Phoronix

AMD continues improving their Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver code within the Linux kernel ahead of next-generation processors debuting later this year...

Last Friday the crew at Asahi Linux led by Hector Martin released the first alpha release for running Linux on Apple Silicon hardware. I eagerly loaded up Asahi Linux on an M1-powered Apple Mac Mini knowing the various early limitations of the Linux kernel support that is still settling. Overall the Apple M1 Linux performance ended up exceeding my expectations for the performance in its early alpha state. Here are some benchmarks.

In addition to the Imagination PowerVR Series 1 code drop of their late 90's era driver code, Imagination Tech has managed to successfully land its new PowerVR Rogue "PVR" Vulkan driver in time for Mesa 22.1's release next quarter...

GNOME 42 is out today as the latest half-year update for this widely-used, open-source desktop environment...

Back in the day, 2.5 million IOPS per core was an impressive feat... That day was little more than one year ago. With faster hardware and relentless optimizations by Linux kernel developers, 14 million IOPS per core is the new record now achieved...

In addition to Imagination working on a open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver for their newest graphics IP within Mesa, Imagination Technologies has also decided to go back and publish their original PowerVR Series 1 macOS/Windows driver as open-source...

Intel announced yesterday that they in cooperation with Microsoft have contributed the Scalable I/O Virtualization (SIOV) specification to the Open Compute Project for being an open standard moving forward...

While GCC 12 is in stage four development and focused just on regression fixes, a few notable patches were merged this week into the codebase ahead of its official release expected in roughly a month or so...

LLVM 14.0 and sub-projects like Clang 14 have been tagged with the official sources now available and the binaries for various platforms are beginning to be uploaded...

It's been a decade since the calls began for deprecating Linux's frame-buffer drivers "FBDEV" and the push for replacing FBDEV with DRM/KMS drivers. While DRM/KMS drivers are now commonplace even in the embedded space, FBDEV still won't die and with Linux 5.18 is seeing another round of fixes going in...

Added to the Linux kernel last year was Amazon's DAMON for data access monitoring that has seen public patches since early 2020. Since its Linux 5.15 introduction, this kernel functionality has continued to see new functionality tacked on and now for Linux 5.18 is DAMOS...

In addition to a slew of exciting NVIDIA announcements from GTC 2022, released today was a new 510 series Linux driver build...

Jaegeuk Kim submitted the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates on Monday that today were merged to mainline for the Linux 5.19 cycle...

Oracle today announced the general availability of JDK/OpenJDK 18 as the reference implementation of Java 18...

After earlier this month announcing Steam for Chrome OS following months of rumors/leaks around the initiative, Google today has made an alpha build of Steam available for select Chromebooks...

Jensen Huang has just wrapped up his GTC Spring 2022 keynote and thus the embargo has lifted on several exciting announcements from NVIDIA. NVIDIA has a lot of interesting hardware and software to talk about at this "#1 AI developer conference" from the Hopper H100 to next year's Grace CPU Superchips to the Jetson Orin.

CodeWeavers is out today with CrossOver 21.2 as the newest version of their commercial downstream based on Wine that offers Windows application and game support across Linux, macOS, and Chrome OS...

Since the release of the Linux 5.17 kernel the leading question in my inbox has been from readers asking how to actually make use of the AMD P-State driver. Right now this driver isn't the default over ACPI CPUFreq and I haven't seen any Linux distribution vendors announce their plans to immediately default to this new driver, but over the months ahead I expect that to change. In any case, if wanting to use amd_pstate on Linux 5.17 today here is a brief how-to guide for making the transition...

A change that had been expected but finally buttoned up in time for next month's Jammy Jellyfish release: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will now default to using the GNOME Wayland session when running the NVIDIA proprietary driver. The caveat/limitation is that's only the case when using the NVIDIA 510 series driver or newer and not when using any of the older legacy driver branches...

SUSE's David Sterba on Monday submitted the Btrfs file-system updates for the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel...

Going back to 2019 the open-source ecosystem has been working on ENQCMD/ENQCMDS support for introduction with Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" as part of the Data Streaming Accelerator work. ENQCMD support was added to the Linux kernel but last June was outright disabled for being "broken beyond repair". It's now managed to be repaired and for Linux 5.18 this instruction usage is being re-enabled...

GNU Linux-Libre 5.17 is out as the downstream flavor of Linux 5.17 that strips out code/support depending upon closed-source microcode or other non-free fragments as well as removing the ability to load proprietary kernel modules...

Thanks to the nature of open-source and independently-controlled projects like the Linux kernel, there is already much code sharing among competitive hardware vendors in areas where applicable. Much of the Linux kernel's x86/x86_64 code is shared between AMD and Intel (and VIA, Centaur, and Hygon for that matter) where relevant while due to different supported features and implementation differences there is divergence at times. With Linux 5.18 there are two features currently with unique AMD and Intel code paths that are working towards more unification...

As expected, the thermal subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel is bringing the new Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI) for benefiting their hybrid architecture processors as introduced recently with Alder Lake...

Samba 4.16 is out as the newest feature release for this leading SMB / CIFS implementation for improving Windows file/print interoperability with Linux-based systems...

