Phoronix

Following a busy week of kernel drama stemming from the Russian sanctions impacting Linux maintainers, Linus Torvalds is out with the Linux 6.12-rc5 weekly test candidate...

Sent out in original patch form this past week and already iterated to a second version this Sunday, a new proposal is underway to introduce "hung_task_detect_count" as a convenient means of tracking the number of times hung tasks are detected since boot...

Intel merged Linear Address Masking into the Linux kernel last year as a means of allowing user-space to store metadata within some bits of pointers without masking it out before use. LAM can be useful for virtual machines, sanitizers / profiling / memory tagging, and other uses. While the brand new Intel Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs support LAM, the Linux kernel is now disabling LAM out of security concerns...

For the past year Intel software engineers have been developing a PCIe cooling driver to reduce the PCIe link speed to cope with thermal issues. In the future with PCI Express 6.0 this driver may be further adapted to also reduce the PCIe link width when encountering thermal problems. This cooling driver is now ready for merging with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel...

The Linux NETFS code as a network file-system helper library is seeing patches to help enhance the read performance for solutions like CIFS as well as adding single blob object support...

In addition to Eric Biggers of Google being busy working on various crypto and hashing performance optimizations, the longtime Linux developer has also been working on "dm-inlinecrypt" for better leveraging inline block device encryption...

Vulkan 1.3.300 debuted on Friday with a handful of fixes and one new extension...

With Linux 6.13 there is going to be the initial kernel graphics driver support for Xe3 in integrated form to be found with next-gen Panther Lake processors. Merged today for Mesa 24.3 this quarter is the initial OpenGL and Vulkan driver enablement for Xe3 graphics...

Submitted today were a set of x86 platform driver fixes for merging ahead of the Linux 6.12-rc5 release due out on Sunday. For the most part mostly mundane fixes. But notable is an ASUS WMI fix to address the Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" performance issue I've pointed out now in several articles...

Following the recent concerns over Bitwarden potentially moving further away from open-source given SDK changes that appeared, Bitwarden has now further addressed the situation to ease the community concerns...

KDE developers continue being very busy prepping more bug fixes for the Plasma 6.2.x series while continuing to work on new feature material for Plasma 6.3...

Linus Torvalds took to some coding himself today to fix a user-address masking non-canonical speculation issue. The Linux kernel needed an adaptation for this "Meltdown Lite" issue due to different behavior with the latest AMD Zen 5 processors...

Yesterday for the Intel Core Ultra 200S Arrow Lake launch date was my extensive look at the Core Ultra 9 285K under Ubuntu Linux for that 24-core desktop processor. Under focus today is the lower-tier Intel Core Ultra 5 245K with a large variety of Linux performance benchmarks for showing how this 14-core processor compares to prior Intel Core CPUs as well as the AMD Ryzen competition atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

A big batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel graphics and compute driver updates were mailed in for DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle...

While last week Qualcomm canceled their Snapdragon X Elite Dev Kit as a $899 USD mini PC built for Windows 11 on ARM and powered by the X1 Elite SoC, the upstreaming Linux support for it is continuing...

The newest drm-misc-next pull request was submitted today ahead of the Linux 6.13 merge window opening up in about one month's time...

Back in 2020~2021 there was lots of talk and work around FUTEX2 for improving the Linux kernel's Futex implementation for fast user mutex. The FUTEX2 work was driven in large part for helping Steam Play / Wine gaming by better matching the behavior of Microsoft Windows with its WaitForMultipleObjects handling. While the initial code landed back in Linux 5.16, there's been other remaining FUTEX2 features still desired like variable-sized futexes and NUMA-awareness. Finally now we're seeing that work revived...

Cloud Hypervisor 42.0 is out as the newest update of this open-source, Rust-based hypervisor that began as an Intel software project but is now developed by a number of different organizations from Arm to Microsoft...

For the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle there is Xe2 Ultra Joiner and GPU temperature monitoring support along with initial Xe3 graphics support for integrated form with Panther Lake among the Intel graphics driver changes expected so far. Another batch of the Xe kernel graphics driver changes were submitted today for modern Intel graphics with this upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle...

