Phoronix

OpenMandriva ROME 24.07 debuted as stable today for this rolling release model of OpenMandriva. With the new release comes the transition to the KDE Plasma 6 desktop but the OpenMandriva developers aren't yet comfortable enough to use Wayland by default and thus the X11 session is preferred...

Greg Kroah-Hartman on Friday sent out all of the USB/Thunderbolt subsystem feature updates destined for the Linux 6.11 kernel of which there are many different patches across the board...

The crypto subsystem updates have landed for the Linux 6.11 kernel...

With Linux 6.11 support for the Lenovo Yoga Slim7x and ASUS Vivobook S15 are upstreamed for some of the first Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite powered laptops. But for follow-on kernel cycles you can expect yet more Snapdragon X1 Elite/Plus powered laptop support to appear with new DeviceTree additions. On Friday, Linaro engineer Konrad Dybcio sent out the patches for enabling the X1 Elite powered Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 laptop...

With Linux 6.11 over on the Arm-focused SoC side there were three new SoCs and 59 new machines/boards added for Arm and RISC-V. The MIPS pull request was submitted overnight for this next kernel version and there is just two new SoCs being introduced...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a summer time update that highlights the interesting improvements made to the KDE desktop and related apps over the past two weeks...

Eric Engestrom is once again serving as the Mesa release manager and today took to forking the Mesa 24.2 codebase followed by issuing the first release candidate...

Back in January AMD quietly posted an XDNA Linux kernel driver for enabling the Ryzen AI NPUs. The driver has been maintained within that GitHub repository since but without any clear effort for getting this accelerator driver reviewed and merged into the upstream Linux kernel. Today that first step is finally being taken with the Ryzen AI XDNA Linux kernel driver patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list and dri-devel to begin facilitating the upstream review process for getting this AI accelerator driver in the mainline kernel...

Red Hat developer Karol Herbst continues improving the support for Rusticl, the Rust-based modern OpenCL implementation for Mesa's Gallium3D drivers...

All of the SoC and platform updates slated for the Linux 6.11 kernel have been merged including new SoCs and adding DeviceTree files for a number of new systems, including some of the first Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops...

NVIDIA's EGL-Wayland library continues to be maintained as an EGLStream-based Wayland external platform library for client-side Wayland support to EGL atop EGLDevice/EGLStream...

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai has sent out all of the sound driver patches for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel...

Vulkan 1.3.291 was published this morning and with this specification update comes one prominent new extension: VK_AMD_anti_lag...

The SLAB pull request landed in Linux 6.11 Git on Thursday with kmem_buckets-based hardening of kernel memory allocations...

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver that started out a decade ago providing reverse-engineered, open-source 3D driver support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware has now enabled support for the X1-85 GPU that is found within the Snapdragon X1 Elite and Snapdragon X1 Plus laptop SoCs...

The Fedora change proposal was approved this week by their engineering and steering committee to support AMD SEV-SNP virtualization host support to allow easily launching confidential computing virtual machines (VMs) with Fedora 41...

Last week I published some initial benchmarks of the Amazon/AWS Graviton4 processors now available within the EC2 cloud using the new "R8g" instances. That initial comparison was a 64 vCPU comparison of Graviton4 against AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon 64 vCPU AWS instances. In today's article is a look at the 96-core Graviton4 bare metal performance using the "r8g.metal-24xl" AWS instance type. The Graviton4 r8g.metal-24xl performance was then compared in today's article against various bare metal AMD EPYC, Ampere Altra Max, and Intel Xeon processors in the lab at Phoronix.

It looks like the AMD RDNA4 "GFX12" graphics driver support is in good shape: AMD is now enabling the driver support for the next-generation graphics "out of the box" with the latest pending patches...

The Intel-initiated Sound Open Firmware project for open-source audio DSP firmware and related tooling is out with a new v2.10 release. SOF continues to be backed not only by Intel but also Google, AMD, Realtek, NXK, Mediatek, and other organizations...

With the maturity of the EXT4 file-system it's not too often seeing any huge feature additions for this commonly used Linux file-system but there's still the occasional wild performance optimization to uncover... With Linux 6.11 the EXT4 file-system can see upwards of a 20% performance boost in some scenarios...

Toward the end of 2022 a GCC AArch64 compiler change was quietly made by Arm that allows "-march=native" to be handled on 64-bit ARM by treating it as the equivalent "-mcpu=native" option. The change happened to fly under my radar at that time and didn't draw much attention at large while now it's finally being officially documented in hopes of similar behavior being adopted by other compilers for AArch64...

The ROCm 6.1 series is the latest stable version currently of AMD's open-source GPU compute stack with an increasing large focus on AI. AMD has confirmed to Red Hat that ROCm 6.2 will debut before the release of Fedora 41, so the developers are now hoping to be shipping ROCm 6.2 packages with this upcoming Fedora Linux release...

The XFS file-system updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel...

Microsoft today published a new version of their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in pre-release form...

While Rust is viewed as a memory safe and robust programming language, there is the "unsafe" keyword within Rust that can be used for unsafe code that grants "unsafe superpowers" for the language. As dealing with Rust at low-levels as the Linux kernel can lead to needing to use "unsafe" Rust at times, a documentation standard has been proposed for dealing with such code inside the kernel...

It's been a wild two years since NVIDIA began publishing an open-source Linux GPU kernel driver for Turing GPUs and newer. With the latest NVIDIA 555 Linux driver series that open-source kernel driver support is in great shape and NVIDIA today is out with a lengthy blog post promoting it...

