Phoronix

Microsoft on Friday released version 1.14 of their ONNX Runtime, a cross-platform, high performance machine learning inferencing and training accelerator...

Back in 2018 the X.Org Developers Conference (XDC) was hosted in A Coruña, Spain by Igalia developers and for XDC2023 it's again returning...

A ten month old merge request to GNOME's Mutter for adding implicit grabbing to the Clutter code was finally merged last week...

HarfBuzz 7.0 is out as a new version of this open-source text shaping library used by software like GNOME, KDE, Chrome OS, Java, Chrome, LibreOffice, and others...

Lutris 0.5.13 Beta is out this weekend as the newest test release for this open-source game manager that makes it easier to install and play video games from multiple game stores, emulators, and integration with other services...

Several years ago the open-source "Hangover" project started as allowing Windows x86_64 and x86 programs to run on 64-bit ARM Linux by leveraging the upstream Wine software as well as QEMU. Hangover also saw work for allowing Windows programs to run on POWER9 Linux hardware and other architectures. The Hangover project has been on hiatus but is now back to being revived...

The H.266 / Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard was finalized back in 2020 and while the hardware acceleration is currently limited to a few SoCs with video decode, in the years ahead there will likely be plenty of content encoded in H.266/VVC. The Fraunhofer HHI group in Germany has been working to ensure capable open-source support around this video compression standard with their VVenC encoder and VVdeC decoder...

There is already some AVX-512 optimizations for software contained within the FFmpeg multimedia library, but there is room for greater AVX-512 usage especially now with AMD supporting this Advanced Vector Extensions expansion and the latest Intel Xeon CPUs having little associated cost now with AVX-512 use...

Longtime Linux users likely have fond memories of the XMMS audio player from two decades ago. For those that enjoyed XMMS back in the day, Audacious continues being updated as a modern fork of XMMS...

KDE developers and users are very excited for Plasma 5.27 that will be making its stable debut next week and also serves as the last major release of the Plasma 5 series...

Being worked on actively by a number of stakeholders in recent years has been Flang as a Fortran language front-end to the LLVM compiler stack. While not yet ready for general use, Flang has been making strides as well as showing some promising performance results...

NVIDIA just published to GitHub the DLSS Super Resolution SDK v3.1, their first software development kit update made public since last May when DLSS v2.4 was the latest and greatest...

Systemd 253 is gearing up for release while out today is the third and possibly final release candidate...

An Intel engineer has implemented compute-based transcoding support to the DXT5 texture format as part of S3TC texture compression. This new path yields a 56% decrease in upload time for a texture upload micro-benchmark when tested on an Intel Ice Lake system with the Iris Gallium3D driver...

This week Intel released Embree 4.0 as the newest version of their open-source, high performance ray-tracing library. While the headline feature is now having support for GPU acceleration with SYCL to take advantage of Arc Graphics and other GPU hardware with SYCL support, for those that have long been using Embree on CPUs its performance has also improved. Here are some initial CPU-based benchmarks I did this week on Embree 4.0 with Intel's new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors.

Apple introduced the Touch Bar to their MacBook Pro laptops a half-decade ago as a dynamic touchscreen to replace the function keys on the keyboard. While some MacBook Pro models have already dropped the Touch Bar for not catching on, some community developers in the open-source Linux community continue work on enabling the functionality for the upstream Linux kernel...

After being in development for nearly one year , Zstd 1.5.4 has been released with many "significant performance improvements across multiple scenarios" for this increasingly-used data compression algorithm...

Red Hat engineers have been working on a new web-based user-interface for Fedora's installer for more than on year now and it's been worked into good shape while still not at feature parity to the Anaconda installer with its GTK interface. Martin Kolman presented at FOSDEM last weekend on Fedora's new installer UI to offer insight into their motives for making it web-based and what work remains...

The Gentoo project has provided a 2022 recap that highlights all of their interesting milestones achieved over the past year for this traditionally source-based Linux distribution that has long been popular with enthusiasts and power users...

The past few years there has been hipSYCL as an open-source project for not only taking SYCL codes to Radeon ROCm with HIP but also NVIDIA CUDA and other targets. The hipSYCL project has now decided to rename itself to Open SYCL to reflect its broader focus on supporting CPUs and GPUs from all major vendors and not being limited to just AMD's HIP interface...

Upstream kernel developers have begun hitting RAM capacity issues when carrying out large Linux kernel builds with the likes of "allyesconfig" for enabling all possible modules/options. While 32GB of system RAM has been common for developer desktops in recent years, large Linux kernel builds and taking advantage of multiple compile jobs have begun to cross that threshold and leading to out-of-memory behavior. Fortunately, a set of patches to the kernel's objtool is taming the memory use to rein in kernel builds for such scenarios...

AMD has made some late changes for Linux 6.2 around the Scatter/Gather (S/G) functionality for APUs that enables display scan-out from system memory...

Earlier this week I posted benchmarks looking at how the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X performance has evolved in the three years to the day since that 64-core / 128-thread HEDT chip launched. While overall the Threadripper 3990X performance has evolved nicely under Linux since 2020, when it came to the video encoding tests in particular they performed worse overall. As I had raised in that earlier article and now elaborated with some follow-up tests, that regression is driven by the default "schedutil" frequency scaling governor used by default.

For fans of the Doom (2016) video game looking to enjoy the title with the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation, a simple fix showed how addressing a simple oversight can boost the performance by a magnitude of 10x...

