Phoronix

A patch on its way to the mainline Linux kernel tunes Alder Lake N and Raptor Lake P mobile processors to have slightly lower power consumption out-of-the-box to help with battery life and thermal characteristics...

Stemming from the recent discussion of Intel's open-source Linux driver for Arc Graphics not yet running on POWER, another rather interesting support caveat was also raised. It turns out updating the GSC firmware for Arc Graphics hardware currently requires the Intel Management Engine (ME) functionality, which basically limits the graphics card firmware updating in turn to systems with Intel CPUs...

While Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" will finally see its formal launch in January as recently revealed by Intel, it will then be succeeded down the road by Emerald Rapids. Succeeding Emerald Rapids will then be Granite Rapids to which there is now an initial GCC compiler enablement patch posted. Granite Rapids won't be out until at least well into 2024 while fortunately they have already begun their compiler enablement work to ensure that new CPU instructions and other capabilities are in place well ahead of launch...

BOLT as the Facebook/Meta-developed tech for optimizing binaries in the name of greater performance by optimizing the code layout was merged to mainline LLVM at the start of the year. Now as we approach the end of the year BOLT is getting a bit of a promotion with being flipped on by default for Linux x86_64 and AArch64 test releases...

Microsoft has issued a big update to their in-house Linux distribution, CBL-Mariner, with a few new packages introduced as well as various updates to existing packages and other OS modifications...

As was expected, AMD's Lisa Su just announced the Radeon RX 7000 series "RDNA3" graphics cards. AMD continues to back their graphics processors by fully open-source Linux driver support and Linux benchmarks will come on Phoronix for launch. Here are the initial details on the announced Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards.

With CPU core counts continuing to rise, we've seen various optimization efforts in recent times to help with the boot speed of getting large servers online. One of the latest discoveries can trim down the boot speed by up to 30 seconds for some large servers and what appears to be a next-generation AMD EPYC "Genoa" platform...

Next week already marks ten years since Valve made public their Steam on Linux beta builds while today Google has advanced Steam on ChromeOS / Chromebooks to beta. Back in March Google formally announced Steam for Chrome OS and began with alpha support for select devices. Today that support has reached beta with new device support, new features, and other improvements...

A set of patches were posted on Wednesdasy for "blksnap", a proposed kernel driver to allow creating non-persistent snapshots of arbitrary kernel block devices. Among the possible uses with blksnap would be for creating backups at the block storage device level...

Vulkan 1.3.233 is out as the latest weekly spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API. With Vulkan 1.3.233 comes three new NVIDIA-developed vendor extensions...

Back in September was a proposal to promote Rust's UEFI firmware targets to tier-2. With the current tier-3 designation the Rust UEFI targets they currently lack continuous integration (CI) guarantees and official builds in the Rust release channels, which means users wanting to use Rust for targeting the UEFI binaries need to rely on nightly/unstable compiler builds...

Making good progress this year has been the open-source FEX-Emu emulator for running x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on 64-bit Arm (AArch64). This isn't only for running Linux x86_64 applications on Arm but with Steam and Steam Play (Proton) can mean running Windows games on Linux 64-bit Arm. With FEX 2211 out today more progress has been made on the Proton front for getting more modern games running...

Besides open-source drivers being loved by Linux enthusiasts for the greater technical clarity/insight, better security with the ability to verify the driver's behavior, and better durability of the driver over the longer-term, another common open-source driver benefit is being able to get the drivers working on other CPU architectures not otherwise a focus by the upstream hardware vendor. With Intel's open-source graphics driver stack for Arc Graphics and also in the data center with the Data Center GPU Flex Series and forthcoming Ponte Vecchio, it's drawn interest from ARM, RISC-V, and POWER folks. Unfortunately at least in the case of the POWER9 hardware, the current Intel Linux graphics driver isn't yet building properly there...

The latest patches from Microsoft for the Linux kernel are for extending the kernel's support to allow running on a nested Microsoft (MSHV) hypervisor...

