Phoronix

A new patch series sent out today by AMD Linux engineers confirm that PCIe TPH will be supported with "upcoming AMD hardware" as a nice performance optimization feature for PCI Express...

While Canonical has been investing more into the performance of Ubuntu Linux and engaged some new performance improvements in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it's still not the fastest Linux distribution out there on x86_64 hardware. Similarly, the recently released Fedora Workstation 40 features the brand new GCC 14 compiler and other leading-edge open-source software packages, but there's still more performance left on the table as shown by Intel. Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at how Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 40 are competing with Intel's in-house Clear Linux distribution that offers aggressive x86_64 Linux performance defaults and the best possible out-of-the-box Linux performance on modern x86_64 hardware.

As expected, AMD today published the Micro Engine Scheduler "MES" firmware documentation for RDNA3 graphics processors as part of better engaging with the open-source community and aiming to address some gaps in their open-source GPU compute stack...

In addition to a Framework Laptop EC driver being prepared for Linux that extends the Chrome OS embedded controller (EC) used by recent Framework Laptops, a ChromeOS EC hardware monitoring (HWMON subsystem) driver has also been revived as a further support extension for Framework laptops on Linux...

The Intel iVPU accelerator driver changes for the upcoming Linux 6.10 merge window have been submitted for advancing the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) support found since the launch of Meteor Lake with Intel Core Ultra notebook CPUs. For this iVPU/NPU driver in Linux 6.10 are a few notable new features...

The AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver has seen a new patch series preparing enablement of a new hardware intellectual property (IP) block for the first time: the ISP...

For fans of SQLite and/or new database solutions, Limbo is an in-development, open-source OLTP database management system that is compatible with SQLite while written in the Rust programming language and leveraging Linux's IO_uring for async I/O...

The first beta of Python 3.13 is now available for testing ahead of its official release later this year...

The developers at System76 working on their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment catering to their in-house, Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS Linux distribution have provided their latest monthly status update on the desktop effort...

Following the release of ROCm 6.1 just under one month ago, ROCm 6.1.1 was published today as the newest point release to deliver various bug fixes and other minor improvements to this open-source GPU compute stack...

Ongoing Mesa release manager Eric Engestrom continues carrying out a splendid job with the on-time releases of new bi-weekly Mesa point releases and the weekly release candidates heading toward the next feature release of these open-source predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan drivers...

Back in January the Zed editor was open-sourced for this new code editor from the creators of the Atom editor and Tree-sitter syntax parsing framework. This high performance code editor has been initially focused on macOS support while the Linux support has begun coming together...

Since last year Intel's open-source software engineers have been working on a PCIe bandwidth controller driver for the Linux kernel to avoid thermal issues by being able to automatically reduce the PCIe link speed when needed. This driver still isn't over the finish line but today brought the fifth iteration of these patches...

Recently I've been testing out the Scaleway's Elastic Metal RV1 (EM-RV1) RISC-V cloud servers. Initially they were using Ubuntu 23.10 for providing an up-to-date Ubuntu Linux RISC-V experience while quickly upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. For those curious how Ubuntu 24.04 is performing on RISC-V hardware, here are some comparison benchmarks.

Building off the recent release of Fedora 40, Fedora Asahi Remix 40 is now available for this downstream of Fedora Linux that's optimized to run on Apple Silicon ARM systems...

SHIFTphone 8 is the upcoming modular and easy-to-repair smartphone from Germany's SHIFT GmbH. This is the first major SHIFTphone update in four years and there are pending patches providing mainline Linux kernel support for this forthcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon powered modular/upgradeable smartphone...

AMD Linux engineers have introduced a new perf tool called "schedstat" that aims to be less resource intensive and convenient than the existing "perf sched" tool for profiling kernel scheduler behavior...

With GCC 14 stable released and GCC 15 now in development on trunk, new feature code is landing for the GNU Compiler Collection. Among the early features is Microsoft contributing the "Windows on ARM64" target with aarch64-w64-mingw32. The start of the new cycle also brings code removal for features deprecated in prior cycles. Among the old code being cleared out in GCC 15 is saying goodbye to Oracle Solaris 11.3...

As noted recently, EROFS has been exploring Zstd compression support for this open-source read-only Linux file-system. Today the patch was posted for enabling Zstandard use...

Two different merges today for Mesa 24.2 are worth calling out for the open-source Linux graphics stack...

The GNOME Foundation today published their 2023 annual report that outlines their accomplishments as well as a look at the finances...

Microsoft engineers have contributed Windows On ARM64 support to the upstream GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) with the new "aarch64-w64-mingw32" target...

While rolling out the new iPad Pro tablets today, Apple announced the M4 as their newest in-house silicon design...

Red Hat Summit 2024 is underway in Denver, Colorado... Given the times, artificial intelligence (AI) is taking a heavy presence at the event with Red Hat announcing today RHEL AI...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation today announced the beta availability of Raspberry Pi Connect as a means of securely having remote GUI access to your Remote Pi from a web browser...

Vulkan 1.3.284 was published on Monday with only a few changes but bearing one notable new extension...

