Phoronix

Another change that has now landed in Mesa 23.3 is enabling support in the TURNIP Vulkan driver for running atop the VirtIO GPU kernel driver in virtualized scenarios...

As a follow-up to the first-on-Phoronix article last month that highlighted Linus Torvalds' frustrated views on the AMD fTPM random number generator continuing to cause problems for users even with updated firmware/BIOS, as of today the Linux kernel has gone ahead and blanket disabled RNG use for all current AMD fTPMs...

AMD last week launched the Radeon PRO W7500 and Radeon PRO W7600 professional graphics cards built on RDNA3. Due to AMD's unique position with their open-source Linux graphics driver stack, I decided to see how these new Radeon professional GPUs compare to FirePro hardware from 13 years ago for the raw performance and power efficiency.

Following Canonical deciding to pull in control of the LXD project and LXD maintainership being limited to Canonical employees, the Linux Containers project has announced the forking of LXD as Incus...

Last year Google decided to deprecate JPEG-XL image support within their Chrome/Chromium web browser. They expressed not enough interest and other factors for so quickly removing JPEG-XL support from their browser. They went ahead and removed the support for this next-gen JPEG standard while now a half-year later they may be having second thoughts...

For those that have fond memories of the NeXTSTEP days and in particular its graphical user interface during the pre-Apple times, Window Maker 0.96 was released this weekend for that X11 window manager inspired by the NeXTSTEP GUI...

Sourceware.org that provides the open-source hosting for projects like GCC, Cygwin, and more had long been sponsored by Red Hat and a rather opaque organization. Earlier this year SourceWare.org became part of the Software Freedom Conservancy. In addition to now calling the SFC home, they are planning other changes ahead to expand their hosting services, diversifying hardware and software partners, and other changes...

AMDVLK 2023.Q3.1 is out this morning as the first update to AMD's official open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver since mid-June...

The Linux kernel's "dimmtemp" driver allows for reporting memory temperatures with capable memory modules and when exposed by the Intel processor's PECI (Platform Environment Control Interface). Currently though the DIMM temperature driver is hard-coded to only allow reporting up to 32 DIMMs while a change queued for Linux 6.6 will extend that limit...

Recently merged to GNOME's Mutter compositor development code is implementing a dedicated kernel mode-setting (KMS) thread and allows for pointer motions to bypass the main thread during cursor sprite movements. Ultimately this effort is around lower-latency cursor movements...

Google's open-source BBR TCP congestion control algorithm is widely used within Google and its v3 iteration is already proving a success within the company and they are working toward upstreaming BBRv3 into the mainline Linux kernel...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.5-rc5 as the newest test candidate aiming for the stable Linux 6.5 kernel around the end of August...

Available now for testing is the release candidate of Python 3.12 ahead of its formal release later this year...

The open-source FEX-Emu project continues advancing as an emulator to run x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on 64-bit ARM (AArch64), even for games, Valve's Steam Play / Proton, and other complex software. FEX-Emu 2308 is out today with more performance optimizations and other features implemented for this emulator...

In addition to Loongson preparing Loongson Binary Translation (LBT) for LoongArch to help with MIPS / x86 / Arm binary translation on this domestic Chinese CPU architecture, additional LoongArch features are also now slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel cycle...

Tagged on Saturday was GTK 4.12 as the newest version of this open-source toolkit...

Intel's open-source ConnMan software that is an Internet connect manager focused on embedded Linux devices is out with a new release...

The newest motherboard port to land in mainline Coreboot Git is for enabling the HP EliteBook 820 G2 laptop...

Yesterday KDE developer Nate Graham outlined the progress with the Plasma 6 desktop while out today he's out with his usual blog post that highlights the various KDE changes to have been merged over the past week...

The NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver has finally been merged into mainline Mesa for easing development of this driver moving forward...

The past several weeks at Phoronix has been very exciting with benchmarking AMD EPYC Genoa-X processors (along with Bergamo) and the incredible uplift delivered by these latest AMD server processors. But for those not yet having the opportunity to test the new EPYC Genoa-X processors locally, those wishing to evaluate the Genoa-X capabilities in the public cloud prior to making an investment in these high-end server processors with 3D V-Cache, or those simply preferring the ease of cloud infrastructure, Azure's new HBv4 series provide an excellent route for leveraging AMD Genoa-X compute capabilities in the cloud. Here are benchmarks of the new Azure HBv4 powered by EPYC Genoa-X compared to prior Azure HPC VMs. The Azure HBv4 performance is outstanding with incredible generational uplift and leading value among Microsoft's HPC-focused VMs.

Back in Linux 6.4 there were Intel HD audio additions for Lunar Lake processors, ACE2.x integration with Lunar Lake has also been worked on as part of the SoundWire support, and also early preparations on the Sound Open Firmware side. With Linux 6.6 there are more audio bits coming together for Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processors...

For those making use of the open-source, cross-platform ClamAV anti-virus/anti-malware software backed by Cisco, the first release candidate of ClamAV 1.2 is now available for testing...

With KDE Plasma 6 development going well and a beta potentially in a few months, the KDE Neon Linux distribution crew has created a new archive with the latest Plasma 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 components to help developers and enthusiasts in testing out this leading-edge open-source desktop code...

With new i915 driver code ready for the upcoming Linux 6.6, new threshold tuning around the RPS (cited as both Render P-States and Requested Power States) for some Intel graphics hardware and in some games can yield around a 10~15% boost to performance...

