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Intel's IWD 1.11 Released For Faster WiFi Scanning

Phoronix | Jan. 7, 2021, 9 a.m. | Original

The Intel-developed IWD Linux wireless daemon is out with its first feature release of 2021.

IWD 1.11 as the new release issued on Wednesday isn't a big update but comes with primary new feature: "intelligent scan of all [wireless] frequencies", as noted in the 1.11 tag .

Digging more into that, it basically should yield faster initial WiFi scanning times. The commit leading to this change is splitting DBus scans into three frequency scans.

That commit by

RadeonSI Gallium3D Adds Radeon GPU Profiler Support

Phoronix | Jan. 7, 2021, 7:45 a.m. | Original

Surprisingly it has taken until 2021 but the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver now supports using the company's own Radeon GPU Profiler.

The Radeon GPU Profiler (RGP) is a low-level optimization tool for Windows and Linux geared for OpenCL / OpenGL / Vulkan / Direct3D tracing and performance profiling on Radeon GPUs.

Radeon GPU Profiler has obviously been geared for their proprietary/official (closed-source) graphics driver components on both Windows and Linux. Meanwhile last year Mesa's RADV Vulkan

NVIDIA Prepares XWayland OpenGL/Vulkan Acceleration Support

Phoronix | Jan. 7, 2021, 6:17 a.m. | Original

NVIDIA's Wayland support is finally coming together albeit long overdue with DMA-BUF passing support and now patches pending against XWayland for supporting OpenGL and Vulkan hardware acceleration with their proprietary driver.

Pending patches to the X.Org Server's XWayland code paired with a yet-to-be-released proprietary driver update finally allow for hardware accelerated rendering with XWayland.

The XWayland patches were sent in by NVIDIA driver developer Erik Kurzinger who has been involved with many of their Wayland affairs. As to the performance he noted,

Open Source LLM

Fedora 34 Approved To Enable Systemd-OOMD By Default For All Spins

Phoronix | Jan. 7, 2021, 3:05 a.m. | Original

The release of Fedora 34 this spring is now cleared to enable systemd-oomd by default for all spins in an effort to enhance the out-of-memory / memory pressure experience on Linux.

Systemd OOMD is currently an experimental feature of systemd based on Facebook code adapted for systemd to be used on both desktops and servers. Systemd-OOMD allows monitoring for resource contention and can kill opt-in processes when the memory/SWAP pressure is above a predefined threshold.

Plans were drafted last month for Fedora 34

Freedreno In Mesa 21.0 Flips On OpenGL 3.3 Support

Phoronix | Jan. 7, 2021, 12:03 a.m. | Original

It was just at the end of December that the Mesa 21.0 development code enabled OpenGL 3.2 support for Freedreno , the open-source Gallium3D driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware. Now in time for Mesa 21.0 still, OpenGL 3.3 support has been achieved.

OpenGL 3.3 contexts (and GLSL 330) in turn is supported with the newest development code this week per this commit .

The OpenGL 3.3 support in Freedreno is enabled for Qualcomm Adreno

Linux 5.10.5 Released - It Disables FBCON Accelerated Scrolling

Phoronix | Jan. 6, 2021, 8:23 p.m. | Original

Linux 5.10.5 LTS is out today with at least one rather interesting addition.

Linux 5.10.5 picks up the patch talked about back in October to drop accelerated scrolling from the Linux frame-buffer console (FBCON) since it's riddled with bugs and not widely used.

Bugs continue to be discovered within the FBCON code, particularly around the accelerated scrolling. Thus the code is being removed since it's not widely used and due to these code issues.

The main user

Intel

A Look At The CPU Security Mitigation Costs Three Years After Spectre/Meltdown

Phoronix | Jan. 6, 2021, 3:17 p.m. | Original

With this week marking three years since Spectre and Meltdown were made public in ushering in a wave of CPU security disclosures that followed and mitigations that often resulted in measurable performance hits, here is a look at how the performance costs stand today with various new and older Intel CPUs as well as AMD processors too. This article is looking at the current performance costs under Linux with the default mitigations and then the run-time disabling of the relevant mitigations for each of the processors under test while using an up-to-date

AMD's "AMDVLK" Vulkan Driver Making It Easier To Switch To RADV Driver

Phoronix | Jan. 6, 2021, 1:52 p.m. | Original

AMD has begun staging their new open-source driver code ahead of the next AMDVLK driver release that will likely occur this week or next. With this latest AMDVLK code dump, there is easy run-time switching support between the AMDVLK and RADV Vulkan drivers.

Already it's quite easy switching between multiple Vulkan drivers thanks to the common Vulkan loader and ICD handling, but with the newest AMDVLK driver it's made even easier. AMD has created a Vulkan layer that makes it as easy as setting an environment variable

OpenZFS 2.0.1 Released With Linux 5.10 Support, Many Fixes

Phoronix | Jan. 6, 2021, 1:33 p.m. | Original

Released at the end of November was the much anticipated OpenZFS 2.0 open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems. Today that has been succeeded by OpenZFS 2.0.1 with support for newer Linux kernels and many bug fixes.

OpenZFS 2.0.0 was compatible with Linux kernels up through 5.9 while now OpenZFS 2.0.1 adds Linux 5.10 kernel support and early compatibility patches around the still in development Linux 5.11.

OpenZFS 2

Fedora 34 Looks To Sign Individual Files Within RPMs

Phoronix | Jan. 6, 2021, 10:39 a.m. | Original

Yet another big change being eyed for Fedora 34 is to sign individual files within shipped RPM packages. The signatures will use the Linux Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) and in turn can be used to enforce run-time policies around only allowing the execution of trusted files.

The proposal laid out this week is to sign all files within Fedora RPMs with IMA signatures. The signatures will be made using a key held by the Fedora Infrastructure team.

By leveraging the Linux Integrity Measurement Architecture, IMA policies can be created by

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