It looks like Intel's ISHTP_ECLITE driver will be ready for mainlining in Linux 5.16 as a driver for newer systems skipping out on a traditional embedded control (EC) and instead using this EC-like IP as part of their Programmable Service Engine subsystem.
Those reading Phoronix over the years likely know the X.Org Server has had an increasing number of vulnerabilities come to light in recent times and statements by security researchers like the security being even worse than it looks. Given the age of the X.Org/X11 codebase and many components being rather unmaintained these days, the security situation isn't that great combined with a lack of manpower. The security topic was under the spotlight today at the XDC2021 conference.
Following the big OpenZFS 2.1 release from July that brought Distributed SPARE RAID, a compatibility property for pools, and other new features, OpenZFS 2.1.1 is available today as a follow-up release for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.
Prominent Intel open-source Vulkan Linux driver developer Jason Ekstrand presented at today's X.Org Developers Conference (XDC2021) about their work on enabling Vulkan ray-tracing support.
It was in October of 1996 that the KDE desktop environment was founded and as such with marking twenty-five years since its creation, the forthcoming Plasma 5.23 is being advertised as the "25th Anniversary Edition" for the desktop.
As usual when the Linux 5.15 merge window began wrapping up, I set out to dive into its performance to see what is in store for this next version of the kernel and whether there was any regressions or other performance changes worth noting. Linux 5.15 overall has been in good shape for the "-rc1" state except noticing that code compilation workloads were taking longer on multiple Linux 5.15-rc1-running systems than Linux 5.14 or prior. Seeing it across multiple systems and a very real-world regression, it was worth bisecting and looking closer so here are the details.
With the Linux 5.15 merge window out of the way, the first drm-misc-next pull request has been sent in to DRM-Next for staging until the Linux 5.16 merge window opens up about two months from now.
The latest work landing for Mesa 21.3 is supporting FP16 within the LLVM-based software driver code namely for the LLVMpipe Gallium3D OpenGL and Lavapipe Vulkan drivers.
It's been known that Google has been using the open-source "MSM" DRM/KMS driver on Qualcomm-powered devices that originally started out as a reverse-engineered driver project separate from the company. Now it's also been confirmed how Google is successfully using the open-source Mesa Freedreno OpenGL and TURNIP Vulkan drivers on Qualcomm-powered Chromebooks too.
The latest area where BPF is looking to expand within the Linux kernel is its CFS scheduler.
While Microsoft has long had WGL as an API analogous to EGL for residing between OpenGL and the Windows interfaces, Microsoft has now wired up an EGL implementation for Mesa that works on Windows.
Alyssa Rosenzweig spoke today at the virtual X.Org Developers Conference about the ongoing work for bringing up Linux display and graphics support on the Apple M1 graphics processor.
AMD today released their quarterly update to the Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise graphics driver package, which includes an updated Linux build as well.
A small but important step forward is seeing AMD recently publishing their binary firmware files in advance of new GPU/APU launches for rounding out their Linux driver support stack.
Iago Toral of Igalia kicked off the first day of the virtual XDC2021 developer conference today by sharing a status update on V3DV as the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver most notably used for Raspberry Pi 4 and newer.
French telecommunications giant Orange has published "BMC" as the (e)BPF Memory Cache providing a cache focused on memcached usage within the Linux kernel.
HP's higher-end "OMEN" laptop series is set to see better support with the next kernel cycle.
The GNU Compiler Collection has already supported Intel's Tremont cores as used by the low-power Jasper Lake platform. Now though coming to GCC are some optimizations to further enhance the performance when targeting the Tremont micro-architecture.
Following portions of the merge request landing, the rest of the RadeonSI CPU-overhead-lowering work was just merged to Mesa 21.3.
Intel has released a new version of their loader for oneAPI Level Zero for loading the Level Zero software driver components.
Java 17 has made it to general availability status today with a number of improvements.
While NVIDIA has been supporting Resizable BAR for a while now with their GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards, for those exclusively using Linux it remains more of a challenge due to AIB partners generally not releasing any vBIOS updates for ReBAR support that can be easily applied under Linux. But if you do carry out an update -- such as under Windows -- the performance uplift can be worthwhile if using a game that can benefit from the support.
"Intel Seamless Update" is a forthcoming feature for Intel platforms seemingly first being exposed by their new Linux kernel patches working on the functionality... Intel is working on being able to carry out system firmware upates such as UEFI updates but doing so at run-time and being able to avoid the reboot in the process.
Libinput 1.19 is now available as the newest version of this Linux input handling library commonly used these days by both X.Org and Wayland desktops.
While Linux 5.15-rc1 was released on Sunday with its many changes, landing on Monday was a late change to raise the baseline GCC version requirement for building the Linux kernel.
Mesa 21.3 today landed a debug option that can help with the XWayland-based gaming performance around latency and for power management as well.
In addition to the big Advanced Matrix Extensions support still being in flux and the kernel-side AMX code not yet being merged, another feature of next year's Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" that we are only now seeing in early published form for the Linux kernel is handling of x86 user interrupts.
While Linux 5.15 has many new features and improvements, one of the patch series we have been eager to see land is the work introducing the new FUTEX2 system call. FUTEX2 can help improve the performance of newer Windows games running on Linux via Wine / Steam Play's Proton by better matching the Windows kernel behavior, but while it didn't land for Linux 5.15, at least a new version of the patches were posted.
After last month landing the Zink sub-allocator code for improved performance and also enabling OpenGL ES 3.2 support for Zink, lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz at Valve has been spending time this month working to get more games running on this OpenGL-over-Vulkan Mesa driver.
GDB 11.1 is now available as the latest feature update to the GNU Debugger.
Feature development is over on the Linux 5.15 kernel with Linux 5.15-rc1 being issued. It's now on to testing and bug fixing over the next two months before the kernel is christened as stable. Here is our original Linux 5.15 feature overview about all of the big changes in this next kernel version.
While Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS shipped one year ago as the last planned point release to the "Bionic Beaver", an emergency issue is leading to Ubuntu 18.04.6 now being prepared.
Of all the great stuff for AMD in Linux 5.15, one of the patches still not having yet been mainlined is the control support around Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) with Zen 3 processors. It's been six months since AMD published their security whitepaper around PSF while the Linux patch has yet to be mainlined while now it seems will be updated for a reduced focus on KVM usage.
On and off for years has been talk of an accelerator subsystem for the Linux kernel considering that for now most AI training/inference accelerator drivers end up lodged within the "char/misc" area of the kernel. That accelerator subsystem discussion has been restarted with talks of having such a subsystem or moving those drivers within the GPU/DRM subsystem space.