Last week with delivering a number of AMD vs. NVIDIA Vulkan ray-tracing benchmarks under Linux with the current drivers and using the new "Breaking Limit" benchmark, the question was raised how well does AMD's official "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver handle ray-tracing these days compared to the more popular Mesa RADV Vulkan driver used commonly by Linux gamers and as the default driver on most Linux distributions. Here is a fresh look at the RADV versus AMDVLK Vulkan performance on Linux with a focus on ray-tracing performance.

The power management updates have been merged for Linux 6.11 that include some nice improvements for Intel and AMD processors...

The "x86/bugs" code has been merged for the Linux 6.11 kernel that is just three patches this go around but includes a new Spectre BHI mitigation option...

The EFI changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel. Notable this cycle on the EFI side is removing support for EFI fake memory maps and then a workaround to get dual GPU support working for some of the older x86-based Apple MacBook Pros by pretending that Apple macOS is booting rather than Linux...

The networking subsystem updates have landed for the Linux 6.11 kernel with support for a variety of new wireless and wired networking hardware...

All of the media subsystem feature updates for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel were sent out overnight. Arguably most notable with the media driver changes for the new kernel is introducing the Raspberry Pi "PiSP" driver for the image signal processor (ISP) found with the Raspberry Pi 5 for powering its camera system...

Wlroots 0.18 recently debuted as the newest version of this Wayland library born out of the Sway compositor project. With wlroots 0.18 is support for new Wayland protocols and other exciting features...

Installing the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver stack on Fedora currently doesn't jive with UEFI Secure Boot systems and can lead to the OS being unbootable. As such, the NVIDIA driver option was previously removed from GNOME Software. But as the NVIDIA driver is still widely sought after on Fedora by Linux gamers and those wanting to run CUDA/AI workloads especially, Fedora 41 is now cleared to roll-out NVIDIA driver support with UEFI Secure Boot integration...

The AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) changes have been submitted for the recently opened Linux 6.11 merge window. Notable this cycle is getting support in the mainline kernel for SEV-SNP guest support over a Secure VM Service Module (SVSM)...

The open-source LLVM compiler today dropped support for AMD's long forgotten 3DNow! instructions...

For those running the popular, modular/upgradeable Framework Laptops, the Linux 6.11 kernel is bringing some nice driver additions for enhancing the support on the recent models...

Intel engineers have been busy preparing their open-source Linux software stack for H.266/VVC video decoding that is expected with upcoming Xe2 graphics for Lunar Lake and Battlemage. FFmpeg 2024Q2 is out today with VVC decoding now working on Intel graphics for this widely-used multimedia library...

Jens Axboe has seen all of the block subsystem and IO_uring changes already mainlined for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel...

It's Blender 4.2 release day! Blender 4.2 marks the newest long-term support (LTS) release for this wonderful free software 3D modeling solution that has developed quite a following across the industry...

While many have been excited around the prospects of laptops powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC, the Linux support so far still leaves a lot to be desired... The initial Snapdragon X Elite laptops aren't utilizing ACPI standards and the bring-up under Linux has been slow, but patches have begun appearing for some models. But even with patches, the Adreno GPU remains a big obstacle still being tackled along with other features like web camera, USB4, Bluetooth, etc. With a new kernel patch, the GPU for the Snapdragon X Elite (X1E80100) is being disabled by default...

There's a new driver subsystem being introduced in the Linux 6.11 kernel for power sequencing...

For the past year and a half Intel engineers have been working on Linux kernel improvements for Sub-NUMA Clustering (SNC) in the presence of Resource Director Technology (RDT). Intel has been advising its customers not to use Sub-NUMA Clustering when making use of Resource Director Technology since these features would effectively fight eachother. Well, with the Linux 6.11 kernel that's finally being addressed...

Stemming from a recent investigation into a GCC compiler regression on Zen 4, it was discovered that the unaligned load/store costs for the Zen 4 and Zen 5 targets were inaccurate and have now been tweaked within GCC Git...

Linus Torvalds began the Linux 6.11 merge window yesterday by merging some of his own feature code for this next kernel version...

The Solus Linux project announced today they will be dropping the AppArmor patches carried by their kernels. In turn this means their Snap packaging support will only run with partial confinement...

While there have been various efforts like HIPIFY to help in translating CUDA source code to portable C++ code for AMD GPUs and then the previously-AMD-funded ZLUDA to allow CUDA binaries to run on AMD GPUs via a drop-in replacement to CUDA libraries, there's a new contender in town: SCALE. SCALE is now public as a GPGPU toolchain for allowing CUDA programs to be natively run on AMD graphics processors...

Following last night's release of the Linux 6.10 kernel, the FSF LA developers have released GNU Linux-libre 6.10-gnu as their downstream kernel flavor that strips out the ability to load binary-only kernel modules and the ability to load non-free firmware/microcode into open-source drivers, among other alterations in the name of software freedom...

Last week I had the pleasure to be out in Los Angeles for the AMD Tech Day focused on their new Ryzen 9000 "Granite Ridge" and Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" processors. This was an exciting event with many new details shared around Zen 5 CPU cores and the RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics found with the upcoming Ryzen AI 300 series mobile processors. The embargo concerning those architectural details have now expired while the review/benchmarking embargo isn't until a later date.

Alongside all of the exciting Ryzen 9000 and Ryzen AI 300 series details shared last week at the AMD Tech Day in Los Angeles, what I also found to be very interesting was AMD sharing a bit more about a "Unified AI Software Stack" they are working to release in the coming quarters...