AMD engineers posted a new set of Linux driver patches on Tuesday that "addresses critical issues and enhances performance settings for CPUs with heterogeneous core types" while using the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver...

In addition to approving -O3 optimized Python builds, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESC)) this week unanimously approved a Fedora 41 change proposal for making RPM package builds more reproducible...

Over the past year there's been much work happening within the Linux kernel's sysctl code for clearing up ~64 bytes of bloat per array throughout the kernel by dropping the last sysctl "sentinel" entry at the end of each array. This also helps in reducing the build time of the kernel and is a nice improvement. With Linux 6.10, the sysctl sentinel clearing throughout different subsystems is set to happen...

For the past several months AMD Linux engineers have been working on AMD Core Performance Boost support for their P-State CPU frequency scaling driver. The ninth iteration of these patches were posted on Monday and besides the global enabling/disabling support for Core Performance Boost, it's now possible to selectively toggle the feature on a per-CPU core basis...

GCC 14.1 has been released today as the first stable compiler release in the GCC 14 series. GCC 14.1 brings one year worth of improvements to this open-source compiler from new CPU support and new ISA extensions to new C/C++ language features, static analyzer improvements, new AMD GPU support, and many other additions...

Back when looking at the AMD Ryzen 7000 series budget server performance last year, DDR5-4800 ECC UDIMMs were used with the ASRock Rack 1U4LW-B650/2L2T Ryzen server given that's what was broadly available at the time. Since then there's been more ECC UDIMMs coming to market above DDR5-4800 speeds. Recently I bought a pair of Kingston Server Premier 32GB 5600MT/s DDR5 ECC CL46 UDIMMs (KSM56E46BD8KM-32HA) and that's the focus of today's tests. For those curious if the faster ECC UDIMMs are worthwhile compared to the commonality of DDR5-4800 ECC UDIMMs, these benchmarks are for you.

Following last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 stable, the AlmaLinux crew today announced AlmaLinux 9.4...

In addition to Linux 6.10 expected to drop support for very old DEC Alpha processors (EV5 and earlier), it looks like the PowerPC 40x (early PowerPC 400 series) processor and platform support will be retired too...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on the plans for Fedora 41 to build its Python using the "-O3" compiler optimization level rather than the "-O2" default for Fedora packages in the name of better performance...

The Linux 6.10 kernel is poised to remove support for old DEC Alpha EV5 platforms and earlier...

The modular/upgradeable Framework Laptops employ an open-source embedded controller (EC) firmware derived from Google's Chrome OS EC project. This is great for open-source fans and allows re-using much of the same Chrome OS EC software support that already exists. But there is also vendor-specific commands supported by the Framework Laptop EC and thus a dedicated Linux kernel driver is now being worked on for handling those vendor/device-specific features...

The first beta of FreeBSD 14.1 is now available for testing in kicking off what will be the first point release building off last November's FreeBSD 14.0 release...

There's a new release of the open-source nvidia-vaapi-driver available, the third-party VA-API implementation that in turn targets NVIDIA's NVDEC interface to allow software like Mozilla Firefox that only targets VA-API for video acceleration to work on NVIDIA GPUs...

Dillo 3.1 has been released to succeed the Dillo 3.0.5 release all the way back from 2015... Dillo is a lightweight web browser making use of the FLTK toolkit and is cross-platform, maintains few dependencies, and implements its own rendering engine...

GIMP 2.10.38 was released on Sunday as what might be the "possibly last" GIMP 2 stable release ahead of the upcoming GIMP 3.0 release. GIMP 2.10.38 back-ports more features from the GIMP 3.0 / GTK3 codebase plus other improvements and fixes...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.9-rc7 and it's looking good like the Linux 6.9 stable kernel will hopefully be out next Sunday...

Intel's power management lead Rafael Wysocki posted a set of patches recently for working out asymmetic CPU capacity on hybrid Core x86 systems...

Cirrus engineers have seen a number of patches queued into the Linux sound subsystem's "for-next" branch for enabling audio support on some new laptops with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle...

Synaptics this week published a big update to their out-of-tree graphics driver package for DisplayLink USB graphics...

Mesa's Venus Vulkan driver has made cross-device functionality optional in order to enable QEMU support for this open-source driver for virtualized environments...

Ahead of the Linux 6.9-rc7 kernel being released later today, some last minute pull requests for the week have enabled some new bits of hardware support where only new device IDs are necessary and thus safe to add at this late stage of Linux 6.9 development...

While on Linux the desktop environments, graphics stack, and other application software is steadily adopting Wayland support and focusing less on X11/X.Org support, the state of Wayland support and the open-source graphics driver stack in general is less robust among the BSDs. The NetBSD project published a status report around their ongoing dependence and modifications to their X.Org stack...

There's been a lot of improvements coming about in the GNOME desktop space thanks to the ongoing Sovereign Tech Fund and other initiatives toward GNOME 47...

In addition to all of the contributions Valve graphics engineers have been making to the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver, they have also begun investing in improvements to the open-source Mesa NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver too. With pending patches there is now explicit GPU synchronization support working for the NVK driver in conjunction with their Gamescope compositor...