Phoronix

Back in May Steam on Linux usage crossed the 2% threshold and remained that way until August when it dropped back below 2% for all Steam gamers. The September 2024 Steam Survey results were just published and point to another downward bump for Steam on Linux gaming...

Python 3.13 had been scheduled for release today with a new interactive interpreter, experimental free-threaded build mode to disable the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), an experimental JIT, and other shiny new features. But a performance regression has delayed the Python 3.13 release to next week and in turn an unexpected Python 3.13-rc3 final test release...

Intel is preparing a new staging feature for better handling of CPU microcode updates. Initial patches for the Linux kernel are out for discussion in enabling this feature that can yield around a 40% reduction in latency during the CPU microcode updating process...

Taking place last week in Paris was the annual Kernel Recipes conference devoted to a variety of Linux topics and sponsored by Meta, Dell, Arm, AMD, and other organizations. The slides and videos from the different Linux/open-source talks are now online for those wanting to watch some interesting technical content...

One of the interesting highlights of September was finally having our hands on an AmpereOne server! After years of being eager to test Ampere Computing's next-generation AArch64 server processors, Ampere sent over their 192-core flagship server processor for a few weeks of testing. The review server was comprised of the AmpereOne A192-32X flagship model within a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR 2U server.

Building off last year's release of the EPYC 8004 "Siena" processors featuring up to sixty-four Zen 4C cores, AMD today announced the EPYC Embedded 8004 series...

Firefox 131 is out today with a few improvements worth mentioning for Mozilla's web browser...

For those making use of "reverse PRIME" setups where you have a primary NVIDIA discrete GPU while monitors are connected to Intel integrated graphics as the secondary GPU, such configurations should be working nicely with the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release under Wayland. This support is also likely to be back-ported for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS...

While the Linux 6.12 merge window only ended this weekend and won't be out until November, already code is beginning to accumulate for DRM-Next of graphics driver improvements targeting the Linux 6.13 cycle that in turn will be the first major Linux kernel release of 2025. A nice improvement is on the way for the Raspberry Pi graphics driver...

Igalia open-source developer Carlos Garcia Campos has written a new blog post to outline recent graphics improvements found in WebKitGTK 2.46 and WPEWebKit 2.46. Most notable with the new stable release is using the Skia library rather than Cairo as the 2D graphics renderer. There are also other graphics improvements and more enhancements to come...

During the month of September on Phoronix there were 265 original news articles and 16 Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles. Here's a look back at the most exciting content for September...

Open-source developer Zeeshan Ali Khan presented at last week's systemd "All Systems Go" developer conference on busd as a new D-Bus broker written in the Rust programming language...

The Linux Mint project has published their status update for September 2024 that outlines work on this desktop-focused, Ubuntu-derived Linux distribution as well as its in-house Cinnamon desktop environment...

An open-source developer at AMD has carried out a DOOM port that runs almost entirely atop AMD GPUs for rendering and the game logic. This DOOM GPU port relies on the AMD ROCm library with the LLVM libc C library for offloading the classic DOOM to the AMD GPU...

While I have been very eager to test out the Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake series on Linux in part due to the new Xe2 integrated graphics, after several days of pushing a new Lunar Lake laptop on Linux the results have been very disappointing. Besides needing a very leading-edge software stack to enjoy the Xe2 accelerated graphics out-of-the-box, the performance currently is poor. It's a fraction of the Windows performance and currently falls behind the Meteor Lake graphics performance and in turn also being well behind the AMD RDNA3.5 competition with the Ryzen AI 300 series laptops.

The newly-merged sched_ext allows for the Linux kernel scheduler to be made more extensible by allowing BPF programs to be loaded to affect the kernel's scheduling behavior. There's now a similar take on CPU frequency scaling: cpufreq_ext. There's a "request for comments" patch series on cpufreq_ext for making extensible CPU frequency scaling algorithm adaptations with BPF...

With the third quarter drawing to a close, here's a look back at the most popular Linux/open-source related content for the quarter. This quarter there's been more than 730 news articles and 50 Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles all written by your's truly covering a range of areas...

FFmpeg 7.1 is out today as the newest update to this widely-used open-source multimedia library. With FFmpeg 7.1 the VVC video decoder has been promoted to stable, there are a number of Vulkan Video improvements, and an assortment of other exciting enhancements...

Open-source developer Simon Ser has released Sway 1.10-rc1 as the newest feature release to this i3-inspired Wayland compositor. With Sway 1.10 there are many new features coming...

AMD today released AMDVLK 2024.Q3.3 as their latest open-source Vulkan API driver for Linux systems prior to ending the quarter...

As expected the Linux 6.12-rc1 kernel is out today in marking the end of the very exciting two-week Linux 6.12 merge window that saw many high profile features land...

The Linux 6.12 merge window is wrapping up today with the release of Linux 6.12-rc1 in the coming hours. This is going to be a heck of an exciting kernel. There's real-time PREEMPT_RT finally in mainline, the much anticipated sched_ext code also was merged, QR codes for DRM panic messages, initial out-of-the-box support for Intel Xe2 graphics with Lunar Lake and Battlemage, initial Raspberry Pi 5 support, and a ton of other hardware support additions and new innovative kernel software features.

The Arch Linux based CachyOS operating system that is known for pursuing aggressive performance while still delivering a nice Linux desktop experience is out with its September 2024 release...

The x86 platform driver changes that were merged last week for the Linux 6.12 kernel continue to be quite lively with changes for enhancing Linux laptop support along with other Intel platform improvements...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates for Linux 6.12 added some new drivers as well as adding new device support to some of the existing drivers...

