Phoronix

The Linux 6.9-rc4 weekly test release is due out later today and ahead of that this week's "x86/urgent" material has been sent in that includes several patches for various x86 speculation mitigation fixes...

In addition to a SLUB optimization for extreme scenarios, faster AES-XTS disk/file encryption for modern Intel/AMD CPUs, and other performance optimizations on the way for Linux 6.10, another minor one was queued up this week...

Mike Blumenkrantz with Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has merged a big optimization / bug fixing effort he's recently been tackling for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver...

A change proposal has been filed for building the CPython interpreter and the Python standard library using the "-O3" compiler optimization flag rather than Fedora's imposed default of the "-O2" optimization level. This is being sought in the name of greater Python performance on Fedora 41...

KDE developers had a very busy week with a lot of new feature work continuing to land for Plasma 6.1 plus continuing to address bugs and other fallout from the recent Plasma 6 introduction...

APT as the packaging tool built around Debian Linux is embarking on some big upgrades with the APT 2.9 development series to then roll-out as APT 3.0. There's big improvements to the command-line user interface with the new APT and it's certainly looking nice from my initial Friday night encounter...

The XWayland 23.2 series was introduced last August while now release preparations have begun for releasing XWayland 24.1 as the next feature release for this X.Org Server derived code for allowing X11 clients (apps / games) to work within the confines of Wayland environments...

KDE Frameworks 6.1 is out today as the first monthly update since the release of KDE Frameworks 6.0 alongside KDE Plasma 6.0...

A patch to the Linux kernel's SLUB allocator has been queued ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.10 merge window to help reduce memory consumption in extreme scenarios...

David Rheinsberg has released Dbus-Broker 36 as the newest version of this speedy, drop-in DBus implementation for Linux systems...

Back at the start of March AMD published updated VCN firmware to fix VP9 video decoding on Rembrandt APUs and other GPUs. Today is a new round of AMDGPU firmware file updates believed to firmly address the VP9 video decode glitches for a wide range of AMD GPUs...

As the first new release since last September, LPython 0.21 has been released for this alpha-stage Python ahead-of-time compiler written in C++. LPython remains focused on providing "the best possible performance" especially for numerical use-cases, cross-platform compatibility, and hopes to be able to eventually transform Python code over to C++ and Fortran or other languages...

For the widely-used SDL hardware/software abstraction layer that is commonly used by cross-platform games, the upcoming SDL 3.0 release now has the logic to be able to prefer using PipeWire directly rather than PulseAudio when successfully detecting the presence of PipeWire...

While TUXEDO Computers has already been offering powerful AMD Zen 4 laptops such as the Pulse 14 Gen 3 with Ryzen 7 7840HS SoC, today the Bavarian company announced their first Ryzen 8000 series mobile laptop...

Intel's software team is today sharing their newest innovation for achieving greater performance on Linux systems: the Thin Layout Optimizer. Intel's Thin Layout Optimizer is inspired by the likes of the Meta/LLVM BOLT optimizer and Google's Propeller but aims to be much easier to use while still delivering measurable performance gains for optimized binaries...

With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS due out later this month and the beta now available, I've been spending more time recently testing out the latest development state for this next Long Term Support installment of Ubuntu Linux. Similar to seeing some Ubuntu 24.04 performance gains on server class hardware both from Intel and AMD, testing on workstation hardware is also showing some gains over the current Ubuntu 23.10 release. Here are some comparison tests of the System76 Thelio Major with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X.

For those trying to use the X.Org Server's GLAMOR accelerated 2D rendering on legacy/obsolete GPUs, there's now a fallback in place to allow software rendering to work when encountering crippled hardware...

While GNU Hurd continues having a tough time on x86 support and GNU Hurd x86_64 is being worked toward, the GCC 14 compiler has been working on compiler toolchain support for GNU Hurd AArch64...

The Ubuntu 24.04 beta release is now available for testing ahead of the official release later this month for this new Long Term Support release of Ubuntu Linux...

The open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa, RADV, has merged its support for handling Vulkan Video accelerated encoding for H.264 and H.265...

Wayland 1.22 released at the start of April 2023 while now Wayland 1.23 is taking shape as the next version of this core Wayland code...

Last week Bcachefs' repair code was largely completed and in good shape for merging with the Linux 6.9-rc3 kernel. Bcachefs patches last week amounted to about one third of the kernel changes for the week. This week is a new round of fixes to further stabilize the experimental file-system...

A new release of Lutris is now available, the open-source game manager that's popular with Linux gamers and enthusiasts for managing games from Steam, GOG, a number of retro game consoles and emulators, and other sources from one convenient UI...

A day after explicit sync support was merged for XWayland, a week after explicit sync support for Mesa Vulkan drivers hit Mesa 24.1, and GNOME's Mutter enabling explicit sync at the end of March, KDE's KWin compositor has now merged its Wayland explicit sync support!..

Mesa's Lavapipe driver as a software (CPU-based) implementation of the Vulkan API has now implemented support for ray-tracing pipelines...

The turbostat utility is useful on Linux systems for reporting idle/power-state statistics, temperatures, and other useful metrics for modern CPUs. It's also able to dive deeper and provide various MSR values and counters and other intriguing CPU bits. For much of these features root access is required and thus turbostat has bailed out up to this point if not running as root. But as a number of the metrics can still be obtained without root access, turbostat is finally being adapted to handle running better as a non-root user...

Intel's FFmpeg Cartwheel is where they maintain their various yet-to-be-upstreamed patches for the FFmpeg multimedia library either to enhance/enable new Intel graphics hardware support or improve/add extra functionality to this widely-used open-source library. With the Intel FFmpeg Cartwheel 2024Q1 release they are shipping a new filter for dealing with older content as well as several other new features...

