Graphics/Benchmarks
Graphics: Mesa 20.3 RC 1 and Mesa 21.0
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 11th of November 2020 04:04:02 PM Filed under
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mesa 20.3.0-rc1
Hi list, It's that time again. Mesa 20.3.0-rc1 is now available for your general consumption. Please be sure to test it out and report plenty of bugs. There's lots of good stuff in this release, among the notable things off the top of my head: - lavapipe for vulkan swrast - v3dv vulkan driver for raspberry PI devices - lots of clover work, in particular spir-v for clover - tons of stuff I've not mentioned Dylan
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Mesa 20.3-RC1 Released With Lavapipe CPU-Based Vulkan, Raspberry Pi V3DV Added - Phoronix
Dylan Baker of Intel announced Mesa 20.3-RC1 overnight with its many new changes for this quarterly feature release. Mesa 20.3 comes the new V3DV Vulkan driver for Raspberry Pi 4/400 devices, LLVMpipe is in much better shape, Lavapipe has been added as a CPU-based Vulkan implementation akin to LLVMpipe, lots of OpenCL modernization work in Clover Gallium3D, many new Vulkan extensions added, various optimizations, and more. Our Mesa 20.3 feature overview will be published soon.
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Mesa 21.0 Merges Direct3D 12 Gallium3D Driver - Phoronix
Mesa 21.0 will allow running OpenCL and OpenGL on top of Gallium3D for any hardware on Windows 10 supporting Direct3D 12 acceleration.
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exFAT File-System Performance On Linux 5.9
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Tuesday 10th of November 2020 06:13:40 PM Filed under
Now that the Samsung-contributed open-source exFAT file-system kernel driver has matured quite nicely since being merged earlier this year as a replacement to the short-lived staging exFAT driver based on an older code-base, here is a look at how exFAT is performing on the Linux 5.9 kernel compared to EXT4 and F2FS as well as the existing exFAT FUSE file-system implementation.
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Graphics: Mesa, Vulkan and CXL
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 10th of November 2020 05:29:49 PM Filed under
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Mesa 21.0 Feature Development Opens For Release In Q1-2021 - Phoronix
Mesa 20.3 was branched this evening in marking the end of feature development for this Q4-2020 Mesa3D release that should debut as stable in December. This also means that Mesa 21.0 is now open for development.
Mesa 20.3 bring continued improvements to LLVMpipe's OpenGL 4 capabilities, various new Vulkan and OpenGL extensions to the Intel/Radeon drivers, the RADV ACO compiler back-end continues getting in much better shape, OpenCL Clover has been seeing renewed attention, continued bring-up around RDNA 2 graphics cards, Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics optimizations, and much more.
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NVIDIA Extends Fragment Shading Rate Extension In Vulkan 1.2.160
Vulkan 1.2.160 is out this morning as the newest revision to the Vulkan graphics/compute API.
Besides the usual assortment of fixes/clarifications to the specification, Vulkan 1.2.160 brings one new extension. That new extension this week is NVIDIA's VK_NV_fragment_shading_rate_enums.
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Compute Express Link 2.0 Specification Published
Just a year after the Compute Express Link 1.0 and 1.1 interconnect specifications were published, CXL 2.0 is being announced this morning for this high-speed, data center minded specification built atop the PCI Express interface.
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Optimized Compiler Builds Are Well Worth It For Intel Tiger Lake
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Monday 9th of November 2020 09:13:58 PM Filed under
Making use of "-march=tigerlake" for building optimized binaries catering to Intel's latest-generation processors is well worth it on the likes of GCC 11. Out of the new instruction set extensions on Tiger Lake is more uplift than we have seen out of recent Intel generations and comparing the different "-march=" targets shows significant performance benefits if you don't mind compiling your own software from source.
For this testing with the Dell XPS 9310 Intel EVO laptop was used with the Core i7 1165G7 processor. While the Tiger Lake notebook was running Ubuntu 20.10 with the Linux 5.10 Git kernel, the GCC 11.0 compiler was used for benchmarking as of its 25 October development state. Off GCC 11.0, the benchmarks under test were built with the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS of "-O3 -march=XXX". The different -march= values tested included generic x86-64, sandybridge, haswell, skylake, icelake-client, and tigerlake for looking at the impact of increasing the instructions exposed and other optimizations / scheduling model in catering to the newer CPU generations.
