AMD sent in a fair number of AMDGPU updates slated for Linux 4.16 but now hitting the cut-off for major feature updates for DRM-Next code looking to make it into 4.16, AMD has submitted some fixes.
Here is a fresh look at the NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon Linux graphics card performance as we start 2018. Testing was done using the latest Linux 4.15 Git kernel -- including the KPTI page table isolation support -- as well as using the newest Mesa 17.4-dev driver code for RadeonSI/RADV and on the NVIDIA side is their brand new 390.12 beta driver.
There's still a week and a half to go until the Linux 4.15.0 stable kernel release is expected and that rings in the Linux 4.16 merge window. On top of various Linux 4.16 changes already talked about, here's a look at some of the other kernel features/additions expected for this next release cycle.
Adam Jackson of Red Hat has sent out the second version of the ongoing patches for providing server-side GLVND functionality for the X.Org Server.
RADV co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen has landed support for the Vulkan VK_EXT_discard_rectangles extension within Mesa 17.4-dev.
For those NVIDIA Linux users reliant upon the proprietary driver and wanting to upgrade to the Linux 4.15 kernel that will be officially released within the next two weeks, the 390.12 driver is playing nicely.
One of the features exciting us the most about GTK4 is the Vulkan renderer that will make its premiere. This Vulkan renderer continues getting worked into shape for GTK+ 4.0.
As upstream Glibc is working on deprecating libcrypt for its eventual removal from the codebase, Fedora developers are looking at using libxcrypt for their hashing/encoding crypto library.
If you are still running with a pre-GCN AMD graphics card, a number of R600 Gallium3D commits landed in Mesa Git over night as well as an interesting patch series on the Mesa mailing list.
Last week DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon posted initial patches for addressing Meltdown on this popular BSD distribution. Dillon has now posted his initial patch for targeting the Spectre CPU vulnerability.
In the wake of Meltdown and Spectre, Intel yesterday released new microcode binaries for Linux systems.
While Intel Cannonlake processors aren't out yet with their new "Gen 10" graphics hardware, Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has published their first graphics driver patches for Linux enablement of Icelake "Gen 11" hardware.
Over the past week I have posted many KPTI and Retpoline benchmarks for showing the performance impact of these patches to combat the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. But with my testing so far I haven't done any showing the combined impact of KPTI+Retpoline on Ubuntu versus a completely unpatched system. Here are some of those results.
NVIDIA issued a security bulletin today regarding their GPU drivers and the Spectre speculative side-channel attacks.
While Mesa 18.0 will premiere later this quarter as the first feature update of 2018, Mesa 17.3.2 is now available as the second bug-fix release for last quarter's Mesa 17.3 series.
Razer's concept device being shown off at the Consumer Electronics Show this year is an Android-powered laptop/hybrid device.
While it took LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler initially a long time to supporting OpenMP, the code continues to mature in supporting the latest updates to this parallel programming specification.
Yesterday Intel landed KPTI page table isolation and Retpoline support in their Clear Linux distribution. Given that one of the pillars of this Intel Open-Source Technology Center platform is on delivering optimal Linux performance, I was curious to see how its performance was impacted. Here are before/after benchmarks on seven different systems ranging from low-end Pentium hardware to Xeon servers.
Users of the openSUSE rolling-release Linux distribution will soon find an improved installer thanks to Libstorage-NG landing soon and improvements to YaST.
This shouldn't come as much of a surprise as Fedora Linux normally ships with the very latest upstream toolchain components and with Fedora 28 it will be no different.
The VC5 open-source Gallium3D driver designed to support the next generation of Broadcom VideoCore graphics hardware is onto rendering more triangles, at least with the hardware simulator.
Next month the Vulkan 1.0 API will turn two years old but a goal that has remained elusive to date has been getting SPIR-V -- the intermediate representation shared by Vulkan and OpenCL -- into upstream LLVM.
HTC used CES 2018 to announce their new virtual reality head-mounted display, the VIVE Pro.
Back in November a Google developer proposed HDCP content protection support for the Intel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) Linux driver that is based upon their code from Chrome OS / Chromium OS. It looks like that High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection support in the i915 DRM driver will come for Linux 4.17.
The GNU Compiler Collection 8 (GCC 8) is currently in "stage three" development whereby general bug fixing can still happen along with allowing new ports to be added. But that is changing next week as it enters its final stage of development prior to release.
NVIDIA is sticking to their pledge of being quick with delivering support for new revisions of Vulkan support in their Windows and Linux drivers.
Intel's own Clear Linux distribution has now been updated with protection for addressing the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities disclosed last week.
