Phoronix

Following recent international travels, Linus Torvalds is back to his usual late Sunday Linux kernel release regiment. Linux 6.11-rc7 was released a few minutes ago as Linux 6.11 approaches the finish line...

While Windows gamers seem mixed over the AMD Ryzen 9000 series processors, for creator, scientific / HPC, code development, and many other technical computing areas I remain very impressed by the Ryzen 9000 (Zen 5) series desktop processors more than one month into constant testing with these Granite Ridge chips. One of the areas I hadn't explored until now but made me curious given the mixed messaging around gaming was how well workstation graphics workloads were performing with the new processors. For this brief weekend article is a look at the workstation graphics performance between the Ryzen 9 9950X and former Ryzen 9 7950X/7950X3D processors.

The work written about earlier this year on New Intel Linux Patches Continue Working To Improve Hybrid CPU Task Placement looks like it will be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle as the patches have now been queued into the power management subsystem's "-next" branch. This latest Intel Core hybrid handling work is particularly focused on hybrid P/E-core processors without SMT / Hyper Threading, such as found with the upcoming Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" processors...

OpenBMC as the Linux Foundation project backed by vendors like Intel / Microsoft / Google / Meta for an open-source BMC firmware stack continues to be a growing success. This alternative to long-used proprietary BMC software stacks continues to grow in popularity with AMD now using it on their reference motherboards and Supermicro being another notable user with some of their server platforms. Not entirely new but been meaning to write about it and NVIDIA talked more openly about it this week: NVIDIA is also a big supporter and user of OpenBMC for their high-end AI/HPC servers and BlueField DPU hardware...

While RISC-V processors don't need to worry about Meltdown and Spectre or have any other severe CPU vulnerabilities at the moment, with the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel the RISC-V code is set to enable the generic CPU vulnerabilities support...

Merged three years ago in Linux 5.12 was IDMAPPED mounts for new use-cases from containers to systemd-homed. IDMAPPED mounts allow for different mounts to expose the same file or directory with different ownership such as for sharing files between multiple users or multiple systems. With time all of the major Linux file-systems have seen support added for IDMAPPED mounts while for Linux 6.12 support is on the way for FUSE file-systems...

While KDE developers this weekend are busy attending Akademy 2024 as their annual developer conference taking place in Wurzburg, Germany, prior to that there were a few last minute features merged for the upcoming Plasma 6.2 desktop...

Building off yesterday's release of Wine 9.17 with its latest improvements for enjoying Windows games/apps on Linux, Hangover 9.17 is now out. Hangover as a reminder is the Wine-based effort for running Windows x86 applications under ARM64 Linux by leveraging Wine with emulators like QEMU, FEX, and Box64 for the cross CPU architecture handling...

While C tends to be the go-to launguage for microcontrollers, Raspberry Pi is promoting the prospects of using Rust on their RP2350 microcontroller...

The Slimbook crew shared on Twitter/X that they are showing off the new Slimbook 6 (Slimbook VI) laptop this weekend during the KDE Akademy conference taking place in the wonderful Wurzburg, Germany. This new Slimbook laptop features an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS SoC and of course uses the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment out-of-the-box...

Ahead of GNOME 47's imminent release, Matthias Clasen has released GTK 4.16 as the newest exciting update to this toolkit powering GNOME software. Notable with GTK 4.16 is the GSK renderer defaulting to its Vulkan back-end when running on Wayland...

We are just a week or two out from the start of the Linux 6.12 merge window and AMD has submitted a final round of feature updates to DRM-Next of kernel graphics driver changes they want to round out AMDGPU/AMDKFD for this next cycle...

Cairo 1.18.2 released this week nearly one year after Cairo 1.18's debut for this cross-platform 2D vector graphics library -- in turn that was the project's first stable release in five years. Cairo is important for the GTK toolkit, Mozilla's Gecko engine, and dozens of other software projects. With Cairo 1.18.2 there are many fixes that have accumulated over the past year for bettering this graphics library...

Wine 9.17 is out today as quite an exciting update for this open-source software that allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux systems and other platforms...

