Phoronix

With the maturity of the EXT4 file-system it's not too often seeing any huge feature additions for this commonly used Linux file-system but there's still the occasional wild performance optimization to uncover... With Linux 6.11 the EXT4 file-system can see upwards of a 20% performance boost in some scenarios...

Toward the end of 2022 a GCC AArch64 compiler change was quietly made by Arm that allows "-march=native" to be handled on 64-bit ARM by treating it as the equivalent "-mcpu=native" option. The change happened to fly under my radar at that time and didn't draw much attention at large while now it's finally being officially documented in hopes of similar behavior being adopted by other compilers for AArch64...

The ROCm 6.1 series is the latest stable version currently of AMD's open-source GPU compute stack with an increasing large focus on AI. AMD has confirmed to Red Hat that ROCm 6.2 will debut before the release of Fedora 41, so the developers are now hoping to be shipping ROCm 6.2 packages with this upcoming Fedora Linux release...

The XFS file-system updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel...

Microsoft today published a new version of their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in pre-release form...

While Rust is viewed as a memory safe and robust programming language, there is the "unsafe" keyword within Rust that can be used for unsafe code that grants "unsafe superpowers" for the language. As dealing with Rust at low-levels as the Linux kernel can lead to needing to use "unsafe" Rust at times, a documentation standard has been proposed for dealing with such code inside the kernel...

It's been a wild two years since NVIDIA began publishing an open-source Linux GPU kernel driver for Turing GPUs and newer. With the latest NVIDIA 555 Linux driver series that open-source kernel driver support is in great shape and NVIDIA today is out with a lengthy blog post promoting it...

Last week with delivering a number of AMD vs. NVIDIA Vulkan ray-tracing benchmarks under Linux with the current drivers and using the new "Breaking Limit" benchmark, the question was raised how well does AMD's official "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver handle ray-tracing these days compared to the more popular Mesa RADV Vulkan driver used commonly by Linux gamers and as the default driver on most Linux distributions. Here is a fresh look at the RADV versus AMDVLK Vulkan performance on Linux with a focus on ray-tracing performance.

The power management updates have been merged for Linux 6.11 that include some nice improvements for Intel and AMD processors...

The "x86/bugs" code has been merged for the Linux 6.11 kernel that is just three patches this go around but includes a new Spectre BHI mitigation option...

The EFI changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel. Notable this cycle on the EFI side is removing support for EFI fake memory maps and then a workaround to get dual GPU support working for some of the older x86-based Apple MacBook Pros by pretending that Apple macOS is booting rather than Linux...

The networking subsystem updates have landed for the Linux 6.11 kernel with support for a variety of new wireless and wired networking hardware...

All of the media subsystem feature updates for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel were sent out overnight. Arguably most notable with the media driver changes for the new kernel is introducing the Raspberry Pi "PiSP" driver for the image signal processor (ISP) found with the Raspberry Pi 5 for powering its camera system...

Wlroots 0.18 recently debuted as the newest version of this Wayland library born out of the Sway compositor project. With wlroots 0.18 is support for new Wayland protocols and other exciting features...

Installing the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver stack on Fedora currently doesn't jive with UEFI Secure Boot systems and can lead to the OS being unbootable. As such, the NVIDIA driver option was previously removed from GNOME Software. But as the NVIDIA driver is still widely sought after on Fedora by Linux gamers and those wanting to run CUDA/AI workloads especially, Fedora 41 is now cleared to roll-out NVIDIA driver support with UEFI Secure Boot integration...

The AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) changes have been submitted for the recently opened Linux 6.11 merge window. Notable this cycle is getting support in the mainline kernel for SEV-SNP guest support over a Secure VM Service Module (SVSM)...

The open-source LLVM compiler today dropped support for AMD's long forgotten 3DNow! instructions...

For those running the popular, modular/upgradeable Framework Laptops, the Linux 6.11 kernel is bringing some nice driver additions for enhancing the support on the recent models...

Intel engineers have been busy preparing their open-source Linux software stack for H.266/VVC video decoding that is expected with upcoming Xe2 graphics for Lunar Lake and Battlemage. FFmpeg 2024Q2 is out today with VVC decoding now working on Intel graphics for this widely-used multimedia library...

Jens Axboe has seen all of the block subsystem and IO_uring changes already mainlined for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel...

It's Blender 4.2 release day! Blender 4.2 marks the newest long-term support (LTS) release for this wonderful free software 3D modeling solution that has developed quite a following across the industry...

While many have been excited around the prospects of laptops powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC, the Linux support so far still leaves a lot to be desired... The initial Snapdragon X Elite laptops aren't utilizing ACPI standards and the bring-up under Linux has been slow, but patches have begun appearing for some models. But even with patches, the Adreno GPU remains a big obstacle still being tackled along with other features like web camera, USB4, Bluetooth, etc. With a new kernel patch, the GPU for the Snapdragon X Elite (X1E80100) is being disabled by default...

There's a new driver subsystem being introduced in the Linux 6.11 kernel for power sequencing...

For the past year and a half Intel engineers have been working on Linux kernel improvements for Sub-NUMA Clustering (SNC) in the presence of Resource Director Technology (RDT). Intel has been advising its customers not to use Sub-NUMA Clustering when making use of Resource Director Technology since these features would effectively fight eachother. Well, with the Linux 6.11 kernel that's finally being addressed...