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mesa 20.2.2
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 9th of November 2020 12:55:05 AM Filed under
Hi list, I know this is coming rather late, but better late than never! Mesa 20.2.2 is now available, and includes numerous fixes. Please enjoy responsibly. Dylan
Also: Mesa 20.2.2 Released With A Random Assortment Of Fixes
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Graphics: AMD, Intel and Mesa Latest
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 7th of November 2020 01:00:55 PM Filed under
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AMD Radeon Graphics Updates For Linux 5.11 Bring New Hardware, Other Enhancements - Phoronix
An initial round of predominantly AMDGPU kernel driver patches have been called upon for pulling into DRM-Next as new feature work for Linux 5.11.
Among the highlights for this early feature code queuing up for the Linux 5.11 kernel cycle includes:
- Initial support for next-gen Van Gogh APUs. AMD published Van Gogh graphics support at the end of September while it is coming with Linux 5.11. Van Gogh is expected to be a combination of Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA2 graphics. The Linux graphics driver bring-up does reinforce the RDNA2/Navi graphics. Also exciting with Van Gogh is DDR5 system memory support. It's also bringing other new features like as a "fix" for Linux 5.10. Green Sardine looks like it may be the Ryzen 5000 Cezanne APUs.
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Intel Lands Vulkan Ray-Tracing Prep Work In Mesa 20.3 - Phoronix
Following the news that we were first to report last month on Intel starting open-source public patches for Vulkan ray-tracing in preparation for their forthcoming Xe HPG graphics card, the initial prep work for that Vulkan ray-tracing support has now been merged in time for Mesa 20.3.
The Mesa 20.3 code branching is imminent and merged as of writing has just been patches to prep the infrastructure for allowing Intel's "ANV" Vulkan driver to support ray-tracing but not the actual extension enablement. Thus for this Q4'2020 Mesa3D update there might not be the working implementation, but that in turn would then most likely come with Mesa 21.0 next quarter. Given the Xe HPG release doesn't appear imminent, that timing should ultimately turn out fine.
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Mesa Moves Closer To Having OpenCL 3.0 Support In Clover Gallium3D - Phoronix
It's not across the finish line at least yet but Mesa 20.3 just merged today the initial prep changes needed for exposing OpenCL 3.0 support within the Clover Gallium3D state tracker.
David Airlie of Red Hat has merged Clover's "CL3.0 precursor patches" as the initial changes in moving this OpenCL Gallium3D state tracker to OpenCL 3.0 support. Basically it adds the new version number and other prep work around differences in the OpenCL 3.0 spec but doesn't yet enable / flip on any OpenCL 3.0 support as of yet.
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Intel "Big Joiner" Enabling Nearly Squared Away For Allowing 8K Output On A Single Port - Phoronix
For the past several months there have been a number of Intel Linux DRM patch series around "big joiner" support and that is looking like it may soon be finished up for allowing support for driving 8K displays off a single port.
Intel's "big joiner" support with Ice Lake / Gen11 and newer is for allowing two pipes to drive a single transcoder. The main focus of big joiner is for being able to drive an 8K display (at 30Hz or 60Hz, depending upon conditions) off a single DP port.
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Mike Blumenkrantz Concludes His Work on Zink
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 7th of November 2020 11:41:10 AM Filed under


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Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Hitting ~95% Speed Of Native OpenGL Driver Performance
Zink as the Mesa Gallium3D implementation putting OpenGL 3.x/4.x on top of the Vulkan API is now offering near-native performance.
Mike Blumenkrantz who has been extensively working on Zink in recent time with implementing much of OpenGL 4.x as well as enhancing the performance has made great strides in making this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation a very capable alternative to dedicated OpeNGL drivers.
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Mike Blumenkrantz: Last Day
This is a sort of bittersweet post as it marks the end of my full-time hobby work with zink. I’ve had a blast over the past ~6 months, but all things change eventually, and such is the case with this situation.
Those of you who have been following me for a long time will recall that I started hacking on zink while I was between jobs in order to improve my skills and knowledge while doing something productive along the way. I succeeded in all regards, at least by my own standards, and I got to work with some brilliant people at the same time.
