Phoronix

Red Hat engineer Richard Hughes this morning released Fwupd 1.9.25 as the newest feature release to this open-source solution paired with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for making firmware updates on Linux a breeze for an increasing number of systems and peripherals. With Fwupd 1.9.25, the supported device list has grown a little bit longer...

The high performance open-source Mold linker has released version 2.34 with various improvements while also deciding to throw in the towel on DEC Alpha processor support...

Joshua Ashton of Valve's Linux graphics team has opened a Mesa merge request to support a proposed "frog-fifo-v1" protocol for Wayland to address the matter of "FIFO is fundamentally broken under Mesa's Wayland WSI right now."..

While there were many Windows reviews/benchmarks out Tuesday for Intel Core Ultra 200 Series "Lunar Lake" laptops on various websites, Linux tests are still awaiting due to having resorted to pre-ordering a Lunar Lake laptop myself for delivering Linux support/compatibility information and performance benchmarks. But hopefully by this time next week will be the initial data set...

While open-source enthusiasts like to criticize NVIDIA for not maintaining upstream, in-tree kernel graphics driver support (though things have been changing there), for other areas of their vast hardware portfolio they are much better upstream Linux kernel citizens and often at the forefront of new driver innovations. One of the leading examples of that is around the NVIDIA Mellanox networking driver support. With Linux 6.12 they've landed a new feature that has been described as "a sign of things to come, I think we will see more of this in the next 10 years."..

NVIDIA engineers have sent out an exciting set of Linux kernel patches for enabling NVIDIA vGPU software support for virtual GPU support among multiple virtual machines (VMs). In aiming for upstream-focused Linux support, this NVIDIA vGPU support is built around the adapted Nouveau driver with the code previously posted for splitting up the Nouveau/NVKM driver components...

With the Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" launch today the review embargo has now expired. I began with my Intel Granite Rapids Linux benchmarking a few days ago and have initial benchmarks to share for the flagship Xeon 6980P processors paired with MRDIMM 8800MT/s memory. This is just the beginning of a lot of Granite Rapids benchmarks to come on Phoronix. Compared to the existing AMD EPYC competition and prior generation Intel Xeon processors, the Xeon 6900P series performance surpassed my expectations and has debuted as an incredibly strong performer. In some areas of HPC and other workloads, Intel is able to regain leadership performance with Granite Rapids paired with MRDIMMs. In AI workloads where the software is optimized for AMX, the new Xeon 6900P CPUs can showcase staggering leads.

Building off the launch earlier this year of the first Xeon 6 processors with the Xeon 6700E "Sierra Forest" processors, today Intel is lifting the wraps on the much anticipated Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" processors. Where as Sierra Forest is optimized for power efficiency and core density, the Intel Xeon 6 P-core processors are optimized for per-core performance and have shown some very strong generational uplift -- and against the AMD competition -- as we'll show today in the first Xeon 6980P Linux benchmarks.

Intel used their Enterprise Tech Tour last week in Oregon to not only provide insight into the new Xeon 6900 "Granite Rapids" server processors (and Xeon 6980P benchmarks) but also to shed more light on their Gaudi 3 AI inference accelerator. The question I was most curious about with Gaudi 3: where's the Linux driver support?..

Merged as part of the memory management "MM" changes for the Linux 6.12 kernel is a kernel stack usage histogram to help developers in better optimizing the kernel stack sizes and minimizing memory waste...

Going along with other early Linux kernel driver additions for enabling Panther Lake, the intel-lpss driver in Linux 6.12 has made its device ID additions for supporting Panther Lake H and Panther Lake P processors...

The Intel LPMD open-source project is a user-space daemon for optimizing active idle power handling on Linux and can be useful particularly for modern Intel Core hybrid processors. LPMD is short for the "Low Power Mode Daemon" while with today's v0.0.7 release it's now re-identified itself as the "Energy Optimizer" instead...

Landlock as the Linux security module for unprivileged access control handling is adding new controls around Unix socket handling with the Linux 6.12 kernel...

The Dell-WMI-Sysman driver on Linux allows for managing BIOS settings from within Linux using sysfs. This dell-wmi-sysman kernel driver supports most Dell platforms from 2018 and newer for convenient BIOS management...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.12 merge window...

Months ago Intel Linux engineers began adapting the Linux kernel to end the assumptions made around "Family 6" for Intel CPUs that had been used since the 90's with the Pentium Pro as the CPU family ID. With Linux 6.12 they finished the Intel CPU family/model ID restructuring and now we have the first patch confirming a post-Family 6 Intel CPU: Diamond Rapids is Family 19...

AMD's GPUOpen team has released HIP RT 2.4 as the newest version of this open-source ray-tracing library built atop their HIP interface...

Linux 6.11 introduced the getrandom() in the vDSO support for faster yet secure user-space random number generation needs. Initially that was focused on Linux x86_64 while for Linux 6.12 is ported to five more architectures...

The media subsystem updates were submitted today for the Linux 6.12 kernel merge window. Notable this cycle is a new HDMI CEC driver for a 4K HDMI splitter/amplifier for those looking for a device that can be controlled from within Linux using the HDMI Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) specification...

Back in June it was teased that Framework Computer in collaboration with DeepComputing would be releasing a RISC-V motherboard for the Framework Laptop 13. That RISC-V laptop motherboard has yet to be officially released but Linux kernel patches were posted today for enabling the DeviceTree support so Linux can boot on this upcoming board...

The Servo open-source browser layout engine has supported making use of the Firefox Devtools code for the provided web developer tools such as the HTML web page inspector and browser console. But that support had fallen into disrepair. Fortunately, thanks to a useful Outreachy project, the code has been updated and now working nicely with the newer Devtools code...

