Phoronix

A set of proposed patches promise to make the Linux kernel's memchr() implementation faster for locating a character within a block of memory. In tests carried out by the developer, the new implementation can be nearly four times faster on large searches...

Intel's open-source Compute Runtime for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support on their graphics hardware appears to be in roughly good shape now for DG2/Alchemist based on external/independent monitoring of the effort...

The Linux kernel has long honored the "nordrand" kernel parameter to disable kernel use of the Intel RDRAND and RDSEED instructions if not trusting them -- either out of security concerns that they could be compromised by the vendor or running into hardware/firmware issues around RdRand usage. But the Linux kernel is preparing to drop that kernel parameter with users encouraged to use the more generic "random.trust_cpu" parameter...

WayVNC 0.5 was released on Saturday as a feature update to this VNC server for Wayland compositors leveraging the WLROOTS library...

Leah Rowe has announced the release of Libreboot 20220710, the downstream of Coreboot that takes a firm approach to ensure boot firmware freedom with avoiding proprietary blobs even when it means reduced hardware coverage/support. As such with avoiding the likes of the Intel FSP, the supported list of motherboards is quite limited...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap of all the interesting KDE changes this week, which includes building up of more work targeting Plasma 5.26 this autumn as well as KDE application enhancements and more...

Debian 11.4 is out as the fourth stable release update to "Bullseye" of this popular community-based Linux distribution...

In addition to the OpenChrome DRM/KMS driver hoping to be finally mainlined in 2022 for supporting aging VIA graphics hardware from the long-ago days of their x86 chipsets, separately there is a DRM/KMS kernel driver in the works for something even older... A Linux DRM graphics driver for the Atari Falcon from the early 90's...

Gentoo developer Andreas Hüttel "Dilfridge" is experimenting with binary Gentoo package hosting and finding out what improvements to Portage are needed for making it more of a reality at a larger scale...

Intel this week submitted to DRM-Next what it anticipates to be the last batch of "drm-intel-next" feature changes for the upcoming Linux 5.20 merge window...

KDE developers are looking at possibly making use of C++20 language features within the Plasma 5.26 desktop and the newer C++ usage could work its way to other KDE components with time too...

Cloud Hypervisor as what started out as an Intel open-source project and now lives under the Linux Foundation umbrella as a virtual machine monitor (VMM) for use with Linux KVM and Windows MSHV is out with a new feature release...

Following last week's release of Vulkan 1.3.219 that introduced the VK_EXT_shader_module_identifier extension and Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) adding support for it earlier this week, Intel's open-source Vulkan driver "ANV" has landed support for this new extension to close out the week...

The past few months we have been closely covering the Coreboot port to an MSI retail motherboard for Intel Alder Lake. This port carried out by the 3mdeb consulting firm has been with their downstream "Dasharo" firmware based on Coreboot while as of yesterday the motherboard port has begun landing in upstream Coreboot...

Canonical engineers have been continuing their quest to improve the start-up time for the Snap version of Mozilla Firefox that is used by default on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. With the latest improvements now pushed to the Firefox Snap, they are seeing around a 50% reduction in start-time for the web browser...

Last year when the Intel Core i9 12900K "Alder Lake" processor launched, Windows 11 was outperforming Linux to much surprise in general but explainable due to some late Linux kernel patches around Intel's hybrid architecture. Back in February I looked at the situation again and Linux started outrunning Windows 11 on the i9-12900K with the latest Linux kernel at the time. But with a few more months having passed and for the Intel Alder Lake hybrid processors to mature under Windows and Linux, how do things stand now? Here are some new benchmarks.

With the upcoming feature-packed Linux 5.20 kernel adding to the growing list of features is Intel SGX2 support looking like it is set to land...

At least some of Lenovo's new AMD Rembrandt powered laptops with Microsoft Pluton security co-processor are set by default to only trust Microsoft's key and not the Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA Key that Linux distributions and others use for UEFI Secure Boot support. Thus by default only Microsoft Windows will boot with the default firmware configuration on some new Lenovo laptops...

Wayland-Protocols 1.26 was released on Thursday as the collection of protocol specifications for Wayland. With Wayland-Protocols 1.26 is the new Single Pixel Buffer protocol and enhancements to existing protocols...

Red Hat engineers continue working on Stratis Storage as their means of providing Btrfs and (Open)ZFS like features atop the mature XFS paired with DM + Clevis + LUKS. Stratis 3.2 is out today as the newest update to this Linux storage stack...

The rewritten NIR back-end for the R600 Gallium3D driver with a focus on improving performance for old Radeon HD 5000/6000 series hardware has been merged! This also allows proper FP64 usage finally for the Radeon HD 6900 "Cayman" series graphics cards...

FEX-Emu is an open-source emulator project that has been particularly focused on being able to run x86/x86_64 games on AArch64 with great speed including around Steam and Steam Play (Proton) Windows games...

Back in Linux 5.17 the AMD P-State "amd_pstate" driver was introduced for Ryzen and EPYC systems as an alternative to the ACPU CPUFreq frequency scaling driver with an emphasis on delivering better power efficiency for modern AMD Zen 2 and newer systems. Since the mainlining there hasn't been too much change to this driver but now a new patch series has been sent out with some updates...

Established last year was the CentOS Hyperscale SIG as a special interest group with the backing of Facebook and Twitter among other hyperscalers in providing updated packages and other optional modifications to CentOS Stream to make the distribution more practical for use within their large-scale infrastructure environments...

