RSS Reader

Facebook, Twitter Proposing CentOS Hyperscale SIG With Newer Packages + Other Changes

Phoronix | Jan. 12, 2021, 12:09 a.m. | Original

Adding to the changes abound at CentOS beyond CentOS 8 going EOL at year's end to focus instead on CentOS Stream feeding into the future RHEL, the likes of Facebook and Twitter are now proposing a Hyperscale special interest group for this RHEL-based platform.

The Hyperscale SIG will be focused on catering the Linux distribution usage to large-scale infrastructures like those used at Facebook, Twitter, and other "hyperscaler" organizations like cloud providers.

At least the initial focus of the CentOS Hyperscale SIG would be on providing faster

Intel

Intel Rolls Out 10nm Pentium/Celeron CPUs, Previews Rocket Lake

Phoronix | Jan. 11, 2021, 4:30 p.m. | Original

Intel's virtual CES press conference took place today. Here are the highlights from 10nm Pentium Silver and Celeron processors to a preview of Rocket Lake and forthcoming 11th Gen Core H processors.

Intel at the event talked up 10nm processors for low-end devices with their new Pentium Silver and Celeron processors. The entry-level hardware will be catering to the educational market and talks "up to to 144% better Chromebook performance" or "create your STEM project up to 78

Clang LTO Support Looks Like It Could Land For Linux 5.12

Phoronix | Jan. 11, 2021, 3:18 p.m. | Original

The support for Clang LTO of the Linux kernel for link-time optimizations when using that GCC alternative compiler looks like it will land with Linux 5.12.

For a number of months the Clang LTO wiring to the Linux kernel has been undergoing rounds of review and of interest from multiple parties. Vendors like Google already make use of Clang link-time optimizations as part of their kernel builds on mobile devices. There's been much interest and it looks like for Linux 5.12 that work will likely

Fedora 34 Looking To Tweak Default zRAM Configuration

Phoronix | Jan. 11, 2021, 2:34 p.m. | Original

Last year with Fedora 33 zRAM was switched on by default . The setup was that using a compressed zRAM drive for swap space leads to better performance and in turn a better user experience. Some spins of Fedora have been using swap-on-zRAM by default going back many releases while since F33 it's been used for all spins. Now with Fedora 34 the configuration is being further refined.

With Fedora 33, the zRAM configuration was limited to a 0.5 fraction of RAM or

Clear Linux Squeezed Out More Open-Source Performance In 2020

Phoronix | Jan. 11, 2021, 12:37 p.m. | Original

Here is a look at how the performance of Intel's Clear Linux compares for the end of 2020 against the end of 2019 and 2018 on the same hardware platform for looking at the Intel performance optimizations made to this open-source Linux distribution. This was another year of Intel engineers making more headway on out-of-the-box Linux performance even though they have been less vocal about the project over the past year.

Even though 2020 brought Intel

AMD Publishes More Zen 3 Compiler Support Patches For LLVM

Phoronix | Jan. 11, 2021, 10:21 a.m. | Original

AMD is back on track publishing more Zen 3 compiler support patches for the LLVM compiler stack.

Last month AMD engineers began posting their "znver3" support for LLVM that was largely replicating the existing Znver2 (Zen 2) target and exposing the newly-enabled instructions. Fortunately, now through the holidays, further work is coming for LLVM and presumably GCC in time.

Under review today is the Zen 3 scheduler descriptions for LLVM.

Merged last week meanwhile was this addition for exposing the TLBSYNC, INVLPGB, and SNP

Radeon "RADV" Vulkan Driver Adds Sparse Memory Support - Will Help Some D3D12 Games

Phoronix | Jan. 11, 2021, 9:05 a.m. | Original

Adding to the growing list of Mesa 21.0 features is spare memory support for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver.

Vulkan sparse memory allows for resources to be non-contiguous, re-bound to different memory allocations over its lifetime, and relaxed descriptor requirements. All of the Vulkan sparse memory details can be found via this chapter of the Vulkan API specification.

Last month support for sparse images/textures was implemented into the ACO compiler back-end as well as there being the capabilities within AMDGPU LLVM and

Blackberry Is Bringing Vulkan To QNX

Phoronix | Jan. 11, 2021, 7:41 a.m. | Original

The newest platform working on Vulkan API support is... Blackberry's QNX.

While Blackberry devices are no longer popular as they once were, Blackberry's QNX Unix-like platform that they have owned now for a decade is still popular in the embedded space for various in-vehicle systems to medical devices and other similar use-cases. QNX continues to be developed with QNX 7.1 being the most recent release from this past July.

Now in 2021 it looks like Blackberry has been

Mesa 21.0 RadeonSI Will Run Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Faster

Phoronix | Jan. 11, 2021, 6:14 a.m. | Original

Mesa 21.0 is bringing some overdue improvements for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver with the game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Mesa 21.0 with the RadeonSI driver for modern AMD Radeon graphics cards is finally enabling "mesa_glthread" by default for Counter-Strike: GO. This is the opt-in Mesa OpenGL threading behavior that can help increase the performance of various GL games but isn't universally enabled as it has been found to hurt some games or yield no benefits for others

POWER10 Adds New Instructions For Helping Fend Off ROP Exploits

Phoronix | Jan. 11, 2021, 12:09 a.m. | Original

The POWER10 architecture is adding several new instructions to help prevent return-oriented programming exploits.

Hitting the GNU Assembler code this past week was support for new return-oriented programming instructions with POWER10. There are several new POWER instructions intended to help safeguard against this common security exploit means. It's also the first time we've seen these new instructions mentioned.

As it's just the assembler bits being added, it doesn't provide much context to these new ROP instructions but they include

Menu