Red Hat and Fedora engineers are plotting a path to supporting Unified Kernel Images (UKI) with Fedora Linux and for the Fedora 38 release in the spring they are aiming to get their initial enablement in place...
As of today with Mesa 23.0 Git the EXT_mesh_shader extension is finally enabled by default for AMD Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA2" graphics hardware when running on a new Linux kernel build...
The NTFS3 kernel driver, which was contributed to the mainline kernel by Paragon Software for read/write NTFS file-system support and other features while being faster than the NTFS-3g FUSE driver, is seeing a number of updates with the Linux 6.2 kernel...
SUSE has released a new prototype build of their Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) that will serve as the basis for the next-generation SUSE Enterprise Linux...
While NVIDIA is already out with multiple GeForce RTX 40 series products, coming only now with the Linux 6.2 kernel is initial open-source 3D acceleration support for the GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" graphics processors. Here is my initial experience with this open-source NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series support in Linux 6.2.
Intel last year published documentation concerning a feature for future CPUs that they dubbed FRED, the Flexible Return and Event Delivery. FRED has the capability of helping system performance and response time while now initial patches for the Linux kernel have been published for supporting FRED...
In addition to Linux 6.2 upgrading its Zstd implementation for speedier compression/decompression for in-kernel uses of the Zstandard compression algorithm, this new kernel version is adding another Zstd use-case: compressed debug info sections...
Over the past year we've seen a fair amount of work for enabling support for various Aquacomputer devices under Linux. The German parts vendor specializes in various PC cooling solutions and other cooling accessories that can be monitored and managed under Linux thanks to this open-source driver work...
Intel overnight released oneDNN 3.0 as the newest major release to this open-source project for assisting in building deep learning applications. This oneAPI software component can already be used by PyTorch, ONNX, MATLAB, and other prominent software while the v3.0 release prepares it for future Intel hardware...
In the event you missed out on participating in last month's Black Friday deal for joining Phoronix Premium to enjoy the site ad-free and multi-page articles on a single page while helping to support continued operations of Phoronix, the deal has returned for Christmas week and marking the end of the year...
EndeavourOS continues to prove itself as one of the easiest-to-use, quick-to-install Arch Linux powered operating systems out there. Out today is the EndeavourOS "Cassini" update with more desktop enhancements as well as a number of Arm hardware support improvements...
It finally happened! An updated Zstd kernel implementation based on Zstd v1.5 upstream has been merged for the in-development Linux 6.2 to provide better performance and reliability for Zstd compression/decompression use-cases from compressed firmware to transparent file-system compression...
The "char/misc" changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.2 as the random catch-all area of the kernel for drivers not fitting well in other subsystem areas. Notably with this update for Linux 6.2 is continued work on enabling the Intel-owned Habana Labs Gaudi2 AI accelerator...
With the great AMD 4th Gen EPYC Linux performance showing significant generational uplift and dominating against the current Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" competition, it's a combination of the twelve channels of DDR5 system memory support, up to 96 cores per socket, introduction of AVX-512, and other Zen 4 micro-architectural improvements. As follow-up testing articles to all of the Genoa data delivered thus far, over the weeks ahead I have additional benchmark results to share looking more closely at these different areas of improvement for AMD 4th Gen EPYC. In today's article is a look at the EPYC 9654 2P performance with AVX-512 on/off while also looking at the CPU power consumption impact and the affect on CPU clock frequencies and thermals.
In early 2021 the Vulkan Video extensions were published in beta/provisional form as a new industry-standard video encode/decode API with the context of Vulkan. As a nice Christmas gift this week from The Khronos Group, the extensions have been finalized as Vulkan Video 1.0 and are now deemed ready for production use...
The IBM Power/PowerPC architecture updates were sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.2 merge window and most significant with this update is the introduction of a new Power-specific qspinlock implementation designed to bolster large system scalability...
AMD kicked off Christmas week by posting an eighth version of their P-State EPP driver patches for implementing the AMD Energy Performance Preference handling within their recent processors/SoCs for software to hint a performance or energy efficiency hint. P-State EPP can address some of the shortcomings with AMD's original P-State driver implementation merged nearly a year ago and has been showing good results in numbers posted by AMD engineers...
A new set of patches posted for the Plan 9 (9p) resource sharing protocol code inside the Linux kernel can deliver roughly 10x better performance for file transfers...
For years XFS has been working toward online repair capabilities for the file-system and it looks like in 2023 that work may finally come to fruition...
Freed-ora had been a seldom talked about effort from the Free Software Foundation Latin America maintainers of GNU Linux-libre to ensure a fully free software kernel was installed on interested Fedora Linux systems and that no non-free packages were installed on the system. But now that effort has come to an end...