From the recent setup of the MSI Alder Lake motherboard flashed with Dasharo/Coreboot I had an extra LGA-1700 motherboard around. With some Phoronix readers in the past having inquired about more Alder Lake benchmarks on the low-end, I picked up a Core i3 12100 processor that features four performance cores / eight threads. For those curious about the CPU performance and that of the integrated UHD Graphics 730, here are some Ubuntu Linux performance benchmarks with the i3-12100 and other similar processors.

The Blender open-source 3D modeling software is in the process of working on a new GPU-accelerated, real-time compositor...

The newest version of the MGLRU patches were posted and I've also finished up some more benchmarks of this Multi-Gen LRU kernel feature...

Mesa 22.2 as the quarterly feature update to this collection of open-source predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers has been pushed back by two weeks. This delay is for allowing more last minute features to land, which will hopefully ensure that Intel Arc Graphics and RDNA3 support is in better shape for this release...

As time goes on more open-source projects are beginning to make better use of AVX-512 support even though it's no longer enabled in the latest Alder Lake processors. After reporting on the big AVX-512 wins for JSON parsing with simdjson, another open-source project finding gains is the Tesseract optical character recognition (OCR) engine...

Following yesterday's debut of Meteor Lake platform support within Intel's Graphics Compiler, Intel's "i915" Linux kernel graphics driver has begun seeing patches around Meteor Lake support as that 14th Gen Core successor to Raptor Lake...

The cross-platform wxWidgets GUI toolkit is out today with version 3.2 that represents more than 15,000 commits and comes the better part of a decade since they started their last stable release series...

Yesterday's surprise was that Lennart Poettering quietly had left Red Hat following a decade and a half there leading PulseAudio among other projects and ultimately going on to start systemd that has fundamentally reshaped modern Linux distributions. It turns out he had joined Microsoft and continuing his work on systemd...

In addition to Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers being very busy rounding out their DG2/Alchemist enablement patches, beginning to mainline "Ponte Vecchio" work starting with Linux 5.20, and having already done the bit of enablement for Raptor Lake graphics that is predominantly based on existing Alder Lake, they have also started their Meteor Lake bring-up...

The SUSE/openSUSE Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) that is being viewed as the eventual successor to SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 is likely to require higher system requirements for x86_64 CPUs. Just how much newer the Intel/AMD support requirement will be has yet to be firmly decided but they are looking at a baseline of "x86-64-v3" that would effectively mean requiring Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX)...

Last week's Vulkan 1.3.219 release introduced the VK_EXT_shader_module_identifier that was worked on in part by Valve. This ability for software to query an identifier associated with a Vulkan shader module is seeing quick driver adoption and is preparing for use within VKD3D-Proton as an efficiency improvement...

Given the recent releases of openSUSE Leap 15.4 and AlmaLinux 9.0, here are some fresh Linux server/workstation-oriented benchmarks on a dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" platform and running the fresh releases of various enterprise Linux choices.

For as popular as the Raspberry Pi 4 has been since its 2019 launch, Fedora hasn't officially supported this Arm single board computer with its Linux distribution. But now thanks to the upstream, open-source graphics acceleration finally coming together for the Raspberry Pi 4, with Fedora 37 they may end up finally providing "official" support for this popular, low-cost developer board...

It's great seeing AMD continuing to hire for more Linux/open-source driver developers. Beyond their many roles they are still working to fill on the CPU side of the house, they have a new job posting in hiring for their open-source GPU driver stack with a focus on multimedia efforts...

While Apple just recently introduced their first M2-powered Apple Silicon devices, thanks to the dedication of Hector Martin with Asahi Linux and not too many breaking changes over the M1, Asahi Linux is looking at "soon" having a Linux release to support the new platform...

Oracle Linux 9 as Oracle's offshoot of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is now available in general availability (GA) form. Besides being based on RHEL9, Oracle Linux 9 offers up their latest "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" for extra kernel features while also continuing to produce a Red Hat Compatible Kernel flavor as well...

AMD today sent out "new stuff" concerning their AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel graphics and compute drivers to DRM-Next in preparation for the Linux 5.20 cycle kicking off in a few weeks...

System76 has announced a new Lemur Pro laptop model that is now offering 12th Gen "Alder Lake" Intel processors while continuing to feature Coreboot firmware...

To much surprise, the lead developer of systemd Lennart Poettering who also led the creation of PulseAudio, Avahi, and has been a prolific free software contributor has reportedly left Red Hat...

While Python 3.11 is a big release and bringing significant performance improvements, users and developers may need to wait a little longer for the stable release...

MGLRU as the "Multi-Gen LRU" for reworking the Linux kernel's page reclamation code to be less taxing on the CPU and making better choices continues to look very good for the future of Linux performance...

Back in March the folks at OnLogic announced the Factor 201 as a Raspberry Pi CM4 (Compute Module 4) fitted for industrial use-cases like IoT gateways and more. The past few weeks I have been testing out this Raspberry Pi powered device and indeed it opens the door for using the Raspberry Pi within more harsh and demanding environments.

I'm currently working on a fresh comparison of the Windows vs. Linux performance for Intel's Alder Lake hybrid processors due to a number of readers inquiring how the OS support has evolved. In the process of carrying out those tests I also ran some fresh Windows vs. Linux tests with the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT for how the OpenGL and Vulkan driver performance stands...

Support for Arm's Cortex-M85 based on Armv8.1-M has been added for the LLVM 15.0 compiler release this fall...

Today's Coreboot code now has AMD Rembrandt SoC support by splitting it out from the Sabrina SoC support that has been in the works the past several months for this open-source firmware project...

A patch from TUXEDO Computers that is now queued into the input subsystem's "next" branch for Linux 5.20 adds a number of quirks to fix several Clevo / TUXEDO laptops from touchpad and keyboard issues after suspending the system...