Phoronix

Arch Linux powered CachyOS that is known for its performance optimizations and other enhancements is out with its "August 2024" rolling release update...

While Linus Torvalds was hoping to merge the sched_ext extensible scheduler for the Linux v6.11 kernel cycle, that didn't end up happening after some technical issues were raised on the kernel mailing list. Since then though the kernel developers have been collaborating and given the latest sched_ext patches with "for-next" and "for-6.12" markings, it's looking like the extensible scheduler will be attempted again for the Linux 6.12 merge window...

Ahead of the Linux 6.11-rc4 kernel release coming up later today, some more Bcachefs file-system patches were merged this weekend for this experimental copy-on-write file-system...

Faith Ekstrand has merged another two dozen patches for the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver with next quarter's Mesa 24.3...

Lab Wayland Compositor "labwc" v0.8 is now available as the newest release of this Wayland compositor that has been re-based against the wlroots 0.18 Wayland library...

Vulkan 1.3.293 released on Friday as the newest specification for this industry standard graphics and compute API. In addition to a handful of fixes/clarifications, Vulkan 1.3.293 introduces a new NVIDIA vendor extension...

Following the recent work to Mutter and GNOME Shell that was merged for allowing to build with X11 support disabled, the GDM display manager and GNOME-Session code have also seen the ability added to compile without X11 support...

Archinstall is the wonderful command-line driven installer that was introduced to the Arch Linux ISOs three years ago for making it quicker and easier to get a customized Arch Linux installation. Out today is Archinstall 2.8.2 to further refine that experience...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap that highlights all of the interesting KDE desktop changes to have landed over the past week...

AMD Linux engineers are preparing the kernel for Smart Data Cache Injection (SDCI) as a feature for AMD EPYC server processors. Smart Data Cache Injection is a nifty new feature that allows for direct insertion of data from I/O devices into the CPU's L2/L3 cache...

With all of my AMD Ryzen 9900X and 9950X Linux benchmarking and Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X reviews as well, many have wondered if AMD Zen 5 is just really great on Linux, if Windows 11 is in particularly poor shape for these new AMD Ryzen 9000 series processors, if it's just the different/diverse benchmarks being run, or simply why are these new desktop CPUs running so well on Linux but less so with Windows?

Oliver Smith as the Interim Engineering Director for the Ubuntu desktop provided an update around recent efforts on Ubuntu 24.10...

The Cloud Hypervisor open-source project that serves as a Rust-written VMM focused on security and started by Intel but now backed by a multitude of vendors is out with its newest feature release. Cloud Hypervisor 41 is the new feature release worked on by engineers at Intel, Google, Microsoft, Rivos, Tencent, Ant Group, and others for this cloud and security minded virtual machine monitor...

Ahead of the now in-place Ubuntu 24.10 feature freeze, the Ubuntu GNOME X.Org session support was split off into its own separate binary Debian package from the main (default) Wayland session handling...

The Vulkan Video support within Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver continues to be improved upon. The newest addition now found in the code for Mesa 24.3 is enabling 12-bit AV1 content accelerated decoding...

Sent out today was the latest round of DRM-Misc-Next patches to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window opening up in mid-September. For those using ARM single board computers with a Rockchip SoC and have been struggling for 4K support over HDMI, the Rockchip updates in Linux 6.12 should excite you...

For improving the open-source graphics driver support for Qualcomm Adreno 700 series hardware such as what's found in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and other SoCs, preemption support is finally being tackled...

Red Hat engineers have been developing Ramalama as a new open-source project that hopes to "make AI boring" by this inferencing tool striving for simplicity so users can quickly and easily deploy AI workloads without much fuss...

With the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X Linux review out of the way yesterday, today's benchmarking of the Ryzen 9000 series is looking closely at the AVX-512 performance impact. With the Ryzen 9000 series the Zen 5 cores have a full 512-bit data-path compared to the "double pumped" 256-bit data path found in the Zen 4 processors as well as the Strix Point SKUs. In this article is an AVX-512 enabled versus disabled comparison for not only the Ryzen 9 9950X but also the prior generation Ryzen 9 7950X and looking too at the CPU power use, thermals, and peak frequency when engaging a variety of AVX-512 workloads.

After talking about AmpereOne for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure since last year, earlier this month Oracle finally announced general availability on their OCI Ampere A2 instances for tapping into these latest-generation Ampere Computing AArch64 server processors in the public cloud. Here's a brief look at the OCI Ampere A2 performance with AmpereOne compared to their prior A1 instances powered by Ampere Altra.

A set of patches posted today on the AMD graphics driver mailing list begin implementing support for process isolation within the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver...

Intel engineers on Wednesday released the Linux NPU Driver v1.6 release for this for this MIT-licensed user-space mode driver support for the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found since the Core Ultra Series 1 "Meteor Lake" SoCs and currently supporting the upcoming Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processors as well. This Intel Linux NPU Driver in user-space interfaces with their iVPU kernel accelerator driver for making a nice open-source and upstream NPU software stack on Linux systems...

For Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Canonical released Netplan 1.0 as their declarative network configuration software spanning now from servers to desktops. In time for Ubuntu 24.10 due out in two months, Netplan 1.1 has been released as the next iteration of this Linux networking configuration software from Canonical...

Mesa 24.2 is out today as stable for this quarterly feature release to these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers used commonly on Linux systems and other platforms...

Gentoo Linux was one of the last few Linux distributions continuing to maintain Itanium (IA-64) architecture builds but that is now being phased out for those discontinued Intel processors...

