Phoronix

Over the holidays some fun benchmarking was to be had with the dual AMD EPYC 9654 "Genoa" processors providing a combined 192 cores / 384 threads and seeing how various modern Linux distributions were competing for this flagship 4th Gen EPYC server configuration. Up on the testing block was AlmaLinux 9.1, CentOS Stream 9, Clear Linux 37930, Debian 12 Testing, Fedora Server 37, Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS, Ubuntu 22.10, and Ubuntu 23.04 daily.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics team has landed a few patches into Mesa 23.0 for further reducing the CPU overhead of the Vulkan driver's draw path...

Since GCC 11 there has been support for AMX and the upcoming Sapphire Rapids CPU features, which has been further improved in the open-source compiler over the past two years. GCC 13 meanwhile as the next GNU Compiler Collection release is bringing Meteor Lake and Sierra Forest, Grand Ridge, and Granite Rapids. Basic enablement of Intel's Emerald Rapids meanwhile was merged yesterday for GCC 13 too...

Microsoft released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20221222 on Tuesday as their first update of 2023 for their in-house Linux distribution that is used for a variety of purposes within the company from Azure to other behind-the-scenes Linux OS use...

GNOME's Mutter now allows disabling XWayland support at build-time if so desired. This is part of the broader GNOME effort for making X11 support optional and ultimately allowing for a modern Wayland-only environment if so desired and without carrying legacy X11 cruft...

While back in 2018 when the C-SKY architecture was merged to the Linux kernel it was talked about possibly being the last new CPU arch/port to be mainlined given the growing success of RISC-V even back then, it looks like that upstream kernel developer belief might not hold true. France-based Kalray that focuses on high-performance, data-centric computing from cloud to edge posted their initial Linux kernel patches today for their "KVX" kernel port to get the kernel running on their MPPA3-80 "Coolidge" DPU SoC with the KV3-1 CPU architecture...

The past several months saw much discussion over a proposal to add "-fno-omit-frame-pointer" as a default compiler flag to Fedora Linux that would improve profiling/debugging but with possible performance implications that can vary based on the application/workload. While just over one month ago FESCo rejected that change, they re-voted today and decided after all to allow this change to happen but to ensure that packages can easily opt-out if they find performance regressions. By Fedora 40 they will also re-visit the matter to determine if the benefits and performance costs are justified...

DragonFlyBSD 6.4 is now available as the newest version of this open-source BSD operating system forked long ago from FreeBSD...

It's been one year and a few days since BusyBox 1.35 was released while today it's been succeeded by BusyBox 1.36 for this software package that is common to embedded Linux environments with the lone executable providing a plethora of commands and functionality...

GIGABYTE announced this morning they have spun off their server business unit and formed Giga Computing for their enterprise products moving forward...

Intel is using the CES 2023 to announce their 13th Gen Intel Core mobile H/P/U-series processors, additional 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" desktop CPUs for the 35 and 65 Watt tiers, and new Intel Processor (formerly Celeron) and Core i3 N-series processors.

Fwupd 1.8.9 was just released as the newest version of this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems...

The Tellusim Engine that is focused on professional simulations, visualizations, urban planning, VR/AR, and other 3D tasks has added a comprehensive set of Rust programming language bindings...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved of several more changes / new features planned for Fedora 38...

With the Linux 6.2 merge window behind us, feature work for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) changes targeting now the Linux 6.3 kernel have begun queuing with DRM-Next...

The newest CPU back-end added to the LLVM compiler stack is for Xtensa processor cores...

Thanks to Valve's incredible work on Steam Play and investing in low-level Linux graphics stack improvements, the latest milestone being achieved is HDR (High Dynamic Range) support beginning to work...

Yesterday Valve published their Steam Survey results for December and pointed to some really odd discrepancies. Valve this evening has revised the Steam Survey results that address some of the statistics oddities but still points to the Linux gaming marketshare as a percent regressing during the past month and also the Steam Deck usage declining relative to the overall Linux gaming base...

Merged today to the GNU Debugger (GDB) is initial support for the Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) that is a JSON-RPC interface for use by integrated development environments (IDEs) to better communicate with debuggers...

Last week was a fresh look at the AMD Radeon graphics/gaming performance between Windows and Linux using the very latest drivers. Today the testing wrapped up from some holiday benchmarking looking at the NVIDIA GeForce performance under Windows 11 and Ubuntu 22.10 Linux for how the drivers on both operating systems are currently competing.

The open-source R600 Gallium3D driver for supporting up through the Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards on Linux has an interesting new year addition... ARB_gl_spirv!..

A new Ubuntu desktop installer has been talked about going back many years and over the past two years has been focused on providing a rewritten installer making use of Subiquity and Flutter. With Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" in April that new desktop installer is poised to finally be used by default...

With the start of the new year also came the branching of GNU Binutils 2.40 ahead of its expected stable release around early February...

Dragonfly, the open-source project that advertises itself as "Probably, the fastest in-memory store in the universe!" as a high speed in-memory database that is compatible with the Memcached and Redis APIs has out a big release to kick off 2023...

Valve has just published the Steam Survey results for December 2022 that come in at a bit of a surprise...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.2-rc2 as the second weekly release candidate for Linux 6.2 following the merge window's closure last week on Christmas...

A change was merged this holiday weekend ahead of Linux 6.2-rc2 that adjusts the default behavior for AMD Ryzen 6000 series "Rembrandt" laptops and newer...

While there were various holidays in December, there continued to be daily and original content on Phoronix each and every day. During December there were 228 original news articles on Phoronix and 18 featured hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here is a look back at all of the exciting Linux hardware content and software news for closing out 2022...