AMD and Atos announced today that they are building a new supercomputer in Bavaria for the Max Planck Society...

One of the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver milestones we have to look forward to this year is the introduction of the new "Xe" kernel graphics driver to effectively succeed the existing "i915" Direct Rendering Manager driver for recent generations of Intel graphics. More prep code was merged this week to Mesa's Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver in preparing to be able to make use of that new kernel mode driver once its upstreamed into the Linux kernel...

A new GTK blog post summarized a recent meet-up of GTK core developers for better sorting out active GTK4 work as well as some planning toward GTK5...

The BSD operating system projects tend to not receive as much support from hardware vendors as Linux and their driver support is made even more fragmented on the BSD side due to many subtle as well as not so subtle differences between the major BSDs. NetBSD developer Pierre Pronchery has proposed more "harmony" among BSD drivers with increased collaboration between the major BSD players on driver development...

FreeType 2.13 is out today as the newest version of this widely-used font rendering library. New to FreeType 2.13 is a new Qt-based demo program...

Over the past two years since an Aquacomputer HWMON driver was first introduced to the mainline Linux kernel, it's continued to be extended to support more products from this German PC cooling/peripheral retailer. With Linux 6.3 additional Aquacomputer components are now supported by this kernel driver...

The Etnaviv DRM driver started out in the Linux kernel providing reverse-engineered kernel graphics driver support for Vivante graphics IP developed by VeriSilicon and found within various SoCs. With the upcoming Linux 6.3 cycle the Etnaviv DRM driver is adding support for VeriSilicon's Neural Network Processor (NPU) IP...

While there's been a multi-year effort for Wayland high resolution scrolling, support by the desktop environments for this functionality, and all the other infrastructure work, high resolution scrolling is proving to still be a challenge for Linux in 2023. The latest is now the Linux kernel dropping Logitech high resolution scrolling for mice connected via USB until further improvements can be made...

A pending change to the GNOME Shell will make it easier to monitor running background applications that otherwise are not visually presented currently on the desktop...

The open-source Godot 4.0 game engine will finally be released soon while being christened today is the initial release candidate...

The very promising work around parallel CPU bring-up to speed-up Linux kernel boot times with today's high core count servers and HEDT systems has been revised once more. Notable with the v7 patches is re-enabling support for this time-savings boot feature for AMD processors...

Following yesterday seeing RADV Vulkan Video decoding land in Mesa 23.1, the initial Vulkan Video support for Intel's "ANV" Vulkan driver has also been merged to Mesa 23.1...

Google engineers on Tuesday released AOM AV1 v3.6 as the newest version of their open-source, CPU-based AV1 encoder...

GROMACS as the widely-used molecular dynamics software issued its stable v2023 release this week with improved GPU support via SYCL...

Intel today introduced Embree 4.0 as a major update to this high performance ray-tracing library...

With the upcoming Linux 6.3 cycle there is finally support for the Steam Deck being added to the Steam HID driver...

Linux 6.1 was widely anticipated to be a Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel with normally the last major release series for the calendar year normally promoted to LTS status. Greg Kroah-Hartman as the Linux stable maintainer went ahead today and formally recognized Linux 6.1 as the 2022 LTS kernel...

Today marks three years since AMD introduced the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, the first HEDT chip sporting 64 cores / 128 threads. While based on Zen 2, the shear multi-threaded compute power of the Threadripper 3990X still bodes well today. Besides 64 cores / 128 threads still being a lot, Linux software improvements over the past three years have helped maintain the competitiveness of the Threadripper 3990X. In today's benchmarks are results from the System76 Thelio Major as tested back in 2020 based on Pop!_OS / Ubuntu 22.04 LTS compared to the very latest state today when running an Ubuntu 23.04 snapshot on the same system and using a Linux 6.2 Git kernel.

AMD ROCm 5.4 was released back in November while since then it has continue to be refined with new point releases to address various issues with this open-source Linux GPU compute stack...

For those wanting to run Linux bare metal on modern Apple Silicon M1/M2 systems, the easiest way to do so is by using the Asahi Linux distribution with its downstream kernel carrying the latest Apple driver enablement patches for the ARM hardware, the specialized installer for safely setting up the Linux distribution on the Apple, and modern package base provided by Arch Linux. For fans of Fedora Workstation, the Fedora Asahi remix has been working to provide a great Fedora Workstation experience for modern Macs...

GNU Compiler Collection compiler expert Jan Hubicka at SUSE continues working on last-minute tweaks to the GCC 13 for benefiting AMD's latest Zen 4 processors...

The work led by Red Hat's David Airlie on supporting Vulkan Video with the Mesa RADV driver has seen the work mainlined today for Mesa 23.1!..

In addition to the in-development Fedora / Red Hat Anaconda web UI based installer that has been in the works, Fedora IoT is rolling out a new installer of its own to ease deployments around edge computing and Internet of Things devices...

Among the many interesting talks this past weekend at the 2023 edition of FOSDEM was Intel engineer Jiewen Yao presenting TD-Shim as the company's work on a lightweight virtual firmware for containers that complies with their approach to confidential computing...

The X.Org Server keeps on giving when it comes to security vulnerabilities with its massive, aging, and ill-maintained code-base. Disclosed on Monday night was CVE-2023-0494 as the latest security advisory and another discovery by the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative...

Qualcomm's Cloud AI 100 inference accelerator that features up to sixteen cores and focused on AI needs at the edge of data centers continues on a trek toward having mainline Linux kernel support...