Phoronix
Linux RISC-V Preparing For Real-Time Kernel Support (PREEMPT_RT)

As we approach the end of 2023, sadly, the real-time kernel "PREEMPT_RT" support still hasn't been mainlined... The main blocker pending is still the ongoing work around non-blocking consoles / threaded console handling to then allow the few dozen remaining out-of-tree RT kernel patches to be merged. The good news is that when the PREEMPT_RT support is ready for mainline, it looks like the RISC-V architecture support will also be real-time friendly too...

Phoronix
AMD Making It More Clear When Their RadeonSI OpenGL Driver Is Being Used

AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has been around for a decade since the Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" graphics card days while finally the OpenGL renderer string is being changed to reflect "RadeonSI" as the name of the driver in use...

Phoronix
Canonical To Stick With 10 Year Support Cycle For Ubuntu LTS Releases

Given recent talk of upstream Linux Long-Term Support (LTS) kernels likely being reduced from six to two year support windows moving forward, Canonical today decided to re-affirm their support for ten years of support with Ubuntu Long Term Support versions...

Phoronix
RADV Vulkan Driver Lands Initial Support For GFX11.5 "RDNA3 Refresh"

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has landed initial support for GFX11.5 "RDNA3 refresh" graphics within the RADV Vulkan driver for the upcoming Mesa 23.3...

Phoronix
Intel Video Acceleration Drivers Begin Preparing For Arrow Lake S

While Meteor Lake isn't shipping until December, Intel's open-source Linux engineers for months have already been working on 15th Gen Arrow Lake (as well as Lunar Lake, among their other processor lines) for getting the driver support in order. The latest early hardware enablement to talk about is the initial Arrow Lake S support coming to their video acceleration drivers...

Phoronix
The VKMS Display Driver Continues Evolving Nicely For Headless Linux Systems

The VKMS driver as a virtual kernel mode-setting solution as a software-only implementation of KMS for use with primarily headless Linux systems continues tacking on more features. Maíra Canal and Melissa Wen presented last week at XDC 2023 on the VKMS driver that continues proving very useful for headless platforms as well as for testing purposes...

Phoronix
RADV Vulkan Driver Merges Cooperative Matrix Support Using RDNA3 WMMA

As yet another open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver change ahead of the upcoming Mesa 23.3 code branching and feature freeze is Vulkan VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix support with the RADV driver for RDNA3 hardware and newer using the GPU's Wavefront Mixed-precision Multiply Accumulate (WMMA) functionality...

Phoronix
XWayland's Rootful Mode Is Becoming More Useful

Most Linux desktop users/gamers/enthusiasts are relying on XWayland for X11 client compatibility atop Wayland compositors in the "rootless" mode. With the XWayland rootless mode, X11 applications and games can integrate nicely within a Wayland desktop environment with just the individual client window presented. However, for those interested, the XWayland "rootful" mode has become more capable this year for those wanting to render an entire X11 environment within the Wayland compositor as a window...

Phoronix
AXI 1-Wire Driver Is AMD's Latest Upstreaming Effort To The Linux Kernel

Since AMD's acquisition of Xilinx and working to broaden the portfolio of offerings for the data center, more AMD-Xilinx drivers have been working their way toward the mainline Linux kernel. There's been upstreaming efforts such as the Versal EDAC driver, generating DeviceTree nodes for PCI devices, Versal watchdog driver, QDMA driver, CDX bus support, and more. The latest driver working its way toward the mainline kernel from AMD is the AXI 1-wire driver...

Phoronix
Stratis 3.6 Released For Improving Linux Storage Management

Red Hat engineers continue working on Stratis Storage as a modern Linux storage solution that leverages the Rust programming language and built atop the proven XFS file-system and LVM. Stratis continues to strive for ZFS and Btrfs like functionality although its use in the wild still seems rather limited...

Phoronix
XWayland & X.Org Server See New Releases Due To Three More Security Vulnerabilities

The X.Org Server and XWayland saw new point releases today as a result of three more security vulnerabilities being disclosed...

Phoronix
Fedora To Possibly Transition From Zlib To Zlib-NG For Better Performance

Fedora Linux is looking at possibly transitioning from Zlib to Zlib-NG for this widely-used compression library. This tentative change request is filed in part by Intel software engineers looking to enhance the Zlib performance on modern processors...

Phoronix
The Ongoing Work For Native Wine Wayland Support

There were many interesting talks last week at XDC 2023 in Spain around Rusticl, the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver, the Raspberry Pi graphics driver, RADV ray-tracing, AMD color management and HDR with the Steam Deck / Gamescope, and others. One of the other talks many Phoronix readers are likely to be interested in is around the state of the Wine Wayland driver...

Phoronix
AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1: Polaris & Vega Support Dropped, Counter-Strike 2 Tuning

AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1 was published today as AMD's first Radeon Vulkan open-source driver update since last month. There comes some new features and improvements with this version but they have also decided to drop Polaris (GFX8) and Vega (GFX9) graphics support...

Phoronix
The Fedora 39 Release Has Been Held Up By Raspberry Pi Bugs

Fedora 39 failed to make its "early" release target date, it didn't meet its otherwise targeted release date one week later, and is now facing another possible setback still. These release delays have been due to outstanding blocker bugs all related to the Raspberry Pi...

Phoronix
Mesa 24.0 Enters Feature Development For Open-Source OpenGL & Vulkan Drivers

Mesa 23.3 has now been branched in Git and in turn that opens up the mainline code to beginning feature work on what will become Mesa 24.0 when it releases in Q1'2024...

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Benchmarking The Performance Cost To Full Disk Encryption For Modern AMD Ryzen Laptops

With the new AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U Zen 4 mobile processor powering the likes of the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4, I was curious about the performance impact of employing full disk encryption. Here are some benchmarks looking at the performance cost to enabling full disk encryption versus not utilizing any disk encryption while running Fedora Workstation on the new ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 AMD laptop.

Phoronix
Intel Releases OSPRay Studio 0.13 With Xe GPU Acceleration Support

Building off the recent release of OSPRay 3.0 with initial GPU acceleration support, OSPRay Studio has now been updated against this new version. As a reminder, OSPRay Studio is Intel's open-source interactive visualization and ray-tracing application...

Phoronix
Mesa 23.3-rc1 Available For Testing With NVIDIA Vulkan Driver, Raspberry Pi 5 Support

Shortly after today's Mesa 23.3 branching and opening Mesa 24.0-devel on Git main, Mesa 23.3-rc1 is now formally available as the first weekly release candidate for this quarter's feature series...

Phoronix
SteamVR 2.0 Officially Released With Many Improvements

For those wishing to interact with Steam from virtual reality (VR) headsets, today Valve promoted SteamVR 2.0 to stable...