Phoronix

While the Christmas holidays are quickly approach, KDE developers remain busy working on new features for the upcoming Plasma 6.3 desktop as well as continuing to land many bug fixes...

Building off the ROCm 6.3 release from earlier this month, there's been a Friday night drop of ROCm 6.3.1 with some rather exciting end-of-year improvements...

The third weekly release candidate of Wine 10.0 is now available for testing with another 15 bugs fixed this week...

Merged to Linux Git minutes ago and ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc4 tagging on Sunday were this week's set of USB fixes that are particularly noteworthy. Most significant is fixing a USB regression that had been present in the stack since the Linux 6.13 merge window last month...

If you are looking for some interesting technical content to watch over the holidays or end-of-year downtime, AMD shared today that they have launched their own YouTube channel for developer-related content...

The openSUSE project announced today YQPkg as a new package management tool for openSUSE Linux distributions...

Jonas Adahl of Red Hat just released Wayland Protocols 1.39 as the latest set of updates to this de facto repository for Wayland protocols...

Following the recent Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks I wanted to expand the testing to look at how well other Linux distributions as well were performing on this new 24-core Arrow Lake desktop processor. To much surprise Intel's own Clear Linux distribution didn't take the top spot this round but as a surprising upset the Arch Linux based CachyOS distribution outperformed Clear Linux, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, and Fedora Workstation on this flagship Arrow Lake processor.

DXVK 2.5.2 is out today as the newest point release to this open-source software implementing the Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 APIs atop Vulkan for powering Windows games on Valve's Steam Play (Proton) as well as being used by other software and some games directly...

A Phoronix Premium subscriber a while back requested some fresh benchmarks of how the Liquorix downstream of the Linux kernel is comparing against the latest upstream kernel... Here are some benchmarks looking at the Liquorix flavor of the Linux kernel compared to upstream Linux 6.12...

The latest round of drm-misc-next material was sent out yesterday to DRM-Next in advance of the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window...

Joshua Hahn has posted the latest "request for comments" draft working on weightedd interleave auto-tuning for the linux kernel in order to better enhance the performance characteristics of primarily Linux servers with multiple memory nodes...

In early 2023 DreamWorks open-sourced their MoonRay renderer as OpenMoonRay. Since then they have continued advancing this award-winning production MCRT renderer. Before closing out 2024 they have now released OpenMoonRay 1.7...

Intel and Canonical have been collaborating to provide an early "Graphics Preview" stack for Ubuntu 24.10 to provide better support for the new Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Lunar Lake" and Intel Arc B-Series "Battlemage" graphics...

Of the many new features in Linux 6.13 for that kernel debuting by late January, AMD customers once again have a lot to look forward to from new Zen 5 features being enabled to additional performance optimizations. Here is a look at some of the most exciting new AMD features and improvements with this first major Linux kernel release coming for 2025...

One of the areas for benchmarking exploration that I had been meaning to dive into since the launch of the Intel Arrow Lake processors back in October was checking out the Microsoft Windows 11 vs. Linux performance for the new Core Ultra 9 285K flagship processor. Particularly with the mix of P and E cores I was curious for a fresh look at the Windows vs. Linux performance capabilities. With recently carrying out a Windows 11 install on Arrow Lake for running the Intel Arc B580 Battlemage Windows vs. Linux benchmarks, following that I carried out some fresh CPU benchmarks for seeing how Arrow Lake processor performance is looking on these competing operating systems.

The Fish Shell as the interactive, user-friendly command line shell debuted its 4.0 beta release ahead of the holidays. Notably in this release is porting the C++ code over to the Rust programming language...

Intel's OpenVINO open-source AI toolkit is out with a new feature release today for closing out the year. The OpenVINO 2024.6 release brings initial support for the Arc B-Series "Battlemage" graphics cards as well as further optimizing the Intel NPU support...

