Phoronix

Just shy of two weeks since fwupd 1.8.2 was released with supporting more hardware for system and peripheral firmware updating under Linux, Fwupd 1.8.3 has now arrived as the newest version...

Toshiba's Visconti SoC provides an optimized image recognition processor and geared for advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) solutions for automobiles and similar modern use-cases. Toshiba engineers are now publishing patches for their DNN image processing accelerator driver with hopes of getting the code upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel...

Toshiba's Visconti SoC provides an optimized image recognition processor and geared for advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) solutions for automobiles and similar modern use-cases. Toshiba engineers are now publishing patches for their DNN image processing accelerator driver with hopes of getting the code upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel...

Since last year Microsoft has been working on Direct3D 12 video acceleration for Mesa so that Windows Subsystem for Linux can run common applications targeting the VA-API video acceleration API and ultimately enjoy GPU-based video acceleration by way of Direct3D 12. After the initial video encode/decode support for D3D12 was merged to Mesa earlier this year, the latest Microsoft contribution is now handling of video engine based effects...

Since last year Microsoft has been working on Direct3D 12 video acceleration for Mesa so that Windows Subsystem for Linux can run common applications targeting the VA-API video acceleration API and ultimately enjoy GPU-based video acceleration by way of Direct3D 12. After the initial video encode/decode support for D3D12 was merged to Mesa earlier this year, the latest Microsoft contribution is now handling of video engine based effects...

Released last month was AMD ROCm 5.2 for the company's open-source Linux GPU compute stack while out today is the v5.2.1 point release...

When it comes to compressing textures using the Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) format that is supported by the OpenGL / OpenGL ES / Vulkan APIs, Arm's ASTC Encoder has long reigned supreme. Out today is ASTC-Encoder 4.0 as the latest performance-boosting update to this open-source compressor...

Intel's Linux graphics driver developers continue to be very busy polishing the DG2/Alchemist graphics card support for forthcoming Intel Arc Graphics hardware... Merged today to the open-source Intel Mesa Vulkan driver was a ray-tracing focused fix that yields "like a 100x (not joking) improvement." Even more of a kicker? The change is one line of code for the massive improvement...

Released today was Vulkan 1.3.222 as the newest Vulkan spec with various clarifications/corrections plus two new extensions coming out of Qualcomm...

The Linux game porters at Feral Interactive have released GameMode 1.7 as the newest version of their daemon that can ensure your CPU frequency scaling governor is set to "performance" mode, among other system performance optimizations, automatically when launching games...

I've begun testing the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U "Rembrandt" SoC under Linux and have some preliminary benchmarks of this Zen 3+ chip up against a variety of Intel and AMD notebooks on hand. Here is the first of several articles looking at the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U Linux performance using a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen3.

AMD today posted new open-source Linux driver code for enabling the audio co-processor (ACP) with the upcoming Raphael platform with the Ryzen 7000 series processors...

Merged yesterday into RADV for Mesa 22.2 is implementing task/mesh shader draw support...

In addition to Red Hat being busy working on their new web-based Anaconda installer for future Fedora and RHEL releases, SUSE engineers have also been pursuing their own web-based installer built atop YaST. D-Installer 0.4 was released recently as the latest improvements on that front...

NVIDIA released new Vulkan beta driver builds last night for Linux and Windows users...

Canonical and Dell are jointly announcing that the new Dell XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition laptop has been officially certified for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

Merged this afternoon to the mainline Linux 5.19 Git kernel and set for back-porting is a fix for a new security bug. Oracle made public CVE-2022-21505 on Tuesday as a trivial bypass to the Linux kernel's lockdown mode...

In addition to Dart, Golang, and being involved with other programming language initiatives over the years, their latest effort that was made public on Tuesday is Carbon. The Carbon programming language hopes to be the gradual successor to C++ and makes for an easy transition path moving forward...

Epic Games is the latest company joining the Open 3D Foundation as a premier member alongside Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, and others...

Last week I posted my initial benchmarks for the Linux impact of mitigating Retbleed as the newest CPU speculative execution vulnerability. As noted in the prior Retbleed articles, on the AMD side it's Zen 1/1+/2 processors affected as well as older Bulldozer CPUs. That earlier article included Zen 2 benchmarks while in this article are Zen 1 tests given its situation is slightly different.

The long in development work around IO_uring zero-copy send for the Linux kernel's networking subsystem is now ready for mainline...

Released this morning was the alpha of the GNOME 43 desktop...

The Mesa Lavapipe driver that provides a CPU-based Vulkan implementation is now officially compliant with the Vulkan 1.3 specification...

The Btrfs send/receive functionality allows for generating a stream of changes between two sub-volume snapshots, which can be useful for efficient backup/archive purposes, among other uses. With the Linux 5.20 kernel is send/receive support for the new "stream v2" format...

The Hantro VPU driver that has been developed the past several years for supporting the Hantro video/image processing IP found on various Rockchip and NXP SoCs is set to be promoted out of the Linux kernel's staging area...

Mesa's Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation is finally ready to enable lazy descriptors by default, which in turn will mean better performance for this generic OpenGL implementation across many games/applications...

Google engineers have released Cirq 1.0 as their first full version -- and stable API -- of this open-source programming framework for quantum computing and written in Python...

Last week AMD quietly released AOCL 3.2 as the newest version of their optimized CPU software libraries for use across Ryzen, Ryzen Threadripper, and EPYC platforms...