Last Wednesday was the review embargo for the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X Zen 5 desktop processors that proved to be very exciting for Linux workloads from developers to creators to AVX-512 embracing AI and HPC workloads. Today the review embargo lifts on the Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X and as expected given the prior 6-core/8-core tests: these new chips are wild! The Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X are fabulous processors for those engaging in heavy real-world Linux workloads with excellent performance uplift and stunning power efficiency.

SiFive today lifted the lid on the P870-D, its new RISC-V processor dor data center and AI workloads. The P870-D is designed to scale up to 256 cores while supporting modern features like CXL and other AI/HPC minded features...

Next month AMD will be providing an update on their long-term strategy for open-source firmware. Central to their open-source firmware plans is their OpenSIL effort that remains in development for eventually replacing AGESA on future generations of Ryzen and EPYC platforms...

A new driver has been posted for better supporting the Corsair VOID gaming headsets under Linux...

The first alpha release of the Weston 14.0 reference Wayland compositor is now available with a handful of new features...

While Linus Torvalds called for including the "sched_ext" extensible scheduler in Linux 6.11, he ultimately decided not to merge it for Linux 6.11 after some technical issues were raised on the Linux kernel mailing list...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system is out with their latest status update that highlights various improvements made in recent weeks...

Intel published a number of new CPU microcode images this Patch Tuesday for addressing various security issues as well as a number of functional issues being addressed across different CPU client and server processor generations...

Intel Linux graphics driver engineers today sent in their first batch of patches to DRM-Next of new material they are prepared to introduce with the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel cycle...

Back in May the folks at Framework Computer announced Framework Laptop 13 support for the Intel Core Ultra Series 1 (Meteor Lake) alongside announcing a new 2.8K 120Hz display option, a new web camera upgrade, and new colors for their expansion cards. Today marks the review embargo expiration with the hardware now shipping. Here's my initial look at the Intel Core Ultra Series (Meteor Lake) within the confines of the modular and upgradeable Framework Laptop 13.

In addition to the ASUS ROG Ally X revision of this handheld gaming console having more (and faster) system memory, doubling of the battery capacity, upgraded storage, improved cooling, and other refinements over the original ROG Ally gaming handheld, there is a different audio amplifier. In turn a Linux kernel patch is needed to fix-up the audio support on the ASUS ROG Ally X as well as needing to fetch a new firmware binary...

Hitting the release button minutes ago, AMDVLK 2024.Q3.1 is available as the newest version of AMD's official open-source Vulkan driver and the first new release since the end of June. This driver continues to trail in popularity to the likes of the Valve-backed Mesa RADV Radeon Vulkan driver but does well in areas like Vulkan ray-tracing and is officially backed by AMD...

Miracle-WM as a reminder is a Wayland tiling window manager that is built atop Canonical's Mir. Miracle-WM also happens to be developed by a Canonical engineer, Matthew Kosarek. Miracle-WM is inspired by i3 and Sway but the main difference is turning to Mir to do the heavy lifting. Miracle-WM 0.3.1 was released on Monday as the project prepares for its Fedora Miracle Spin debut coming up...

Yesterday was a fresh sync of the Asahi Linux projecr's AGX Gallium3D and Honeykrisp drivers to the upstream Mesa 24.3-devel Git repository. Some 42 patches are now upstream in Mesa for benefiting OpenGL and Vulkan atop Apple Silicon graphics...

FEX 2408 has been released as the newest update to this open-source emulator that allows for running x86/x86_64 games and application binaries on AArch64 (64-bit ARM) systems. There are some nice improvements to find with FEX 2408 while already the next release is being teased for even greater performance...

Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS was scheduled to ship this week but has now been delayed to the end of August in order to address some high profile upgrade bugs...

A new version of Eclipse OpenJ9 is now available for this high performance Java Virtual Machine (JVM)..

With all the craze around "AI" and hoping to foster more open-source AI models, the Linux Foundation has welcomed the Open Model Initiative (OMI) into its umbrella of open-source initiatives to help foster high quality, openly-licensed AI models...

Going back four years ago Intel engineers worked out bus lock detection for the Linux kernel to benefit their processors able to detect bus locks and then notify the kernel, given the negative performance implications associated with bus locks. That Intel support was merged in Linux 5.13 back in 2021 while now AMD has their equivalent ready for mainlining in the Linux kernel...

It's been one year since Canonical desktop engineer Daniel van Vugt, who is known for his upstream GNOME contributions, touched his patch-set implementing dynamic deadline evasion support. But this week brought the long-awaited third iteration of the patches that aim to eliminate cursor stutters from the Mutter compositor's KMS thread...

As a follow up to the article from a few weeks ago of Intel publishing the AVX10.2 specifications and posting GCC compiler patches for that next iteration of AVX10, the initial support was merged today into the GNU Compiler Collection...

The past few months have seen patches for updating the XZ (de)compression code within the Linux kernel that's been a lengthy process in part due to the XZ backdoor situation earlier this year and the reputable XZ developers in turn being busy cleaning up that mess. In any event it appears that the updated XZ code for the Linux kernel is now on track for mainlining come Linux 6.12...

Colors within the GTK toolkit have been represented to date using sRGB but developers have been working on supporting other color spaces like Display-P3 and BT.2100-PQ as they work to better support High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays on the Linux desktop...

Linus Torvalds released Linux 6.11-rc3 a few minutes ago as the latest weekly release candidate...

Motherboard vendors have begun releasing updated BIOS versions for Intel Core 13th/14th Gen motherboards that offer the new "0x129" CPU microcode that is intended to address the Raptor Lake stability issues that have been causing instability problems and crashing errors for a growing number of Intel Core 13th/14th Gen processors. Intel reported in their (Windows) testing that the 0x129 CPU microcode should offer negligible performance impact but I was curious to run my benchmarks under Linux of this new CPU microcode.