Along with the recent release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 beta, the AlmaLinux crew released their AlmaLinux 10 beta as the latest wares for this popular community/free alternative to upstream RHEL. I've been running some early benchmarks and testing on this AlmaLinux 10.0 Beta "Purple Lion" release and it's running well with performance right inline with upstream RHEL 10 Beta.

Back in August AMD posted Linux patches for L3 Smart Data Cache Injection Allocation Enforcement (SDCIAE). That L3 Smart Data Cache Injection (SDCI) work was since announced as part of the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. A second iteration of those SDCIAE were posted this week in working to get this functionality enabled for the mainline Linux kernel...

The Linux kernel already supports the Realtek RTL8125D 2.5G Ethernet controller but additional handling is required to enable the revision B variant of this chipset, which will be coming in the next kernel cycle...

Cloud Hypervisor 43 is out as the newest version of this Intel-backed, Rust-based open-source VMM project that now routinely sees contributions from Microsoft, Arm, Rivos, Tencent, and other organizations...

Building off the release of NetBSD 10.0 that arrived for Easter this year and incorporated a half-decade of work, NetBSD 10.1 is out right before Christmas as the first update to this BSD operating system series...

AMD today sent out a first batch of "new stuff" feature patches to DRM-Next of new code for their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD compute driver of material for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle...

While there are a growing number of startups offering AI accelerators, many of them are more or less vaporware and the other big challenge even among those actually shipping products is their software stacks are very premature or an outright heaping mess. Surprisingly there's a company known as MemryX that was started out of the University of Michigan AI research that is both shipping actual hardware -- and at a decent price point -- and where the software stack is a pleasant experience that works on both Windows and Linux. Here are my initial experiences in testing out the MemryX M.2 module that features four of their in-house MX3 AI accelerator chips.

On Tuesday the UEFI Forum released the UEFI 2.11 specification alongside the Platform Initialization (PI) 1.9 specification...

A few weeks back I reviewed the SilverStone XE360-SP5 and XE04-SP5 cooling solutions catering to AMD EPYC 9004/9005 Socket SP5 processors. These coolers worked well with 400 Watt EPYC processors and especially the XE360-SP5 all-in-one liquid cooling was very performant and practical with today's server CPU TDPs ever increasing. After that SilverStone mentioned to me they had a new heatsink that could run up to 13 degrees cooler than the XE04-SP5 4U air cooler... Talk about intriguing. Meet the new SilverStone XED120S-WS for high-end air cooling for up to 450 Watt processors while working with multiple Intel and AMD CPU sockets.

Back for the Linux 6.12 kernel EROFS introduced support for file-backed mounts to help with container and sandboxing use-cases. As part of the EROFS "fixes" merged yesterday to the Linux 6.13 kernel, file-backed mounts are now using buffered I/O by default to speed-up container start times...

The latest house cleaning of the Linux kernel is looking to drop support for IBM Cell Blade servers for those platforms from the better part of two decades ago with Cell BE processors that also had worked their way into some supercomputers at the time...

A drm-intel-gt-next pull request was sent in today to DRM-Next of the latest batch of Intel kernel graphics driver updates destined for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle...

A patch posted on Tuesday for the Linux kernel would introduce new Lenovo Legion WMI driver options for supporting Lenovo Legion laptops as well as the Legion Go handheld gaming console to support different power/performance settings...

AOMP 20.0-1 was released on Tuesday as the newest version of this LLVM/Clang downstream focused on shipping the latest AMD patches around Radeon/Instinct OpenMP accelerator offload support...

Merged today to the Linux kernel are fixes for two vulnerabilities with the Xen hypervisor. One of them concerns a malicious network backend being able to crash a guest after a suspend/resume cycle of a Linux guest. The other more pressing issue addressed is a Xen hypercall page being unsafe against speculative CPU attacks...

