Phoronix

With currently reviewing the HP Z6 G5 A workstation powered by the new 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX Zen 4 processor, one of the areas I was curious about was how well HP's tuned Microsoft Windows 11 compares to that of Linux. In this article is looking at how the Microsoft Windows 11 performance is out-of-the-box with the HP Z6 G5 A workstation as configured by HP versus a clean install of Ubuntu 23.10 with the Linux 6.5 kernel.

Back in Linux 6.2 the in-kernel Zstd compression/decompression code was updated against the Zstd 1.5 upstream state. Now for the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year the plan is for updating to Zstd 1.5.5 that should provide better compression performance...

In addition to Microsoft enabling OpenGL 4.6 over Direct3D 12 via Mesa, Microsoft engineers have also been working on some video improvements within the Mesa code-base...

Intel has announced their 2024 updates to oneAPI that they are promoting as the Intel Software Developer Toolkits 2024 release...

One of the features that was merged yesterday into the GCC compiler just before shifting to its "bug fixing" phase of development was Intel's AVX10.1 support...

FreeBSD 14 has been released as stable today as the newest major release of this leading open-source BSD operating system...

Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver atop the Nouveau DRM kernel driver is now officially Vulkan 1.0 conformant for passing all the necessary Vulkan 1.0 conformance test suite cases. Though don't get your hopes too high for this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver as the performance is still overall slow and the driver stack remains a work-in-progress, but at least it's a step in the right direction...

Ahead of the official release announcement due out tomorrow, the Mozilla Firefox 120.0 release binaries are now available...

Last month AMD announced the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series along with the new Threadripper PRO 7000 WX Series for bringing Zen 4 to the HEDT and workstation space. Ahead of AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors becoming available via DIY retailers on the 21st, today marks the review/performance embargo expiration for the Threadripper 7000 series. First up today is a look at how the new Threadripper 7970X 32-core and Threadripper 7980X 64-core processors are performing for Linux HEDT workstations... Or the TLDR: the incredible Linux performance and potential for a wide-range of creator and developer workloads now possible with the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series.

The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7970X/7980X Linux benchmark review shows just how well the new Zen 4 powered HEDT Threadripper processors can perform with up to the 64 core flagship offering. The results were stunning while today the review embargo also expires on the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 series for the professional-catered SKUs that offer up to 96 cores and support up to 8 channel DDR5 system memory. Here are the initial benchmarks of the 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX for showing the performance potential of this outright workstation performance monster if your budget allows.

Feature development on GCC 14 is now largely over with today marking the start of their stage three of development that is the "general bugfixing mode" and moving past new features for this next annual GNU Compiler Collection release...

Tomeu Vizoso has been leading the effort for supporting Vivante's NPU IP within the Etnaviv driver that began as a reverse-engineered driver for Vivante graphics. The Vivante NPU architecture ends up being close to the graphics cores and Vizoso has been making good progress for enabling the NPUs on this open-source stack. The latest achievement is image classification workloads now running about twice as fast as previously...

Distrobox 1.6 released on Sunday for this open-source project that makes it easy to launch any Linux distribution inside your terminal. Distrobox builds upon Podman and Docker to allow creating containers of the Linux distribution of your choice and for that to integrate nicely with the host environment. With succeeding releases, Distrobox has built up quite an arsenal of features...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.7-rc2 as the second test release of what will become Linux 6.7 stable around the end of the calendar year...

In the absence of Razer providing any official drivers and GUI control panel for Linux systems, the OpenRazer independent open-source project for crafting reverse-engineered driver support and then the likes of Polychromatic as a graphical control utility make for a pleasant Linux experience for Razer hardware on Linux. Out today is a new Polychromatic release...

Narrowly missing the Linux 6.7 merge window that closed last week is the AMD 1-Wire "AXI" driver but it's now on tap for the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year...

Luc Verhaegen has announced the return of the Graphics DevRoom for FOSDEM 2024 taking place in early February in Brussels...

The week began with Microsoft taking its Mesa Direct3D 12 code from OpenGL 4.3 to OpenGL 4.4 and then a short time after that reaching OpenGL 4.5. Microsoft now closed out the week by managing to get OpenGL 4.6 implemented atop Direct3D 12...

The Inkscape open-source graphics editor application that is popular among Linux users and has evolved into a viable alternative to the likes of Adobe Illustrator is celebrating its 20th anniversary...

The LLVM project is now employing profile-guided optimizations (PGO) when building their x86_64 Microsoft Windows release packages. Making use of PGO is able to make their Clang build a stunning 22% faster...

Following last week's KDE Plasma 6.0 Alpha release with more enthusiasts beginning to test out the next-generation KDE desktop stack, there's been a spike in bug reports. KDE developers are on it working to address these bugs ahead of the Plasma 6.0 stable release at the end of February...

In addition to the many OpenGL and Vulkan open-source driver improvements building up for Mesa 24.0, the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has also been preparing some video acceleration improvements for this next quarterly release...

Michal Jires of SUSE posted a new set of patches on Friday for implementing Incremental LTO support for the GNU Compiler Collection. The goal here with Incremental LTO is for reducing compile times while doing quick edit-compile cycles while employing Link-Time Optimizations...

The FFmpeg multimedia library has been making progress with its Vulkan Video API support while this week an interesting change was merged for ffplay, FFmpeg's built-in simple multimedia player. The ffplay player now has a built-in Vulkan renderer provided by libplacebo as an optional means of hardware acceleration...

A few days ago the Wine Wayland driver merged HiDPI support improvements and now for ending out the week is yet more work to land for Wine's Wayland driver: the first bits of Vulkan enablement...