[...]
This does not mean that zink is dead, or the project is stalling development, or anything like that, so don’t start overreaching on the meaning of this post.
I still have 450+ patches left to be merged into mainline Mesa, and I do plan to continue driving things towards that end, though I expect it’ll take a good while. I’ll also be around to do patch reviews for the driver and continue to be involved in the community.
I look forward to a time when I’ll get to write more posts here and move the zink user experience closer to where I think it can be.
This is Mike, signing off for now.
Happy rendering.
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AMD Ryzen 5 5600X Linux Performance
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Saturday 7th of November 2020 08:51:44 AM Filed under
Following yesterday's launch-day AMD Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X benchmarks that showed the utter domination of Zen 3 carrying over just fine in the Linux realm, today we are looking at the performance of the Ryzen 5 5600X on Ubuntu against other Intel/AMD processors. The Ryzen 5 5600X is AMD's new $299 USD part that offers six cores / twelve threads and incredible uplift still over Zen 2 / Zen+ processors while outperforming Intel's Comet Lake competition.
The AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-core processor comes clocked at 3.7GHz with a turbo frequency of 4.6GHz. The 5600X has a 32MB L3 cache and has a 65 Watt TDP.
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Graphics: V3DV + Zink, AMDVLK 2020.Q4.3 Vulkan Driver Released
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 5th of November 2020 10:46:56 PM Filed under
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V3DV + Zink
During my presentation at the X Developers Conference I stated that we had been mostly using the Khronos Vulkan Conformance Test suite (aka Vulkan CTS) to validate our Vulkan driver for Raspberry Pi 4 (aka V3DV). While the CTS is an invaluable resource for driver testing and validation, it doesn’t exactly compare to actual real world applications, and so, I made the point that we should try to do more real world testing for the driver after completing initial Vulkan 1.0 support.
To be fair, we had been doing a little bit of this already when I worked on getting the Vulkan ports of all 3 Quake game classics to work with V3DV, which allowed us to identify and fix a few driver bugs during development. The good thing about these games is that we could get the source code and compile them natively for ARM platforms, so testing and debugging was very convenient.
Unfortunately, there are not a plethora of Vulkan applications and games like these that we can easily test and debug on a Raspberry Pi as of today, which posed a problem. One way to work around this limitation that was suggested after my presentation at XDC was to use Zink, the OpenGL to Vulkan layer in Mesa. Using Zink, we can take existing OpenGL applications that are currently available for Raspberry Pi and use them to test our Vulkan implementation a bit more thoroughly, expanding our options for testing while we wait for the Vulkan ecosystem on Raspberry Pi 4 to grow.
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Raspberry Pi's V3DV Vulkan Driver Can Now Run The Zink OpenGL Translation Layer
The V3DV Vulkan driver that provides support for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer can now run the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan translation layer.
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AMDVLK 2020.Q4.3 Vulkan Driver Released
It was just a few days ago that AMD engineers released AMDVLK 2020.Q4.2 as their newest open-source Radeon Vulkan driver snapshot while that has already been succeeded by version 2020.Q4.3.
AMDVLK 2020.Q4.3 is a small update and the only official changes are enabling VK_EXT_robustness2 support for pre-Vega/GFX9 GPUs and updating against the Vulkan 1.2.158 API. There are also fixes for counter collection hangs with the RenderDoc debugger and fixing Vulkan app failures in conjunction with Mesa 20.1+.
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AMD Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X Linux Gaming Performance
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Thursday 5th of November 2020 03:29:36 PM Filed under


After just publishing the results of 200+ Linux benchmarks under many diverse workloads for the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X we see the 16~20% performance lift is very real and very broad from obscure open-source niche software through high profile programs... What about the Linux gaming performance? This article offers a first look at the Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X Linux gaming performance compared to Zen 2 and the Core i9 10900K while being the first of several Linux gaming performance articles coming out this month.
This article is intended to offer a first-look at the Linux gaming performance with the Ryzen 5900 series while further tests are forthcoming. For this comparison was the Intel Core i9 10900K up against the Ryzen 9 3900XT, Ryzen 9 3950X, Ryzen 9 5900X, and Ryzen 9 5950X at stock speeds and 2 x 8GB DDR4-3600 memory throughout.
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