Since last year have been patches enabling the Raspberry Pi to output at 4K with a 60Hz refresh rate. But since Linux 5.18 at least some of the 4K handling had regressed for this budget Arm single board computer. With the Linux 6.2 cycle in December there are several 4K related improvements to the Raspberry Pi open-source display driver for addressing that prior regression as well as making the 4K monitor handling more robust...

One of the last features to land in Mesa 22.3 prior to yesterday's branching and Mesa 22.3-rc1 release is enabling the Mesa shader disk cache for Panfrost, the Arm Mali open-source driver for Midgard and Bifrost generations...

Feature work on Mesa 22.3 has now concluded as this quarter's feature release to this collection of open-source OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan drivers. Mesa 22.3 was branched this afternoon and Mesa 22.3-rc1 now issued as the first weekly test release leading up to the stable debut in a few weeks...

Ahead of AMD's RDNA3 announcement for tomorrow, 3 November, the Mesa 22.3 open-source Radeon graphics driver code continues seeing more RDNA3/GFX11 enablement work landing...

While initially leary of AMD Zen 4's "double pumped" approach for supporting AVX-512 using a 256-bit data path, it's proven to be very efficient for performance and yield great results without negative clock impairments or wreaking havoc on the power consumption. Back in September I delivered a detailed AVX-512 performance analysis on the Ryzen 9 7950X while in this article is a detailed benchmark look at the Core i9 11900K against the Ryzen 7 7700X. The Core i9 11900K being the currently last Intel desktop CPU officially supporting AVX-512 while the Ryzen 7 7700X was used for matching the core/thread count of that Rocket Lake processor for this AVX-512 on/off comparison.

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver that provides reverse-engineered, open-source OpenGL support for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs is now capable of OpenGL 4.5 with the Adreno 600 series graphics processors...

Merged this morning into Mesa 22.3 are some adjustments to Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for delivering better Vulkan mesh shading performance with Arc Graphics hardware...

It looks like FineIBT as combining the best of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology and Control Flow Integrity as an enhanced, alternative control flow integrity (CFI) implementation could be ready for mainline with the upcoming Linux 6.2 cycle...

JEDEC recently outlined an extension to Universal Flash Storage (UFS) for File-Based Optimizations (FBO) to enhance the performance of UFS devices. A Xiaomi engineer sent out a set of Linux kernel patches for implementing UFS FBO in the name of better performance, but with almost immediate rejection by a veteran Linux kernel maintainer...

With the start of the new month comes updated Steam Survey numbers from Valve for the preceding month. Thanks to the continued growth of the Steam Deck and Valve continuing to ramp up their production, Steam on Linux enjoyed another tick up for October...

The Godot open-source game engine had been part of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) as many open-source projects utilize for handling fiscal sponsorship duties and the like while now the Godot Foundation has been established as its own legal entity...

Going back to late last year Intel began working on a new Linux driver for "Software Defined Silicon" as a means of activating licensed hardware features akin to what they tried a decade ago with the "Intel Upgrade Service" for unlocking extra CPU features. The SDSi driver was merged in Linux 5.18 while this afternoon they sent out a rather sizable update to this controversial driver / hardware feature...

It's been 3+ years that the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been working on NGG Stream-Out support for making use of the Next-Gen Geometry engine that is in workable shape for some RDNA GPUs. Finally with Mesa 22.3 releasing this quarter, a new environment variable option is allowing the NGG Streamout / Transform Feedback functionality to be flipped on with the RADV driver...

Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) is still being eyed for enabling as part of the default Linux x86_64 kernel configurations to provide better out-of-the-box security on supported processors. A patch sent out today continues the upstream discussion over flipping on this feature by default that is part of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) for helping to defend against jump/call oriented programming attacks...

Two high severity security vulnerabilities affecting OpenSSL were made public today, which were the issues that led to Fedora 37 being delayed to mid-November to allow the release images have mitigated OpenSSL packages...

SuperTuxKart 1.4 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source kart racing game originally inspired by Mario Kart...

