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Raspberry Pi "VC4" DRM Driver Sees 10/12 BPC Color Depth With Linux 5.12

Phoronix | Jan. 6, 2021, 9:15 a.m. | Original

With Linux 5.12 the Broadcom BCM2711 SoC used by the Raspberry Pi 4 will see 10 and 12-bit color support with the VC4 Direct Rendering Manager driver.

Currently the open-source VC4 DRM driver that is used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer has just been exposing 8-bit color support while 10/12-bit support is pending for Linux 5.12 for those with capable displays.

The 10/12 BPC support for

Google Continues Work On Linux "Restricted DMA" For Situations Like Remote WiFi Attacks

Phoronix | Jan. 6, 2021, 8:48 a.m. | Original

Google engineers continue working on the Linux kernel around "Restricted DMA" for helping to protect systems that lack DMA access control for hardware without an IOMMU.

Protected DMA aims to help prevent data leakage or corruption stemming from DMA access to system memory unexpectedly for systems without an IOMMU. One of the lead motivators for this work is due to PCI Express giving full system memory access and there already being proven vulnerabilities like WiFi firmware exploits that could escalate to a full system exploit even remotely via WiFi. Google's Project Zero illustrated

HDMI Forum Closing Public Specification Access Is Hurting Open-Source GPU Drivers

Phoronix | Jan. 6, 2021, 2:57 a.m. | Original

It's been recently elaborated why the likes of FreeSync support over HDMI aren't coming to the open-source drivers, at least not yet... It stems from the decision by the HDMI Forum to prevent public access to the HDMI specification, which in turn is hurting open-source graphics drivers.

With the HDMI specification no longer being public but only to "HDMI Adopters" is complicating the open-source GPU driver support. Even for those that are part of the HDMI Forum like AMD in turn

Panfrost Gallium3D Flips On AFBC For Bifrost GPUs

Phoronix | Jan. 6, 2021, 12:08 a.m. | Original

Adding to the long list of changes for Mesa 21.0 is the Panfrost Gallium3D driver that provides open-source OpenGL for Arm Mali graphics hardware now supporting Arm Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC) for Bifrost GPUs.

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver has enabled Arm Frame-Buffer Compression on 2D arrays and 3D textures for Bifrost (or just Bifrost v7 for 3D textures). The AFBC support isn't there for the Midgard GPUs also supported by Panfrost.

Arm Frame Buffer Compression provides

Benchmarking OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 With Its AMD Zen Optimized Build

Phoronix | Jan. 5, 2021, 4:17 p.m. | Original

While Intel has Clear Linux as an aggressively optimized Linux distribution catering towards their hardware, there isn't a direct equivalent for optimally showcasing the performance potential of current AMD platforms. Clear Linux often offers leading performance on Zen CPUs but that is obviously not by design but just an artifact of a lot in common between the latest Intel and AMD microarchitecture features. One of the few distributions (or only notable one) offering specific AMD Zen optimized builds has been OpenMandriva. With the OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 release candidate shipping this

Wasmer 1.0 Released As The Universal WebAssembly Runtime Outside The Browser

Phoronix | Jan. 5, 2021, 3:08 p.m. | Original

As we have been expecting in recent weeks, Wasmer 1.0 has been released as the "universal WebAssembly runtime" for helping to accelerate WASM adoption and new use-cases outside of the web browser.

Wasmer 1.0 marks the point at which this WebAssembly runtime believes its API is fully stabilized and is "better, easier to use, and more stable than ever before." They still have more WebAssembly plans post Wasmer 1.0, but at this point they are confident in their API.

Wasmer is

Fedora 34 To Ship With Standalone XWayland, LLVM 12 + Other Changes Approved

Phoronix | Jan. 5, 2021, 12:06 p.m. | Original

Fedora 34 remains under active feature development and another batch of features were unanimously approved of by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.

Ahead of tomorrow's weekly FESCo meeting now back on track after the holidays, a number of Fedora 34 features already received unanimous approval. The newest features include:

- Perhaps most exciting of this batch of approved changes are the standalone XWayland package has been signed off on for allowing newer XWayland code in the absence of new X.Org Server releases.

- Packaging of LLVM/Clang

Zink With Mesa 21.0 Now Exposes OpenGL 4.1

Phoronix | Jan. 5, 2021, 9:58 a.m. | Original

While for months there have been experimental patches taking Zink to OpenGL 4.6 for this OpenGL-on-Vulkan translation layer integrated into Mesa, the upstreaming process around testing and code review is quite lengthy with up until today still only exposing OpenGL 3.3 with mainline Mesa. But with the latest Git commits, Zink is now up to OpenGL 4.1.

Mesa 21.0-devel today took Zink from OpenGL 3.3 to 4.1 after bumping the supported GLSL version. The necessary OpenGL

Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 Released For Open-Source, Cross-Platform Automated Benchmarking

Phoronix | Jan. 5, 2021, 9 a.m. | Original

Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 is available today as the latest quarterly (Q1-2021) feature update to our open-source automated benchmarking framework for Linux, macOS, Solaris, Windows, and BSD platforms.

There are numerous improvements to find with Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 following last quarter's big Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 release with updated OpenBenchmarking.org . Some of the key highlights for this Q1 feature release include:

- Improved tracking of per-test

RHEL9 Raises Base Target For x86_64 CPUs Plus Possible Optimized Libraries With glibc-hwcaps

Phoronix | Jan. 5, 2021, 6:26 a.m. | Original

As we reported almost one year ago, Red Hat was looking at likely dropping older x86_64 CPU support from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and we now have a better idea of their plans in catering RHEL9 better to modern processors.

Following the work over the past several months by open-source developers on x86-64 microarchitecture feature levels for the compiler toolchains, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 the plan is to assume a base of at least x86-64-

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