System76 has been offering AMD-powered Linux laptops for a few years now and before rounding out 2024 they have announced the new Pangolin "Pang15" laptop with an updated SoC, 2K display with 16:10 screen ratio and 120Hz refresh rate, and other refinements to this all-aluminum build Linux laptop...

Last week with the availability of the Intel Arc B-Series Battlemage graphics cards I ran benchmarks looking at the GPU compute performance, Linux gaming benchmarks, and also the workstation graphics capabilities. The Intel Arc B580 graphics showed some nice generational uplift under Linux for most workloads but there were some anomalies where clearly the Intel Linux graphics driver had room to better optimize the new Xe2/Battlemage graphics support. Windows benchmarks of the Intel Arc B580 also showed it performing more competitively to the likes of the GeForce RTX 4060 compared to what I was seeing under Linux. Thus I spent the past few days working on some Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux graphics benchmarks for both Intel Arc Graphics of Alchemist and Battlemage GPUs to see how the performance compares.

Fedora Asahi Remix 41 as the re-base of the Asahi Linux work for Apple Silicon devices atop the recently released Fedora 41 is now ready for Apple device users...

The LLVM compiler stack offers a number of sanitizers like the AddressSanitizer, MemorySanitizer, UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer, and others for detecting different coding issues like data races, memory addressing issues, use of uninitialized memory, and more. The newest sanitizer addition to LLVM mainline is TySan as a Type Sanitizer...

NVIDIA today announced the Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit as their "most affordable generative AI Supercomputer" with this upgraded Jetson Nano offering 1.7x better GenAI performance while also costing less than its predecessor. This new product looks like an exciting addition to the NVIDIA Jetson line-up and will have performance benchmarks soon on Phoronix...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has decided to extend the Linux 6.1 LTS planned lifespan from four to five years...

While Fedora is often times eager to introduce new spins and other variants as well as supporting a comprehensive set of CPU architectures, it doesn't always drive new users. In the case of atomic versions of Fedora Linux for desktop use on POWER hardware, it turns out there are seemingly no active users...

Merged yesterday as part of "fixes" to the Linux 6.13 were new Intel support additions for their next-generation Core Ultra and Xeon processors...

Qt 6.9 beta is out today as the first test release for this updated Qt6 toolkit...

Fedora is among the Linux distributions that package up the Intel Compute Runtime stack to make it easy to run OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero workloads on Intel graphics hardware via the distribution package manager and without having to jump through any extra hoops. But now with upstream Intel Compute Runtime dropping support for Ice Lake and older leaves the Fedora support in a pickle. Currently they are focusing on the "legacy" branch with older hardware support but for Fedora 42 are looking at upgrading the support to focus on newer Intel graphics hardware support while leaving that older hardware support behind...

Hyprland 0.46 is out today as the newest update to this Wayland compositor that is packing in many new features ahead of the holidays...

Git maintainer Junio Hamano today announced Git 2.48-rc0 as the first test release toward the Git 2.48 distributed version control system release...

Queued up this past week within the Linux kernel's networking subsystem for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle is transmission handling for jumbo data packets as well as RACK-TLP support for managing packet loss and re-transmission. This is work toward supporting larger network transmission windows and higher data throughput...

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 now in public beta this month, I have begun testing out the RHEL 10 beta on a few systems in the lab. In this first look at RHEL 10 performance is seeing how well the RHEL 10 beta is performing relative to RHEL 9.5 stable on an AMD EPYC server.

For further enhancing the AMD EPYC virtualization experience on Linux, the upcoming Linux 6.14 looks like it will support Zen 5's new RMPREAD instruction and segmented RMP mode as part of Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP)...

The upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is set to introduce support for the Blaize BLZP1600 SoC series that is powering various PCIe add-in-card and M.2 adapters for local AI edge processing...

Sent out today was the latest drm-misc-next pull request of various Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) changes queuing up ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle. Most exciting this week is the DRM boot logger being queued for landing to better present kernel messages...