Bringing up Intel discrete graphics on Linux especially when it comes to accelerated 3D rendering has been a very lengthy process for the DG1 graphics card enablement, but it may soon actually start working.

The PHP 8.1 alpha releases got underway in June in working towards the next annual feature release for the PHP scripting language.

The Linux 5.14 RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) and EDAC (Error Detection And Correction) changes have landed with several improvements this time around on the Intel side.

Besides Sapphire Rapids introducing Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX), new developer documentation has detailed AFX-512 FP16 capabilities coming with the next-generation Xeon processors. Intel has posted initial developer documentation around AVX512FP16 as well as a big set of GCC and LLVM Clang compiler patches for handling the new intrinsics.

While Clang PGO support was sent in for Linux 5.14 as part of Clang compiler handling updates for this next kernel version, the functionality was subsequently dropped out and a new pull request issued after criticism from Linus Torvalds and others.

The Direct Rendering Manager (kernel graphics/display driver) updates for Linux 5.14 are putting on the pounds with nearly 300k lines of new code added (312,187 insertions, 22,367 deletions). The big increase is driven by new AMD Radeon graphics support added, a new Microsoft driver added, and other changes.

During this past month on Phoronix were 242 original Linux/open-source/hardware related news articles written by your's truly and another 18 featured Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles. This month also marked Phoronix.com turning seventeen years old for delivering Linux hardware reviews and news.

One of the exciting initiatives taking place recently within the CentOS camp has been the CentOS Hyperscale special interest group that is backed by engineers from Twitter and Facebook along with other organizations. They've been making more progress on offering their hyperscaler-focused packages/updates and even onto publishing a CentOS Hyperscale Workstation operating system image for testing.

The latest public code patches on the mailing list today are preparing for newer AMD heterogeneous servers that will have Aldebaran GPU nodes connected via xGMI links to the CPU(s) and the GPU dies in turn having HBM2 memory.

Michel Dänzer of Red Hat is preparing the release of XWayland 21.1.2 as the newest update to this standalone XWayland package separate from a whole X.Org Server release for running X11 clients within a Wayland environment.

The HID subsystem updates for Linux 5.14 continue improving consumer device support from newer AMD Ryzen laptops to multi-touch improvements.

AMD has issued their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q2 for Linux driver update as their quarterly packaged driver update intended for use with Radeon Pro graphics cards and former FirePro line-up.

Given the dominance of Linux-based devices from embedded/mobile (Android) through data centers and Linux powering all sorts of equipment, the networking subsystem updates for new Linux kernel merge windows continues to be very lively with new hardware support and never-ending improvements and new features.

In preparing to close out the second quarter, the Intel Media Driver 2021Q2 was released today as the company's open-source stack for supporting GPU-accelerated video encode/decode on Linux.

Headlining the power management updates for the Linux 5.14 merge window is the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver now being adapted to handle hybrid processors.

The release candidates for OpenZFS 2.1 continue dragging on with Tuesday marking the eighth such test version while bringing Linux 5.13 compatibility and other fixes.

Linux PC hardware manufacturer System76 has released Pop!_OS 21.04 as the newest version of their Ubuntu downstream that also features their new GNOME-based COSMIC desktop.

The x86 platform driver updates have been submitted for the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel. This area of the kernel principally benefits x86 laptop support on Linux but also has other drivers like around the Intel Speed Select Technology and more.

Linux's KVM virtualization component previously could allow a virtual machine guest relying on AMD SVM virtualization to breakout into the host. This bug persisted in the Linux kernel from late 2020 to March 2021 before being addressed and is the first known issue of such a guest-to-host breakout that didn't also depend upon bugs within user-space components.

While Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" was talked about for launching in late 2021, that was widely expected to be delayed. Intel today proactively confirmed that Sapphire Rapids will now begin production in Q1'2022 with their ramp beginning in Q2'2022.

Quietly released last week by AMD was their Radeon Software for Linux 21.20 driver providing the latest packaged "Open" and "PRO" (Closed) driver components for use within enterprise Linux environments.

Linux 5.14 has cleared out its legacy IDE code from the kernel that means dropping more than forty thousand lines of code.

The Firewalld firewall management tool for Linux that is built around Netfilter/Nftables is preparing for its long awaited 1.0 release.

With Btrfs continuing to see new adoption by various enterprises, Linux distributions like Fedora Workstation/Cloud and SUSE/openSUSE embracing it, and there continuing to be nice upstream improvements to this file-system driver, Btrfs continues on a nice trajectory in 2021.

Compiling the Linux kernel with LLVM's Clang code compiler continues to be more featureful with plumbing now being added to handle profile-guided optimizations (PGO) to help in achieving greater performance for optimizing kernel builds for targeted workloads.

The GNU C Library (Glibc) has landed its _Fork function implementation as an async-signal-safe fork replacement that is also expected to be made part of the next POSIX standards revision.

PipeWire 0.3.31 is out today as the newest version of this audio and video streams server for the Linux desktop that is becoming a viable replacement to the likes of JACK and PulseAudio.

Earlier this year Google announced the Lyra voice codec that could work with AV1 video for video chats over 56kbps modems. Google is today shipping its newest Lyra version.

Intel is going to be disabling Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) by default for various Skylake through Coffee Lake processors with forthcoming microcode updates. Yes, this does mean performance implications for workloads benefiting from TSX. This change has seemingly not been talked about much at all publicly and I just happened to become aware of it when looking through new kernel patches.

Following yesterday's release of the Linux 5.13 kernel, the GNU folks have released GNU Linux-libre 5.13-gnu as their downstream that strips out support for loading binary-only firmware/microcode, blocks the ability to load binary-only kernel modules, and other sanitization work in the name of software freedom.

Among the early pull requests for the just-opened Linux 5.14 merge window are the scheduler updates that includes the introduction of Core Scheduling. The Core Scheduling functionality has been in the works for the past few years by multiple vendors for better securing SMT systems following various vulnerabilities coming to light around Hyper Threading.

The Hantro media driver within the Linux kernel for supporting the Hantro IP-based VPU found in Rockchip and NXP i.MX8M SoCs is seeing improvements with the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has said "yes" to using Yescrypt for hashing shadow passwords with this distribution's next release. Using Yescrypt in place of SHA256/SHA512 should lead to greater security for new user accounts.

The KVM changes were submitted early ahead of the now-open Linux 5.14 merge window.

Linus Torvalds has just released the Linux 5.13 kernel as stable.

Of the many new features in Linux 5.13 one of the prominent security features is the ability to randomize the kernel stack offset at each system call. With Linux 5.13 stable imminent, here are some performance benchmarks of the impact from enabling this security feature.

With the half-way point for the year upon us, here is a look back at the most exciting Mesa open-source graphics driver news so far in 2021 with exciting contributions from Microsoft, AMD and Intel continuing to be the most open-source friendly graphics vendors, Zink making remarkable progress for OpenGL over Vulkan, performance optimizations galore, more embedded Vulkan drivers coming about, and other milestones for open-source Linux graphics.

Microsoft and systemd developers are proposing a global counter for block device changes for the Linux kernel to better track changes and having a unique system-wide number for disk and other block device changes rather than on a per-disk basis.

The hid-input kernel driver with Linux 5.14 is set to see support for "Programmable Buttons" as outlined by the USB HID specification.

Back in April was the last time we saw much XeHP specificc ode land in the open-source Mesa driver code while this week there was a fresh batch of code merged.