Phoronix

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.

PostgreSQL 17 is out today as the newest annual feature release to this widely-used SQL database server. Notable with PostgreSQL 17 is having an AVX-512 optimized bit_count function along with several other heavy hitting performance optimizations...

Following the release of the COSMIC Alpha desktop in early August, System76 is closing out September by issuing the second alpha release of their Rust-based open-source desktop environment...

The USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates were submitted today for the Linux 6.12 kernel merge window along with the other areas of the kernel overseen by Greg Kroah-Hartman. A new USB driver is the 9p network gadget driver that has been in development for quite a while and aims to help ease embedded Linux device development...

The RISC-V architecture updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.12 kernel cycle. More RISC-V CPU ISA extensions are being supported along with enabling some additional kernel features for this CPU architecture...

The VirtIO Vsock guest/host communication interface using virtual sockets will see better performance with the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel...

It's been nearly three months since the last DXVK release for this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 implementation built atop Vulkan for Steam Play (Proton) / Wine. That changed today with Philip Rebohle having just released DXVK 2.4.1...

Vulkan 1.3.296 is out as the first spec update in nearly one month. Given the time that has passed there are more bug fixes than usual but there is also a prominent new extension: VK_EXT_device_generated_commands...

Valve open-source graphics software engineer Mike Blumenkrantz is well known in the Linux community for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver code, various Mesa driver optimizations, and creative writing on his blog. He's also taken up a new task: further accelerating Wayland protocol development...

ChipStar 1.2 has been released as the open-source software enabling HIP/CUDA programs to be compiled and run atop SPIR-V whether it be OpenCL or Vulkan drivers...

While Intel has been making steady progress around enhancing the Linux kernel handling for CPUs with a mix of P and E cores for proper task placement and power optimizations, one area that still is less than desirable for these hybrid Intel Core processors is around virtualization. But Intel engineers are now actively working on improving the Linux virtualization infrastructure for being able to convey the P/E core differences among vCPUs so that the guest VMs can better behave in such environments...

Miguel Ojeda has submitted all of the Rust toolchain and infrastructure changes for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel...

Cloudflare's always-interesting technical blog laid out their details today concerning their next-gen "12th Generation" in-house servers that will be powering their vast web infrastructure. With these next-gen Cloudflare servers they are going with AMD EPYC 9684X Genoa-X processors...

Timothy Arceri with the Valve Linux graphics team has merged the code for Mesa GLSL to convert to NIR at compile-time and in turn dropping the old GLSL IR linker with this being a multi-year effort now wrapped up for Mesa 24.3...

The Network File System (NFS) changes have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.12 development cycle. Notable this time with NFS is adding LOCALIO protocol extension support that can lead to fairly "extreme" performance improvements in scenarios where the NFS client and server are on the same host...

Red Hat engineer Richard Hughes this morning released Fwupd 1.9.25 as the newest feature release to this open-source solution paired with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for making firmware updates on Linux a breeze for an increasing number of systems and peripherals. With Fwupd 1.9.25, the supported device list has grown a little bit longer...

The high performance open-source Mold linker has released version 2.34 with various improvements while also deciding to throw in the towel on DEC Alpha processor support...