Phoronix

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...

For those interested in using Linux on the Samsung Galaxy Book line of laptops that ship with Microsoft Windows out-of-the-box, a new "samsung-galaxybook" driver is being worked on for supporting additional laptop functionality not currently found with these laptops under Linux...

Ahead of AMD's approaching RDNA4 next-generation graphics card launch, today a set of last minute improvements to the AMD GFX12 graphics IP were merged to Mesa 25.0 for the open-source Linux graphics driver support...

Linus Torvalds announced the release this evening of the Linux 6.13-rc3 kernel as Linux 6.13 works its way to stable release by late January...

Last month I looked at the impact of AMD's BIOS tuning guide on AI / machine learning workloads for new 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" processors. In today's article I am looking at the performance and power efficiency impact of AMD EPYC 9005 series processors with AMD's BIOS tuning recommendations for Java workloads on Linux.

It's not too often that "fixes" to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) are noteworthy but today is an interesting exception with among the KVM fixes sent in today ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc3 tagging is for beginning to deal with a "hilarious/revolting" performance regression affecting recent generations of Intel processors. This performance regression won't be fully worked around until Linux 6.14 but at least there is an interim step in place once the code is merged later today...

After roughly two years of development the Xfce 4.20 lightweight desktop has been released ahead of the year end holidays...

It's been a while since there has been anything new to report on the Btrfs file-system's built-in RAID functionality but that is changing with RAID1 round-robin read balancing...

In addition to Linux 6.14 set to add sensor monitoring support for the ASUS TUF GAMING X670E PLUS, another lower-cost AMD AM5 motherboard is also set to see sensor monitoring support with this next version of the Linux kernel...

Linux 6.6.66 was released today alongside other updated Long Term Support (LTS) kernel versions...

Some Qualcomm processors/SoCs on the mainline Linux kernel are left vulnerable to Spectre security issues since Qualcomm hasn't upstreamed patches for properly treating affected CPU cores to their relevant mitigations. But a new patch series from a Google engineer is working to get those Qualcomm CPU security mitigations in order...

As covered last month on Phoronix, Intel has been experimenting with Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) for the Intel P-State driver with a goal of enhancing the power efficiency of Core Ultra "Lunar Lake" processors. Recently a second iteration of that work was posted for review ahead of possible inclusion in a future version of the Linux kernel...

An interesting addition to Mesa 25.0 this week is Alyssa Rosenzweig adding a standard library for the driver OpenCL C code, including the initial abbility to support assert() on device and other standard C constructs for the OpenCL C code...

After some six months of silence, this past week the NTSYNC LInux kernel driver patches were revived for completing this open-source driver to better match the Windows NT synchronization primitives to help with Wine / Proton (Steam Play) Windows gaming performance on Linux. Following those "v6" patches posted a few days ago, on Friday evening a seventh iteration of the patches were volleyed to offer up some API design improvements for this NTSYNC driver...

While not as popular as their Snapdragon SoCs, Qualcomm has been offering their Cloud AI line of accelerators for scalable AI inference. The current flagship is the Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Ultra as a 150 Watt rated PCIe Gen4 x16 card for up to 870 TOPS INT8 performance, 576MB of SRAM, and 128GB LPR4x memory. But given the latest open-source Linux driver patch activity, Cloud AI 200 "AIC200" wares are on the way...

KDE developers continue to be quite busy ahead of the holidays to pack more features into the upcoming Plasma 6.3 desktop release...

Building off last week's release of Wine 10.0-rc1 is now Wine 10.0-rc2 as the next test release in working toward the Wine 10.0 stable debut around mid January...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are busy working to further refine the Xe2 graphics performance for Lunar Lake integrated graphics and the newly-launched Battlemage discrete graphics. Landing in Mesa 25.0-devel this Friday afternoon is a new "Round Robin Strict" optimization to benefit both their OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux with Xe2 hardware...