Phoronix

Last year Google announced the Lyra voice codec for low bit-rates that combined with the open AV1 codec could lead to voice chats on 56kbps connections. Lyra makes use of machine learning and other techniques for extremely low bit-rate speech compression that can function at 3kbps. Google last year open-sourced the Lyra code while today they announced the availability of Lyra V2...

While some Linux enthusiasts eagerly recommend users boot their systems with the "mitigations=off" kernel parameter for run-time disabling of various relevant CPU security mitigations for Spectre, Meltdown, L1TF, TAA, Retbleed, and friends, with the new AMD Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" processors while still needing some software mitigations, it's surprisingly faster for the most part leaving the relevant mitigations enabled...

Currently Linux's Logitech HID++ driver "hid-logitech-hidpp" relies on a static list of device quirks for indicating which Logitech mice support high resolution scrolling. With the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel, the plan is to change that list of devices/quirks and to automatically determine if a device supports high resolution scrolling...

Linux 6.0 should be released as stable on Sunday unless Linus Torvalds has last minute reservations and decides to extend the cycle by an extra week. AMD has sent in a last minute set of patches for their AMDGPU kernel driver with Linux 6.0 for dealing with what appear to be the upcoming RDNA3 graphics cards...

This week was word of the Intel Arc Graphics A770 launching for $329+ on 12 October, yesterday was the embargo lift on the Arc Graphics A750 also shipping on 12 Ocrober for $289+, and now today is another embargo lift concerning Intel Arc Graphics.....

The Ubuntu-based Linux Mint operating system has been working to enhance its Driver Manager utility for dealing with proprietary and other out-of-tree kernel hardware drivers...

Recently the open-source AMD OpenGL driver "RadeonSI" enabled OpenGL threading by default for the "glthread" option that has long been opt-in on a per-game/app basis. Along with that has been a number of glthread-related improvements to this code that punts executing OpenGL calls to a separate CPU thread. The Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver has now unconditionally enabled OpenGL threading too...

Microsoft engineers continue working on improving their Direct3D 12 driver within Mesa for benefiting Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) usage and similar...

On Thursday night Canonical released the beta of next month's Ubuntu 22.10 "Kinetic Kudu" Linux distribution update...

Cloud-Hypervisor as what started as an open-source project by Intel and now run under the Linux Foundation umbrella as a Rust-based, modern-focused hypervisor for cloud workloads keeps on advancing. In addition to Intel, Microsoft and Arm continue investing significant resources into Cloud-Hypervisor for this security-focused VMM for running Windows and Linux guests...

Prior to ending out the third quarter, AMD's graphics driver team has released AMDVLK 2022.Q3.5 as their newest open-source Vulkan Linux driver update...

Earlier this week at the Intel Innovation event it was announced the Arc Graphics A770 would be launching 12 October and the base model costing $329 USD. Today the embargo lifts on more details around Intel's forthcoming higher-end Arc Graphics hardware...

Back in 2019 Google announced Stadia as their cloud gaming service using Linux, embracing Vulkan, and leveraging AMD graphics. While promising at first, it's been dwindling down and Google announced today they are in the process of shutting down this streaming service...

Earlier this week I published my AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 9 7950X Linux review as well as an extensive Zen 4 AVX-512 analysis and Linux gaming performance tests. Since then I have received the Ryzen 7 7700X from AMD for Linux testing and out today are those initial Linux benchmarks. The AMD Ryzen 7 7700X is available in-stock at $399 USD from Internet retailers and is an 8-core / 16-thread processor with a maximum boost clock speed of 5.4GHz.

It was just yesterday that reverse-engineering, open-source driver developer Asahi Lina got the display output working and running Wayland's Weston. After a long day hacking away on this first Rust-written Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver, the GNOME desktop is even running off this Apple M1 graphics driver as well as applications like Firefox complete with YouTube...

Just as a friendly reminder the Phoronix Premium sale is ending this weekend as our autumn "Oktoberfest" special for supporting the site and enjoying the site ad-free and multi-page articles on a single page, among other benefits...

