The open-source FEX-Emu project continues advancing as an emulator to run x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on 64-bit ARM (AArch64), even for games, Valve's Steam Play / Proton, and other complex software. FEX-Emu 2308 is out today with more performance optimizations and other features implemented for this emulator...
In addition to Loongson preparing Loongson Binary Translation (LBT) for LoongArch to help with MIPS / x86 / Arm binary translation on this domestic Chinese CPU architecture, additional LoongArch features are also now slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel cycle...
Yesterday KDE developer Nate Graham outlined the progress with the Plasma 6 desktop while out today he's out with his usual blog post that highlights the various KDE changes to have been merged over the past week...
The past several weeks at Phoronix has been very exciting with benchmarking AMD EPYC Genoa-X processors (along with Bergamo) and the incredible uplift delivered by these latest AMD server processors. But for those not yet having the opportunity to test the new EPYC Genoa-X processors locally, those wishing to evaluate the Genoa-X capabilities in the public cloud prior to making an investment in these high-end server processors with 3D V-Cache, or those simply preferring the ease of cloud infrastructure, Azure's new HBv4 series provide an excellent route for leveraging AMD Genoa-X compute capabilities in the cloud. Here are benchmarks of the new Azure HBv4 powered by EPYC Genoa-X compared to prior Azure HPC VMs. The Azure HBv4 performance is outstanding with incredible generational uplift and leading value among Microsoft's HPC-focused VMs.
Back in Linux 6.4 there were Intel HD audio additions for Lunar Lake processors, ACE2.x integration with Lunar Lake has also been worked on as part of the SoundWire support, and also early preparations on the Sound Open Firmware side. With Linux 6.6 there are more audio bits coming together for Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processors...
For those making use of the open-source, cross-platform ClamAV anti-virus/anti-malware software backed by Cisco, the first release candidate of ClamAV 1.2 is now available for testing...
With KDE Plasma 6 development going well and a beta potentially in a few months, the KDE Neon Linux distribution crew has created a new archive with the latest Plasma 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 components to help developers and enthusiasts in testing out this leading-edge open-source desktop code...
With new i915 driver code ready for the upcoming Linux 6.6, new threshold tuning around the RPS (cited as both Render P-States and Requested Power States) for some Intel graphics hardware and in some games can yield around a 10~15% boost to performance...
SK engineer Byungchul Park noticed costly migration overhead especially with TLB shoot-downs hurting performance while he was working with Compute Express Link (CXL) on Linux. That led to some optimization patches to reduce TLB flushes under some select cases that in turn led to a 50% reduction in full flushes and has the possibility of helping performance...
Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has published a lengthy blog post outlining the current state of the Plasma 6 desktop, what code porting work has wrapped up, and what major tasks remain before Plasma 6.0 can advance onto its beta and then release phase...
Preventing some modern Windows games from running on Intel Arc Graphics under Linux with Valve's Steam Play has been held up by lack of sparse support within Intel's ANV Vulkan driver. Those limitations will hopefully be overcome with the Intel Xe kernel mode driver when that is mainlined in hopefully the coming months, but for now it's a bit of a sore spot for Intel Linux gamers. A partial workaround though has now been merged for Mesa 23.3 with fake sparse support...
It's been ten years since Intel launched the Haswell processors that were great for the time followed by Broadwell. On the laptop side for Haswell and Broadwell the Panel Self Refresh (PSR) power-savings support has been rather notorious at least on the Linux side. Finally for the Linux 6.6 kernel due out in late 2023, the developers are re-enabling PSR support for these aging laptops...
An updated patch-set was sent out on Wednesday to address fixing wake-up problems for some AMD client platforms when going through a suspend/resume cycle...
Another weekly batch of drm-misc-next changes were sent out today to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the Linux 6.6 merge window opening in a few weeks...
The just-announced AMD Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 are working quite well under a fully open-source and upstream graphics driver stack. AMD is making available a new Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver release for those on enterprise Linux distributions, but those living more on the leading-edge and preferring the open-source upstream Linux/Mesa driver experience, I've been testing these new RDNA3 professional offerings and the support is already in place and working out rather well. In this article are some initial tests of the Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 as well as showing how the performance of the new packaged driver compares to that of using all open-source and upstream GPU driver components.
Earlier this year AMD introduced the RDNA3-based Radeon PRO W7800/W7900 series while today the company is introduced the Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 series at the lower-end of the professional graphics spectrum...
Intel open-source driver engineers have begun starting work on preparing the Linux graphics driver stack to ultimately handle Lunar Lake integrated graphics that is the generation following Arrow Lake...
Microsoft has released an updated version of its CBL-Mariner 2.0 in-house Linux distribution that includes various security patches, new packages being added to the OS, and a variety of other updates...
LibreOffice 7.6 as the next major update to this open-source office suite is due out in mud-August while today's RC2 release serves as a last chance for testing out this updated free software alternative to Microsoft Office...
