Released back in April was GCC 13.1 as the first stable release in the GCC 13 series that brought Modula-2 language support, more C++23/C23 features, and other new CPU targets supported from Arm to Intel. Debuting today is GCC 13.2 as the first point release in the series to ship dozens of bug fixes...
While this week was the surprise announcement of Intel AVX10 and with that taking the super-set of AVX-512 to both E and P core processors in the future, for next year's Xeon "Sierra Forest" server processors at up to 144 cores, it appears they will lack AVX-512/AVX10. Intel's AVX10 announcement noted initial support with Granite Rapids processors that will debut next year but no mention of the E-core-only Sierra Forest. With the AVX10 only coming to P/E core client processors after Granite Rapids, it would appear the high density Sierra Forest generation will miss out on AVX10/AVX-512 and not appear until Clearwater Forest. Meanwhile with the 128-core AMD EPYC "Bergamo" processors now shipping, there is AVX-512 with the Zen 4C cores. Here are some benchmarks looking at the AVX-512 impact for Bergamo.
Mold 2.0 is out today as a major update to this high performance linker developed by Rui Ueyama. Mold has consistently shown to outperform GNU's Gold and LLVM's LLD linkers while today is making another shift with it now turning to MIT licensing...
NVK as the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver being developed for Mesa has to this point been developed out-of-tree as it's been in its early stages, depends upon Nouveau DRM kernel driver improvements, and ultimately isn't too useful until the Nouveau GSP/re-clocking situation is sorted out upstream. But overnight the merge request was opened to introduce NVK to mainline Mesa...
There's been talk of new Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards this quarter and adding some weight to that is AMD publishing several new firmware files for different intellectual property blocks of IP versions previously not seeing firmware binaries in the linux-firmware.git repository...
Thanks to work carried out by Sony engineers and then offered for upstream, over the past few weeks support for a unified LTO bitcode front-end has materialized within the LLVM codebase...
For a few years now Canonical has partnered with Intel to offer Ubuntu images optimized for their hardware like with IoT initiatives while the latest now are new Ubuntu real-time images optimized for Intel Core usage...
Two weeks ago a bug report was opened for Mesa that when using Radeon RX 7900 XT or Radeon Pro WX 9100 graphics, Blender's Eevee shader node trees are unusably slow. A fix has now been merged in reducing that shader compilation time from around 251 seconds to now getting done in just about 9 seconds...
Just days after covering a recent ~10% speed-up for the Intel Arc Graphics on Linux, another optimization has landed in Mesa 23.3-devel for further enhancing Intel's latest graphics wares with their open-source driver stack.
For processors supporting CPU performance boosting with higher performance states available beyond the base states, Linux allows toggling the boosting on a per-CPU basis. However, a new patch proposed this week would allow per-policy performance boosting where capable...
As part of AMD's recent Linux graphics driver development approach of enabling new GPU support gradually on a IP block-by-block basis rather than big monolithic patch series marked by colorful fishy codenames, it's worked out well for getting new hardware support rolling into the kernel early and without revealing any combined details on yet-to-be-released graphics processors. This week has seen some new IP block patches surface...
Loongson Binary Translation (LBT) support for the Chinese LoongArch CPU architecture is slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle. Loongson Binary Translation aims to help speed-up and handle ARM / x86 / MIPS binary translation on LoongArch more efficiently with capable LoongArch processors...
While the EROFS Linux read-only file-system already supports LZ4 and microLZMA support, Zlib DEFLATE support is also being worked on and could be introduced in the next Linux kernel cycle...
The first beta is out of FreeRDP 3.0, the open-source Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation of that proprietary Microsoft protocol for remote desktop/GUI handling...
Along with detailing Advanced Performance Extensions (APX), Intel as effectively a footnote to that also disclosed another exciting addition to find with future Intel CPUs: AVX10. Most notably for consumer use is that AVX10 will enable AVX-512 capabilities across both Performance and Efficient core designs with hybrid processors...
Following Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) and more recently Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) for furthering the x86_64 CPU compute potential, Intel has now published initial details on APX: Advanced Performance Extensions...
Last week in the AMD EPYC 9684X review were many benchmarks looking at how this flagship Genoa-X processor compares to various AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors. The EPYC 9684X delivers terrific generational uplift compared to Milan-X, offers significant advantages over the EPYC 9004 Genoa processors thanks to the 1.1GB of L3 cache per CPU that proves very beneficial in HPC and AI workloads, and the 96-core / AVX-512 / 3D V-Cache combination far surpassed the Intel performance in the vast majority of benchmarks. As some follow-up benchmarks, today is looking precisely at the performance difference caused by the 3D V-Cache presence by looking at the EPYC 9684X performance when the 3D V-Cache feature was enabled and then the tests repeated when disabled.
It looks like the updated Family 17h microcode this morning isin relation to a new Zen 2 CPU security vulnerability being disclosed. The Linux kernel has also just received a patch for this "Zenbleed" vulnerability for older AMD CPUs...
Qiang Yu continues leading the charge on integrating the ACO compiler back-end into the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as an optional alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end...
