Phoronix

The PCI subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 6.9 kernel. Among the changes are the usual code churn around device-specific quirks and tuning of the power management code...

Going back years but documented in 2022 has been a desire for the SDL hardware/software abstraction layer popular with cross-platform games to offer an abstracted file-system API. That's finally come to reality with the new SDL_Storage interface added for SDL 3.0...

While the GNOME 46 desktop is being released next week, one of the very last minute feature items being merged hit the Mutter codebase on Friday...

Mold 2.30 is out this weekend as the newest version of this open-source high speed linker alternative to GNU Gold/LD and LLVM LLD...

Open-source AMD Linux graphics driver engineer Marek Olak who is known for his focus on the Gallium3D code has shown no signs of slowing down when it comes to discovering new areas to further enhance the performance and tune the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

As noted a month ago that IBM was starting on Power11 CPU/platform enablement for the mainline Linux kernel, indeed the first batch of Power11 code has now been merged for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel...

Tomeu Vizoso who recently has been working on extending the Etnaviv open-source graphics driver to also support the Vivante NPU IP has made great progress on that with competitive performance to the proprietary NPU driver and upstreaming the Teflon framework into Mesa for handling the Neural Processing Unit. Tomeu Vizoso has now shifted his attention to working on an open-source, reverse-engineered NPU driver for the AI hardware found in various Rockchip SoCs...

If you were feeling adventurous and began using the Bcachefs file-system upon its introduction in Linux 6.7 mainline and using it for a multi-device setup, you are best off upgrading to Linux 6.8 as soon as possible due to known issues with the code in v6.7...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his latest weekly development summary to outline all of the new KDE features and bug fixes that have come about for the KDE desktop and apps over the past week...

A slew of new Linux stable kernel point releases were issued today, driven in part for getting out the Intel Register File Data Sampling "RFDS" mitigations for the kernel code as part of this week's disclosure and microcode updates and kernel patches...

The FUSE passthrough mode that's been years in the making for better performance was merged upstream today for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel!..

Earlier this week on Patch Tuesday was the disclosure by Intel of the Register File Data Sampling (RFDS) vulnerability and mitigation via updated CPU microcode and a kernel patch. RFDS is around malicious user-space software potentially being able to infer stale register values from kernel space. Register File Data Sampling affects recent Intel Atom / E-core bearing processors including the latest Raptor Lake Refresh processors. In this article are some initial benchmarks of the RFDS performance impact under Linux when using the Core i9 14900K processor.

Earlier this week with the original Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.9 Linus Torvalds wasn't happy with some of the code pertaining to spinning out a new library code so that it could be re-used by at least the XFS file-system. A revised pull request was since submitted without that library spin-out and Torvalds today went ahead and merged that updated file-system driver...

VKD3D-Proton 2.12 is out today as the newest version of this software used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for implementing Direct3D 12 over the Vulkan API. With VKD3D-proton 2.12 is initial support for NVIDIA Reflex technology along with various other features...

Ahead of next month's Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release, Canonical has released LXD 5.21 as the newest feature update to this container and VM manager. LXD 5.21 now ships with a production-grade graphical user interface by default, brings AMD SEV support for memory encryption of VMs on EPYC CPUs, object storage support, and other features...

All of the ARM64 (AArch64) feature updates have been merged for the Linux 6.9 kernel. Besides the new SoC and platform hardware support, there are a few ARM64 architecture updates worth pointing out...

Intel has published SVT-AV1 2.0 as the newest major feature release to this leading open-source CPU-based AV1 video encoder. Along with various API changes, SVT-AV1 2.0 has yet more encode performance optimizations...

While Mobileye has already announced EyeQ6 and EyeQ7, being upstreamed in the Linux 6.9 kernel is finally support for the EyeQ5 SoC used for advanced driver-assistance systems in various automobiles. The EyeQ5 is a MIPS-based platform now capable of running an upstream kernel...

The Virtual Function I/O (VFIO) updates for the Linux 6.9 merge window bring a mostly mundane assortment of driver patches and other routine changes. But there is a new driver for NVIDIA's Grace-Hopper superchip...

A few days ago I had the chance to indulge on an incredible compute nirvana: eight AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators at my disposal for some albeit brief testing. Not only was it fantastic from the sheer compute performance, but for Phoronix fans, all the more exciting knowing it's atop a fully open-source software stack from the kernel driver up through the various user-space libraries (well, sans the GPU microcode). This first encounter with the AMD MI300 series was eye-opening in seeing how far the ROCm software stack has come and the increased challenges for NVIDIA going forward with the rising competitiveness of AMD's hardware and software efforts.

AMD's HIP Ray-Tracing library "HIP RT" has been one of the few projects under the GPUOpen umbrella that starts off as closed-source software but then is eventually open-sourced... That happened now with the HIP ray-tracing code becoming publicly available...

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai with SUSE has submitted all of the core sound updates and driver changes for the ongoing Linux 6.9 kernel merge window...

Intel today is introducing the Core i9 14900KS as their newest "world's fastest desktop processor" with up to 6.2GHz clock frequencies...

Some Phoronix readers have been interested in Slint as a Rust-focused graphical toolkit that offers a royalty-free license and in addition to desktop ambitions has also been porting to Android. Slint 1.5 was released today and in addition to the Rust programming language support has begun offering a Python API...

The openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling release Linux distribution has begun rolling out the KDE Plasma 6.0.1, Gear 24.02 apps, and Frameworks 6.0 packages. Plasma 5 is being replaced within the Tumbleweed repository but openSUSE Tumbleweed isn't yet transitioning to the Wayland session by default...