The most significant limitation of Intel Arc Graphics on Linux with the existing open-source driver stack has been the lack of sparse resources support that is needed for many newer games to work via Steam Play on Linux. Intel has a proper solution in place with their yet-to-be-merged Xe kernel driver while now for Mesa 24.0 their ANV Vulkan driver has landed an implementation that works with the existing i915 kernel driver...

This weekend marks 25 years already since Valve originally released Half-Life! In celebration of this milestone, Valve released today the Half-Life 25th Anniversary Update that now includes official Steam Deck support, Steam networking and controller support, updated graphics settings, and more...

With the Linux 6.7 merge window having closed on Sunday, here's a recap of all the interesting new features to find with this new kernel. Linux 6.7 stable will be out either in the final days of 2023 or more than likely in the early days of next year.

As noted a few weeks back, NVIDIA is working to add OpenACC support to the upstream LLVM Clang compiler for this parallel computing standard. Today that work began landing in LLVM/Clang's development codebase...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa has added support for the protected memory feature available with Vulkan 1.1+...

An initial set of drm-misc-next changes has been sent out today to DRM-Next of the very first feature patches to begin queuing until the Linux 6.8 merge window opens up around the start of the new year...

While the KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell desktops are running on Wayland well, there are still many smaller desktops that haven't yet been ported over to Wayland or still in the early stages. There's also no shortage of passionate open-source developers toying around with their own desktops / compositors. Louvre is now the latest library out there like WLROOTS and libweston aiming to help develop Wayland compositors...

For those Ubuntu Linux users enjoying the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA for having the very latest kernel stable point releases or being able to test daily Git kernel builds with ease or weekly RCs, the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA returned this week after a month of downtime...

Earlier this week Intel compiler engineers posted patches enabling Intel APX NDD support for the GCC compiler as the "New Data Destination" feature of the Advanced Performance Extensions. Those engineers are ending out their week by posting patches for enabling APX PPX for GCC, the new Push-Pop Acceleration of this forthcoming ISA addition...

Valve has released SteamOS 3.5.5 to its stable channel for Steam Deck users that brings Steam Deck OLED device support, HDR display settings if supported by the external display, the default color rendering for Steam Deck LCD now emulates the sRGB color gamut, and many other changes...

Ahead of AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors becoming available, Noctua recently introduced the new NH-U14S TR5-SP6 and NH-D9 TR5-SP6 heatsinks. In addition to working with the Threadripper 7000 series, these CPUs fit as well for Socket SP6 introduced with the new AMD EPYC 8004 "Siena" processors. Here is a look at the cooling performance of these new Noctua TR5-SP6 heatsinks on AMD EPYC.

Embedded Linux consulting firm Bootlin has announced they've developed open-source Linux kernel driver support for the H.264 video encoder found with Allwinner V3, V3s, and S3 SoCs...

As was expected but now made official: this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel is Linux 6.6...

The uutils open-source project continues working on re-implementing the widely-used GNU Coreutils utilities within the Rust programming language for better security and a fresh take on rm, cd, cat, ls, and other commands...

Intel has released OpenVINO 2023.2 as the newest version of their open-source toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI inference. OpenVINO continues in its never-ending quest for maximizing deep learning performance and efficiency while continuing to expand in its model support and features...

Going back to May 2022, AMD Linux graphics driver engineers were working on AMDGPU driver patches to enable a new Light System DMA "LSDMA" IP block. Since then we haven't heard much about LSDMA until some new patches surfaced yesterday for optionally enabling the LSDMA ring mode for the AMDGPU kernel driver...

Intel has rolled out a new quarterly update to QATlib, its QuickAssist Technology library for Linux systems to enjoy hardware acceleration of various crypto and compression algorithms on QAT Gen 4 hardware...

Dimitri John Ledkov of the Ubuntu kernel team has written about some of the improvements made for the default kernel build on Ubuntu 23.10. Ubuntu's Linux kernel build is now using much less disk space, lower RAM use, and much faster initrd generation...

Mesa 23.3 is gearing up for release in a week or two while out now is Mesa 23.3-rc4 for the latest weekly release candidate to this collection of open-source graphics drivers...

With Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) continuing to prove popular mot only for end-users and independent developers but within organizations as well for having easy access to a Linux environment from the confines of Windows 11, Microsoft has added new enterprise-focused security options for WSL...

Intel has released a new version of ISPC, their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler. The ISPC 1.22 release is clocking in a few percent faster across the board as with their release builds they are now making use of LLVM Clang's link-time optimizations (LTO) for speeding up the binaries...

A change proposal currently undergoing discussion for Fedora 40 would change their toolchain's (BFD) linker to error out on potential security issues. Currently BFD is emitting warnings on potential security problems but the F40 proposal is to instead error out so the program being built will fail to link when hitting recognized security issues...

For those in the market for an AMD Ryzen 7040 series (Zen 4) laptop, the Framework 13 laptop is a great option for those wanting a Linux-friendly device and is a rare breed in being a completely upgradeable laptop similar to Framework's Intel laptop models. I've been testing out the Framework Laptop 13 the past month and after a BIOS update has been working out wonderfully on Linux.

The GNOME GTK toolkit is introducing support for graphics offloading within the toolkit. This new GTK "GraphicsOffload" support is Wayland-only at this time and not working either for non-Linux platforms...

A new feature coming to next-generation Intel graphics display hardware has been revealed in new open-source Linux graphics driver patches: CMRR as an extension of the existing adaptive-sync variable rate refresh (VRR) functionality...