The D1 is Allwinner's first SoC based on a RISC-V core design. While the Allwinner D1 isn't powerful at all, it's appearance in low-cost boards, RISC-V based design, and the Allwinner development community has made this an attractive entry-level RISC-V target. While various Linux distributions are already supporting D1-based boards, the mainline support for the D1/D1s platform looks like it will finally be merged in 2023...

On New Year's Eve, Greg Kroah-Hartman released a new set of stable kernels with Linux 6.1.2, 6.0.16, and 5.15.86 LTS being the new set...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been working with the Quake II RTX and DOOM Eternal games for a while now and recently the performance has also picked up nicely as shown in recent benchmarks. But for the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions to be exposed has required setting the RADV_PERFTEST=rt environment variable, but that has now changed initially for those two games...

For those Linux gamers and enthusiasts using the current Mesa 22.3 series, Mesa 22.3.2 was released this New Year's Eve for delivering the latest batch of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver fixes...

It shouldn't be too surprising given the pace of beta releases and planning for post-4.0 releases, but the open-source Godot game engine is planning for its major Godot 4.0 stable release to happen in the "first months" of 2023...

AMD in 2022 continued its open-source/Linux support embrace with offering good launch-day support on both the CPU and GPU sides with their new products, continued ramping up their Linux support on the client side, and has worked more on optimizations and other enhancements to their Linux support...

Fedora has a tradition of always shipping with the very latest open-source compiler toolchain components and central to that is always having the very latest GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). At times this up-to-date toolchain quest has meant shipping a release candidate / near-final GCC build when it comes to their Q2 release of the year that often lands right around the same time as the annual GCC feature release. Fedora 38 will be another release to again aim for the very latest GNU compiler toolchain components...

KDE developers have wrapped up another busy year enhancing their open-source desktop environment and application stack...

The Linux USB gadget kernel driver saw a patch published today for exposing of a device's landing page as part of the WebUSB specification. WebUSB as a reminder is the industry standard for providing a JavaScript API to securely access USB devices from web pages and is already supported by the likes of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge...

One of the early alternative spins of Ubuntu back in the day was Edubuntu as an education-focused flavor of Ubuntu shipping with various educational packages pre-installed and an optimized workflow for students. Edubuntu gradually faded away but in 2023 is looking to re-establish itself and become an official flavor under new leadership...

While there still are a few more articles coming up on Phoronix over the next day before closing out 2022, for this year on Phoronix there were 191 Linux hardware reviews and featured articles along with 2,846 original news articles on Linux, open-source, and hardware topics. Here is a look back at what excited our Linux/open-source readers the most over the course of 2022...

For going along with the new keyboard driver and other upstreaming efforts around the PinePhone Pro, getting the display support mainlined has been the latest effort for enhancing this $399 Linux smartphone...

It shouldn't be news to you that most of the corporate-backed developers working on the Linux desktop are no longer investing in new feature work around the X.Org Server and have shifted their efforts to a Wayland-focused environment moving forward. In looking at the Git statistics for the X.Org Server over the course of 2022 it shows how the development has pulled back dramatically and now at a two decade low for the commits and code changes...

Calculate Linux has now issued its v23 release as the project marks fifteen years of being a Gentoo Linux built distribution focused on suitable Linux deployments within organizations / corporate environments...

Merged just over a year ago into the Linux kernel was DAMON as an Amazon-developed solution for monitoring data accesses. In the year since being merged, DAMON has continued to see more functionality added and new users and developers becoming involved with this data access monitoring...

With the end of the year upon us it's a great time to see how the Windows vs. Linux gaming performance is looking as we enter 2023. In particular, it's interesting on the AMD Radeon side with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack having made great gains this year thanks to the continued investment by AMD and heavy contributions by Valve to the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver that is used by the Steam Deck and commonly in general by Linux gamers. Here is a look at the Windows vs. Linux GPU performance both for the mature RDNA2 support as well as the recently-released RDNA3 graphics.

Valve developers investing heavily into the open-source 3D graphics driver stack, AMD continuing their big contributions to Mesa, the Apple AGX Gallium3D driver taking shape, Microsoft continuing to leverage Mesa for various purposes on Windows, Zink maturing for OpenGL atop Vulkan, and other efforts all culminated with the most ever code growth to Mesa in a single year as well as nearly the most ever commits to this 3D graphics driver project...

Earlier this month prolific open-source GPU driver developer David Airlie at Red Hat picked up work again on Vulkan Video support for the RADV driver. Initially that RADV Vulkan Video work was focused on H.264 and H.265 video decoding while since then he has shifted focus to preliminary video encode support with H.264...

When the Retbleed security vulnerability was introduced earlier this year mitigating it for Intel Skylake and Skylake-derived CPU cores required imposing Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) that further tanked the out-of-the-box performance for these aging Intel CPUs. But being introduced now with Linux 6.2 is a new mitigation technique named Call Depth Tracking that is helping recover some of that lost performance and in turn extending the usefulness of the Skylake-derived processors still in service.

More than a few Phoronix readers have written in that have been early adopters to the Linux 6.1 kernel released as stable earlier this month and now finding their HDMI audio outputs no longer working. Fortunately, the issue has been sorted out by upstream developers and a fix is on the way...

OpenCV 4.7 was released today as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source computer vision library...

With the end of the year upon us, it's interesting and fun running GitStats on various prominent open-source projects and looking at some of the key growth metrics over the past year. Here is a look at how systemd's Git activity has paced in 2022 compared to years prior...