Matthew Wilcox of Oracle today sent out his latest patch series implementing the new "memory folios" type for the Linux kernel in an effort to improve Linux memory management and allow for better efficiency that ultimately translates into measurable performance gains.
As part of Intel's new M.2 modem push for EVO laptops and Chromebooks, open-source Intel engineers have been working on "IOSM" as their new M.2 modem driver and this code which has been in the works for months is set to see its debut with the Linux 5.14 cycle.
Intel today went public with their vision and early work around a "Infrastructure Processing Unit" (IPU) as their newest ware for data centers and cloud providers.
A new feature point release is available for FWUPD for handling of system/component firmware and BIOS updating on Linux and other platforms.
At the end of 2019 "Ubuntu Pro" was announced as Ubuntu for Amazon's EC2 cloud with ten years of package updates/security, kernel livepatching, Canonical Landscape integration, and more. Google and Canonical are announcing today that Ubuntu Pro is now coming to Google Cloud.
Given the recent forum discussion stemming from the -O3 optimization level still too unsafe for the Linux kernel (in part due to older, buggy compilers) and some users wondering about the current -O2 versus -O3 compiler optimization level impact, here is a fresh round of reference benchmarks using GCC 11.1 on Fedora Workstation 33 looking at various optimization levels and optimizations tested on dozens of different application benchmarks to see the overall impact on performance.
Platform Runtime Mechanism was incorporated into the ACPI 6.4 specification earlier this year and allows moving some system management interrupt (SMI) handlers out of the system management mode (SMM) "black box" and into the OS/VMM execution context. With Linux 5.14 initial work on ACPI Platform Runtime Mechanism is set to land.
While Intel engineers have been working on Alder Lake support for Coreboot as with other recent CPU generations that open-source firmware/BIOS support remains focused on their reference boards with a particular focus on meeting necessary requirements for Google Chromebook devices. Sadly, there is not much or any in the way of consumer retail motherboard support at this point. For those looking for retail desktop motherboard support for Coreboot, aside from the open-source POWER9 systems out of Raptor Computing, on the x86_64 front it largely means using aging Intel and AMD platforms.
Launched last November was the Raspberry Pi 400 as a Raspberry Pi Keyboard Computer with effectively a Raspberry Pi 4 SBC embedded within the keyboard and attached to a large aluminum block for cooling. It's a great little device and beginning with Linux 5.14 looks like it should be playing fine with the mainline kernel.
Last year Intel detailed Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) as a new means of better protecting virtual machines with hardware-assisted isolation between VMs as well as from the VMM/hypervisor. Shortly after that Intel began posting TDX enablement patches and that work has continued while is still ongoing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Following the last AMDVLK update at the end of May, AMD has released AMDVLK 2021.Q2.4 as their newest open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver release.
Following the bump in April from Cloud-Hypervisor v0.14.x to v15, Cloud-Hypervisor 16.0 was released on Thursday for this Intel-led open-source hypervisor that is leveraging Rust and focused on cloud and security use-cases.
Earlier this year was talk of Linux finally removing its legacy IDE subsystem that has been deprecated for years in favor of just maintaining the still-supported libata code for IDE support. The libata path is much better supported and matured for nearly two decades, but one of the holdouts was some Motorola 68000 series hardware -- like early Macintosh computers -- not being supported outside of the legacy context. That is finally set to change with Linux 5.14 so in turn the legacy IDE code will likely be able to be removed soon.
Linus Torvalds is known primarily in the past for his colorful scripture on the Linux kernel mailing list while today he does have a passionate and important read on the LKML around vaccinations for COVID-19.
Back in March during the announcement of Intel Foundry Services it was mentioned that SiFive and Intel were working together to allow RISC-V chips to be fabbed within Intel's facilities. Additionally, Intel Capital previously invested in SiFive during prior funding rounds. Now it turns out Intel is reportedly positioning to potentially acquire SiFive.
Merged today into Mesa 21.2-devel is OpenGL ES 3.1 support being exposed for the Panfrost Gallium3D driver that provides open-source Arm Mali graphics.
Last month System76 launched their Launch Configurable Keyboard. They sent over this new open-source keyboard for some brief testing and I must say the build quality has been top notch and while this is their first keyboard they are bringing to market, with their US manufacturing expertise that began with their Thelio computer cases, it has carried forward with their Launch keyboard. This keyboard is beautifully crafted and among the most durable (and heaviest) keyboards I've used in the past two decades. It reminds me of the IBM Model M from a quality perspective but with its own unique advantages.
Along with Intel having wrapped up their graphics driver feature work for Linux 5.14, AMD sent in another pull request too with more feature code they have ready for their AMDGPU kernel driver in 5.14 and will likely be their last major pull for this cycle too.
For over a year Amazon engineers have been working on DAMON as a new means of monitoring data accesses under Linux. That patch series has yet to be mainlined but continues being worked on with the intention of getting it upstreamed when ready. More recently the engineers involved have been working on a DAMON-based page reclamation implementation for the Linux kernel in dealing proactively dealing with systems having high memory load.
Following this week's release of the big and long overdue GRUB 2.06 bootloader release, there is already development talk and action for the next release. Succeeding GRUB 2.0, GRUB 2.02, GRUB 2.04, and GRUB 2.06 is now going to be a bit of a version shakeup with GRUB 2.11 to be the next release.
Intel has maintained a lengthy "Optimization Reference Manual" for showing developers how to optimize code for their latest CPU microarchitectures, but accompanied by their latest manual update is now a lot of actual code samples for easing the process of learning about Intel's optimization techniques for taking full advantage of their latest processors.