The Qt Company this morning released Qt 6.4 as their newest half-year update to this popular open-source and cross-platform toolkit...

Following LLVM adding Zstd compressed ELF debug sections support, GCC 13 in conjunction with newer Binutils has also introduced support for Zstd-compressed debug sections...

This week's Vulkan spec update is on the larger side with six new extensions being introduced...

The proposal for accelerating GnuTLS with kernel TLS has been approved for Fedora 38 that will debut next spring...

A new feature being worked on for the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is the ability to atomically replace files...

The second day of the Intel Innovation event in San Jose featured Intel CTO Greg Lavender talking up the greatness of open standards, open-source, and their wonderful oneAPI initiative. There were a few bits of oneAPI news as part of today's keynote...

One of the new drivers set to make its debut with Linux 6.1 is the AMD Platform Management Framework "PMF" with an intent on "making AMD PCs smarter, quieter, power efficient by adapting to user behavior and environment" with next-generation hardware. Another part of AMD PMF, the Cool and Quiet Framework (CnQF) has also been queued up for introduction in Linux 6.1...

Last week the Rust-written Apple Direct Rendering manager (DRM) Linux driver for supporting Apple M1/M2 graphics managed to rendered its first cube. Asahi Linux contributor Asahi Lina today is back at it and working on getting more of this experimental kernel driver working for the Linux desktop...

Ahead of the flagship Arc Graphics A770 launching on 12 October, Intel's Mesa "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver has finally exposed the ray-tracing support for DG2/Alchemist graphics hardware...

Earlier this month I revisited the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D Linux performance for looking at the effectiveness of the AMD 3D V-Cache under Linux when now using the very latest Linux kernel along with other new/updated benchmarks of the past several months. While already being very impressed by the performance of AMD EPYC Milan-X since those 3D V-Cache server CPUs launched earlier this year, here is a fresh round of Linux benchmarks looking at the EPYC 7763 vs. 7773X performance when running on a development snapshot of Ubuntu 22.10 paired with the Linux 6.0 development kernel and other newer software packages for a very up-to-date look at the performance potential on the server side.

The GCC compiler and related GNU toolchain infrastructure has long been hosted by Sourceware.org that has been sponsored by Red Hat the past two decades. But now the GNU Toolchain Infrastructure (GTI) project is being established as it works to leverage the Linux Foundation's IT services to provide more robust and secure infrastructure for these critical open-source projects...

For Fedora Linux users currently making use of Mesa's VA-API support with the open-source AMD graphics driver or similar and using it to speed-up H.264, H.265, or VC1 decoding, you may soon be out of luck and will have to fall-back to either using CPU-based decoding or be relying on an unofficial/third-party Mesa build...

Aligned with Intel's Innovation event happening this week in San Jose, Intel on Tuesday released oneDNN 2.7 as the newest version of their deep neural network library. In addition to optimizing support for new Intel hardware, oneDNN 2.7 also has AMD GPU support...

NVIDIA on Tuesday released the 515.49.18 Linux beta driver and the 517.55 beta driver for Windows. Most notable with the Vulkan beta driver updates are revising the support for the latest Vulkan Video provisional extensions...

Yet more news from Intel's Innovation event taking place in San Jose is the initial SDK source code availability of the much anticipated Xe Super Sampling. XeSS is Intel's alternative to AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution and NVIDIA DLSS...

Google this afternoon promoted Chrome 106 to their stable channel for Linux, ChromeOS, macOS, and Windows users of this web browser...

In addition to announcing 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPUs, Intel also announced their Arc Graphics A770 flagship graphics card will be launching in just two weeks...

Monday saw the AMD Ryzen 7000 series review embargo lift and retail availability beginning today for those Zen 4 desktop CPUs. Intel meanwhile is using today -- the first day of their second annual Innovation event in San Jose -- to announce 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" processors for aiming to take AMD's Zen 4 head-on...

Intel at their Innovation conference confirmed that 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors will feature an optional "on demand" activation model...

