Phoronix

The 64-bit Arm (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture changes were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.1 merge window...

Released last month was LLVM/Clang 15 and since then a number of Phoronix readers have been inquiring about Clang 15 compiler benchmarks or there the lack of on Phoronix. I've been testing various Intel and AMD systems with Clang 15, but it hasn't been particularly exciting -- but that's not a bad thing, just that it doesn't make for particularly compelling benchmark articles...

Mesa's Zink driver implementing the OpenGL API atop Vulkan continues advancing at a rapid pace and today the latest major addition landed: async pipeline precompiles...

In addition to MGLRU and Maple Tree having been merged overnight, Linus Torvalds also picked up the x86/mm changes for Linux 6.1 that will now by default warn about W+X mappings...

Last week Valve launched their much anticipated Steam Deck Docking Station as the official "dock" for the Steam Deck to allow connecting up to two external displays, power, additional USB ports, and Gigabit Ethernet. I've been testing out the Steam Deck Docking Station and it's been working out well but on the pricier side compared to alternatives.

The KDE community has just published Plasma 5.26 as the newest update to this open-source desktop environment and as the end of Plasma 5 feature development quickly approaches...

While 2023 is quickly approaching and the Modula-2 programming language has since been succeeded by the Modula-3 and Oberon languages since the late 80's, GNU Modula-2 continues to be worked on as a front-end to the GNU Compiler Collection for this structured, procedural programming language...

For more than a year AMD engineers have been working on IOMMU v2 page table support and with the in-development Linux 6.1 kernel the initial patches are finally being merged...

The latest daily development builds of the Blender 3D modelling software have enabled native support for Wayland. If all goes well, the Blender 3.4 release coming up will ship with this native Wayland support for Linux...

MGLRU has successfully landed in Linux 6.1 as one of the best kernel innovations of the year to be mainlined. Along with that the new Maple Tree data structure was also merged...

At last week's XDC 2022 conference, Google engineer Rob Clark presented on VirtGPU DRM Native Contexts and the potential there for much better performance - especially for gaming - within virtual machines than using API-level virtualization like with Virgl...

Back in 2019 the Linux kernel finally deprecated a.out support for that format superseded by ELF long ago. Since earlier this year kernel developers moved ahead with beginning to remove a.out support, including the old x86 a.out support. Now with Linux 6.1 some lingering remnants of a.out are being cleared away...

This should come as little surprise with the GeForce RTX 4090 series releasing this week as the first Ada Lovelace GPUs, but NVIDIA is releasing a new feature branch driver for Linux users...

It's been a long time since last having anything significant to report on for Oracle's VM VirtualBox software: VirtualBox 6.0 debuted in 2018 and VirtualBox 6.1 in 2019, but since has been rather quiet... But out today is now VirtualBox 7.0 with big features like support for full virtual machine encryption and a new Direct3D 11 based graphics stack, which for Linux use is now going through DXVK...

The "perf" kernel subsystem for Linux with the perf performance analyzing tool has picked up some new AMD processor capabilities for Linux 6.1...

The platform drivers x86 updates were merged a few days ago for the Linux 6.1 kernel. Most notable is the introduction of the AMD Platform Management Framework (PMF) while there are also a number of laptop driver updates too as part of this feature update...

For those wondering the difference using the aging ACPI CPUFreq driver or the newer AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling drivers make for modern Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" desktops, here are some CPUFreq/P-State driver tests using the Ryzen 9 7950X as well as testing the various governor options and looking at the impact on the CPU power consumption, peak frequency, and thermals too.

Over the weekend code began landing in mainline Coreboot for an AMD SoC codenamed Morgana -- another new codename -- as well as prepping for an AMD Glinda SoC too...

Following the recent HID driver updates for Linux 6.1, the other input subsystem driver updates for this new kernel version have been submitted. The input driver updates this cycle range from supporting the optional PinePhone keyboard to a driver enabling the IBM Operation Panel used by some IBM servers...

Wayland-Protocols 1.27 was released this morning by Jonas Ådahl in pushing out two new protocols under the staging umbrella...

A big chunk of new EFI feature code was merged for Linux 6.1...

Among the new applications becoming available with Ubuntu 22.10 "Kinetic Kudu" later this month is GNOME-Network-Displays for dealing with Miracast wireless displays...

In early September AMD announced their new P-State "EPP" driver for Linux systems to further evolve their P-State driver effort started last year. This P-State EPP driver effort is aiming for better performance and power control while this weekend they sent out the second iteration of these Linux kernel patches...

Erik Faye-Lund of Collabora raised an interesting discussion this past week at XDC 2022 about leveraging Zink for post-OpenGL graphics development. With Zink able to run "anywhere" and currently focused on existing OpenGL APIs atop Vulkan, Zink could be used as a vehicle for developing new OpenGL APIs or trying to evolve the API in its own right while being able to run atop Vulkan API drivers on Windows or Linux...

EROFS as the read-only Linux file-system started by Huawei originally for Android devices continues seeing new adoption, including in the area of container use-cases beyond the original Android focus...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has submitted the USB and Thunderbolt feature updates for the in-development Linux 6.1 kernel...

Andrew Morton this afternoon submitted his memory management "MM" related updates for the Linux 6.1 merge window. Most notable with this pull request is the inclusion of Multi-Gen LRU "MGLRU" and the Maple Tree kernel features...