NVIDIA engineers have been working on NUMA distance metrics within the Linux kernel to replace the simple local/remote NUMA preference interface currently used by some drivers for NUMA-aware memory allocations. In their testing this improved NUMA distance handling is leading to "significant performance implications" for throughput and CPU utilization...

Following the recent discussions about -O3'ing the Linux kernel and other compiler optimizations, a request came in to see some fresh GCC compiler optimization benchmarks with the recently released GCC 12. So here is a fresh look at various GCC optimization levels up through -Ofast as well as with link-time optimizations (LTO) and "-march=native" tuning on the new GCC 12 with the mature AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X platform.

Added to Intel's documentation in late 2020 and initial kernel patches out since early 2021, Intel has been slowly working on Linear Address Masking (LAM) support for the Linux kernel. Out this past week was finally the latest iteration of this work for leveraging untranslated address bits of 64-bit linear addresses to be used for storing arbitrary software metadata...

A feature supported by the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that sadly isn't used more often is function multi-versioning (FMV) for supporting multiple versions of a function with the given function selected based upon the target processor in use. GCC FMV on x86_64 allows for different functions to be used whether supporting SSE4.2, AVX, or even a particular CPU micro-architecture. Arm is finally working on GCC function multi-versioning support for AArch64...

Nadav Amit who previously spearheaded work on reducing unnecessary TLB flushes, concurrent TLB flushes, and other low level optimizations over the years. The latest work is now on "relaxed" TLB flushes as another low-level performance improvement...

Yesterday marked the release of LightDM 1.32 as the first official release of this display manager since 2019...

In addition to AMD engineers being busy working on RDNA3 graphics support for their open-source Linux graphics driver stack, concurrently they have also been working on enabling GFX940 as their next-gen CDNA part, presumably to launch as the AMD Instinct MI300 if traditions hold...

While Retbleed was grabbing the headlines last week and attention of kernel developers, an Intel engineer sent out a new patch series adding Linux kernel support for "BHI_DIS" as a new hardware-based mitigation that appears to be coming with future Intel CPUs for better fending off Spectre-BHI (Branch History Injection) that was disclosed back in March. But initial indications are this new hardware-based prevention may be even more costly for performance and is not being enabled by default...

Canonical engineer Daniel van Vugt who is known for his work on enhancing the upstream GNOME desktop stack to improve the experience for Ubuntu has recently taken up interest in getting the AMD-Xilinx Kria KR260 working with the GNOME Wayland session. The Kria KR260 is for the recently-announced AMD/Xilinx Robotics Starter Kit...

After dealing with the Intel Alder Lake P GuC firmware breakage around Linux 5.19 Git that is now to be addressed by the upstream Intel developers, it was on to performance testing the shiny new Core i7 1280P with this kernel due to be released as stable within the next two weeks... For those concerned about maximum performance, there was a glaring performance regression for this Alder Lake P on the new kernel being released as stable later this month. Well, a default change in performance/behavior at least but the power efficiency / performance-per-Watt tended to be better on this new kernel.

AMD today published AMDVLK 2022.Q3.1 as their latest snapshot of this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems...

Asahi Linux has issued an update with initial support for the Mac Studio powered by the M1 Ultra SoC as well as having initial (experimental) suppoirt for the new Apple M2 hardware...

Stemming from my article last week noting how Linux 5.19 Git broke Intel Alder Lake P graphics support due to requiring new firmware while not retaining backwards compatibility with the existing Intel GuC firmware, a solution is still being worked on prior to Linux 5.19 final whether it be a revert or the proposed patch working on GuC v69/70 firmware compatibility. Linux firmware guidelines are also being proposed to ensure kernel developers in the future don't try to break firmware support guarantees...

One of several improvements being prepared for the XFS file-system with the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle is focused on improving the CIL scalability for systems with many CPU cores...

The ASUS-EC-Sensors driver that provides better and faster hardware sensor reading for ASUS motherboards on Linux and premiered earlier this year in Linux 5.18 is continuing to broaden its list of supported ASUS motherboards...

Ben Widawsky who had been at Intel for the past seventeen years, most of which were spent improving their open-source Linux graphics driver as well as other Linux kernel contributions, has joined Google...

Red Hat released Stalld 1.17 this past week as the newest version of this open-source daemon used for thread stall detection and boosting on Linux...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.19-rc7 following a busy week due to the Retbleed security mitigation and not only the CPU overhead performance impact it puts on users but the mess it has on kernel development especially when it comes to embargoed issues that make the patches difficult to review/test well prior to embargo lift...

Following some weekend benchmarks here are more complementary numbers on the Retbleed mitigation performance benchmark costs. These additional numbers are on a Zen 2 based AMD Ryzen 7 4800U APU that has been common both to laptops as well as embedded/low-profile devices for thin client computing, IoT / edge use-cases, and more...

Due to the new "Retbleed" security mitigation further hurting CPU performance for affected processors, Intel engineers have revisited work on call depth tracking mitigation as an alternative to the Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) mitigation to help in lowering the overhead costs...

Raptor Computing Systems that is known for their open-source POWER9-based Talos II and Blackbird systems that are fully open-source designs and running on free software down to the firmware level are preparing for a new product launch...

As of this week in Mesa 22.2, the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for the VK_NV_device_generated_commands extension. This NVIDIA-created extension that has been around for a few years with their hardware allows for the GPU to generate some of the most frequent rendering commands on the hardware itself...