Phoronix

After the COVID-19 pandemic hiatus, Debian's annual conference "DebConf" is back to being an in-person event and started this morning in Kosovo...

Intel this week issued their Compute Runtime 22.28.23726 pre-release for this open-source GPU compute stack on Windows and Linux for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support on their graphics hardware...

The existing GTK-based Anaconda installer is to remain the default installation experience for Fedora 37 this autumn but a change proposal has been filed with hopes of having a public preview image for Anaconda's next-gen web-based interface for installations...

Igalia developer Christopher Michael has begun a blog post series outlining the consulting firm's work on improving the accelerated 2D rendering for the Raspberry Pi 1 through Raspberry Pi 3 single board computers...

Arcan 0.6.2 was released this week as the newest version of the open-source display server built atop a game engine and aiming to compete with the likes of X11 and Wayland while focusing on advanced capabilities...

Vulkan 1.3.221 was released this week as the newest spec update for this industry-standard graphics/compute API...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with another great weekly recap of all the interesting changes coming together in the KDE desktop space...

Wine 7.13 is now available as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

While AMD is normally fairly good at promptly supporting major new enterprise Linux distribution releases from Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical (Ubuntu), this time around with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS it's taken just shy of three months since the official release for them to formally release a new packaged driver supporting it...

While there are many shiny new features coming in this next kernel version, the Linux 5.19 cycle hasn't been particularly smooth for Intel. In addition to now needing to deal with their GuC firmare breakage for Alder Lake P "ASAP", their brand new In-Field Scan (IFS) driver set to premiere in Linux 5.19 has been marked as "broken" after it was determined its exposed interface may need some alterations...

Earlier this week Linux security researcher Matthew Garrett shared that Lenovo's newer AMD Rembrandt laptops with Microsoft's Pluton security co-processor would not boot Linux by default. The issue stems from the third-party UEFI certificate not being enabled by default and it turns out is something Microsoft is seemingly now enforcing. Fortunately, I had a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen3 with Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U on the way and so was now able to test this experience under Linux.

Earlier this year TUXEDO Computers announced their Stellaris 15 Gen4 laptop that when stationary could be water-cooled using their TUXEDO Aquaris water-cooling solution. Oddly for this Bavarian Linux PC retailer that was a Windows-only feature, but today they have announced Linux support for this laptop water cooling solution...

Developer "adlo" announced to Wayland developers today the work on porting Xfce's Xfwm4 window manager code to Wayland and this new "Xfway" compositor is being brought up using the wlroots library that is becoming increasingly common among the smaller Wayland compositors...

The openSUSE project is talking up their first-class support for the Nim programming language in joining Arch Linux for shipping up-to-date packages for this compiled programming language...

Coming for the Linux 5.20 cycle is a IO_uring user-space block driver developed by a Red Hat engineer...

The AMDGPU kernel graphics driver had been preparing to make use of the buddy allocator started by the Intel Linux graphics driver. But now with today's batch of DRM fixes that AMDGPU support is being reverted for Linux 5.19 due to it causing garbled screens for some users...

A final batch of feature updates for the AMDGPU/AMDKFD drivers were mailed in this afternoon to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the Linux 5.20 merge window opening later this month...

As a public service announcement for those who already have bought an Alder Lake P laptop or thinking of getting one, with kernel upgrades you need to be cautious/aware now of breaking accelerated graphics support due to versioned firmware requirements around the GuC micro-controller. While I am surprised Linus Torvalds allows this or wonder if he even is aware of it given his past statements on Linux kernel updates not breaking user-space, the Intel GuC firmware handling being versioned and not supporting backwards compatibility can throw a wrench into your upgrade experience like with the upcoming Linux 5.19 kernel...

Launched earlier this year was Alder Lake P series for modern Intel laptops with up to 14 cores / 20 threads for modern Intel laptops. Many Phoronix readers have been inquiring about Alder Lake laptop support and performance under Linux and recently I finally got my hands on an Alder Lake P device in the form of the MSI Prestige 14Evo A12M-231 that features the flagship ADL-P model of the Core i7 1280P. Today's article is focused on the Linux performance of that flagship Core i7 1280P compared to other AMD and Intel laptop processors.

Out today is the beta of the upcoming Linux Mint 21 "Vanessa" desktop-oriented Linux distribution that is built off Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

Rocky Linux 9.0 was officially released today that joins the likes of AlmaLinux 9.0 and Oracle Linux 9.0 as free alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0...

Recently on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS I've noticed that after installing dependencies for a number of benchmarks that the Ubuntu Linux installation is simply broken... I can start off with a clean install of Ubuntu 22.04 desktop but then after installing the dependencies for a number of tests, the Ubuntu installation is effectively unusable until going back and reinstalling numerous default packages. The desktop is no longer installed, networking support was dropped, and many other packages went missing. It turns out it's due to problematic and unintentional APT package management behavior that is now being fixed...

Merged last year for Linux 5.16 was the FUTEX2 system call for improving the FUTEX interface on Linux and with the original motivation for those improvements to wait on multiple futexes so Wine/Proton can better match Microsoft Windows' behavior for a more optimal Linux gaming experience. Beyond the performance/efficiency benefit of FUTEX2, other improvements have also been talked about while we are now beginning to see action on one of them: NUMA awareness...

GNOME Builder as the desktop's integrated development environment (IDE) is the latest software project to be ported to the GTK 4 toolkit...

The last set of drm-intel-gt-next changes intended for Linux 5.20 have now been submitted for pulling into DRM-Next. This pull has some notable changes, including initial Meteor Lake graphics bring-up...

