Phoronix

Adding to the growing list of changes that is making September's GNOME 47 desktop release quite a delight, the Mutter compositor has merged another great feature...

Basemark last week released GPUScore: Breaking Limit as a "groundbreaking cross-platform ray-tracing benchmark" that is scalable from mobile to desktops. They self-describe Breaking Limit as "the world's first true cross-platform benchmark for ray tracing." Given that and the benchmark meeting my benchmarking criteria, I've been trying it out on various AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards under Linux.

AMD's GPUOpen group this morning released the FidelityFX SDK 1.1 version that incorporates FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.1 (FSR 3.1) as the newest version of their game upscaling tech. Plus it introduces new components in the form of the Breadcrumbs Library and Brixelizer...

Merged for Mesa 24.2 is a massive set of patches providing a new platform abstraction for NVK, the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver. With this new platform abstraction it begins to open the door toward running the NVK driver on alternative kernel (DRM) drivers...

Box64 v0.3 is now available as the newest feature release to this user-space x86_64 emulator for Linux binaries on AArch64 (ARM64) hosts. Box64 is one of several promising projects in this area for being able to run x86_64 games and applications under ARM64 with great speed...

With CentOS Stream 10 beginning to take shape as the basis for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, the Hyperscale Special Interest Group (SIG) has begun crafting CentOS Stream Hyperscale 10...

For those using an Apple Magic Keyboard with a T2-secured Mac, the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel will enable working keyboard backlight support...

Mozilla Firefox 128.0 is now available for download ahead of the official release announcement due out in the coming hours...

While Loongson's LoongArch processors have been supported under Linux from the start, there remain some missing/late elements still being pursued by Loongson engineers for better upstream support. One of the areas being worked on recently is a proper CPUFreq driver for Loongson 3 series processors for CPU frequency scaling for better performance and power management...

Fedora Workstation 41 has been granted approval for its installation media (ISOs) to ship with only Wayland GNOME support with the X11 support removed...

With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was a fundamental change made by Canonical to enable frame pointers by default for their packages in the name of improving the debugging and profiling experience. This has been as part of a broader push by Canonical to focus more on Ubuntu Linux performance and ensuring the needs of developers are met. With Ubuntu 24.10, more of the packages will have frame pointer support enabled...

In preparation for upcoming CPU launches I have been spending the past month re-testing the various Intel Core and AMD Ryzen current generation processors on the very latest Linux software stack and latest system BIOS along with some updated and new benchmarks. For those wanting a fresh look at how the current AMD Ryzen 7000 and 8000 series processors are competing with 14th Gen Intel Core (Raptor Lake Refresh) processors, this article is for you with 18 processors and 443 benchmarks being carried out while using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and upgrading to the Linux 6.10 development kernel.

Canonical today released LXD 6.1 as the newest version of this Ubuntu-focused solution for managing virtual machines (VMs) and containers...

A year ago Google engineers posted experimental Linux code for Device Memory TCP for more efficient transferring of data from GPUs/accelerators to network devices without having to go through a host CPU memory buffer. After going through many rounds of review, Device Memory TCP appears to be nearing the finish line...

Back in February I wrote about Intel's open-source graphics driver engineers working on a new adaptive sharpening filter capability to be found with upcoming Xe2 graphics starting with Lunar Lake. This new adaptive sharpening filter has minimal power and performance impact and at least according to the driver engineers is working out rather well. Besides the Intel Xe kernel driver support around enabling this adaptive sharpening filter, Intel has also been readying the rest of the Linux desktop stack for exposing this capability...

For those with an ASUS ProArt X670E-CREATOR WIFI motherboard or thinking of getting one for this high-end AMD Ryzen 7000 series platform, the Linux support is taking another small step forward...

Both the GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers today saw support for Intel's Branch Hint extension merged today for this feature of Redwood Cove P cores as found with current generation Meteor Lake processors as well as upcoming Intel Granite Rapids server processors...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.10-rc7 as the latest weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 6.10 kernel...

GDB 15.1 was released on Sunday as the first version in the GNU Debugger 15 branch for this widely-used, open-source debugging solution...

Direct3D 8 support by way of the D8VK project has now been merged into DXVK, the widely relied upon open-source software for mapping Direct3D 9/10/11 atop Vulkan that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying Windows games on Linux...

Ubuntu-based Linux Mint 22 aims for release this month after a busier than usual period of bug fixing...

Upstreamed to the mainline Linux kernel last year was HID BPF as a means of more easily shipping new drivers and in particular quirks/workarounds for different HID devices. This allows for some nice continued innovations around (e)BPF within the Linux kernel. With Linux 6.11 there is yet more HID BPF capabilities to be upstreamed as well as new drivers...

When it comes to (non-Apple) ARM laptops all the excitement these days is around the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC. But for those that happen to have a 5+ year old Lenovo Yoga C630 WOS laptop or come across one in a bargain bin, the Linux kernel is seeing improved support for this older ARM laptop powered by an aging Snadragon 850 SoC...

