Phoronix

Last month AMD Linux engineers posted patches for a 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver for Linux that allows the user to communicate their cache vs. frequency preference depending upon workload and for the 3D V-Cache processors where some CCDs have the larger cache but not all. That driver is now ready for appearing in the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel...

A patch queued yesterday ino the Linux power management subsystem's "linux-next" branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.13 merge window will tune Intel Xeon Granite Rapids processors for better performance out-of-the-box...

Linux 6.10 introduced TPM bus encryption and integrity protection for enhancing the Trusted Platform Module support to protect against interposers from compromising them with TPM sniffing attacks. There is now a new option being added to opt-out of this protection due to a discovered performance bottleneck...

The newest Linux driver being developed by Intel is for the Touch Host Controller (THC) as a new high performance input tech for enhancing touch screen, touch pad, and stylus input handling...

Ahead of the expected final Linux 6.12 stable kernel release this weekend, a last round of Bcachefs file-system fixes were submitted today for this next kernel version...

AMD today went public with details on the "AMD Next-Gen Fortran Compiler" as a new Fortran compiler they are working on based on LLVM's Flang...

Last week Mesa 24.3 was finally branched and Mesa 24.3-rc1 subsequently issued for getting the release process kicked off for this quarterly 3D graphics driver feature release. Out today is Mesa 24.3-rc2 with an initial batch of fixes...

Apple last week released their latest iMac, Mac Mini, and MacBook Pro products powered by their fourth-generation M-series Apple Silicon. The new Mac Mini in particular is interesting for under $600 starting out with the all re-designed Mac Mini with 10-core M4 and now the base model having 16GB of memory. It will take some time before there is any reasonable Linux support on the M4 hardware with Asahi Linux, but for those curious about how the M4 Mac Mini with macOS compares to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core CPUs under Linux, here are some preliminary benchmarks.

Canonical's Interim Engineering Director for Ubuntu Desktop, Oliver Smith, has shared some early roadmap plans for the Ubuntu 25.04 development cycle...

Framework Computer has been promoting a RISC-V motherboard option for their Framework Laptop 13 to complement their existing Intel Core and AMD Ryzen motherboard options. This RISC-V motherboard is being developed in cooperation with DeepComputing. Early access pricing and more details on this quad-core StarFive JH7110 powered mainboard for the Framework 13 have now been announced...

Back in Linux 6.11 support for getrandom() in the vDSO was upstreamed for much better performance in providing speedy yet secure random number generation (RNG) needs. Since Linux 6.11 getrandom in the vDSO has expanded to more CPU architectures and now there's a notable user-space user ready to go: the GNU C Library "glibc" support was merged...

The Intel In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA) found in various Xeon SKUs since Sapphire Rapids can be of big benefit to Linux servers/workstations with a Linux kernel patch series that has been in the works to provide Zswap IAA compress batching...

The NVIDIA MLX5 driver for NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-5 network adapters is preparing to introduce a new Data Direct Placement "DDP" feature with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel merge window...

As covered last week Linux I/O expert Jens Axboe has been taking a fresh pursuit of uncached buffered I/O for Linux. This "RWF_UNCACHED" work was originally started back in 2019 while a renewed effort around it is showing ~65% faster read/write performance and so far has been extended to work across EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS file-systems...

The AlmaLinux operating system project that was started from the fallout of the RHEL/CentOS development shift several years ago has once again courted AMD as a sponsorship of this community enterprise Linux operating system...

Xcompmgr 1.1.10 was released yesterday as the newest update to this basic X11 compositor providing "eye candy" effects for classic X.Org usage...

The "intel_idle" driver provides CPU idle time management for Intel processors on Linux for helping to put the processor into low-power states in conjunction with the MWAIT instruction. With the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel, the Granite Rapids D support for the Intel Idle driver is set to be merged...

It's the second Tuesday of the month and this Patch Tuesday brings new CPU microcode for mitigating the latest Intel processor security vulnerabilities and updates to some previously disclosed issues...

One of the many changes to look forward to with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle is the AMD P-State driver to be used by default with the new EPYC 9005 series processors. While AMD Ryzen CPUs for a while now have been defaulting to the modern AMD P-State driver that makes use of ACPI CPPC platform support for allowing better power efficiency, AMD EPYC CPUs have kept to using the generic ACPI CPUFreq frequency scaling driver. But now AMD engineers have deemed amd_pstate ready for use with EPYC 9005 "Turin" CPUs and will be the default choice moving forward. Here is more information and power/performance benchmarks for this shift while testing using the EPYC 9755 processors.

Merged today to GNOME's Mutter compositor is improved logic for selecting the graphics processor to treat as the primary one within multi-GPU laptops...

Red Hat announced today they have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Neural Magic, an AI software company behind the likes of DeepSparse and nm-vllm...