The Krita open-source graphics editor and digital art program is looking at possibly adding some AI features to its arsenal as well as possible GPU acceleration and other new features in 2024...

The current Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series products that were announced in 2022 built off Arctic Sound M are the Data Center GPU Flex 140 and Data Center GPU Flex 170 while now a new "170G" variant was added for Intel's open-source Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan drivers...

Eric Engestrom has released Mesa 24.0.3 as the newest bi-weekly bug-fix release to the current Mesa 24.0 stable series graphics drivers...

Since the Bcachefs file-system was upstreamed in the Linux 6.7 kernel it's been humming along fairy well. But today the Bcachefs feature updates were sent in for the Linux 6.9 merge window and Linus Torvalds isn't happy about some of the proposed code...

The EFI updates were merged today for the ongoing Linux 6.9 merge window. This cycle the EFI kernel code is seeing enhancements for confidential computing as well as for satisfy Microsoft's requirements for getting them to sign the x86 shim loader again for UEFI Secure Boot handling...

As a follow-up to the article earlier this month around DeviceMapper's Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) preparing to be upstreamed, it was successfully merged today by Linus Torvalds as the newest shiny feature of Linux 6.9...

All of the ARM SoC updates and new machine/platform additions were submitted and merged on Tuesday for the ongoing Linux 6.9 kernel merge window...

System76 had been planning an initial alpha release of their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment to debut at the end of Q1 (March), but now they are delaying the first alpha to May for allowing time to wrap up feature work on their new desktop apps...

Richard Hughes of Red Hat who leads development of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and Fwupd firmware updating utility is currently pondering plans for 2025. Among the ideas he's seeking input from the community is on whether the main focus should be on servers, desktop motherboards, laptops, or other removable hardware/peripherals...

The Linux work around atomic consoles and threaded printing remains ongoing. This work is particularly interesting as it's the last major blocker before real-time "RT" kernel support can land. This work sadly isn't ready for the new Linux 6.9 cycle but at least some printk clean-ups are landing for issues discovered during the atomic consoles effort...

While the new Intel Xe kernel graphics driver was upstreamed in Linux 6.8 as this modern DRM driver that is opt-in for current generation hardware and aims to be the default for Lunar Lake / Xe2, currently with Mesa you must build the Intel ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D driver code with the "intel-xe-kmd" option to enable compatibility for this alternative kernel driver to i915. With Mesa 24.1 coming next quarter, that Intel Xe kernel driver support will be enabled out-of-the-box...

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz has been known for many great Mesa improvements the past several years, especially around Zink for the OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation within Mesa. Over the past four years he has taken on many great performance optimizations and other significant code undertakings to improve Mesa. Blumenkrantz has picked his latest battle and appears to be around Mesa's Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) interfaces...

David Airlie has submitted all of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display driver updates today for Linux 6.9...

Building off last November's release of the big OBS Studio 30.0 release, OBS Studio 30.1 debuted today as the newest feature release...

Last week saw Plasma 6.0.1 for an initial batch of bug fixes for this major desktop environment that debuted the week prior. Out today is Plasma 6.0.2 with another round of bug fixes that have been addressed over the past week...

VUSec and IBM Research Europe today announced Speculative Race Conditions (SRCs) as a as a new class of vulnerabilities where thread synchronization primitives using conditional branches can be microarchitecturally bypassed on speculative paths using a Spectre-V1 attack. The researchers have dubbed CVE-2024-2193 as GhostRace and is said to affect all major CPU vendors...

Intel has released new CPU microcode for addressing five security issues and additionally there is newly-merged Linux kernel code for mitigating the new Register File Data Sampling "RFDS" micro-architectural vulnerability affecting Atom / E cores...

With the upgraded Linux kernel, compiler, and other software upgrades with next month's Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, those using recent AMD EPYC server processors like the 4th Gen EPYC Genoa(X) / Bergamo / Siena processors stand to benefit from greater performance over the current Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release...

The recently covered overhaul of the x86 CPU topology code to clean-up quite a code mess has been merged for Linux 6.9. Among other benefits, this improved topology code properly accounts for modern Intel Core hybrid systems with a mix of P and HT-less E cores...

The big set of networking subsystem updates have been sent in for the Linux 6.9 merge window including a number of new wired and wireless devices being supported as well as a number of core networking improvements and optimizations...

AdaptiveCpp 24.02 is out this week as the newest version of this SYCL compiler formerly known as hypSYCL and Open SYCL. AdaptiveCpp supports C++-based heterogeneous programming models targeting all major CPU and GPU vendors thanks to SYCL and C++ standard parallelism...

An interesting anecdote was mentioned as part of the x86/misc changes queued for the Linux 6.9 kernel: on some unnamed AMD systems, NMI debug messages were too excessive that they actually slowed down the systems...

Nearly one year ago Intel published the X86S specification (formerly stylized as "X86-S") for simplifying the Intel architecture by removing support for 16-bit and 32-bit operating systems. X86S is a big step forward with dropping legacy mode, 5-level paging improvements, and other modernization improvements for x86_64. With the Linux 6.9 kernel more x86S bits are in place for this ongoing effort...

A "request for comments" patch series was posted on Monday for a new dynamic kernel stacks feature for Linux. Early testing has shown the potential for significant memory savings...

After two years of talking about Intel FRED as Flexible Return and Event Delivery for overhauling how transitions are done between privilege levels (CPU rings), the support code was finally in good shape for merging now with the Linux 6.9 kernel...