ClangIR is a new IR for LLVM's Clang compiler built atop MLIR. Thanks to this year's Google Summer of Code, there has been progress on being able to compile GPU kernels using ClangIR as another improvement for heterogeneous programming with this open-source compiler stack...
With this past weekend's release of Linux 6.11-rc7, the kernel changes for the week were larger than prior RCs and Torvalds was a bit hesitant on releasing v6.11 this coming Sunday due to the upcoming that takes place next week in Vienna, Austria. But after a bit of time and feedback from other kernel developers, Torvalds is now more inclined to release Linux 6.11 this coming Sunday rather than dragging it out for an extra week...
The latest Rust-written OpenCL driver "Rusticl" work by Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst is support for shader variants and introducing an optimized kernel variant...
WolfSSL is an embedded SSl/TLS library designed for a range of use-cases and available as open-source under the GNU GPLv2. WolfSSL was recently packaged and added to Fedora Linux since Netatalk began building against wolfSSL and in the longer-term plans to require its use. So the Fedora packager of Netatalk went ahead with packaging up wolfSSL. But this in turn has led to issues and as of today is now being "immediately retired from Fedora."..
As part of the ongoing AmpereOne testing at Phoronix with the 192-core AmpereOne A192-32X flagship processor, I've been working on several different Linux distribution benchmarks with this Supermicro AmpereOne server. That comparison in full should be published next week while worth highlighting on its own are some of the gains seen with the in-development CentOS Stream 10 that serves as the upstream to what will be Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10. There are some nice performance gains seen on AArch64 with CentOS Stream 10 compared to CentOS Stream 9.
Intel today as part of their "Patch Tuesday" released new CPU microcode for recent generation Core and Xeon processors. Two security updates were made along with fixing a handful of functional issues...
A patch merged yesterday to the GNU C Library (glibc) codebase can help the memset() function's performance by 24% as measured on an Arm Neoverse-N1 core...
With the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel the Intel graphics driver will finally be able to report GPU fan speeds. Another long sought feature is also on the way for this open-source Linux driver: GPU package temperature reporting for Intel discrete GPUs...
AlmaLinux to further distinguish itself from other RHEL-based Linux distributions has announced a Certification Special Interest Group (SIG) and out of that is coming a AlmaLinux Hardware Certification Program...
While OpenJDK Java is available via the Ubuntu package archive and the go-to JVM on Ubuntu Linux, Canonical is working to package up Oracle's GraalVM as another option for enhancing the Java stack on Ubuntu...
Intel today released a new version of QATlib, the QuickAssist Technology library for enjoying hardware-accelerated offloading of security, authentication, and compression needs. Recent Intel Xeon CPUs with built-in QAT accelerators stand to benefit a lot from the new QATlib 24.09 release...
Following Canonical's decision to enable frame pointers by default in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and then they ended up adding a number of performance tools to ship by default with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, for Ubuntu 24.10 a late change is adding another tool to be installed by default on the Ubuntu desktop: Sysprof...
Thanks to the work of Valve Linux graphics driver developer Samuel Pitoiset, the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver is now the first within Mesa supporting the new Vulkan pipeline binary extension...
The Intel Arrow Lake Linux graphics driver support appears largely wrapped up following a patch for properly handling the necessary GSC firmware requirements and building off all the existing Meteor Lake Arc Graphics driver code paths. There are a number of Arrow Lake PCI device IDs already present for the graphics while a new one is being added now to the kernel drivers...
Last year Canonical delivered an Intel TDX "tech preview" for Ubuntu 23.10 to experiment with using Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) found on the latest Xeon server processors. With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS they began shipping a formal TDX software stack and now have rolled out an update to that software stack as a stable release update...
Some long-rotting code in Mesa has been flushed out today... Mesa 24.3 is now 11.6k lines of code lighter after removing support for the OpenMAX (OMX) API that was implemented as a Gallium3D state tracker long ago and hasn't seen any activity in recent years and the upstream OpenMAX standards work halted more than one decade ago...
Last month I wrote about Intel Linux engineers working on a new Efficiency Latency Control feature for their uncore driver. This ELC option allows for adjusting the behavior of the Intel uncore for efficiency versus latency characteristics. Those Intel ELC patches to the TPMI uncore driver are now queued up for merging with the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle...
Excitement is building that the real-time kernel "PREEMPT_RT" support might finally be ready for the mainline kernel as soon as the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window. It will be interesting to see if that long-awaited day finally comes this month but recently noted patches have now been queued into tip/tip.git's "sched/rt" branch ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window...
With the Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD server that's in the lab for a few weeks for reviewing the AmpereOne A192-32X and delivering the first independent benchmarks of the AmpereOne 192-core AArch64 server processor, the AmpereOne benchmarks to date have been comparing to other Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server platforms. But if looking up to the cloud is the closest AArch64 server competition to AmpereOne there is: Amazon's Graviton4. In today's article ia showdown looking at how AmpereOne and AWS Graviton4 compete at 192 cores for ARM 64-bit server performance.
Earlier this summer KDE began soliciting ideas for what their goals should be over the next 2~3 years. This weekend at their annual Akademy KDE developer conference their next round of goals were solidified...
While Intel Lunar Lake is only beginning to ship later this month, Intel Linux engineers have already begun work on enabling its successor: Panther Lake. With the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel cycle will be more early enablement work on Intel Panther Lake, presumably what will be the Core Ultra 300 series...
Miracle-WM 0.3.5 was released this weekend as the newest step forward for this Mir-based window manager / Wayland compositor developed by a Canonical engineer. Miracle-WM continues being polished ahead of the upcoming Fedora Miracle Spin debuting as part of Fedora 41...
OpenJPH v0.16 has been released as the newest version of this open-source implementation of High-Throughput JPEG2000 (HTJK), also known as JPH / JPEG2000 Part 15. With this new release comes faster performance thanks to making use of Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2) to complement its existing AVX-512 code...
Hyprland 0.43 is out as the newest version of this independent, very customizable Wayland compositor focused on providing a dynamic tiling experience...
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...
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...
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...
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