For a number of months Mediatek engineers have been posting some Linux kernel driver code for bringing up the AI Processing Unit (APU) within the MT8192 SoC while out this weekend is the complete patch series at more than eight thousand lines of code.
Recently I wrote about Vortex86 processors seeing detection work under Linux for improving the state of these aging x86 32-bit SoCs. That work is now slated to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 5.16 cycle for those running these aging SoCs/processors.
It's been an exciting week for KDE developers with preparing their formal support for handling NVIDIA's driver with GBM support as well as getting fingerprint authentication finally in place, among other improvements.
The FreeBSD team has begun preparations for their next release process with an aim to ship FreeBSD 12.3 in early December.
Last week was the virtual Vulkanised Fall 2021 event hosted by The Khronos Group. The two-day event was focused on all things Vulkan and for those that missed it all of the slide decks and other material are now available.
Wine 6.20 was released today as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms.
Patches queued this week into the platform-drivers-x86 "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 5.16 merge window will provide some useful improvements to System76 laptop owners.
PipeWire 0.3.39 was released on Thursday as the newest update to this audio/video stream solution for Linux systems that continues proving itself capable of replacing the roles of JACK and PulseAudio, among other use-cases.
While for many years we have been accustomed to seeing Intel land their new hardware feature enablement work in the Linux kernel and related components well ahead of products shipping, occasionally there are lapses due to various internal and external timings. The launch of Sapphire Rapids is quickly approaching and one of the major additions is Advanced Matrix Extensions with its Linux support still being in the works.
GCC 12 isn't seeing its stable release until around March~April as usual, but with feature development slowly wrapping up as approaching the next stage of development next month to focus on fixes, recently I wrapped up some preliminary benchmarks for how GCC 12.0 is currently performing against GCC 11.2 on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (Zen 3) system.
Valve continues embracing DXVK-Native for allowing more of their older games to target Vulkan by using this Direct3D-to-Vulkan translation layer for native games. DXVK-Native 1.9.2a is out with the latest fixes and improvements.
Intel's "parallel submission" user-space API for their i915 kernel graphics driver has been queued into DRM-Next today ahead of the Linux 5.16 kernel cycle.
A new Steam client beta is out with a few Linux enhancements worth noting.
SiFive just shared word that at today's Linley Conference they teased their Performance P550 successor that will "set a new standard for the highest efficiency RISC-V processor available."
An effort going on for a while at Canonical has been to develop a new desktop installer for Ubuntu. With the recent Ubuntu 21.10 release they are still using their classic Ubiquity installer by default but have published a new preview build of Ubuntu 21.10 with their new desktop installer option. Here is a look at Ubuntu's forthcoming new installer.
Following this week's release of Chrome 95, Google has now promoted Chrome 96 to beta status.
The release candidate to XWayland 21.1.3 is out today with just a few changes but made significant by support for the NVIDIA 495 series driver GBM code path.
It's been a half-year already since AMD introduced the EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors that continue performing well and gaining marketshare. While the recently released Ubuntu 21.10 is not a long-term support (LTS) release, for those wondering what this latest Linux distribution means for EPYC 7003 series performance, here is a look at its performance across many benchmarks against that of Ubuntu 21.04 that was released right after the Milan launch and then Ubuntu 20.04 as the current LTS stable series.
AMD patches this month have begun preparing support for a new CPU feature called Smart Trace Buffer (STB).
Mesa's V3DV driver for supporting newer Broadcom VideoCore graphics hardware with Vulkan now is advertising v1.1 support. This Vulkan 1.1 support in V3DV is notable as the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer are the most notable beneficiaries of this driver.
The ongoing supply chain issues across the semiconductor industry (and more broadly) are now impacting the Raspberry Pi operations for end-users/customers when it comes to pricing.
The Ruby programming language implementation has merged YJIT, its new just-in-time (JIT) compiler.
NVIDIA has made available CUDA 11.5 today as the latest version of their popular but proprietary compute stack/platform. Notable with CUDA 11.5 is that CUDA-Python has reached general availability status.
GIMP 3.0 as the GTK3 port of this open-source Adobe Photoshop alternative has been talked about for nearly a decade now and the work remains ongoing. However, out today is GIMP 2.99.8 as the newest development snapshot.
Last year Intel announced ControlFlag as a machine learning tool for helping to uncover bugs within code. ControlFlag promised impressive results after being trained on more than one billion lines of code and at the end of 2020 was already being used internally on Intel's code-bases from firmware to software applications. We hadn't heard anything more about ControlFlag this year... Until today. Intel has now made ControlFlag open-source for helping to autonomously detect more programming bugs.
The newest feature release to Eclipse OpenJ9 is now available, the high performance Java Virtual Machine originating from IBM J9.
Just one week ago was the public launch of the Radeon RX 6600 as the newest offering in the RDNA2 GPU line-up. While in our Radeon RX 6600 Linux review the performance was good on AMD's well regarded open-source driver stack and standing ground against the likes of the GeForce RTX 3060 with NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver, it turns out the RX 6600 Linux performance can be even better already. Here are benchmarks of the Radeon RX 6600 on Linux across six different driver configurations.
Separate from all the ongoing Apple Silicon/M1 bring-up work for the Linux kernel, the Linux 5.16 cycle is set to support this year's Apple Magic Keyboard.
Queued this week into the Linux PCI subsystem's "next" branch is the Apple PCIe driver needed to enable PCI Express support for Apple SoCs such as the M1.
Thanks to the nature of open-source, AMD engineers for the "AMDGPU" kernel graphics driver are looking to make use of Intel's new i915 buddy allocator code they introduced as part of all their video memory management changes as part of their discrete graphics bring-up.
It's been a half-year since talking about the Wii U gamepad driver that's been in development with mainline ambitions for supporting this wireless gamepad in conjunction with the Nintendo Wii U console. The driver has just been revised to address earlier code review comments, again renewing interest in the effort and possible mainlining in a future kernel version.
Oracle has published its latest quarterly update to GraalVM, the open-source Java JVM/JDK implemented in Java that also supports other execution modes and programming languages from Python to R to Ruby.
Chrome 95 has rolled out as stable today as the latest version of Google's web browser.
In recent months we have seen a lot of RadeonSI optimizations focused on SPECViewPerf with AMD seemingly trying to get this open-source OpenGL driver into very capable shape moving forward for workstation GL workloads. Hitting Mesa 22.0-devel today is yet another round of patches for tuning SPECViewPerf.
Karanbir Singh who had served as the CentOS Project Leader and involved with the community-based RHEL distribution since 2004 has stepped down from his roles.
Announced earlier this year for Google Cloud was a new family of virtual machines called Tau VMs. The initial T2D instances are powered by AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors to deliver leading performance and are also positioned to deliver great value in going up against the likes of Amazon's Graviton2 instances. Tau VM instances are now available as a preview and Google has provided us with gratis access to the new instance types for benchmarking.
Last Friday night we spotted OpenCL 3.0.9 with several new extensions included. Today The Khronos Group is formally announcing these latest OpenCL additions focused on Vulkan interoperability as well as neural network inferencing.
With OSS-Fuzz for continuous fuzzing of open-source projects and along with working on the various sanitizers for compilers, Google has been doing a lot for proactively uncovering software defects in key open-source projects. Now though a group of their engineers have been working on SiliFuzz for software aiming to discover new CPU defects.
As another possible performance win for RadeonSI Gallium3D as AMD's open-source Radeon OpenGL driver on Linux systems is enabling of NGG culling for Navi 1x consumer graphics processors rather than limiting it only to newer Navi 2x (RDNA2) GPUs.