FreeRDP 3.0 continues getting better for this open-source solution for interoperability with Microsoft RDP for remote desktop purposes...

SK engineer Byungchul Park noticed costly migration overhead especially with TLB shoot-downs hurting performance while he was working with Compute Express Link (CXL) on Linux. That led to some optimization patches to reduce TLB flushes under some select cases that in turn led to a 50% reduction in full flushes and has the possibility of helping performance...

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has published a lengthy blog post outlining the current state of the Plasma 6 desktop, what code porting work has wrapped up, and what major tasks remain before Plasma 6.0 can advance onto its beta and then release phase...

Preventing some modern Windows games from running on Intel Arc Graphics under Linux with Valve's Steam Play has been held up by lack of sparse support within Intel's ANV Vulkan driver. Those limitations will hopefully be overcome with the Intel Xe kernel mode driver when that is mainlined in hopefully the coming months, but for now it's a bit of a sore spot for Intel Linux gamers. A partial workaround though has now been merged for Mesa 23.3 with fake sparse support...

It's been ten years since Intel launched the Haswell processors that were great for the time followed by Broadwell. On the laptop side for Haswell and Broadwell the Panel Self Refresh (PSR) power-savings support has been rather notorious at least on the Linux side. Finally for the Linux 6.6 kernel due out in late 2023, the developers are re-enabling PSR support for these aging laptops...

An updated patch-set was sent out on Wednesday to address fixing wake-up problems for some AMD client platforms when going through a suspend/resume cycle...

Another weekly batch of drm-misc-next changes were sent out today to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the Linux 6.6 merge window opening in a few weeks...

The just-announced AMD Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 are working quite well under a fully open-source and upstream graphics driver stack. AMD is making available a new Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver release for those on enterprise Linux distributions, but those living more on the leading-edge and preferring the open-source upstream Linux/Mesa driver experience, I've been testing these new RDNA3 professional offerings and the support is already in place and working out rather well. In this article are some initial tests of the Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 as well as showing how the performance of the new packaged driver compares to that of using all open-source and upstream GPU driver components.

Earlier this year AMD introduced the RDNA3-based Radeon PRO W7800/W7900 series while today the company is introduced the Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 series at the lower-end of the professional graphics spectrum...

Intel open-source driver engineers have begun starting work on preparing the Linux graphics driver stack to ultimately handle Lunar Lake integrated graphics that is the generation following Arrow Lake...

Microsoft has released an updated version of its CBL-Mariner 2.0 in-house Linux distribution that includes various security patches, new packages being added to the OS, and a variety of other updates...

LibreOffice 7.6 as the next major update to this open-source office suite is due out in mud-August while today's RC2 release serves as a last chance for testing out this updated free software alternative to Microsoft Office...

Clement Lefebvre shared today as part of the monthly status update for the Linux Mint project that they'll be releasing an "EDGE" ISO to help in running this desktop Linux distribution on newer hardware...

For several years now The Khronos Group has been developing the ANARI standard as an analytics rendering API and focusing on scalable 3D data virtualization. Today the ANARI 1.0 release finally took place for this cross-platform 3D rendering engine API...

Asahi Linux is great for those wanting to run the best Linux experience on Apple Silicon hardware while using this Arch Linux based distribution. But for those preferring Fedora Linux over Arch, a Fedora Asahi Remix is coming and was announced today at the Flock To Fedora conference...

The second release candidate of XWayland 23.2 is now available that restores an earlier performance optimization around depth 24 windows...

While Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) on Intel/AMD x86_64 processors is limited to providing one additional thread per core, SMT on IBM POWER hardware can provide 4-way and even 8-way SMT for some processor models. With Linux 6.6 the /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control interface is being extended to allow greater control over managing partial SMT states in cases of the CPUs supporting more than 2-way SMT at Linux run-time...

Just days after the FreeCAD 0.21-rc release, FreeCAD 0.21 is now available for this popular open-source CAD software...

After six years as serving as the XFS file-system maintainer, Darrick Wong announced he'll be stepping down from this role and that really multiple developers need to step up to maintain XFS and help with testing and other responsibilities...

Intel has published their latest quarterly update to the Intel Media Driver open-source VA-API implementation as well as to their oneVPL video processing layer library...

The Steam Survey results for July 2023 were just published and it points to a large and unexpected jump in the Linux gaming marketshare...

Canonical has aimed to ship Linux kernel stable release updates (SRU) for Ubuntu releases on a three week cycle. That has worked out well overall but has led to delays at times in getting down CVE security fixes and other urgent customer requests. Moving forward Canonical is aiming for a new "4/2" week cycle for kernel SRUs...

Linux's cpupower utility lives within the Linux kernel source tree for reading and tuning various CPU power settings rather than poking at sysfs files directly or other means of adjusting your processor power-related tunables. With the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel cycle the cpupower utility is adding support for adjusting new AMD P-State driver features...

The "v1" patches were posted today for a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver to be used for display purposes with the StarFive JH7110, a low-cost RISC-V SoC found in the VisionFive boards, PINE64 Star64, and other low-cost RISC-V single board computers...

Since last year Intel Linux engineers have been busy working on FRED support for the Flexible Return and Event Delivery specification that will be found with future-generation processors. FRED overhauls how CPU transitions are handled between privilege levels and a design goal of lowering transition latencies and allow for more robust software use-cases...