While Milan-X was announced back in November, today is the day of the Milan-X embargo lift for reviewing these new processors and sharing more about these high-end server processors focused on delivering even greater performance for high performance computing (HPC) workloads. In this review is a look at the performance of the AMD EPYC 7773X series against other AMD EPYC parts and the Intel Xeon Scalable competition under Linux.

Today the AMD EPYC 7003 Milan-X processors are officially shipping. See my AMD EPYC 7773X Linux review for more details and plenty of benchmarks. The 768MB of L3 cache per CPU won't be of benefit to all workloads, just as the forthcoming Ryzen 7 5800X3D is focused on gaming. Aside from the dozens of benchmarks covered in my review, if you are still left wondering about whether other workloads stand to benefit from Milan-X, thankfully it's easy to already test drive it in the cloud with Microsoft Azure. Here are some Microsoft Azure HBv3 benchmarks looking at the Milan-X uplift in the cloud.

Intel has added a little OpenCL C compiler binary to Mesa 22.1 today in the latest development code-base...

Ingo Molnar has begun sending out the pull requests for the code he oversees in the kernel for the newly-opened Linux 5.18 merge window. The scheduler updates this cycle are rather notable especially for AMD Linux server users...

TornadoVM continues advancing as the open-source plug-in to OpenJDK and GraalVM that allows Java programs to run on heterogeneous hardware from GPUs to FPGAs and other targets...

The recent work by Mike Blumenkrantz on getting Lavapipe to advertise Vulkan 1.3 has successfully landed within Mesa 22.1...

It's been a while since having any shiny new features to talk about for FSCRYPT, the Linux kernel's file-system encryption framework that is used by the likes of EXT4 and F2FS. With Linux 5.18 that changes with FSCRYPT adding direct I/O support...

Following yesterday's Linux 5.17 release, HWMON subsystem maintainer Guenter Roeck was quick to send in the feature updates for the hardware monitoring subsystem for Linux 5.18...

Following the one week delay to the release schedule, Linus Torvalds issued the Linux 5.17 stable release a short time ago...

AMD quietly posted a new version of its instruction set architecture documentation concerning its Instinct MI200 accelerator. AMD originally published the ISA documentation for the MI200 back in November but it seems to have gone unnoticed (including by me) while in February they went ahead and released a new version of that technical documentation...

The Linux Mint crew have today released Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 (LMDE5). This is the effort carried out as a safeguard should Linux Mint in the future determine it unsuitable to continue basing their flagship distribution atop Ubuntu...

In addition to the IO_uring updates for Linux 5.18, block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe has also submitted the core block and driver changes ahead of the v5.18 merge window opening tonight following the release of Linux 5.17...

AMD's Radeon Linux graphics driver developers remain very busy working on their upcoming GPU support...

It was just last week Microsoft issued a new monthly update to CBL-Mariner, its Linux distribution within use at the Windows company for tasks ranging from Azure to WSL. Now a second update for March has arrived for CBL-Mariner with security fixes and a few other updates...

Fish 3.4 is out as the newest version of this popular shell particularly among enthusiasts/hobbyists...

The Linux 5.17 kernel will be released tomorrow and in turn that will kickoff the start of the Linux 5.18 merge window. Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe has already begun submitting his feature pull requests for this next kernel, including the IO_uring updates...

The Intel-led Sound Open Firmware project for providing open-source firmware for newer Intel audio hardware and even support for some AMD audio hardware is nearing its v2.1 release...

The recent work around Lavapipe picking up many new Vulkan extensions is culminating with Vulkan 1.3 support for this CPU-based Vulkan software implementation...

Even amid the ongoing war, KDE developers remain quite productive and continuing to push ahead for furthering this open-source desktop environment...

The Asahi Linux project for running Linux on Apple Silicon (currently the Apple M1 SoCs) is out with its first official alpha release...

It's arguably long overdue, but landing today within Mesa 22.1 is support in the V3D driver for Mesa's on-disk shader cache functionality. By adding this shader cache to V3D it can help with the performance of this Gallium3D open-source driver most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer single board computers...

The much anticipated dav1d 1.0 open-source AV1 video decoder has been released! Dav1d 1.0 is a big update to this leading CPU-based AV1 decoder that now offers AVX-512 support for newer Intel CPUs, threading enhancements, and more...

While AMD EPYC processors offer phenomenal performance at the high-end for servers with up to 64 cores / 128 threads per socket, eight memory channels, and other features, not all server deployments call for such capabilities. In the lower-end dedicated web server rental space, budget web hosting, and similar personal / small office server space, AMD Ryzen processors can prove more than capable. Already some dedicated server providers are offering AMD Ryzen powered servers and more are expected to come soon -- especially with even more server-minded wares for Ryzen expected next generation. In looking at this space, we have been testing a number of AMD Ryzen processors recently compared to Intel Xeon E class competition for looking at the performance and value in the low-end dedicated server space.

Mesa has long had the OpenCL "Clover" Gallium3D state tracker that has supported OpenCL 1.x but lacked important extensions that impaired its practicality. With AMD backing their ROCm compute stack in more recent years and Intel going with their Compute-Runtime stack for oneAPI and OpenCL support, there also isn't a major backer to Clover besides Red Hat engineers and the community. Now though "Rusticl" has been published as a new Mesa OpenCL implementation written in the Rust programming language...

A small but important change was just merged into GCC 12 ahead of its upcoming release in a month or so and also the same patch back-ported now for the GCC 11 stable series...