With Qt 6 porting and KDE Frameworks 6 development continuing at full-speed, KDE developers are looking at Plasma 5.27 being the last feature release in the Plasma 5 series...

Taking place this week alongside the X.Org Developers Conference (XDC 2022) was WineConf as the annual gathering of Wine developers. CodeWeavers organized the co-hosted events in Minneapolis and during WineConf were two days of interesting talks for enjoying Windows games/applications on Linux and macOS...

Intel engineers have released libva 2.16 as the newest feature update to this open-source VA-API common library used for video acceleration by many drivers and multimedia applications...

The HID subsystem updates have been submitted for the ongoing linux 6.1 merge window of which there are several notable driver additions for bettering the hardware support on several fronts...

The OpenChrome DRM driver has been in development for over a decade for providing open-source display driver support for VIA's aging x86 chipsets. For years now OpenChrome development has been down to one developer left on the project, Kevin Brace, and months ago he hoped to get the driver finally merged into the Linux kernel. He still holds out on those ambitions but will first aim to get basic acceleration working with a stable user-space API/ABI before mainlining...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly development summary concerning all of the progress made to the open-source desktop over the past two weeks. This status update actually covers the past two weeks due to last weekend being preoccupied with the annual KDE Akademy developer conference...

Systemd 252-rc1 is out as the first test candidate ahead of this next big feature release for this dominant Linux init systemd. Systemd 252 has been working on a new "systemd-measure" tool and a wide variety of other changes...

Fwupd 1.8.6 is out today as the newest stable release of this open-source firmware updating tool most notably used by Linux systems but also supported on various BSDs and even Windows...

Intel on Thursday sent out the initial Linux kernel patches for supporting the LKGS instruction coming with future processors...

At the end of September when the review embargo lifted I looked at the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and 7950X for our launch-day Linux testing and that was then followed by the Ryzen 7 7700X Linux review. Since then I received the fourth and final Ryzen 7000 series desktop processor currently available: the AMD Ryzen 5 7600X. The Ryzen 5 7600X is currently AMD's most affordable Zen 4 processor at $299 USD and provides six cores / 12 threads and a boost clock up to 5.3GHz.

Red Hat's Karol Herbst has managed to get his Rust-based OpenCL implementation "Rusticl" running atop the Zink Gallium3D driver that in turn runs atop Vulkan drivers...

For the past nearly two years the CentOS Hyperscale effort has been working on adapting CentOS Stream to make it more applicable for use within large scale deployments like those at Twitter, Facebook/Meta, and other large companies. This week the special interest group published their latest quarterly report outlining their activities...

This shouldn't be particularly surprising but the in-development Linux 6.1 kernel will likely be this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel version...

The media subsystem updates for the Linux 6.1 kernel have landed with new drivers and promotions for some of the existing image/video drivers...

A change now merged for Linux 6.1 will attempt to print the CPU core where a segmentation fault happens. The hope by printing the CPU/core where a segmentation fault happens is that over time trends may materialize with this information potentially being useful for helping to spot faulty CPUs...

Valve has worked their way through the pre-orders and ramped up the production of the Steam Deck to the point that the reservation queue is over. You can now order your Steam Deck today in-stock and Valve has also made available the much anticipated Steam Deck Dock docking station...

The networking feature pull for the Linux 6.1 kernel brings 127k lines of new code and 50k lines of code removed as a rather hearty set of wired/wireless networking driver updates and core improvements this round...

One of the rather elusive items on the Linux desktop is High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support... There's been code in the works for years but across desktops and drivers, it's still a long-term effort getting HDR support on the Linux desktop. Even going back to 2016, with NVIDIA's cross-platform driver code the Linux desktop remained the bottleneck. There is at least some ongoing work to address this long-term issue with AMD this week presenting on the topic...

Merged last month into Mesa 22.3 was Rusticl as a Rust-written OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D that is beginning to work with the open-source Radeon Linux driver, the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver, and others. This is also the first Rust-written component within the Mesa code-base. Karol Herbst of Red Hat who has led Rusticl development presented this week in Minnesota on this promising cross-vendor OpenCL implementation that may also support SYCL in the future...

Last week at Intel's Innovation conference the Intel Developer Cloud "DevCloud" was announced, while on the AMD side there is already something similar: the AMD Cloud Platform. At the tail end of 2021, AMD announced the Accelerator Cloud as a way for trying out the latest EPYC CPUs and Instinct accelerators complete with a pre-configured ROCm compute software stack. The AMD Cloud Platform is a currently parallel effort to the Accelerator Cloud with the former intended more for developers while the latter is more customer-oriented. After trying out the AMD Cloud Platform, it's indeed an easy way to evaluate the latest AMD data center wares while having a easy-to-deploy, pre-configured software environment.

The Arm SoC and platform enablement pull requests were sent out this morning that provide the Linux 6.1 kernel with support for several new SoCs, various platforms including some newer smartphones, and other hardware support improvements...

There are patches that provide support for ZRAM to be able to handle multiple compression streams on a per-CPU basis. This kernel module for creating compressed block devices could be made more versatile with this proposed patch series...

In addition to the excitement of the Arc Graphics A750 and A770, Intel has unveiled oneVPL 2022.2 as the newest version of this open-source video processing library that is their flagship video decode/encode library and related video processing toolkit as part of oneAPI...