driver changes for Linux 5.12 as "a lot going on this time, which seems about right for this drama-filled year."..

PipeWire 0.3.22 Released With Many Improvements

Phoronix - Sun, 02/21/2021 - 13:07
With Fedora 34 aiming to use PipeWire by default for audio use-cases currently handled by PulseAudio and JACK, the Red Hat developers working on PipeWire remain very busy in addressing bugs and wiring up new functionality for this audio and video framework/server...

Netrunner 21.01 Released For Customized KDE Desktop On Debian

Phoronix - Sun, 02/21/2021 - 07:21
It's been nearly one year to the day since the release of Netrunner 20.01 as this desktop Linux distribution focused on providing a good KDE-based desktop environment and backed by Blue Systems. Today Netrunner 21.01 has been released as the latest step forward for this KDE desktop distribution built atop a Debian base...

OpenGL vs. Vulkan Performance For Portal 2 With Radeon Linux Graphics

Phoronix - Sun, 02/21/2021 - 02:15
With Valve's Portal 2 having added a Vulkan renderer by way of DXVK for converting Direct3D calls to Vulkan, here are some initial benchmarks with several different AMD Radeon graphics cards for seeing the performance of this nearly decade old game on Linux with the existing OpenGL rendering path compared to that of the new Vulkan rendering option.

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