Phoronix

With the Nouveau driver support for using the NVIDIA GSP (GPU System Processor) that was added in Linux 6.7, that is only used by default on the GeForce RTX 40 "Ada" GPUs and moving forward where otherwise there is no accelerated support. The NVIDIA GSP is present in the GeForce RTX 20 "Turing" and RTX 30 "Ampere" hardware too, but not used by default unless setting a module option to enable the mode. However, a new patch is pending that would allow kernel builders to optionally enable the GSP mode by default...

Intel's oneDNN Deep Neural Network Library used for building deep learning applications is preparing another release that continues going heavy on performance optimizations and preparing for future Intel hardware generations...

In development the past several months has been patches to allow changing the compression algorithm used by the hibernation images of the Linux kernel while preserving the system memory contents. With using LZ4 yields faster system restore times from hibernation than the current de facto compression algorithm used of LZO. This work is now queued for introduction in Linux 6.9...

While Intel is the company behind XeSS - Xe Super Sampling, under Linux it's an ongoing story of having to hide the fact that Intel graphics are in use when trying to enjoy Windows games running on Steam Play that are XeSS-enabled. The latest example is the HITMAN 3 game that can work on modern Arc Graphics as long as you conceal the fact under Linux that Intel graphics are being used...

Adding to the list of features slated for the upcoming Linux 6.9 cycle is allowing RISC-V kernel builds to be compiled with Clang Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) enabled...

Kicking off what may end up being a fairly busy Patch Tuesday are two WiFi authentication vulnerabilities being made public that affect Intel's IWD daemon as well as the WPA_Supplicant software -- between the two they are the most common solutions for wireless daemons on Linux systems...

A new blog post was posted by the Redox OS team that is working on their Rust-written micro-kernel designed open-source operating system. Their latest post lays out their porting strategy for getting more Linux and BSD user-space software running on this Rust-based OS...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) on Monday approved some last-minute features ahead of the Fedora Linux 40 release quickly coming up in February...

Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver for providing open-source OpenGL support on Linux systems has implemented indirect draw generation. For software relying heavily on indirect draws will see a "massive boost" in performance...

The FEX emulator 2402 release is now available for this open-source project allowing x86_64 binaries to run on AArch64 (ARM64) platforms, including games and the likes of Valve's Steam Play software...

As noted in prior Phoronix articles for months, FreeBSD 14 is likely to be the last for supporting prominent 32-bit systems. On the FreeBSD mailing list more details on the FreeBSD 32-bit deprecation process was posted this week...

It's been nearly one year to the day since outlining intel's AVX-512 powered sorting library to offer blazing fast sort speeds. Over the past year has brought the 1.0 release, new algorithms in v2.0, AVX2 support and more AVX-512 optimizations in v4.0, and now today Intel is out with x86-simd-sort 5.0 with yet more performance improvements...

While there have been efforts by AMD over the years to make it easier to port codebases targeting NVIDIA's CUDA API to run atop HIP/ROCm, it still requires work on the part of developers. The tooling has improved such as with HIPIFY to help in auto-generating but it isn't any simple, instant, and guaranteed solution -- especially if striving for optimal performance. Over the past two years AMD has quietly been funding an effort though to bring binary compatibility so that many NVIDIA CUDA applications could run atop the AMD ROCm stack at the library level -- a drop-in replacement without the need to adapt source code. In practice for many real-world workloads, it's a solution for end-users to run CUDA-enabled software without any developer intervention. Here is more information on this "skunkworks" project that is now available as open-source along with some of my own testing and performance benchmarks of this CUDA implementation built for Radeon GPUs.

At the end of last year OpenZFS 2.2.2 was released to fix a rare but nasty data corruption issue but it turns out there are other data corruption bug(s) still lurking in the OpenZFS file-system codebase...

Samsung engineers have been extending their "samsung" HID driver to support more of their wireless input devices by the mainline Linux kernel...

Code merged today to mainline LLVM is preparing for the notion of generic targets across the GFX9, GFX10, and GFX11 GPU families. With follow-on work these generic targets are aiming to allow compiling code once and then running across multiple GPUs in the given hardware family...

The 64-bit Arm (AArch64) little-endian kernel will be ready to support the Rust kernel code with the upcoming Linux 6.9 cycle...

GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor today issued their GNOME 46 Beta releases with some notable changes ahead of the API/ABI and feature freezes for the GNOME 46 desktop due for release in March...

As more exciting than the Super Bowl (at least for some of us) is the new Linux 6.8-rc4 kernel available for testing...

AMD has begun queuing AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver updates in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.9 merge window kicking off next month...

TrenchBoot has been in development for several years now by Oracle, 3mdeb, and other stakeholders for providing greater security and integrity to the Linux boot process via measured launch of the OS using a Dynamic Root of Trust Measurement (DRTM) backed by Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) and AMD Secure Startup. Much progress was made over 2023 while more work is ahead in 2024 for furthering the TrenchBoot efforts...

Debian 12.5 is out this weekend as the newest stable point release for this widely-used Linux distribution in order to ship the latest security fixes and various bug fixes...

Making for a very exciting Saturday morning, AMD just posted their initial enablement patch for plumbing Zen 5 processor support "znver5" into the GNU Compiler Collection! With GCC 14 due to be released as stable in March~April as usual for the annual compiler release, it's been frustrating to see no Zen 5 support even while Intel has already been working on Clear Water Forest and Panther Lake support with already having upstreamed Sierra Forest, Granite Rapids, and other new CPU targets months ago... Well, Granite Rapids was added to GCC in late 2022. But squeezing in as what should now be merged in time is the initial AMD Zen 5 support!..

