Phoronix

KDE developers were quite busy this week... In addition to shipping KDE Gear 23.04, lots of bug fixing took place this week with around half of Plasma's VHI priority bugs being addressed...

Building off December's release of Manjaro 22.0, this Arch Linux based distribution is out now with its next iteration...

Ahead of the Linux 6.3 kernel being potentially released as stable on Sunday, two last minute patches for the Btrfs file-system driver were submitted today to address a pressing problem since Linux 6.2...

While Linux 6.2 supports Arc Graphics out-of-the-box and Mesa 23.1 has good OpenGL/Vulkan support, for those running Linux distributions on older kernels and Mesa packages there is less than ideal support -- either no support at all or having to resort to force-enabling the DG2/Alchemist support and potentially running on older OpenGL/Vulkan drivers with various problems. To ease the experience for those running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Intel has been maintaining a packaged version of their DRM kernel driver as a DKMS module as well as updated Mesa packages...

Corsair recently launched their line-up of 2 x 24GB DDR5 memory kits. With recent DDR5 memory prices falling, for as little as $215 USD it's now possible to obtain 48GB of DDR5-7000 RAM. With this being my first time testing a non-binary DDR5 memory kit, here is an initial look at the Corsair CMK48GX5M2B7000C40 compatibility and performance under Linux.

While the upcoming Mesa 23.1 stable release enables RadeonSI build support for Rusticl and is working out overall, the RadeonSI driver with this Rust-written OpenCL driver is nearing the point of officially passing OpenCL conformance...

For more than one year Intel's been working on developing the Xe Linux kernel graphics driver as a modern Direct Rendering Manager driver for Gen12 and newer integrated/discrete graphics. For recent hardware this is to replace the existing i915 kernel driver usage. The Intel open-source developers continue working toward the milestone of being able to submit this driver for mainlining in the upstream Linux kernel...

Yesterday just hours after writing about a RADV optimization by Valve for an "upcoming game" to nearly match the performance they see under Windows, another performance improvement for an "upcoming game" has been merged...

With the Linux 6.3 kernel likely being released as stable on Sunday, pull requests have already begun to be submitted of feature code for the Linux 6.4 merge window...

This week the FreeBSD project published their Q1-2023 status report that outlines various technical and organization accomplishments made for the past quarter...

Rust 1.69 is out today as stable as the newest update to this increasingly popular programming language that has become passionate to many open-source developers for its memory safety guarantees and other principles...

A new patch series from AMD today for the Linux kernel enables Dynamic Boost Control support that can be found with some Ryzen SoCs for tuning the processor for optimal performance...

Back in January Intel engineers posted Linux patches for Linear Address Space Separation (LASS) as a feature being introduced with future Intel CPUs. Intel engineers today posted a set of patches extending that LASS support to the realm of KVM virtualization...

Valve's Linux graphics driver developers continue relentlessly optimizing the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" and today landed an optimization for an unnamed, upcoming game where now it's able to nearly match the performance enjoyed under Windows...

Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" release images are now available for download for those wanting to fetch the latest Ubuntu desktop or server builds or alternatively the various downstream flavors/spins...

Today marks the release of Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" and I've already been trying it out on a number of test systems. Up today are some initial Ubuntu 23.04 vs. 22.10 laptop benchmarks. If you were hoping though for this release to improve performance, unfortunately that doesn't appear to be the case with overall across a range of workloads Ubuntu 23.04 is similar to -- or in some areas trailing -- Ubuntu 22.10 on both Intel and AMD hardware.

Building off the Wine 8.0 stable release from January, out today is Wine 8.0.1 as the first maintenance point release to this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux, Chrome OS, macOS, and other platforms...

Libreboot as the downstream of Coreboot focused on providing fully open-source system firmware support has added support for the Dell Latitute E6400, a laptop from the Intel Core 2 Duo days that was popular with many businesses and can be found via various used channels for around $100...

Opus 1.4 is available today as the first update in four years to this open-source, royalty-free versatile audio codec...

Following the Lutris 0.5.13 beta from mid-February, a second beta of this open-source game manager is now available...

KDE Gear 23.04 has been released today as the newest version of this collection of KDE desktop applications...

QEMU 8.0 is out today as the newest feature release for this processor emulator that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Eric Engestrom has released Mesa 23.1-rc2 right on time as the newest weekly test candidate for Mesa 23.1 as this quarter's feature update to this set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers...

The long-awaited port of the GIMP image manipulation program to the GTK3 toolkit is now declared "officially finished"...

For those wondering how the NVIDIA Linux gaming/GPU performance is looking relative to Windows 11, here are some benchmarks using the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards. Both NVIDIA RTX 40 graphics cards were tested on Windows 11 Pro and Ubuntu 23.04 while primarily focusing on games making use of Valve's Steam Play to reflect current Linux gaming trends as well as featuring some other cross-platform GPU accelerated software.