Intel has submitted more kernel graphics driver changes for the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle. Following the pull requests to DRM-Next last week to enable Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics and Battlemage by default, some more lingering feature patches were merged today. Most exciting with this last round of patches before Linux 6.12? Intel graphics card fan speed reporting is finally wired up for their Linux driver...

One of the security changes with AMD Zen 5 processors that I haven't seen AMD publicly mention at least not prominently is that the new cores are not vulnerable to Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO). Unlike Zen 4 and prior, under Linux I noticed that Zen 5 is no longer affected by the SRSO "INCEPTION" vulnerability. But of course there does remain other CPU security mitigations in place carried over from Zen 4. For those wondering about the mitigation costs or if it's worthwhile running Zen 5 with the "mitigations=off" insane mode, here are some benchmarks.

Back in 2022 were a set of patches that allowed compiling the ARM64 Linux kernel from Apple macOS hosts. The intent was for developers just wanting to do some build/smoke testing from under an Apple Silicon device running macOS to see at least any kernel changes are successfully compiling on macOS with its LLVM/Clang-based toolchain. An updated form of those patches were posted today for review...

With this week's announcement of the Intel Core Ultra 200V Series "Lunar Lake" processors, I've been very eager to try out the Meteor Lake successor for Linux testing. As sadly is usually the case, for delivering Linux support details and performance benchmarks around launch-time I'm typically left buying a laptop retail for Linux testing. In this case after seeing the Lunar Lake laptops announced this week and their availability, I ended up settling on the ASUS Zenbook S 14 (UX5406SA-S14.U71TB) for the initial Core Ultra 200V series Linux review...

We're very close to the finish line for the mainline Linux kernel being able to enable real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel support...

Sent out today were the DRM fixes for 6.11-rc7 ahead of the Linux 6.11-rc7 kernel being released on Sunday. As usual most of the changes revolve around the AMDGPU and Intel i915/Xe drivers plus random fixes to the smaller drivers. There is one change though with the AMD Radeon graphics driver side worth highlighting to address a performance regression affecting recent kernels...

It's taken until now to add FreeBSD to the X.Org Continuous Integration (CI) automated testing so that all proposed changes to the X.Org Server can now be build-tested on FreeBSD rather than just Linux...

FEX 2409 has been released for this open-source project that's known for allowing x86_64 Linux binaries -- including both games and applications -- to run rather well on AArch64. It's also been working on enabling x86_64 programs on RISC-V but there due to architectural differences it's more of a challenge than with ARM...

Back in 2018 Oracle introduced Libresource as a standardized API for accessing system resource information around memory / network / device statistics and other metrics. Libresource v2 was announced this week as largely a rewrite of the project...

Following the recently covered patches on Phoronix that enabled Intel Xe2 graphics out-of-the-box / by-default for Lunar Lake and Battlemage with the Mesa 24.3-devel Git code, Mesa 24.2.2 is out today in stable form that back-ports these Xe2 support changes...

KDE e.V. announced the availability today of their annual report for covering 2023. While they made a lot of accomplishments and worked a lot on KDE Plasma 6 development, it was another year they unfortunately operated in the red funding wise...

Continuing on with the AmpereOne performance benchmarking while having the AmpereOne A192-32X in the lab within a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD server, the next set of benchmarks is looking at the performance when using the near-final Linux 6.11 kernel. Additionally, quantifying the performance impact of using the ARM64 64K page size kernel as an alternative to the default 4K page size.

Last year to much excitement in our community was the new AMD project announcement of openSIL as an open-source CPU silicon initialization project that is an advancement for open-source firmware and to eventually replace AMD's AGESA across both client and server processors. This week an exciting new update on AMD OpenSIL was shared and that they are still on-track for having it production-ready next year...

Ah the memories of old AGP graphics cards... But it's largely just that these days: distant memories. For anyone by chance still running an Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) graphics card in production, FreeBSD is looking at deprecating its generic AGP driver and then potentially removing it in FreeBSD 15.0...

The first alpha release of OpenSSL 3.4 is now available for testing as the next feature update to this widely-used SSL library / cryptography toolkit...

With Linux 6.12 the Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics are being enabled by default for out-of-the-box support with Intel's next-gen Xe2 graphics. Over in user-space the Intel OpenGL and Vulkan driver code has also begun enabling Xe2 graphics by default for use when running on Linux 6.12+. In Mesa besides no longer being hidden by the force probe option, a warning is now removed so users aren't told about unsupported Vulkan support when using Xe2 hardware...