When a number of Russian Linux developers were removed from their MAINTAINERS file in the Linux kernel, it was described as due to "compliance requirements" but vague in what those requirements entailed. Linus Torvalds then commented on the Russian Linux maintainers being de-listed and made it clear that they were done due to government compliance requirements / legal issues around Russia. Now today some additional light has been shed on those new Linux kernel "compliance requirements"...

Earlier this month Intel announced the Core Ultra 200S "Arrow Lake" processors and today they go on sale. In turn, the review embargo also lifts for these new desktop processors. Up first today on Phoronix is the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Linux performance review for this flagship 24-core desktop processor.

For the recently launched AMD EPYC 9005 series "Turin" processors there is good support out-of-the-box running on the likes of Linux 6.8 as found with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The one exception is if wanting to engage CPU power monitoring you need a RAPL/PowerCap patch that was just upstreamed in v6.12. But what about using a newer kernel for greater performance in light of all the upstream optimizations to the kernel in general? Here are some Linux 6.8 vs. 6.11 vs. 6.12 kernel benchmarks on a dual AMD EPYC 9755 server...

Intel today released the Intel Media Driver 2024Q3 release to provide updated Video Acceleration API (VA-API) support for Linux systems along with an updated oneVPL GPU Runtime...

Going back to 2016 we've known of NVIDIA beginning to use RISC-V to replace their Falcon micro-controller and other micro-controllers within their graphics processors to using this common open-source ISA. That use has continued to grow and an unofficial estimate now puts it at around one billion RISC-V cores shipping in 2024 NVIDIA chips...

Following the launch of the Raspberry Pi AI Kit back during the summer with up to 13 TOPS performance for AI inference, the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ was announced today with up to 26 TOPS capabilities...

Following the ASUS AIPT patch posting this weekend from an Intel Linux engineer that was analyzing my previously-published Lunar Lake results showing rather poor performance on the ASUS Zenbook S 14, the performance has been looking much better. On Monday I posted updated Intel Xe2 graphics results showing strong uplift now that the ASUS Lunar Lake laptop was operating in its standard mode rather than whisper mode. In today's article is data from more than 400 CPU/system benchmarks to see how the Core Ultra 7 256V performance has improved with this new Linux kernel patch and compared to the prior AMD Ryzen and Intel Core laptop comparison data.

Following yesterday's news first featured on Phoronix of several Linux driver maintainers being de-listed from their maintainer positions within the mainline Linux kernel over their connections to Russia, Linus Torvalds has today commented on the matter...

More than a decade ago the DTrace tracing framework from Sun Microsystems was one of the long sought features from Solaris desired by Linux developers. Oracle ended up porting DTrace to Linux over the years but without too much fanfare outside of Oracle Linux especially since the advent of (e)BPF on Linux and other tracing/debugging open-source advancements. With the recent DTrace 2.0, it's now built atop the BPF engine and other upstream kernel tracing features on Linux. Gentoo Linux today announced their support for DTrace 2.0...

Google engineer Eric Biggers has worked on some very nice performance optimizations for the crypto code within the Linux kernel such as faster AES-GCM for Intel and AMD CPUs, much faster AES-XTS disk/file encryption with modern CPUs, and many other optimizations over the years. His latest work is on enhancing the CRC32C crypto performance for x86/x86_64 processors...

Intel engineers this morning sent out their newest pull request of "drm-intel-gt-next" material to queue in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.13 merge window. There is a new feature enabled on newer Intel graphics hardware as well as some improvements for very old Intel integrated graphics...

It was just earlier this week that AMD posted Linux patches to switch EPYC over to using the AMD P-State driver rather than the long-used generic ACPI CPUFreq driver. This should lead to better power efficiency out-of-the-box and is a change being made just for EPYC 9005 "Turin" CPUs and future server processors. Already it's looking like this change will be introduced for the upcoming Linux 6.13 merge window...

It was just one and a half years ago that Cloudflare began rolling out OpenBMC on their massive array of servers to replace traditional proprietary Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) firmware stacks. Since the end of last year they've been talking up their successes using OpenBMC and now as we approach two years of their OpenBMC use within production, they continue singing the praise of this open-source, Linux-based BMC software stack...