Stemming from a recent investigation into a GCC compiler regression on Zen 4, it was discovered that the unaligned load/store costs for the Zen 4 and Zen 5 targets were inaccurate and have now been tweaked within GCC Git...

Linus Torvalds began the Linux 6.11 merge window yesterday by merging some of his own feature code for this next kernel version...

The Solus Linux project announced today they will be dropping the AppArmor patches carried by their kernels. In turn this means their Snap packaging support will only run with partial confinement...

While there have been various efforts like HIPIFY to help in translating CUDA source code to portable C++ code for AMD GPUs and then the previously-AMD-funded ZLUDA to allow CUDA binaries to run on AMD GPUs via a drop-in replacement to CUDA libraries, there's a new contender in town: SCALE. SCALE is now public as a GPGPU toolchain for allowing CUDA programs to be natively run on AMD graphics processors...

Following last night's release of the Linux 6.10 kernel, the FSF LA developers have released GNU Linux-libre 6.10-gnu as their downstream kernel flavor that strips out the ability to load binary-only kernel modules and the ability to load non-free firmware/microcode into open-source drivers, among other alterations in the name of software freedom...

Last week I had the pleasure to be out in Los Angeles for the AMD Tech Day focused on their new Ryzen 9000 "Granite Ridge" and Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" processors. This was an exciting event with many new details shared around Zen 5 CPU cores and the RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics found with the upcoming Ryzen AI 300 series mobile processors. The embargo concerning those architectural details have now expired while the review/benchmarking embargo isn't until a later date.

Alongside all of the exciting Ryzen 9000 and Ryzen AI 300 series details shared last week at the AMD Tech Day in Los Angeles, what I also found to be very interesting was AMD sharing a bit more about a "Unified AI Software Stack" they are working to release in the coming quarters...

The Chrome platform changes for Linux 6.11 as code predominantly for enabling Chromebooks with the mainline Linux kernel is set to introduce two new drivers...

Coming in as a rather late change proposal for Fedora 41 is to support self-encrypting drives from within the OS installer...

Bcachefs maintainer Kent Overstreet has already sent out all of the exciting Linux 6.11 feature updates for this copy-on-write file-system. Bcachefs continues maturing nicely within the mainline Linux kernel while continuing to tack on new functionality...

Among the flurry of pull requests submitted now that the Linux 6.11 merge window is open are the hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem updates...

Wine 9.13 was released on Sunday as off its usual bi-weekly Friday release regiment for this newest development build...

As anticipated the Linux 6.10 kernel was released as stable a few minutes ago by Linus Torvalds...

With Linux 6.10 expected to be released in the coming hours, in turn the Linux 6.11 merge window will open tomorrow unless there is any last-minute v6.10 release delay. With that said, here's a look at some of the features you can likely expect to see for this next kernel version...

Arch Linux based CachyOS has released their "July 2024" release that also introduces an AMD Zen 4 optimized repository that caters to current Ryzen 7000/8000 and EPYC 4004/8004/9004 (Zen 4) procssors and upcoming Zen 5 processors...

Linux engineer Christian Brauner at Microsoft sent out his various pull requests for areas of the kernel he oversees ahead of the Linux 6.11 merge window. One of the more interesting pull requests from Brauner this cycle are the "vfs procfs" updates that now allow restricting access to the /proc/[pid]/mem files of processes...

While Fedora 41 isn't even out yet, early feature planning is already underway for Fedora 42 that will debut in the early months of 2025. One of the interesting proposals raised so far is for making use of the new DRM Panic screen functionality for a "Blue Screen of Death" of sorts for better presenting kernel error messages in case of kernel panics...

Patches have been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list for getting various Lenovo devices supported by the mainline Linux kernel that rely on the Qualcomm MSM8916 and MSM8939 platforms...

Linux 6.10 stable should be released later today. It's been a fairly calm week in the kernel world and thus Linus Torvalds will most likely opt for tagging v6.10 as opposed to doing a v6.10-rc8 extra release candidate. So with Linux 6.10 likely upon us, here's a reminder about some of the most interesting changes in this new kernel release...

The alpha release of GNOME 47 is now available for testing and comes with a number of shiny new features for this big open-source desktop update due out in September...

A patch posted for the Intel i915 kernel graphics driver finally allows for fan speed reporting with Arc Graphics and other Intel discrete graphics cards under Linux...

Last week it was noted AMD would be squeezing in more patches for "new IPs" to "get them tied off" with the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle. This is principally about RDNA4 support and sure enough on Friday more patches were submitted to DRM-Next...

The I2C host changes are ready for the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window...

Pingora started out as an in-house replacement to Cloudflare's Nginx usage that was written in Rust and eventually open-sourced earlier this year. Pingora has evolved into a Rust framework for building fast and reliable networked systems. Ending out the week is the release of Pingora 0.3 as the latest step forward for this Rust code that is widely used within the confines of Cloudflare...

Git 2.46-rc0 was published on Friday as the first tagged development release on the trek toward Git 2.46...

This Week in GNOME is out with their latest issue to highlight all of the interesting work that has taken place over the past seven days in the GNOME camp...