Linux 6.11 merged getrandom() in the vDSO Support for very fast yet secure user-space random number generation needs. That work was initially focused on x86_64 but beginning with Linux 6.12 and following on this getrandom() vDSO implementation will see expanded CPU architecture support...

Succeeding OpenZFS 2.2.5 from early August is now OpenZFS 2.2.6 that brings various fixes plus newer Linux kernel compatibility...

QEMU 9.1 is out in stable form today as the newest feature release to this open-source processor emulator that plays a vital role within the free software Linux virtualization stack...

Continuing on with the AMD Ryzen 9000 series Linux benchmarking, today's testing is looking at the performance and power impact of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X when adjusting the CPU frequency scaling driver, governor, and Energy Performance Preference (EPP) tunable to help look at the performance and power efficiency characteristics of this current flagship Zen 5 desktop processor.

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system has managed to address a performance bottleneck allowing this platform to perform much faster now when running as a virtual machine (VM) and for some synthetic benchmarks even able to run "slightly faster" than Linux...

Following yesterday's initial tuning of the "znver5" target for the AMD Zen 5 CPUs with the GCC 15 compiler, several more rounds of compiler tuning/optimizations were merged for benefiting the Ryzen AI 300 series, Ryzen 9000 series desktops, and upcoming EPYC Turin processors...

While using the older Qualcomm Snapdragon 8xc Gen 3 (SC8280XP) SoC and not the exciting Snapdragon X1 Elite, Linux kernel patches were posted this week for enabling the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G to boot with the mainline kernel...

Mozilla is interested in a Rust-written JPEG-XL image decoder for its memory safety characteristics compared to the existing C++ code they rely on for JPEG-XL image support in Firefox. While Google previously removed JPEG-XL support from Chrome/Chromium, it may be Google that comes to the rescue and writes a Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder that can then be shipped by Firefox...

Linux 6.11 introduces block atomic write support including for NVMe and SCSI devices. With a new set of patches posted this week, atomic write support is wired up for the RAID0 MD code...

There are six accepted blocker bugs so far for the Fedora 41 Beta and three of them all pertain to Raspberry Pi issues...

Weston 14.0 was released today as the newest feature release for this reference Wayland compositor...

When it comes to the Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel one of the limitations is that the CPU architecture support isn't as widespread. Currently Rust for Linux supports x86_64, AArch64 (ARM64) little-endian, LoongArch, and RISC-V. While those cover the main targets, POWER is notably missing and many other niche CPU architectures supported by the Linux kernel especially for aging platforms. Patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list would extend the Rust support to MIPS...

Google announced today that the Android 15 source code has been released to the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP)...

While there are more than 74k packages available within Debian's package management system for x86_64 systems, not all of the packages are well maintained and a portion of them haven't seen any maintenance/updates in ages. Debian developers have recently begun discussing how to begin removing more of those long unmaintained packages from the archive...

Intel formally announced their Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake" laptop processors today in Berlin...

Merged today for the GCC 15 compiler in development and potentially for back-porting to the next GCC 14 point release is a second round of AMD Zen 5 "znver5" tuning...

Now that Linux 6.12 will enable Intel Battlemage and Lunar Lake graphics by default for the out-of-the-box kernel graphics driver support, the user-space Intel Mesa drivers with Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV Vulkan are moving ahead to enable their support out-of-the-box too. This has been merged for Mesa 24.3-devel to have Battlemage discrete GPUs enjoying OpenGL and Vulkan support while it's also marked for back-porting to the Mesa 24.2 stable series...

Samba 4.21 is out as the newest version of this SMB networking protocol implementation commonly used on Linux systems for file and print services interaction with Windows systems...

Posted today as a "request for comments" by longtime Linux developer Josh Poimboeuf of Red Hat is klp-build. The klp-build proposal is a new means of building livepatch modules for live-patching the Linux kernel to address bugs and security issues with the running kernel image...

Patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list today allow for inline tail support within the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS). This inline tail support allows for saving space when storing many small files and with reduced I/O can lead to faster data copy times...