Clément Lefèbvre has published the latest monthly status report for the Linux Mint distribution that is the popular desktop Linux distribution based on Ubuntu Linux...

Landing in "net-next" on Monday is wired networking support for the MotorComm YT8521 Ethernet Gigabit PHY. This network ASIC may not ring a bell for most folks, but is used so far by one notable RISC-V development board...

With the fifteen Linux hardware reviews and 245 original open-source/Linux news stories written by your's truly last month, here is a look back at what was exciting Phoronix readers the most from Google's new KataOS to the release of the speedy Python 3.11, Linux 6.1 taking shaping, and Intel releasing Arc Graphics A750 and A770 graphics cards...

Adding to the long list of Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver improvements coming with Mesa 22.3 this quarter is now a working Mesa front-end shader caching implementation...

OBS Studio as the leading open-source and cross-platform screencasting/streaming app that is popular with gamers and YouTubers is now out with version 28.1...

Wine 7.20 was released today as a rare Monday debut for this newest bi-weekly development snapshot. Wine continues inching close to its release candidate / feature freeze period for the Wine 8.0 release in early 2023...

Systemd developers are celebrating Halloween by releasing systemd 252...

Following last week's start of the i915 DRM-Next changes intended for Linux 6.2, an initial batch of drm-intel-gt-next feature patches have now also been mailed in to DRM-Next for staging ahead of that next Linux kernel cycle. Notable with today's pull request is a lot of DG2/Alchemist improvements...

Last week I looked at the Intel Core i9 13900K performance under Linux while today the focus is on the Core i5 13600K. The Core i5 13600K is a 14-core / 20-thread processor (6 P cores + 8 E cores), up from 6 P cores + 4 E cores with the prior generation Core i5 12600K. The Core i5 13600K has a recommended customer price of $319~329, which is indeed being honored among Internet retailers and with robust availability. Here is an initial look at how the Core i5 13600K "Raptor Lake" is running under Ubuntu Linux.

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been enjoying many performance optimizations and other improvements in recent months around its ray-tracing capabilities. Merged today is another significant optimization to better the Radeon Vulkan ray-tracing support and coming days ahead of AMD's RDNA3 announcement...

As part of Intel's compiler enablement work for Sierra Forest and Grand Ridge CPUs, support for x86_64 AVX-NE-CONVERT is the latest feature being merged into GCC Git in time for GCC 13...

GNU Make 4.4 is now available as the first major release in more than two and a half years. GNU Make 4.4 has many improvements to this important build automation tool that is still widely used by countless free software projects...

Following yesterday's article about Google Chrome preparing to deprecate the JPEG-XL image format, a Google engineer has now provided their reasons for dropping this next-generation image format...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.1-rc3 as the third weekly test release of the in-development Linux 6.1 kernel...

While Intel contributed oneVPL support to FFmpeg this summer that can be used for video encoding/decoding to AV1 and other formats, this past week Intel engineers contributed an AV1 encode Quick Sync Video (QSV) encoder too for FFmpeg. This AV1 encode path using their Media SDK with QSV is ultimately building atop oneVPL...

Sigstore that is backed by Google, Red Hat, GitHub, and other prominent organizations with an aim to secure the open-source software supply chain has reached general availability and issued the "v1.0" releases for their key software components...

For those interested in the OneXPlayer handheld gaming consoles, a x86 platform driver for the Linux kernel has been posted for getting working sensor support on the AMD-powered OneXPlayer Mini...

Back in Linux 5.19 the initial code for Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) was merged while still an ongoing matter is getting the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) integration merged that is now up to its tenth revision and spans 108 patches...

Back in late 2020 FreeBSD initially landed WireGuard support ahead of FreeBSD 13. But then during the FreeBSD 13 release candidate phase, the WireGuard driver was removed over concerns over the quality of the initial implementation...

JPEG-XL has been looked on rather favorably as a royalty-free, next-generation lossy/lossless image format with much better performance than JPEG. To much surprise, Google Chrome is already making preparations to deprecate JPEG-XL image support in their browser...