As part of the transition to eventually drop the long dormant Clover OpenCL state tracker from Mesa's Gallium3D codebase in favor of the modern OpenCL Rusticl Rust-written driver, Mesa 25.0 has ended Clover support for NIR-based drivers...

Yesterday brought the eighth and ninth iteration of the AMD XDNA Linux kernel driver posted for review for enabling the Ryzen AI branded NPUs found in their recent SoCs...

Red Hat in cooperation with Intel, Bloomberg and IBM has been developing the Climatik open-source project as a means of power capping AI use within the data center for better energy efficiency and sustainability...

Merged today for the upcoming GCC 15 stable release is a new "X86_TUNE_AVX512_TWO_EPILOGUES" tuning optimization that is enabled by default for AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors...

DXVK 2.5 was just released as the newest version of this open-source project implementing Direct3D APIs atop the Vulkan API for better handling of Windows games on Linux systems as used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) software...

Memtest86+ 7.0 debuted back in January while now as we approach the end of 2024, Memtest86+ 7.20 is now available as the latest significant update to this open-source memory tester commonly used on Intel and AMD systems...

The latest terminology within the Fedora camp causing concern is "karma" that's long been used for conveying feedback around package updates with their Bodhi software used for gating Fedora Linux package updates...

Microsoft last month announced the open-source Rust-written OpenHCL for running confidential Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP virtual machines. Today Microsoft is announcing another interesting open-source, Rust-based project in the virtualization space: Hyperlight. Microsoft's Hyperlight project is an embed-friendly, lightweight VMM for use within Linux and Windows applications...

While not as exciting as if it were Apple M3/M4 device support hitting the upstream mainline Linux kernel, but for those with some older Apple (pre-M1) devices around, support for a number of older SoCs and boards is set to arrive with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel...

As another effort for boosting the energy efficiency and behavior of Intel Core platforms with a mix of energy efficient "E" and performance "P" cores, a set of patches were posted Friday night for adapting Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) to the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver with a focus on providing better energy efficient performance initially for Lunar Lake SoCs...

Set to be merged during the upcoming Linux 6.13 merge window is support with the Rust programming language infrastructure for allowing in-place kernel modules...

The Intel Diamond Rapids target has been merged in time for the upcoming GCC 15 compiler release to allow for "-march=diamondrapids" targeting for leveraging the array of new CPU ISA additions found with these next-gen Xeon processors...

The Rust-written Servo browser web layout engine project is out with its October 2024 status update that provides insight to their development activities the past several weeks...

PHPStan 2.0 is out today as what is the best open-source static analyzer for the PHP programming language...

Linus Torvalds just christened the Linux 6.12-rc7 kernel today for what will hopefully be the last release candidate before declaring Linux 6.12 stable next week Sunday...

The Arch Linux based CachyOS Linux distribution has issued its November 2024 media refresh. Notable this time are pulling a few performance-related patches into its kernel build...

A set of Linux kernel patches posted on Friday by Meta/Facebook provide for sizable performance optimizations for applications leveraging /proc/kcore such as for debuggers...

Debcow is an experimental implementation of deploying Debian packages on copy-on-write file-systems like Btrfs and Bcachefs. Debcow adapts DPKG to use reflinks for installing packages. With reflinking to the file contents from the Debian package archives rather than copying of files, it can lead to a dramatic speed-up of installing Debian packages: as much as 6x faster on CoW file-systems...

A patch is pending for enabling support for the USB-C model of Apple's latest Magic Trackpad input device under Linux...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 9.21, Wine-Staging 9.21 is available as this experimental blend of Wine that carries extra patches for testing/evaluation to enhance the ability for Windows games and apps to run on Linux...

If this weekend's release of Hyprland 0.45 doesn't suit your fancy, Niri is also out this weekend with a new feature release. Niri is the scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor for an interesting Linux desktop experience...

Debian 12.8 is out today as the latest media refresh for the "Bookworm" release with numerous security fixes along with other general bug fixes included as part of the assortment of package updates...

Hyprland 0.45 released today as the newest version of this Wayland compositor focused on being an independent, very customizable, and dynamic tiling compositor...

Longtime NVIDIA Linux engineer Aaron Plattner shared a status update on Friday around the current feature parity difference between the NVIDIA driver stack on X11 and under (X)Wayland...

Friday saw a final round of "drm-misc-next" feature updates ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel merge window. The DRM Panic code continues to be enhanced for improving this "Blue Screen of Death" like experience on the Linux desktop...

A set of Friday night patches provide for some exciting context switching optimizations to the Linux kernel...

Microsoft overnight released the newest version of their Azure Linux 3.0 in-house Linux distribution that is used by a variety of internal services at the company as well as external customers...

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

The belated first release candidate of Mesa 24.3 is now available for testing of the upgraded OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers commonly used on Linux systems and elsewhere...