Last week we looked at the Windows vs. Linux performance on the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X where there was some very friendly competition and much closer results than we are used to seeing for modern, high-end x86_64 processors between the two operating systems. As a follow-up to that testing, here are results of Windows 10 October 2020 Update with Windows Subsystem for Linux (both WSL1 and WSL2) compared to the performance in turn off bare
Mesa 21.0 Merges Initial Direct3D 12 Support For WSL
Last month the initial Direct3D 12 Gallium3D code was merged into Mesa for use under Windows. What's merging today are the initial bits around support on Windows Subsystem for Linux. This includes the ability now to build the Direct3D code on Linux albeit isn't useful outside of the WSL context.
Linux 5.11 Will ChaCha Faster With ARM Network Packets, New Keem Bay Crypto Driver
Herbert Xu sent in the crypto updates on Monday for Linux 5.11 and has already landed into the mainline kernel.
On the performance front, the crypto changes should yield better performance of ChaCha and AEGIS128 for ARM network packets. The ChaCha performance optimizations for ARM network packets should be particularly useful especially with WireGuard making use of ChaCha20 for that
OpenSUSE Leap 15.3 Alpha Released
OpenSUSE Leap 15.3 is "based on the Jump concept" and does provide "a whole new level of harmony" between openSUSE Leap 15.3 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3.
Not only is openSUSE's Jump effort panning out but they are also welcome CentOS users over
Linux 5.11 Has Many x86 Platform Driver Changes For From Dell BIOS Controls To Telemetry
The x86-platform-drivers additions have an assortment of Intel/AMD hardware support changes primarily benefiting Linux laptop users. Among the new changes with the ongoing Linux 5.11 merge window are:
- The AMD SoC PMC driver for the power management controller on Raven Ridge, Picasso, Renoir, and Cezanne and is used for
Linux 5.11 Begins Early Prepping Around PCI Express 6.0
With the Linux 5.11 PCI updates is support for reporting a PCI Express link speed of 64 GT/s. The tentative PCI Express 6.0 specification defines a 64.0 GT/s link speed and this current change is about being able to report it to
NVIDIA CUDA 11.2 Released For Further Enhancing Its Proprietary Compute Stack
There are the usual assortment of small to medium sized updates with the CUDA 11.2 compute stack update. Some of the CUDA 11.2 highlights include:
- Support for importing Direct3D 11/12 textures.
- The external semaphore interface can now work with the Vulkan Timeline Semaphores to import, wait, and signal on
Ampere Altra Performance Shows It Can Compete With - Or Even Outperform - AMD EPYC & Intel Xeon
While the talk in recent weeks has been about the performance of Apple's M1 ARM chip and then rumors there might be a 32 core chip in the pipe, there is already something much stronger: Ampere Altra has begun shipping and its flagship 80-core SoC with up to two sockets per server can easily take on the AMD EPYC 7742 "Rome" and Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 "Cascade Lake" performance across a variety of workloads. Here is our initial look at
Intel "IGEN6" Driver Comes To Linux 5.11 For In-Band ECC (IBECC)
The EDAC (Error Detection and Correction) updates were sent in on Monday for Linux 5.11. With this pull comes the IGEN6 driver for the in-band ECC with new client SoCs
SECCOMP Filters Get A Very Nice Speed-Up With Linux 5.11
The SECCOMP updates for Linux 5.11 include the addition of constant-action bitmaps to reduce the overhead for many real-world syscall filters from O(N) to O(1). The filters benefiting the most are for allow/reject-only system call handling. This constant action bitmaps is also faster than BPF call optimization.