Following Vulkan Video H.264/H.265 video encoder support being merged into the FFmpeg library, the latest improvement for this open-source multimedia API when leveraging Vulkan is implicit DRM synchronization...

While there sadly the previously-annual Phoronix meet-up at Oktoberfest in Munich remains defunct, in honor of Oktoberfest 2024 kicking off this weekend in Munich, it's time for the annual Phoronix Premium special. With the Oktoberfest sale you can go ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode support, and other benefits while supporting the site and enjoying a discounted rate...

In between Linus Torvalds' busy week being in Vienna for the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit and related Linux Foundation events as well as managing the Linux 6.12 merge window with landing new features like sched_ext and real-time PREEMPT_RT, he also managed to finish up some of his own code for this next kernel version. Being merged today is his own code working on a new user access fast validation path using address masking...

The perf tooling changes were merged today for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel. Notable on the perf tools side is supporting some features found in newer Intel processors...

Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet has submitted all of the Bcachefs file-system feature patches for the Linux 6.12 kernel merge window. In his pull request he also lays out his ambitions to remove the "EXPERIMENTAL" flag from Bcachefs within the next year...

The PCI changes for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel add support for Native PCIe Enclosure Management "NPEM" as a code contribution by Intel for implementing the PCIe spec to standardize storage LEDs...

Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023 also known as "Project Volterra" was an early effor to improve the Windows on ARM support by developers via having a nice small form factor ARM PC to run Windows 11. With pending DeviceTree patches there would be mainline support for the Windows Dev Kit 2023 under Linux...

The kernel patches collected by Andrew Morton were upstreamed today for the Linux 6.12 kernel. Among those changes are pulling in the updated XZ Embedded code...

Linux 6.12 is shaping up to be a heck of a kernel update! Following real-time "PREEMPT_RT" going mainline after twenty years and many other kernel features merged this week, Linus Torvalds just pulled in the much anticipated sched_ext code!..

While not as exciting as some of the shiny new features for Linux 6.12 like real-time going mainline and Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics by default, the Firewire (IEEE-1394) subsystem has seen some significant alterations this cycle. With Firewire hardware increasingly rare, the maintainer is hoping to get this Linux 6.12 code better tested by the community...

Linux 6.12 yesterday merged the real-time "PREEMPT_RT" patches that had been in development for two decades. Today another big hitting feature was merged for Linux 6.12 that's been in development nearly as long...

The SDL abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games now prefers using Vulkan on Windows as its ideal graphics API. Direct3D 12 has been demoted lower in priority compared to Vulkan for this Simple DirectMedia Layer...

KDE developers have been busy preparing for Plasma 6.2 with lots of bug fixing and polishing while also beginning to land some features for Plasma 6.3...

Oracle has shifted their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel to a Linux 6.10 base with UEK-next...

Following the AMD ROCm 6.2 release from early August, ROCm 6.2.1 was released on Friday evening as the first point release to that series for this AMD GPU compute stack for Linux systems...

Wine 9.18 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software that enables running Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

The beta release of Ubuntu 24.10 "Oracular Oriole" was released in time for some weekend testing...

For months there has been talk and speculations around Raspberry Pi working to release a Compute Module 5 (CM5) in putting the power of last year's Raspberry Pi 5 into the small form factor for various embedded/industrial applications. It's pretty much a given that the Compute Module 5 will come, it's just a matter of when. With recent activity by Canonical engineers working on Ubuntu Linux, it's looking like the CM5 could be here soon...

When it comes to the question of the fastest x86_64 Linux distribution the answer is very easy with Intel's Clear Linux. But what about in the AArch64 world? When having the AmpereOne server in the lab curiosity got the best of me and I ran benchmarks across seven different Linux distributions on this Supermicro ARM server for seeing what platform had the fastest out-of-the-box Linux performance. The Linux distributions tested on this AmpereOne A192-32X server included Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Ubuntu 24.10 daily, Fedora Server 40, AlmaLinux 9.4, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Debian Testing, and CentOS Stream 10.

The HID subsystem updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel. Notable this time around are some new feature additions for the popular Wacom drawing tablet support...

Most Linux distributions have been defaulting to MariaDB as the default MySQL server for years. Ubuntu though has been a notable outlier still relying on Oracle MySQL for the default MySQL service. A proposal raised by an Ubuntu developer hopes to change that for Ubuntu 25.04 in the new year...

After seven months under review, Google's Gfxstream code has been upstreamed into Mesa 24.3 as a Vulkan virtualization solution...

The OpenZFS project has merged DirectIO (O_DIRECT) support for the ZFS file-system to bypass the ARC for reads and writes...

The Haiku open-source operating project known for letting the BeOS spirit live on is out with their newest monthly progress report...

Following the other recent work around Linux enablement for Snapdragon X1 powered laptops, yesterday patches were posted for getting the X1 Elite powered Dell XPS 9345 working with Linux but not all functionality is currently working...

After many years in the making, it finally was merged overnight... The real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel support was merged a few hours ago into Linux Git for this year's Linux 6.12 kernel!..

Well this is a hell of a surprise... Microsoft announced today that DirectX will be adopting SPIR-V as the interchange format of the future. Microsoft's DirectX 12 will accept shaders compiled to SPIR-V, the intermediate representation defined by The Khronos Group and commonly associated with Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenCL drivers...

After several weeks of testing Valve has released Proton 9.0-3 as the newest version of this Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for being able to enjoy Windows games on Linux...

Oliver Smith as the Interim Engineering Director for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical is out with a new status update on Ubuntu 24.10 development and related ambitions. This also includes more details about bringing the KDE Plasma desktop to Ubuntu Core Desktop in Snap form...