Phoronix

Following a recent Intel Mesa driver improvement to yield ~10% better performance, another change is on the way that has the ability to boost the performance for at least one game by 12% and other games by smaller yields...

There is a phenomenon where running a multi-threaded workload inside a virtual machine (VM) with Simultaneously Multi-Threading (SMT / Intel Hyper Threading) that a sibling thread could find itself busy while the CPU core is idle. A new Linux CFS patch series aims to make the scheduler better adapt to the QEMU topology...

For those on Linux running a multi-monitor setup with a mix of resolutions or screen sizes between the different displays, Google Chrome (and Chromium) will soon be able to better cope with this arrangement by allowing per-display scaling factors...

Following GCC recently adding new x86 instructions for Intel Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake, the LLVM 17 open-source compiler has now received similar treatment...

The release candidate is out today for XWayland 23.2 as the next update for this code that allows for X11 clients to function within Wayland environments...

In addition to the review embargo lift today for Genoa-X with our AMD EPYC 9684X benchmarks, the lift is also today on the new AMD EPYC "Bergamo" processors for offering up to 128 cores / 256 threads per socket using the new Zen 4C core. In this article is an initial look at the performance provided by the AMD EPYC 9754 128-core processors.

Last year AMD launched Milan-X as their first server processors with 3D V-Cache. The performance uplift from the 768MB of L3 cache per socket was phenomenal, but now here we are today with the next-generation successor: Genoa-X. The flagship EPYC 9684X is the new leader for HPC and AI performance as in addition to a 1.1GB L3 cache it leverages AMD's modern Zen 4 micro-architecture with AVX-512, 12 channel DDR5 memory, and other improvements found with existing EPYC 9004 series processors to easily triumph as the new best CPU for high performance computing from CFD and FEA to dozens of other scientific workloads. Here are the first benchmarks of the AMD EPYC 9684X processors.

The Linux Foundation has established the Ultra Ethernet Consortium "UED" as an industry-wide effort founded by AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden, HPE, Intel, Meta, and Microsoft for designing a new Ethernet-based communication stack architecture for high performance networking...

While not too useful as limited to OpenGL-only and will perform extremely slowly until the NVIDIA GSP firmware support is sorted out for the Nouveau DRM kernel driver, merged today for Mesa 23.3-devel and marked for back-porting to Mesa 23.2 is initial NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPU support...

As part of AMD's interest in improving graphics around Xen virtualization for in-vehicle infotainment systems and other customer uses, AMD engineers have expanded the video acceleration capabilities provided by Mesa's Virgl code...

Just days after System76 upstreamed Intel Raptor Lake HX and their new Adder WS 3 laptop into Coreboot, three more of their laptops have now made their way to upstream Coreboot...

Intel has published their 2023Q2 release of their FFmpeg Cartwheel repository that holds the many different patches around Intel integrated/discrete video acceleration for use with the popular FFmpeg multimedia library. Intel engineers continue working on upstreaming their various patches to FFmpeg proper while "cartwheel-ffmpeg" is their staging area where they continue to have the latest and greatest patches available for easy consumption...

Intel announced this evening they agreed to a term sheet with ASUS for manufacturing, selling, and supporting the Next Unit of Compute (more commonly known as NUCs) from 10th to 13th generation systems and to develop future NUC system designs...

In addition to Intel engineers being responsible for much of the Linux kernel driver work around USB4 and Thunderbolt, they have now published thunderbolt-utils as a collection of user-space utilities for managing USB4/Thunderbolt on Linux environments...

A new version of Canonical's Mir display server was released today that these days serves as a library for building Wayland-based shells...

NVIDIA today published their latest stable point release in the R535 Linux driver series to fix a variety of outstanding issues...

MySQL 8.1 is available today with the community server builds now available for this latest major update to this popular SQL database server...

There's a lovely new Linux kernel patch series out that's big in working on a major clean-up of the x86 APIC code (or "decrapification" as it's called in the patches) and also bringing up for discussion the idea of killing off x86 32-bit support. It's unlikely the x86 32-bit support will be removed right now, which is "just museum pieces", but as an alternative would be making it SMP-only to at least remove the uni-processor code paths...

While Intel Arc Graphics continue enjoying performance optimizations with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack, the major limitation facing Arc Graphics on Linux right now for gamers is the lack of sparse residency support that is needed for running many newer games on Linux with Intel graphics -- particularly newer Windows D3D12 titles running on Linux via Valve's Steam Play. It's been a long known limitation and will hopefully be addressed once the Intel Xe kernel driver is introduced, but at least as an interim solution there is now "fake" sparse support being implemented...

A set of 35 patches were posted on Sunday for introducing ARM64 Guarded Control Stack (GCS) support to the Linux kernel. This is akin to x86 Shadow Stack support for hardware-protected stacks of return addresses to help fend off ROP attacks...

CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230630 is now shipping as Microsoft's newest in-house Linux distribution release...

GNU Shepherd is the Guile-written service manager for handling daemons that is most notably used by the GNU Guix project as an alternative to the likes of SysV and systemd. With today's GNU Shepherd 0.10.2 some long-standing issues have finally been resolved...

Merged to Mesa 23.2-devel recently was an Intel Arc Graphics driver change to improve performance. This ended up being a rather significant improvement to performance and in today's article is a look at the performance impact of the recent Mesa work by Intel engineers to better the Arc Graphics family.

Merged for Linux 6.5 was initial MIDI 2.0 support for the necessary USB audio and raw MIDI drivers to support this major MIDI update. Being worked on now for merging into a future kernel release is the USB gadget driver support around MIDI 2.0...