In early 2017 Microsoft open-sourced their DirectX shader compiler and shortly thereafter it's been possible to build it on Linux while finally as of this week Microsoft has begun providing official Linux binaries of their shader compiler...
Introduced nearly two years ago with Linux 5.12 was IDMAPPED mounts for many innovative use-cases from containers to systemd-homed. With the Linux 6.2 kernel, SquashFS is the latest file-system adding support for IDMAPPED mounts...
Introduced at the start of the year was an experimental open-source project implementing the VA-API interface over NVIDIA's NVDEC video decoding API. In turn this VA-API support for running atop NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver allows for GPU video acceleration within Firefox and other software only targeting the Video Acceleration API. Now in closing out the year is a new NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver release...
Merged back in Linux 5.13 last year was Landlock for allowing unprivileged application sandboxing. Landlock allows restricting ambient rights for a set of processes and is implemented as a stackable Linux security module (LSM) for establishing safe security sandboxes. With Linux 6.2 file truncation support is added for Landlock...
In addition to the HID driver updates for the Linux 6.2 kernel that were merged this week, the input subsystem updates also landed this week and were headlined by having several new touchscreen drivers...
While Debian 12.0 "Bookworm" will hopefully be out around mid-2023, Debian 11.6 is out this weekend as the newest point release to the current Debian 11 "Bullseye" stable series...
As of today the LLVM Git compiler finally has initial support for AMD Zen 4 CPUs with the -march=znver4 option now wired up for Ryzen 7000 series and EPYC 9004 series processors...
Linus Torvalds can be known for his hardware commentary at times like hoping AVX-512 "dies a painful death", Intel's "bad policies" around ECC memory, and giving NVIDIA the finger. The latest colorful commentary by the Linux creator is around Intel's new Linear Address Masking (LAM) feature that aimed to land in Linux 6.2 but is now delayed until the code can be reworked...
After recently getting H.264 and H.265 video decode working for the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver with the current Vulkan Video extensions, David Airlie of Red Hat resumed his prior work on enabling the Vulkan Video extensions for the open-source Intel "ANV" driver too...
As written about last month, Sony has been working on adding DualShock 4 controller support to their newer PlayStation HID driver in Linux. The DualShock 4 controller has long been supported under the older "hid-sony" driver but now with Linux 6.2 the support can also be found under "hid-playstation"...
Introduced in early 2021 with now prior-generation AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors was SEV-SNP as the "Secure Nested Paging" addition to their Secure Encrypted Virtualization technology. While this year saw the initial SEV-SNP support was finally merged to the mainline Linux kernel, the hypervisor portion remain outstanding and have taken a step back as the AMD engineers overhauled their implementation...
Last month when AMD launched the EPYC 9004 "Genoa" series they also published AOCC 4.0 as the newest version of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler derived from LLVM/Clang and tailored to their latest Zen microarchitecture. At the time I ran some AOCC 4.0 benchmarks on the Ryzen 7000 series and compared it to GCC and Clang. Since then I've had the time on my Genoa test rig to look at how well AOCC 4.0 is performing and in this article are some benchmarks with the EPYC 9374F processors between GCC and AOCC 4.0.
The KDE Plasma 5.27 desktop, which is to be the last Plasma 5 feature release before Plasma 6.0, is poised to introduce revamped multi-monitor handling...
Well known Mesa developer Marek Olšák has for years meticulously optimized the RadeonSI driver and before that R600g and R300g where he got his start as a student developer. Besides ensuring the AMD Radeon OpenGL performance is in great shape for Linux gaming, he's also spent much time more recently in focusing on workstation OpenGL performance and with that the common SPECViewPerf benchmark. This week he landed another set of patches providing around a 7.5% improvement for one of the SPECViewPerf tests...
The x86/microcode changes that were merged this week into the Linux 6.2 kernel address prior shortcomings with the Intel In-Field Scan (IFS) driver so it's now deemed ready to help in spotting out faulty silicon across a fleet of systems in production or prior to commissioning new hardware...
Ampere Computing is the latest major vendor now backing the Cloud Hypervisor Project hosted by the Linux Foundation as a Rust-written VMM focused on running modern cloud workloads in a fast and secure manner...
For those relying on Microsoft's exFAT file-system for your SD cards or USB flash drives, the kernel driver with Linux 6.2 is capable of handling much faster file and directory creation than on prior versions...
VKD3D-Proton 2.8 has been released as a nice Christmas gift to Linux gamers for advancing this Direct3D 12 on Vulkan implementation that is part of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying Windows games on Linux...
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is transitioning to x86-64-v2 CPU requirements and for the x86 32-bit realm they are working to carve-out their i586 packages into a separate "openSUSE:Factory:LegacyX86" archive. But so far no one has stepped up to maintain these 32-bit packages and thus jeopardizing its future...