The Linux kernel's block subsystem for storage is poised to introduce support for atomic writes with the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window...

The latest Linux kernel enablement work for upcoming Intel Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors is perf subsystem support...

This Week in GNOME is out with their newest issue to detail changes made by various GNOME components over the first few days of July...

It's been a busy start to July with KDE developers tackling more features for Plasma 6.2 while continuing to deliver fixes to the modern KDE Plasma desktop stack...

Intel's IDXD driver is what enables the Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) under Linux as found since Sapphire Rapids as part of Intel's accelerator offerings on their Xeon processors. With patches posted today, the IDXD driver will help the hardware recover in case of errors to provide a more robust experience...

Back in Linux 6.9 the Mobileye EyeQ5 SoC support was upstreamed for that MIPS-based platform powering Mobileye's level-5 autonomous driving system. With the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel, support for the newer Mobileye EyeQ6 is being upstreamed...

One of several nice Linux performance optimizations recently by Eric Biggers of Google has been speeding up DM-Verity via multi-buffer hashing. DM-Verity is used for transparent integrity checking of block devices and this multi-buffer hashing code looks like it will land with the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle...

As part of the memory management changes expected to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle is allowing more fine-tuned control over the swappiness setting used to determine how aggressively pages are swapped out of physical system memory and into the on-disk swap space...

While there were plans of adding getrandom() in the vDSO with the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window to speed up user-space random number generation access, Linus Torvalds is unconvinced by the work and intends to reject any pull request with it for Linux 6.11...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released Raspberry Pi OS 2024-07-04 as the newest update to this default operating system for Raspberry Pi ARM single board computers...

A Debian General Resolution was called following a lengthy and contentious period among Debian stakeholders on moving forward tag2upload, a system that lets Debian developers and maintainers more easily carry out source-only uploads by using a signed Git tag...

It's been nearly one decade since Intel began working on 5-level paging support for the Linux kernel to allow for greater virtual and physical address space with expanding memory sizes. The 5-level paging kernel-side bits were upstreamed back in Linux 4.12 in 2017 and enabled by default since 2019 with Linux 5.5. Intel CPUs for a while (since Ice Lake) have supported 5-level paging and AMD CPUs too since Zen 4. The Linux kernel may move to unconditionally enabling 5-level paging support for x86_64 kernel builds...

While Linux 6.10-rc7 is due out this weekend and it's usually around the -rc6 timeframe when is the effective new material cut-off to DRM-Next of new graphics/display driver code aiming for the next kernel cycle, AMD is working to squeeze a bit more in for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle...

Patches have been posted for enabling the ROCK 5 ITX board for working with the mainline Linux kernel...

This month's FEX 2407 release as the open-source emulator for running x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (64-bit ARM) is a big one with now handling AVX/AVX2...

The OpenMandriva ROME 24.07 RC is available for testing over the US holiday weekend or just summer downtime...

Oracle today published their newest release of UEK-Next, their forward-looking version of the "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" targeting Oracle Linux users...

In the making the past two years by developer Jason Donenfeld (of WireGuard fame) is adding getrandom() to the vDSO in the name of better performance. In some tests this has yielded as much as a ~15x speed-up to performance for user-space obtaining crypographically secure random number generation. It's looking like for the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window, this work will finally be merged...

Linux 6.10 introduces DRM Panic for providing a new panic screen in case of kernel errors and situations where the VT support may be disabled. This new kernel functionality is akin to Windows' Blue Screen of Death or thanks to open-source can be adapted to take on other forms such as a black screen of death and conveying monochrome logos rather than ASCII art. New patches provide for the ability to show QR codes of error messages within the DRM Panic screens...

For years Meta/Facebook has been exploring using BOLT with the Linux kernel to optimize the layout of the Linux kernel binary. Since BOLT was upstreamed into LLVM, they've continued work around BOLT'ing the kernel. There is now a public guide for carrying out a BOLT-optimized Linux kernel build and roughly 5% better system performance to expect from such an optimized kernel...

While CentOS 7 reached end of life a few days ago, CentOS Stream 10 as the future basis of RHEL 10 continues advancing along with other ongoing initiatives in the CentOS Stream space...

UC San Diego researchers have gone public with Indirector, high-precision branch target injection attacks on the indirect branch predictor. This UCSD security researchers found Indirector impacting recent Intel Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors. Intel believes though that no further mitigations are required...

Two years after originally posting patches for working on Unified Shared Memory (USM) support for OpenMP with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), there is finally an updated patch-set for implementing this shared memory functionality with both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs...

A new Ubuntu utility seeing an uptick in development recently is crypto-config as a means of system-wide cryptography configuration...

The GNU Hurd team has put out their Q2'2024 status update to outline recent activity around this micro-kernel platform...

The RADV Radeon Vulkan driver in Mesa 24.2-devel has received support for task shaders with the NVIDIA Device Generated Commands "DGC" extension...

A new preview release is available of Microsoft's Azure Linux 3.0 operating system...