With the Intel Xeon Max testing at Phoronix that's been ongoing so far for the past month on Phoronix has all been done within the Supermicro Hyper SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR rackmount server. This 2U dual socket platform for 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors has been working out well and provides a robust feature set while working out well for all of my Linux testing thus far.

The High Precision Event Timer (HPET) has long been a source of issues for Linux developers and it turns out systems relying on HPET rather than the CPU's TSC have in recent months suffered significant performance degradation with the Mesa OpenGL driver code...

New AMDGPU targets seeing the initial plumbing merged today for LLVM 17 are GFX1150 and GFX1151 as upcoming AMD APU products...

GNU Boot 20230717 has been released as the fork of Libreboot that in turn is a downstream of Coreboot focused on providing system firmware support only where they are fully free software. With GNU Boot the game is upped further by removing select motherboard ports and documentation where they do not comply with the GNU System Distribution Guidelines...

For two years now Arch Linux's official install media has been shipping with archinstall as a nice, text-based installer for more quickly setting up an Arch Linux environment. In preparation for release now is Archinstall 2.6 as the next feature release while available for testing today is the release candidate...

Meson 1.2 was released on Sunday as the newest feature release for this wildly popular, cross-platform build system that has become widely used by open-source projects as a superior alternative to GNU Automake and other solutions...

The newest weekly test version of the Linux 6.5 kernel is now available for evaluation and looking out for any bugs/regressions...

Linux Mint 21.2 has been released today as the newest update to this Ubuntu 22.04 LTS based Linux distribution known for its Cinnamon desktop environment and other Linux desktop focused refinements...

System76 has contributed Intel Core Raptor Lake HX support to Coreboot with some minor additions over the existing Raptor Lake "RPL" code as well as adding their new Adder WS 3 laptop to upstream Coreboot...

Back in April I pointed out some new AMD patches at the time for enabling a new "Dynamic Boost Control" feature that hasn't been widely talked about by AMD yet for allowing more frequency/power controls around Ryzen SoCs. But making this power/performance feature controversial is that it requires authentication with the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP) for activation with user-space blobs for tapping this greater control of the hardware. This AMD Dynamic Boost Control feature now looks like it is ready for merging into Linux 6.6...

Similar to the Dell WMI system management driver and Lenovo's Think-LMI driver, the HP-BIOSCFG driver now poised for introduction in Linux 6.6 allows for managing and configuring BIOS settings on capable HP laptops/desktops from under Linux itself...

Queued up ahead of the Linux 6.6 cycle later this summer is a new input driver for the Azoteq IQS7210A/7211A/E controllers...

For the past few months Intel has been working on a new cluster scheduling implementation for their hybrid CPUs. This rework was due to their earlier cluster scheduling code not working out so well for the likes of Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors while this new patch series can at least help some workloads in the ~1% range...

Btrfs has long provided a built-in integrity checker tool into the file-system driver. However, slated for Linux 6.6 is deprecating of this integrity checker...

Ahead of the Linux 6.5-rc2 release tomorrow there was a set of x86/x86_64 kernel changes merged overnight to deal with some weaknesses in the kernel's Control Flow Integrity (kCFI) / FineIBT (Indirect Branch Tracking) code...

With all the news in recent weeks following Red Hat's decision to limit access to RHEL sources that in turn lead to changes for AlmaLinux, finding new ways to obtain sources at Rocky Linux, interesting statements from Oracle, and even SUSE forking RHEL. The public RHEL sources now will basically be the upstream CentOS Stream code for which future Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions are ultimately based. The CentOS Project issued a new statement on Friday...

Earlier this month brought the release of systemd 254-rc1 with a new soft-reboot mechanism, officially deprecating System V scripts, a new systemd-battery-check process that runs at boot to check any system battery level status, and various other changes. On Friday systemd 254-rc2 was released with a few more changes...

The uutils project continues advancing as a modern, drop-in replacement to the GNU Coreutils utilities that is written in the Rust programming language...

Imagination Technologies today published their fourth iteration of their in-development PowerVR DRM kernel graphics driver targeting their Rogue architecture and future graphics IP. This open-source kernel driver ultimately will go along with their PowerVR Vulkan driver they continue developing within the Mesa code-base...

While IO_uring has been one of the most interesting kernel innovations of recent years and can allow for great speed-ups to async I/O, there have been some security concerns and with the Linux 6.6 kernel it will be easier for Linux administrators to disable it system-wide if so desired...

AMD Linux engineers are working on extending the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem used by their GPUs/accelerators to allow up to 128 DRM devices per system...

System76 developers working on their Rust-written COSMIC desktop have recently been improving a number of areas of this open-source desktop...

The GTK toolkit and GLib support for Apple's macOS may be taking a back-seat to other platforms moving forward and would fall into a "best effort" category...

Yesterday Intel engineers sent out early compiler patches for Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake with adding the new instructions of AVX-VNNI-INT16, SM3, SHA512, and SM4. Today that new instruction support was complemented by a new patch out of Intel for actually adding the new Lunar Lake, Arrow Lake, and Arrow Lake S targets to GCC...

Consulting firm 9elements sent out a set of patches this week to the peci-cputemp and dimmtemp drivers for supporting Intel Sapphire Rapids platforms, including for the up to eight socket configuration capable this generation...

Mesa's Rusticl OpenGL implementation written in Rust it turns out can already run the Tinygrad open-source software with its OpenCL back-end for running the LLaMA model...