The independently-developed “Crocus” driver providing a Mesa Gallium3D implementation for Intel Gen4 “i965” through Gen7 “Haswell” graphics has now been merged into Mesa 21.2 for ultimately aiming to improve the open-source OpenGL support for these aging Intel integrated graphics generations…
Source: Phoronix – Intel Gallium3D Driver Merged Into Mesa 21.2 For Gen4 Through Haswell Graphics
After several weeks worth of 5.13-rc releases where there were more changes than Linus Torvalds would like to see, Linux 5.13-rc6 is out now and it’s on the smaller side while panning out nicely for this later stage of kernel development…
Source: Phoronix – Linux 5.13-rc6 Released With The Kernel Cycle Smoothing Out
Announced last year was KWinFT as a fork of KDE’s KWin to focus on improving the Wayland support more rapidly and incorporating other modern technologies. KWinFT has been making progress on advancing its code-base while in recent months it was seemingly more quiet. However, it turns out KWinFT is alive and well and has been going through some code refactoring while preparing for the next wave of feature work…
Source: Phoronix – KWinFT Going Through Code Refactoring, Working On WLROOTS-Based Usage
While a decade ago Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver engineers resisted TTM at the time and instead devised the Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) for kernel graphics memory management needs in its place, now with discrete graphics cards and dedicated video memory, Intel has been working on making use of TTM memory management for those purposes. With Linux 5.14 the initial bits are going to be there for using TTM by the Intel driver when running with discrete graphics having local memory…
Source: Phoronix – Linux 5.14 To Begin Enabling The Intel Graphics TTM Memory Management Bits for dGPUs
As a quick follow-up to last year’s L-shaped desk build for accommodating plenty of displays, laptops, and more, it’s still working out very well…
Source: Phoronix – Last Year’s L-Shaped Desk Build Has Been Holding Up Well
In addition to the recent WebAssembly project releases of Wasmer 2.0-rc and WASM3 v0.5, the Bytecode Alliance that is made up of Intel and Mozilla and other organizations has announced Wasmtime 0.28…
Source: Phoronix – Wasmtime 0.28 Released With C++ Embedding Support
A number of Intel’s open-source projects have been seeing new released this week presumably for making Q2/H1-2021 goals, including two of the networking projects maintained by the company: the ConnMan connection manager and IWD wireless daemon…
Source: Phoronix – Intel’s ConnMan 1.40, IWD 1.15 Released For Linux Networking
A big patch series out of Red Hat is now queued into the XFS file-system development Git branch that is part of the new material for the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle…
Source: Phoronix – XFS To Enjoy Big Scalability Boost With Linux 5.14
Recently the mainline Linux kernel has seen a lot of improvements to its feature set when compiling it under LLVM’s Clang rather than GCC as traditionally the only supported compiler. The most recent feature being brought to the Linux kernel when using Clang is finally allowing the use of compiler profile guided optimizations (PGO) for squeezing even greater performance out of the system by letting the compiler leverage the real-world profiles/metrics collected to make more informed code generation / optimization decisions…
Source: Phoronix – Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) Likely Coming To Linux 5.14 For Clang
One of the most promising BSD-based desktop distributions in recent times has been helloSystem that wants to be the macOS of BSDs with a polished desktop experience. helloSystem has been making good progress towards their goals in recent months and this weekend now issued version 0.5…
Source: Phoronix – helloSystem 0.5 Released For macOS-Inspired FreeBSD Desktop
On Friday afternoon Intel released a new version of their ISPC compiler, the Implicit SPMD Program Compiler, that supports a variant of the C programming language with extensions around single-program, multiple-data programming for CPU and GPU execution. Not only does this release prepare support for upcoming Intel CPUs but also adds support now for Apple’s Arm processors…
Source: Phoronix – Intel’s ISPC Compiler Adds Alder Lake + Sapphire Rapids Support And Apple Arm Chips
The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) saw queued into its “dev” tree this week the new compress_cache mount option ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle…
Source: Phoronix – F2FS Picking Up “compress_cache” Feature With Linux 5.14
KDE developers didn’t spend much time basking over their Plasma 5.22 release this week as they have already begun lining up changes for the first point release, new feature work for Plasma 5.23, and other improvements to this open-source desktop environment…
Source: Phoronix – Plasma 5.23 Picking Up Latest Breeze Evolution Style, SDDM Lands Native Wayland Support
The Linux kernel’s RISC-V support continues picking up remaining features not yet wired up beyond the base architecture support. The latest is transparent hugepages (THP) to be supported for RISC-V with Linux 5.14…
Source: Phoronix – Transparent Hugepages Are Coming To RISC-V On Linux
Last month we reported on CUDA documentation pointing to the NVIDIA 470 driver series to be the last supporting GeForce GTX 600/700 Kepler GPUs and that has now been summed up more formally with new guidance out of NVIDIA…
Source: Phoronix – NVIDIA Confirms Plans To Drop “Kepler” GPU Driver Support
Intel’s Linux engineers continue squaring away the next-generation Alder Lake hybrid processor support. In addition to continued graphics driver work and other platform device IDs being added for the upcoming Linux 5.14 kernel, it looks like ADL’s Thunderbolt/USB4 support will be merged too…
Source: Phoronix – Intel Alder Lake Thunderbolt/USB4 Support For Linux 5.14
Last year Intel’s updated ISA extensions reference guide was updated with references to Xeon “Sapphire Rapids” having High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) given new HBM-related error codes. Now it’s even more clear there are Xeon CPUs coming to market with onboard HBM memory as Intel has begun submitting Linux kernel driver changes…
Source: Phoronix – Linux Kernel Prepares For Intel Xeon CPUs With On-Package HBM Memory
With last week’s launch of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and this week’s launch of the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti there have been plenty of Linux gaming benchmarks on Phoronix. But for those interested in these new RTX 30 Ampere graphics cards for GPU compute or rendering workloads, in this article are many benchmarks on that front compared to various RTX 20 and RTX 30 series graphics cards.
Source: Phoronix – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti / RTX 3080 Ti Compute + Renderer Performance Benchmarks
While there was kernel talk of merging the PREEMPT_RT code in 2020 for this real-time functionality for the Linux kernel, among other times in the past that has yet to happen. These “RT” patches have long been maintained out-of-tree but it turns out that while in the past it was seemingly close for merging, that effort has stalled for lack of funding…
Source: Phoronix – Real-Time Support “PREEMPT_RT” For Linux Held Up Due To Lack Of Funding
The seventh release candidate of OpenZFS 2.1 is now available for testing while it looks like soon it will cross the finish line as the latest feature release for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems…
Source: Phoronix – OpenZFS 2.1 Gets More Cleanups, Better Documentation Ahead Of Release