Intel has upstreamed the firmware for their "BlazarU" core to linux-firmware.git for improving the out-of-the-box wireless experience with newer Intel WiFi adapters...

The Free Software Foundation announced on Tuesday they have begun work on "freedom in machine learning applications". Or in particular, a to-be-issued "statement" on free machine learning applications for software and the associated scripts and training data...

Rustls was initially talked up as a modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language for its memory safety guarantees. But now besides the talked up advantages due to being written in Rust, it has reached the point of reportedly being faster than both OpenSSL and BoringSSL...

Quietly merged into this week's Linux 6.12-rc4 kernel was a patch that removes a number of kernel maintainers from being noted in the official MAINTAINERS file that recognizes all of the driver and subsystem maintainers...

AlmaLinux Kitten 10 has been introduced today as what will be the next iteration of this community-based, RHEL/CentOS-derived enterprise-grade Linux distribution. AlmaLinux Kitten 10 is tracking the CentOS Stream 10 sources for what will eventually become the base of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10...

System76 is announcing one of their most innovative and interesting products going back to their Launch Configurable Keyboard and HP Dev One collaboration: the System76 Thelio Astra. The Thelio Astra is a high-end ARM64 desktop system geared for developers with a focus on AI / STEM / self-driving technologies and powered by Ampere Computing and NVIDIA.

The first NVIDIA R565 series Linux driver beta was released this morning in the form of the NVIDIA 565.57.01 driver release...

Intel's compiler engineers today posted a number of feature patches for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for enabling new ISA features to be found with next-generation Xeon "Diamond Rapids" processors. Excitingly a number of new Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) features are coming with next-gen Intel Xeon...

Intel Compute Runtime 24.39.31294.12 was released on Monday as the newest update to this open-source Intel integrated/discrete graphics compute stack for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support for their hardware on Windows and Linux...

Outside of the likes of the Arch Linux based CachyOS and Intel's Clear Linux there aren't too many distributions that widely rely on aggressive compiler optimizations in the name of bettering the system performance. A suggestion was raised recently though for Fedora to use profile-guided optimizations (PGO) and post-link optimizations with the likes of LLVM BOLT for more packages, but at this stage it's not clear if such a shift in Fedora package optimizations will actually materialize...

For those interested in the prospects of WebAssembly for being able to write "universal apps" that can run anywhere, Wasmer as one of the leading WASM runtimes is closing in on its v5.0 feature release...

For those still managing to avoid systemd use on Linux systems and preferring SysVinit as their init system of choice, SysVinit 3.11 is out today with a new "important feature" addition...

Earlier this year SiFive announced the HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V development board with plans for shipping in July. That timeframe for shipping since passed but SiFive today issued a new update on their RISC-V development board...

On Sunday there was a new patch posted by an Intel Linux engineer to boost the Lunar Lake Linux performance out-of-the-box for ASUS laptops by adjusting the new ASUS Intelligent Performance Technology "AIPT" feature so that Linux follows the same behavior as Windows 11. My initial testing of this ASUS AIPT patch has indeed shown the Core Ultra 7 256V "Lunar Lake" yielding much better performance with this patch applied.

Making for an exciting Monday morning, AMD Linux engineers have kicked off the new week with a patch series introducing an exciting and long-awaited change: using the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver by default for EPYC server platforms moving forward rather than the ACPI CPUFreq driver...

Intel's iNet Wireless Daemon (IWD) for Linux systems is out with a v3.0 release for this featureful and modern alternative to WPA_Supplicant...

Over the past week Linux creator Linus Torvalds has been active on a Linux kernel mailing list thread around avoiding barrier_nospec() in copy_from_user() due to being "overkill and painfully slow." The conversation evolved into low-level discussions over CPU behavior and how to best handle, differing behavior/requirements with new Intel CPUs supporting Linear Address Masking (LAM), and the overall headaches these days around CPU security mitigations...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 9.20 for running Windows games/applications on Linux, Hangover 9.20 is now available for this extension of Wine that builds off that codebase while pairing it with an x86/x86_64 emulator for running Windows programs on other CPU architectures like ARM64 Linux. With Hangover 9.20 they have restored the ability for running Win64 applications on ARM64 Linux hosts...