While the developers acknowledge modern open-source projects should be using Git as their distributed revision control system, if you find yourself still using GNU Bazaar there is now a fork known as Breezy.
While the Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) patches were quick to land in the mainline Linux kernel for addressing the Meltdown CPU vulnerability, the "Retpoline" patches are still being worked on as the leading approach on the Linux side for dealing with the Spectre CPU vulnerability. The Retpoline patches are said to have little impact on performance, but here are our benchmarks of these kernel patches for seeing how they affect a variety of AMD and Intel systems.
The latest in the long list of planned features/changes for Fedora 28 come down to an AArch64 promotion.
There's been a well-published branch the past few days of a patched GCC 7.2 code-base with the code changes for fending off Spectre while now patches have arrived on the mailing list for Spectre/CVE-2017-5715 of mainline GCC 8.
While Intel announced their new CPUs with Radeon Vega M graphics, AMD had a host of announcements on their own for getting CES 2018 started with some excitement.
Kicking off CES 2018, Intel launched their new CPUs featuring integrated Radeon Vega M Graphics.
The first development milestone of the next quarterly release of the Phoronix Test Suite open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software is now available.
Linus Torvalds has released the seventh weekly release candidate for Linux 4.15.
Following the move by Linux to introduced Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) to address the Meltdown vulnerability affecting Intel CPUs, DragonFlyBSD has implemented better user/kernel separation to address this issue. While the Linux performance hit overall was minor, in our tests carried out so far the DragonFlyBSD kernel changes are causing more widespread slowdowns.
Longtime Nouveau Gallium3D contributor Ilia Mirkin has landed OpenGL bindless texture (ARB_bindless_texture) support within Mesa 17.4-dev Git.
This weekend our OpenBenchmarking.org online component to the Phoronix Test Suite has crossed another milestone: more than 28 million downloads of test profiles and test suites.
Taking a break from KPTI and Retpoline benchmarks, here are some tests recently conducted with Linux 4.15 when it comes to trying out the different CPUFreq scaling governors with this latest kernel and running various games with a Radeon RX 580 Polaris graphics card.
If Fedora developers are successful, Fedora 28 will feature secure and properly supported Thunderbolt 3 device handling out-of-the-box.
LightNVM is the abstraction layer within the Linux kernel for supporting open-channel NVM Express solid-state drives. LightNVM 2.0 is on the way.
While kernel developers are busy with Spectre and Meltdown bugs right now, 20 years from now is the big "Year 2038" problem. Kernel developers are still working through the massive codebase to allow it to function past this "Unix Millenium Bug."
For fans of Rust that didn't hear yet, Rust 1.23 was released this week as the newest stable version of this popular programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.
For fans of the BFQ I/O scheduler, more improvements for it are coming with Linux 4.16.
For those happening to use Oracle Solaris on desktops/workstations, Solaris 11.4 will finally be making the transition from GNOME 2 to the GNOME 3.24 Shell.
Overall most of our benchmarks this week of the new Linux Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) patches coming as a result of the Meltdown vulnerability have showed minimal impact overall on system performance. The exceptions have obviously been with workloads having high kernel interactions like demanding I/O cases and in terms of real-world impact, databases. But when testing VMs there's been some minor impact more broadly than bare metal testing and also Wine performance has been impacted. The latest having been benchmarked is seeing if the Docker performance has been impacted by the KPTI patches to see if it's any significant impact since overall the patched system overhead certainly isn't anything close to how it was initially hyped by some other media outlets.
Well known open-source AMD 3D driver developer Marek Olšák has published a set of new patches featuring his latest optimization work: 32-bit GPU pointers.
David Woodhouse of Amazon has sent out the latest quickly-revising patches for introducing the "Retpoline" functionality to the Linux kernel for mitigating the Spectre "variant 2" attack.
The Khronos Group has released their first Vulkan graphics/compute programming specification update of 2018.
While it's approaching one year since Canonical decided to divest from Unity 8 and mobile/convergence, the UBports community continues making some progress in getting their forked desktop environment ready for their forked Ubuntu Touch environment as well as the desktop.
On Friday DragonFlyBSD's Matthew Dillon already landed his DragonFly kernel fixes for the Meltdown vulnerability affecting Intel CPUs. But what about the other BSDs?
With the plethora of software security updates coming out over the past few days in the wake of the Meltdown and Spectre disclosure, released by SUSE was a Family 17h "Zen" CPU microcode update that we have yet to see elsewhere... It claims to disables branch prediction, but I've confirmed with AMD that is not actually the case.