Clement Lefebvre shared today as part of the monthly status update for the Linux Mint project that they'll be releasing an "EDGE" ISO to help in running this desktop Linux distribution on newer hardware...
For several years now The Khronos Group has been developing the ANARI standard as an analytics rendering API and focusing on scalable 3D data virtualization. Today the ANARI 1.0 release finally took place for this cross-platform 3D rendering engine API...
Asahi Linux is great for those wanting to run the best Linux experience on Apple Silicon hardware while using this Arch Linux based distribution. But for those preferring Fedora Linux over Arch, a Fedora Asahi Remix is coming and was announced today at the Flock To Fedora conference...
While Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) on Intel/AMD x86_64 processors is limited to providing one additional thread per core, SMT on IBM POWER hardware can provide 4-way and even 8-way SMT for some processor models. With Linux 6.6 the /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control interface is being extended to allow greater control over managing partial SMT states in cases of the CPUs supporting more than 2-way SMT at Linux run-time...
After six years as serving as the XFS file-system maintainer, Darrick Wong announced he'll be stepping down from this role and that really multiple developers need to step up to maintain XFS and help with testing and other responsibilities...
Intel has published their latest quarterly update to the Intel Media Driver open-source VA-API implementation as well as to their oneVPL video processing layer library...
Canonical has aimed to ship Linux kernel stable release updates (SRU) for Ubuntu releases on a three week cycle. That has worked out well overall but has led to delays at times in getting down CVE security fixes and other urgent customer requests. Moving forward Canonical is aiming for a new "4/2" week cycle for kernel SRUs...
Linux's cpupower utility lives within the Linux kernel source tree for reading and tuning various CPU power settings rather than poking at sysfs files directly or other means of adjusting your processor power-related tunables. With the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel cycle the cpupower utility is adding support for adjusting new AMD P-State driver features...
The "v1" patches were posted today for a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver to be used for display purposes with the StarFive JH7110, a low-cost RISC-V SoC found in the VisionFive boards, PINE64 Star64, and other low-cost RISC-V single board computers...
Since last year Intel Linux engineers have been busy working on FRED support for the Flexible Return and Event Delivery specification that will be found with future-generation processors. FRED overhauls how CPU transitions are handled between privilege levels and a design goal of lowering transition latencies and allow for more robust software use-cases...
Over the past month on Phoronix were 223 original news articles along with 17 multi-page featured articles / Linux hardware reviews, all written by your's truly. When it came to the hardware testing in July, AMD processor tests easily dominated from the Ryzen Z1 Extreme within the new ASUS ROG Ally over to the AMD EPYC Genoa-X and Bergamo server processors to close out the month...
Back in March Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal finally released for this community-developed smartphone/tablet OS that finally migrated from an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS base to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. This past weekend Ubuntu Touch OTA-2 Focal was released as the first update this lineage of being based off the newer Ubuntu Long-Term Support state...
Intel today released Embree 4.2 as the newest feature update to this open-source and high performance ray-tracing library. While Embree has long offered fast CPU-based ray-tracing support, Embree 4.0 introduced GPU acceleration via SYCL. With the Embree 4.2 release, the GPU SYCL support is no longer being treated as beta...
Following the release this weekend of GNU Binutils 2.41, another important GNU software project just issued their latest update: the GNU C Library 2.38...
With the upcoming Intel Meteor Lake processors is the introduction of the Versatile Processing Unit "VPU" IP block for computer vision and deep learning use-cases to provide better performance. Earlier this year with Linux 6.3 the iVPU driver was merged. Meteor Lake processors haven't even officially launched yet while already Intel's open-source engineers have begun enabling the next-gen VPU to be found with Lunar Lake processors...
One of the latest feature additions for next quarter's Mesa 23.3 release of these open-source user-space graphics driver components is adding support for the EGL explicit device extension...
Qualcomm engineers have begun rolling out a new open-source V4L2/media driver for a new Qualcomm "Iris" video accelerator hardware for video encode and decode on Qualcomm SoCs...
Alpine Linux remains one of the most popular lightweight Linux distributions built atop musl libc and Busybox. Alpine Linux has found significant use within containers and the embedded space while now sadly the most prolific maintainer of packages for the Linux distribution has decided to step down from her roles...
Linux creator Linus Torvalds is growing frustrated with AMD fTPM hardware random number generator bugs on recent Ryzen systems plaguing the kernel and has expressed a desire in disabling its use...
RISC-V is now an official Debian architecture for the Debian 13 "Trixie" release to happen in about two years time. Over the weekend a brief status update was issued surrounding this newest CPU architecture to be supported by the Debian GNU/Linux team. Arguably most interesting is how they are currently building out the Debian RISC-V packages...
Just in time for the next monthly ISOs of Arch Linux, Archinstall 2.6 has been released as the latest feature update for this easy-to-use, text-based Arch Linux distribution installer...
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