After years of work by Qualcomm and Linaro engineers, the Qualcomm SoC support on the mainline Linux kernel has finally matured enough that new hardware support tends to come rather quickly and be well supported. With the forthcoming Linux 6.8 kernel the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 can boot on the mainline kernel, the Snapdragon-powered ThinkPad X13s has been popular with Linux developers thanks to the upstream support, and other Qualcomm-powered devices tending to play more nicely with upstream Linux these days rather than having to resort to vendor kernel builds...

Xfce developers have updated their Wayland roadmap this week to reflect their latest plans around the Xfce 4.20 release...

Today marks the UI, feature, and API/ABI freezes for the GNOME 46 desktop ahead of its stable release on 16 March. One feature coming down to the wire that looks like it may not make it -- unfortunately -- is the Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) integration...

There is just under three weeks to go until the much anticipated KDE Plasma 6 debut...

While we are still waiting to get our hands on AmpereOne hardware for Ampere Computing's in-house design Arm cores with up to 192 cores, Friday night Git activity to LLVM has revealed an "Ampere1B" core...

The macOS-inspired, FreeBSD-based helloSystem open-source operating system has published a new experimental build based on the fresh FreeBSD 14.0...

Wine 9.2 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this software for enjoying Windows applications and games on Linux and other platforms...

SPEC has effectively invalidated more than two thousand SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark submissions after it was discovered the Intel oneAPI DPC++ compiler was effectively "cheating" per their standards with a targeted optimization...

In an era of Internet streaming digital video recorders (DVR) / personal video recorder (PVR) software isn't nearly as popular as it was in the past, but the long-used open-source MythTV software is out with its first major update in one year...

While the Linux kernel has seen increased activity around dropping old/unused hardware drivers and other support, for old hardware that is still proven to be used on upstream Linux kernel releases does stick around and even will see the occasional fix... The latest example of that is a fix on the way for restoring Linux kernel support for the Transmeta Crusoe, the x86-compatible processor released back in 2000...

Webcamera support on recent generations of Intel laptops have tended to be a mess due to the Intel IPU6 requiring an out-of-tree kernel driver and a proprietary user-space component. But fortunately thanks to the work of Linar and Red Hat on a "SoftISP" implementation within libcamera, it's becoming possible to leverage these recent MIPI-based webcameras on an open-source software stack...

Along with the recently merged Intel OpenGL and Vulkan driver support for Arrow Lake next-generation Core processors with Mesa 24.1, it looks like the i915 kernel graphics driver support for Arrow Lake will be all-set with the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle...

Born out of the success of Fedora Silverblue and the other Fedora immutable variants relying on RPM-OSTree, Fedora has announced Fedora Atomic Desktops as the new branding for these spins...

While AMD ships pre-built ROCm/HIP stacks for the major enterprise Linux distributions, if you are using not one of them or just want to be adventurous and compile your own stack for building HIP programs for running on AMD GPUs, one of the AMD Linux developers has written a how-to guide...

Merged for Mesa 24.1 is Teflon for Etnaviv NPU driver support in enabling reverse-engineered, open-source driver support for VeriSilicon NPU IP similar to the long-standing Etnaviv Gallium3D graphics support for Vivante graphics. Tomeu Vizoso who has been leading the work on the Etnaviv NPU support has managed to achieve another performance victory and taking the open-source driver performance closer to the proprietary driver...

Vulkanised 2024 took place this week in Sunnyvale, California as the 6th go at this Vulkan Developer Conference. The slides from this conference are now available for those wishing to learn more about this open industry standard cxompute/graphics API...

It looks like next-generation RDNA4 graphics will feature a new iteration of the Video Core Next (VCN) for accelerated video encode/decode. VCN 5.0 patches were posted today for the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver...

Kicking off our NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper benchmarking at Phoronix is an initial look at the 72-core Grace CPU performance with 96GB of HBM3 memory. Here are some initial benchmarks of the Grace CPU performance while the Hopper GPU benchmarks will be coming in a follow-up article.

Mitchell Baker announced today she is stepping down as CEO of Mozilla Corporation but will retain the position of Mozilla Corporation Executive Chairwoman...

Cyberus Technology announced today the open-source release of a KVM back-end developed for VirtualBox. This new back-end allows the VirtualBox VMM to run virtual machines utilizing the Linux KVM hypervisor instead of the custom kernel module relied upon by the standard Oracle VM VirtualBox software...

Fwupd 1.9.13 was released today by Red Hat's Richard Hughes as the newest feature update to this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems and more...

As the first of Arm Mali firmware to be added to the linux-firmware.git repository, the Gen10 Mali "Panthor" firmware has been added as part of the effort on the new open-source Panthor DRM kernel driver currently working its way upstream...

Canonical is continuing the emphasis on Snaps for the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release...

Asynchronous device shutdown support for the Linux kernel has been pursued in the past as with hyperscalers like Google having too many NVMe storage devices can slow the shutdown/reboot process. Red Hat on Wednesday submitted a new patch series aiming to implement async device shutdown support...

Merged today to DragonFlyBSD Git is the WireGuard protocol driver for leveraging this popular tech...

When running Windows vs. Linux performance benchmarks one of the real-world areas where Linux consistently dominates across both AMD and Intel platforms is Blender 3D modeling software's rendering performance. For CPU-based rendering in Blender as well as other 3D modeling software, Linux typically dominates by wide margins. With the upcoming Blender 4.1 release, it looks like Linux's lead will only further expand...

There's been recent reports that Microsoft is bringing sudo to Windows as discovered in recent Windows 11 Insider previews. This was briefly confirmed today by Microsoft in a since-removed blog post as well as noting that it's open-source...