Submitted today as the "x86 fixes" for the Linux kernel ahead of the Linux 6.12-rc1 release this evening is adding two new Intel CPU model numbers...

Taking place this week in Berlin was systemd's annual "All Systems Go" developer conference. Among the interesting talks was Lennart Poettering talking about the ongoing challenges of D-Bus for inter-process communication (IPC) with systemd and how they are looking at Varlink for IPC needs moving forward...

The KVM x86/x86_64 changes were merged today as we are nearly done with the Linux 6.12 merge window...

Following AMD and FreeBSD Foundation collaborations and the Sovereign Tech Fund making a big investment into FreeBSD, the FreeBSD Foundation and Quantum Leap Research have announced a $750,000 USD commitment to improve laptop support on this BSD operating system with backing by Dell, AMD, and Framework Computer...

File-systems in user-space continue to become more robust with the latest FUSE updates merged for Linux 6.12...

It's been a busy week for Valve Linux graphics software engineer Mike Blumenkrantz. Besides hacking on Mesa's Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation, this week his latest target was working to help accelerate the pace of Wayland protocol development. He's been working through a few proposals like addressing NACK usage for how Wayland protocols can be rejected and in ending out the week he has drafted some additional workflow improvements...

The LoongArch architecture support for these Chinese processors continue seeing better support with the upstream Linux kernel...

Ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window wrapping up this weekend with the Linux 6.12-rc1 release, merged on Friday were all of the Compute Express Link (CXL) updates for the new kernel...

KDE developers remain very busy landing bug and crash fixes ahead of the upcoming Plasma 6.2 desktop release...

Valve's SteamOS is built atop Arch Linux and now the company is further helping the upstream Linux distribution by collaborating with resources to help with build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave...

If you wanted to get in on the last Phoronix Premium promotion before the end-of-year holidays, this is your last chance to do so with the "Oktoberfest" sale ending this weekend for helping to support the site while enjoying ad-free browsing, native dark mode, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits...

It's been just one week since the release of ROCm 6.2.1 while today ROCm 6.2.2 was released...

The input subsystem updates merged this week bring a number of improvements to existing drivers while adding one new input driver...

AMD today announced "AMD-135M" as their first small language model they are publicly releasing. AMD-135M is open-source with the training code, dataset, and weights all being open-source to help in the development of other SLMs and LLMs...

With the Linux 6.12 merge window wrapping up this weekend and the bulk of the new feature merges now in the tree, I've begun running some Linux 6.12 benchmarks. Here is an initial look at Linux 6.10 vs. 6.11 vs. 6.12 Git on an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X desktop...

Similar to the ACPI CPUFreq and AMD/Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver and scaling governor benchmarks and power efficiency comparisons I routinely do on Phoronix, when recently having the Supermicro AmpereOne server in the lab with the 192-core A192-32X processor, I carried out some CPPC CPUFreq schedutil vs. performance governor benchmarks for curiosity and reference purposes while looking at the performance and power efficiency...

Intel software engineers have released version 0.7 of Open PGL, their open-source Path Guiding Library (PGL) that can be used by 3D renderers to enjoy state-of-the-art path guiding methods for better sampling quality and efficiency...

Apache CouchDB 3.4.1 was released today after the developers decided at the last minute before releasing CouchDB 3.4 to drop automatic upgrading of password hashes... Thus CouchDB 3.4.1 is out as the big "CouchDB 3.4" release. The CouchDB 3.4 series brings a number of performance improvements, QuickJS as an alternative to the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine, and other enhancements...

Patches for wiring up async device shutdown within the Linux kernel were queued via the driver core branch for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel. However, at the last minute these asynchronous device shutdown patches were reverted so that they can be reworked and hopefully land for the Linux v6.13 kernel in the new year...

Sound Open Firmware 2.11 is now available for this open-source audio DSP firmware infrastructure and SDK project backed by Intel, AMD, and other IHVs/ISVs. With SOF 2.11 comes support for new hardware from both AMD and Intel...

The upstream Linux 6.11 kernel introduced the ability to easily produce a Pacman kernel package for Arch Linux with the new "make pacman-pkg" target. With Linux 6.12 new additions to the Kbuild code make it easy to also produce a debug kernel build for Arch Linux systems...

As part of his new hope for helping to accelerate Wayland protocol development, Mike Blumenkrantz with Valve proposed an "experimental" protocol development area within Wayland-Protocols. He's also laid out a proposal for seeking to solidify the means by which suggested protocol changes can be rejected...

BusyBox 1.37 has been released as the first feature release in one and a half years for this "Swiss Army Knife of embedded Linux" systems. With BusyBox 1.37 comes some new options, many fixes, and other enhancements...

There's been much speculation since this morning over a reported "severe" unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) flaw affecting Linux systems that carries a CVSS 9.9.9 score... The embargo has now lifted with the details on this nasty issue...

Earlier this week in the launch-day Intel Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids review/benchmarks I unfortunately wasn't able to provide any CPU power consumption and performance-per-Watt benchmarks due a Linux kernel issue and the minimal time ahead of launch for testing. I've now repeated the Xeon 6980P benchmarking on the Linux 6.8 kernel of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with power monitoring working and have those power efficiency numbers to share today for how Granite Rapids compares to prior Emerald Rapids / Sapphire Rapids / Ice Lake and against the current AMD EPYC Bergamo/Genoa(X) competition.