Due to yesterday's Native BHI vulnerability disclosure affecting all Intel processors with this variant of Branch History Injection (BHI) not requiring BPF to exploit, a slew of new Linux kernel stable releases are out today to back-port this security mitigation...

While the Gentoo Foundation has long existed, to reduce the organizational complexity and overhead as well as becoming effectively a tax deductible non-profit at the US federal level, Gentoo Linux has become an associated project with Software in the Public Interest (SPI)...

Microsoft's Azure Linux formerly known as CBL-Mariner for their in-house Linux distribution is out with a new version. Azure Linux 2.0.20240403 was released overnight and comes with a number of security updates and other fixes...

Following yesterday's news of Canonical launching Ubuntu Pro For Devices, the latest mobile/embedded news in the Ubuntu space this week is Canonical partnering with Qualcomm...

For several years Intel has been developing the OpenCL Intercept Layer to assist in debugging OpenCL software. It's been nearly two years since the last release of this open-source OpenCL interception layer while today brings v3.0.4 with a number of optimizations and new features...

Sent out this morning were a batch of x86 platform driver fixes by Intel engineer and platform-drivers-x86 co-maintainer Ilpo Jarvinen. Besides a couple of fixes, worth mentioning is the Intel HID driver seeing support added for upcoming Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake platforms...

UPower as the abstraction layer for enumerating power devices on Linux systems and allowing various battery / power supply features is out with a new feature update...

Disclosed back in March 2022 was Branch History Injection (BHI) as a new Spectre vulnerability affecting Intel and Arm CPUs. Then in July of 2022 were patches for Intel working on hardware-based prevention for Spectre-BHI attacks. Now two years later the Linux kernel is seeing mitigations added for the native Branch History Injection vulnerability given a new "Native BHI" variant...

Since SiFive ceased production of the HiFive Unleashed developer board we've been clamoring for a new and more powerful RISC-V developer board... Today SiFive announced the HiFive Premier P550 as a new developer system offering that will be available this summer...

Intel is using its Vision 2024 conference in Arizona today to announce the Gaudi 3 AI accelerator. With Gaudi 3 comes some rather bold AI claims from Intel: 50% on average better inference and 40% on average better power efficiency than the NVIDIA H100. All while costing "a fraction" of the NVIDIA H100. Gaudi 3 sounds quite promising and will be interesting to see how its adopted in the marketplace. In addition, Intel also is disclosing the new Xeon 6 branding for their upcoming server processors formerly codenamed Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids.

Similar to Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure spinning their own Arm-based processors for their data centers, Google Cloud today announced the Google Axion Processors that will be available in the future...

OpenSSL 3.3 is out today as the latest major feature release for this widely-used SSL library...

In addition to working on NOVA as a Rust-based, GSP-focused NVIDIA open-source kernel graphics driver being developed as the eventual successor to the existing Nouveau DRM kernel driver, over in user-space Mesa developers have begun landing a portion of their Nouveau/NVK driver library code rewritten in Rust...

One year in the making, NVIDIA's code for explicit GPU synchronization in XWayland along with the X.Org Server DRI3 and Present extensions has now been merged! This is a big culmination of all the recent work around Wayland explicit synchronization and notably takes care of a number of NVIDIA driver problems on Wayland in the process...

Linux Mint is working on providing "ultra fast" repositories for users obtaining system updates and installing new packages on this popular desktop Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu...

Complementing Canonical's existing Ubuntu Pro subscription service for expanded security maintenance, live kernel patching, compliance and hardening, real-time kernel flavor support, and other enterprise/support add-ons, Canonical today announced Ubuntu Pro For Devices...

An earlier fix to the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA kernel graphics driver with the new GPU System Processor (GSP) code path had fixed RTX 20 "Turing" GPU support but inadvertently broke the RTX 30 "Ampere" support. David Airlie sent out an urgent new fix today for addressing that regression in the NVIDIA GSP display code...

AMD is using the Embedded World conference in Bavaria for today introducing their Versal Series Gen 2 SoCs for AI-driven embedded systems. Today's embargo lift covers the Versal AI Edge Series Gen 2 and Versal Prime Series Gen 2 Adaptive SoCs...

Following the plans going back to 2022 for Fedora 39 to use DNF5 but last summer deemed weren't ready and then delayed DNF5 to Fedora 41 due to the RHEL10 branching from Fedora 40, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now given their sign-off for the updated package manager in F41...

For those making use of AES-XTS crypto for the likes of disk and file encryption on x86_64 CPUs, the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle is bringing some very tantalizing improvements especially if you are running recent AMD and Intel processors. With AMD Zen 4 processors the benefits can be as much as 155% faster while even Intel Ice Lake and Sapphire Rapids server processors can enjoy 127~151% faster AES-XTS-256...

With a few weeks having passed since the KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop release along with some point releases for addressing initial fall-out, I've been meaning to run some Plasma 6.0 Linux gaming performance benchmarks. I'll have up some interesting metrics soon using Fedora 40 while for this initial article is a look at the KDE Plasma 6.0 gaming performance between the Wayland and X11 sessions atop KDE Neon. Then similarly are the results for GNOME Shell with its X11 and Wayland sessions.

Engineers at the KDAB consulting firm have begun experimenting with embedding the Rust-written Servo web engine inside Qt software using CXX-Qt...

Following the launch last week of the AMD Ryzen Embedded 8000 Series, SolidRun today announced the Bedrock R8000 as the first industrial PCs designed around these new Ryzen Embedded 8000 series SoCs...