Merged back in 2021 with Linux 5.16 was the FUTEX2 code to help with Linux gaming needs particularly around Steam Play. There were plans to further extend FUTEX2 and now two years later there's been recent patches working out more enhancements to this interface...
The most popular topic among the emails I received this weekend weren't of direct technical nature but the number of people pointing out Twitter's new "X" logo and the similarities to the X.Org logo...
Inkscape 1.3 is now available as the newest feature release ot this open-source software focused on being a vector graphics editor that can rival the likes of Adobe Illustrator...
MPV 0.36 is out today as the newest version of this open-source media player that was originally forked from the MPlayer/mplayer2 code and leveraging the FFmpeg library...
Debian 13 "Trixie" has been aiming for official RISC-V support and indeed it will happen: RISC-V has now been promoted to an official Debian CPU architecture...
Automatic IBRS is a new feature with AMD Zen 4 processors akin to Intel's Enhanced IBRS functionality. Linux 6.3 added Auto IBRS support but it turns out when that was being enabled an oversight was made...
Intel Linux engineer Peter Zijlstra's EEVDF CPU scheduler code to replace the existing Completely Fair Scheduler "CFS" code looks like it will attempt to land with the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window...
Mesa's LLVMpipe software driver is now exposing system Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support with the necessary API bits being in place for the modern Rusticl OpenCL driver as well as the older Clover code. Plus with being a CPU-based driver there isn't any added work or complications around shared virtual memory...
Red Hat engineers are looking at making it more evident on Fedora IoT, CoreOS, and Server editions when firmware updates become available for the hardware in use...
WineConf as what had been the regularly hosted Wine developer conference for this open-source project devoted to running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms is likely over. Due to dwindling attendance and no one stepping up to organize the next WineConf, the developer conference is on hiatus but in place there may end up being something like a Proton conference in the future...
Last month saw the first release candidate of OpenZFS 2.2 that introduces Linux container support, BLAKE3 checksums, and block cloning capabilities. Out this weekend is a second release candidate as OpenZFS 2.2 nears release...
Following the annual Akademy KDE developer conference, more Plasma 6.0 changes have been landing for this major desktop environment release that will likely come in H1'2024...
In addition to Proton 8.0-3 being released today for Steam Play, Wine 8.13 is out today as the latest bi-weekly release of this software for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...
The most common request from my recent ROG Ally benchmarking with the Ryzen Z1 SoC and also the Ryzen 7 7840U laptop SoC testing has been wanting to know how these Zen 4 mobile processors compete with Apple's M2 on Linux. Well, for those curious, here are some initial performance figures of the Apple M2 in a MacBook Air running Asahi Linux up against the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme and Ryzen 7 7840U SoCs on Linux.
Proton 8.0-3 is rolling out on Steam that powers Steam Play to enjoy the latest Windows games on Linux. Proton 8.0-3 brings many fixes and gets more Windows games now running gracefully on Linux desktop systems as well as the Steam Deck...
The DRM subsystem is slated to pickup a GPU Virtual Address "VA" Manager with the Linux 6.6 kernel that is motivated by work around Vulkan sparse memory binding requirements...
Vulkan 1.3.258 was published today as the newest revision to this high performance graphics and compute API. There's many fixes with the last Vulkan spec update having been in early July but making this release more notable are two new extensions...
Future AMD CPUs will be having larger microcode patches and thus the Linux kernel is now being adapted to better handle that increased microcode payload...
Prior to LLVM/Clang becoming so popular within organizations and it maturing well on x86_64, AArch64, and other architectures, Open64 was once quite popular in areas now dominated by LLVM and GCC. Open64 had been popular with academic researchers, AMD even maintained their Open64 optimized compiler a decade prior to the LLVM-based AOCC, and was quite popular in the HPC space. Surprisingly there's been some recent activity on the Open64 compiler code...
New patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list prepare the AMD Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) driver for the upcoming AMD Instinct MI300 APUs...
Linux has supported Quick Assist Technology (QAT) devices from the start whether it be QAT PCIe adapters or QAT support found within select Atom and Xeon CPUs as well as the latest-generation Sapphire Rapids CPUs. Only now though with the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel is it adding a heartbeat feature for determining if a QAT device becomes unresponsive so that it can be acted upon...
While the AMD EPYC 9754 "Bergamo" processor is impressive for having 128 physical Zen 4C cores, it also has Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) to provide for 256 threads per socket. Meanwhile with Ampere Altra Max and AmpereOne there is no SMT and it's likely Intel's upcoming Sierra Forest will also lack SMT (Hyper Threading) given it's an E-core-only design. But that led to my curiosity over the SMT impact for Bergamo on power and performance when leveraging SMT for the 128-core flagship EPYC 9754. Today's Bergamo benchmarking is looking at SMT on and off for both 1P and 2P server configurations.
While Intel is well known -- and well regarded -- as being one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel as well as being a significant player in many other open-source projects with their countless open-source software contributions over the years, Arm is now trying to better promote their open-source support and open contributions...
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