Intel at their Innovation event this week in California is talking up the new Intel Developer Cloud. The Intel Developer Cloud aims to make it easier for customers/partners/developers to test new and future hardware platforms...

Miguel Ojeda who has led the work on the Rust programming language infrastructure support for the Linux kernel today posted the tenth version of these patches. It is these Rust v10 patches that are expected to be mainlined as soon as next week for the Linux 6.1 kernel merge window...

As further indication of MGLRU hopefully being mainlined for Linux 6.1 as planned, the Multi-Gen LRU patches have now been moved to Andrew Morton's mm-stable branch...

Last week I wrote about how Microsoft landed a VA-API improvement in Mesa to support faster Video Acceleration API encoding with FFmpeg. That code was initially only wired up for the Microsoft D3D12 driver within Mesa for WSL use-cases, but now AMD has taken advantage of the new capability for RadeonSI Gallium3D usage with their Radeon GPUs...

There have been some notable merges this week for Mesa 22.3, particularly as it concerns the open-source Radeon graphics driver code...

Pyston as what was born at Dropbox as a speedy open-source Python implementation is out with a new update as it continues to focus on maximizing performance. Dropbox ceased work on Pyston years ago while the developers continued and since last year joined Anaconda to continue their performant Python quest...

VKD3D 1.5 was recently tagged as the newest version of this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan implementation used by Wine and originally an upstream to Valve's VKD3D-Proton. VKD3D 1.5 has been integrated into Wine Git ahead of next week's Wine 7.19 release...

Mold 1.5 is out today as the newest version of this open-source, high-speed linker alternative to the likes of GNU Gold and LLVM LLD...

This morning I called attention to some pending work around a 20 year old chipset workaround in the Linux kernel had been hurting modern AMD systems by erroneously still applying the change to modern hardware. Fortunately, that patch has now been picked up by Linus Torvalds in time for the Linux 6.0 kernel expected for its stable debut next weekend...

Earlier this year it was shared that SUSE/openSUSE is developing the Adaptable Linux Platform "ALP" for next-generation SUSE Linux Enterprise. Coming out later this week is the first public preview of openSUSE ALP...

The review embargo just lifted for the AMD Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" desktop processors ahead of their retail availability this week. As such there are a few Phoronix articles today looking at these Zen 4 processors under Linux and many benchmarks whole several more follow-up articles will be coming over the weeks ahead. For the launch-day review I have the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and 7950X processors. Let's take a look at the significant performance improvements to find with the AMD Ryzen 9 7900 series under Linux.

While much of AMD's briefings for the Ryzen 7000 desktop series were focused on gaming and other consumer workloads, one of the most exciting aspects for me with the Ryzen 7000 series is AMD now supporting AVX-512. But rather going for a 512-bit FPU data path and the possibility of reduced clock frequencies and power/thermal concerns, they employed a 256-bit "double pumping" strategy. When getting the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X in the lab, exploring the AMD Zen 4 AVX-512 performance was one of the areas I was most excited to evaluate. From the benchmarks about to be shown, AMD's initial AVX-512 implementation is promising and has me all the more excited for finding it on AMD EPYC "Genoa" processors.

Today the review embargo expires on the AMD Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors ahead of their retail availability this week. Over the past two weeks I have been testing the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and 7950X processors as the initial review samples (I should be receiving the Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 7 7700X CPUs this week, AMD is staggering their review seeding of the different models). In this article to get things started are my initial Linux gaming benchmarks with the Ryzen 9 7900X/7950X compared to an assortment of other AMD and Intel systems.

Nick Desaulniers with Google who has been known for his contributions around compiling the Linux kernel with LLVM/Clang has recently taken to the challenge of being able to compile the Linux kernel under macOS...

AMD engineer K Prateek Nayak recently uncovered that a ~20 year old chipset workaround in the Linux kernel still being applied to modern AMD systems is responsible in some cases for hurting performance on modern Zen hardware. Fortunately, a fix is on the way for limiting that workaround to old systems and in turn helping with performance for modern systems...