The RkVDEC driver that is mainlined in the Linux kernel for supporting accelerated video decoding on select Rockchip SoCs has so far been focused on H.264 and VP9 video codec support. With a new patch series out on Wednesday, HEVC/H.265 acceleration is being ironed out...

Yesterday Retbleed was made public as a new speculative execution attack exploiting return instructions. While the "good" news is Retbleed only impacts prior generations of AMD and Intel processors, the bad news is the mitigated performance impact on Linux is quite severe. Since yesterday I have been benchmarking the newly-merged Linux patches on various Intel and AMD processors affected by Retbleed. It's very bad if you are on an affected processor.

DXVK 1.10.2 has been released as the newest version of this Direct3D 9/10/11 implementation atop the Vulkan API that is most notably used with Proton for Steam Play to enjoy Windows games on Linux...

Following the upstream discussions over -O3'ing the Linux kernel last month I ran some fresh benchmarks of the Linux kernel built with -O2 versus -O3. After the -O3 optimized kernel build results weren't too impressive, a number of Phoronix readers were virtually shouting that "-O3 -march=native" is where it's at for fun and performance... To appease those even though in the past it hasn't proven worthwhile and upstream kernel developers are against it, here are those numbers...

There hasn't been much to report on lately for the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver providing open-source NVIDIA GPU driver support on Linux. Several recent Linux kernel series haven't even seen any Nouveau DRM/KMS driver pull requests with changes. For the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle, a Nouveau set of changes were sent in today to DRM-Next but it's quite tiny...

Intel's effort to add oneAPI/SYCL support to Blender for GPU acceleration with forthcoming Arc Graphics hardware appears all buttoned up for the upcoming Blender 3.3 release...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver contributor Timur Kristóf known for being one of the Valve contractors to improve the open-source Linux graphics stack has shared his experiences working on the Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) support for AMD RDNA GPUs with this open-source driver...

Disclosed on Tuesday were two new X.Org Server security vulnerabilities concerning possible local privilege escalation and remote code execution. X.Org Server 21.1.4 was released with these mitigations to the XKB extension while XWayland is also vulnerable and has now been patched with XWayland 22.1.3...

Being made public this Patch Tuesday is "RETBLEED" as two new CVEs for the latest speculative execution attacks affecting today's hardware. Retbleed exploits return instructions and is able to undermine existing defenses against Spectre Branch Target Injection (BTI)...

Intel today announced the release of open-source "AI Reference Kits" to help in the development of artificial intelligence software around healthcare, manufacturing, and other fields...

Back in March when AMD Milan-X rolled out I published a number of EPYC 7773X benchmarks as well as Milan-X benchmarks in the cloud. Since then there have been new Linux kernel improvements and other changes in the ever-advancing open-source world. Plus simply more time to conduct additional tests over the summer. Here is the latest round of my AMD EPYC 7773X 1P and 2P benchmarking compared to the Milan EPYC 7713/7763 SKUs as well as Intel's Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" competition.

Getting things started for this "Patch Tuesday" are the disclosure of two new X.Org Server vulnerabilities...

The Document Foundation has made available this morning the LibreOffice 7.4 release candidate as the newest test version of this cross-platform, open-source office suite...

Last month Intel began publishing the Linux kernel driver changes needed for Habana Labs' Gaudi2 AI accelerator. That enablement and subsequent kernel review process has went well and that hardware support has now been queued into char-misc ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.20 merge window...

IBM this morning announced more Power10 servers being added to their portfolio, now including mid-range and scale-out platforms based on this latest POWER architecture...

While AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver stack is wonderful if living on the bleeding-edge with a modern Linux distribution, for those on enterprise Linux distributions that tend to stick to older versions of packages for the support lifetime or where wanting to run a vetted/qualified driver stack, it can be more of a pain. For AMD's packaged Linux driver stack it only supports those select enterprise Linux distributions and can run into pain points trying to run elsewhere or even say running brand new LTS distributions at times can lack support. There are also challenges in installing/running the ROCm compute stack outside of the few officially supported Linux distributions by AMD. Fortunately, they are now hiring Linux build engineer(s) to work on such issues...

Merged prior to the weekend into LLVM 15 was a basic web server implementation...

The GCC Steering Committee has approved of the GCC Rust front-end providing Rust programming language support by the GNU Compiler Collection. This Rust front-end will likely be merged ahead of the GCC 13 release next year...

With the very popular HP Dev One that is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO SoC and running Pop!_OS, a number of Phoronix readers inquired about seeing benchmarks of some of the alternative kernel flavors on the device. So here is a look at the stock Linux 5.17 kernel up against the Linux 5.18 and 5.19 (Git) kernels and then Liquorix and XanMod tossed in as alternative flavors running on the Pop!_OS 22.04 installation.

LVFS/fwupd lead developer Richard Hughes at Red Hat has released Fwupd 1.8.2 as the newest version of this open-source solution for handling firmware updates under Linux and other platforms...

While no new X.Org "katamari" releases are planned for a collection of all the X.Org component updates combined, this weekend longtime X.Org contributor Alan Coopersmith of Oracle issued many new updates to various old, seldom-maintained X.Org projects...

One of the newest extensions now supported by the RADV Vulkan driver is VK_KHR_performance_query, which can be used by RenderDoc and other utilities...

In gearing up for the GNOME 43 Alpha release coming out soon, this weekend marked the release of the new alpha versions of GNOME Shell and Mutter...

Rob Clark as the lead developer of the MSM DRM kernel driver and the Freedreno/TURNIP Mesa drivers for open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics driver support has submitted the Direct Rendering Manager driver changes for the upcoming Linux 5.20 merge window...

Linus Torvalds just announced the availability of Linux 5.19-rc6 as the latest routine test release for the upcoming Linux 5.19...