Linux kernel developers are preparing for the first upgrade to its Rust toolchain since the Rust code initially merged in Linux 6.1...

The upstream, open-source Nouveau DRM kernel driver working to make use of the NVIDIA GPU System Processor "GSP" will ideally lead to more punctual new hardware support, hopefully overcome the power management / re-clocking challenges that have plagued the driver for years with very low performance, and other current limitations. But it will also lead to more NVIDIA GPU firmware files in the linux-firmware tree and increased bloat...

AMD has published AMDVLK 2023.Q2.1 as their first official open-source Vulkan driver update for the quarter that for Linux users serves as an alternative to the Mesa RADV driver or the code bundled up into their Radeon Software packaged driver...

While the Godot 4.0 open-source game engine only shipped at the start of March, there are already plans underway for some renderer upgrades that will be part of the upcoming Godot 4.1 engine upgrade...

As expected following the GCC 13 release branching this week, the first release candidate of what will be the premiere GCC 13.1 stable release is now available...

The Hero C Compiler "HCC" wants to make it easy to compile C code to run on GPUs by compiling common C11 code and turning it into SPIR-V modules that can then be consumed by GPUs with Vulkan support...

Wasmer as the open-source project focused on providing a "universal WebAssembly runtime" that supports a variety of platforms and architectures is out today with a new feature release...

OpenCL 3.0.14 has been released that has a few minor fixes/corrections plus one prominent new extension: cl_khr_command_buffer_multi_device...

Joshua Strobl and original Solus project founder Ikey Doherty are both becoming re-involved with the Solus Linux distribution and moving ahead will be built off the SerpentOS project that Ikey has been independently working on the past few years...

Fedora 38 has been released today after meeting its early release target...

Libuv as the cross-platform asynchronous I/O library that is used by the likes of Node.js, Julia, and other software packages now has support for making use of IO_uring on Linux...

For weeks we have been eager to learn more about AMD openSIL that will formally be announced at the OCP Prague event later this week. In anticipation of that event, AMD last week revealed the initial details around this open-source firmware push...

Intel's one-year-old merge request for introducing VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library support to their open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver has finally been merged for Mesa 23.2...

AMD has released AOMP 17.0-1 as the newest version of this open-source compiler focused on providing the latest OpenMP offloading support for Radeon and Instinct accelerator products...

A new release of Eclipse OpenJ9 is now available, the high performance JVM implementation previously developed as IBM J9...

Intel's open-source OpenGL "Iris" and Vulkan "ANV" Linux drivers are now part of the auto-generated set of drivers set to be built for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) when compiling this code inside Mesa...

A change merged today for the Mesa 23.2 graphics driver stack benefits video transcoding performance for new Radeon RX 7000 series "RDNA3" graphics cards...

Valve and CodeWeavers have made available Proton 8.0-1 as their newest version of this downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux...

Back in 2019 Valve developers introduced the ACO compiler back-end within Mesa for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver. This alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler has been instrumental in helping RADV perform very well for Linux gaming both with Vulkan native titles as well as games going the route of DirectX to Vulkan via DXVK and VKD3D with Proton (Steam Play). On and off there's been talk and work towards bringing ACO to RadeonSI Gallium3D for OpenGL while now there is some new work on this front...

The GNU Compiler Collection 13 codebase has no more P1 bugs, which are regressions of the highest priority, and as such the GCC 13 codebase was branched today with plans of issuing GCC 13.1-rc1 likely in the next day and hopefully releasing GCC 13.1 as the first stable release of the GCC 13 series next week...

With the recent launch of the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, several Phoronix Premium supporters expressed interest in seeing how well the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance compared for this Zen 4 3D V-Cache processor. Given those requests, here are some CPU/system benchmarks looking at the performance of Windows 11 Professional against Ubuntu 23.04 in its near-final state on the 7800X3D desktop.

Moore Threads was established in 2020 to create domestic GPU solutions in China with their first products having been announced last year. Most of the talk around Moore Threads "MThreads" GPUs have been for Windows but they are working on Linux support to at least some extent...

In addition to Linux 6.4 bringing some early work around the Apple M2 device support that isn't yet ready for end-users but begins laying the foundation for supporting the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini, another set of Apple changes have now been submitted ahead of this next kernel cycle...

It was just four years ago in Ubuntu 19.10 that Ubuntu's desktop installer added OpenZFS support for carrying out root file-system installations atop this ZFS file-system. Since then the Canonical/Ubuntu interest has waned. Ahead of the Ubuntu 23.04 release this week, I tried out the Ubuntu Lunar Lobster daily snapshot this weekend to find the OpenZFS install support with Ubuntu's new desktop installer to still be missing...

Linux 6.3-rc7 was just released and if the next week remains calm, it would mean that Linux 6.3 is shipping next weekend...