Phoronix

After not making its early beta target for 12 March and then failing to make its intended release date of 19 March, Fedora Linux 40 Beta is now cleared for releasing next week...

Intel 5th Gen Xeon Scalable processors already offer some nice generational improvements with improved AVX-512, faster DDR5 memory support, and also the new Optimized Power Mode option. But if wanting to maximize the performance capabilities even further, Intel's Clear Linux distribution continues working out well for maximizing the performance capabilities of Intel x86_64 hardware.

For those that have been interested in Intel's Meteor Lake mobile processors for the great integrated Arc Graphics capabilities and/or the new integrated NPU with open-source Intel iVPU kernel driver upstream, System76 today announced the new Lemur Pro laptops with Core Ultra processors...

Merged this week into Mesa 24.1 for the Broadcom VideoCore V3DV Vulkan driver that is most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi boards is support for VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering...

The in-development Linux 6.9 kernel is introducing a new USB_DEFAULT_AUTHORIZATION_MODE Kconfig build-time switch to change the default authorization mode for how Linux should deal with attached USB devices...

The KSMBD in-kernel SMB3 server is gaining support for durable file handles in the Linux 6.9 kernel...

The latest file-system driver with notable mentions for Linux 6.9 is that for Microsoft's exFAT file-system...

Microsoft has submitted their various Hyper-V updates to the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel...

Wayland Protocols 1.34 was released on Wednesday with three new staging protocols for further enhancing Wayland's capabilities...

AMD used the Game Developers Conference (GDC 2024) this week to announce FSR 3.1, the latest iteration of their FidelityFX Super Resolution tech for game upscaling...

Red Hat's display driver team has recently been devising plans for Nova, a new to-be-developed Linux DRM kernel driver written in Rust for open-source NVIDIA graphics support as the successor/replacement to Nouveau for newer NVIDIA GPU generations supporting the GPU System Processor (GSP). Making this effort all the more involved is being written in Rust at a time when various kernel abstractions are still being devised and not yet upstreamed...

The x86/entry pull request last week for the Linux 6.9 kernel contained just a single patch but it was a significant one at that in that it helps lower the overhead for CR3 writes and the benefits can be visible for workloads like Linux's perf functionality...

The GNOME project has announced the much anticipated release of the GNOME 46 desktop...

Announced back in 2021 by the Linux Foundation was Amazon Lumberyard becoming the Open 3D Engine and the Linux Foundation fostering the Open 3D Foundation for evolving this new open-source game engine. Three years later there is now a commercial game announced for the Open 3D Engine (O3DE)...

DXVK 2.3.1 has been released for this Steam Play component that implements the Direct3D 9/10/11 APIs atop Vulkan. Notable with DXVK 2.3.1 is VK_NV_raw_access_chains support for more efficient shader code generation on NVIDIA GPUs...

In-step with early Power11 patches in Linux 6.9, IBM engineers have posted the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) patches for enabling -mcpu=power11 targeting within this open-source compiler...

Tiny Corp has been frustrated before with AMD / ROCm and planned to drop AMD graphics cards in their planned compute boxes over it only to go back to AMD GPUs with their open-source driver stack later. It's now happened again following frustrations over firmware binaries. After recently lobbying AMD to at least open-source some relevant pieces of their firmware and at ~70% confidence over their plans, Tiny Corp announced on Tuesday they are dropping AMD GPUs again from their compute plans...

Following the revised Bcachefs code making it into Linux 6.9 and a warning for Bcachefs multi-device users to move past Linux 6.7, a batch of fixes was merged overnight for Linux 6.9 while further fixes to this file-system are expected soon...

Running XWayland in rootful mode now allows for working HiDPI and fractional scaling support...

It has taken many years but the Mesa 3D open-source graphics drivers have proven very successful from the open-source AMD Vulkan and OpenGL drivers proving they can be capable of competing with the closed-source drivers not only for gaming but also workstation tasks, the Windows vs. Linux graphics driver performance gap largely closed, Microsoft even leveraging Mesa for their translations to the D3D12 API, vendors like Imagination developing once unthinkable open-source drivers, etc. But with the increasing importance to corporations, so has the responsibilities and concerns of Mesa driver developers...

More AMD SEV-SNP bits are upstreamed now for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel that is putting the EPYC processor support on the mainline kernel trajectory for "the ultimate goal of the AMD confidential computing side" to hopefully be in great shape come Linux 6.10 later in the year...

Following recent benchmarks looking at how the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release is looking on Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids as well as the performance gains for AMD EPYC 9004 series on Ubuntu 24.04, I next turned to the Ampere Altra ARM64 server processor for seeing what the performance is looking like there with this Long Term Support Linux distribution release due out in just over one month.

Oracle has announced the general availability of OpenJDK Java 22...

Announced last summer was the Ultra Ethernet Consortium started by the Linux Foundation along with AMD, Intel, Cisco, Meta, Microsoft, Broadcom, and other organizations. Ultra Ethernet aims for high performance networking for the likes of AI and HPC. The group announced today they've courted an additional 45 organizations to become members of this consortium and they are on track for their v1.0 specification in Q3...

Following last week's main set of power management updates for Linux 6.9 that saw AMD P-State Preferred Core support and tuning for Intel Meteor Lake, a secondary set of power management subsystem changes were sent out today for this new kernel...

The x86 cache updates for Linux 6.9 offer an improved memory bandwidth throttling heuristic such as used by Intel Resource Director Technology (RDT) and also AMD EPYC CPUs with the resctrl code...

The Linux 6.9 kernel has a big rework to the CPU timer code that has been years in the making and has some power and performance benefits...

Merged today were all the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel...

XWayland had targeted both the Generic Buffer Management (GBM) and EGLStream APIs due to NVIDIA not supporting GBM like all of the other Linux drivers. But now that the NVIDIA proprietary Linux graphics driver has been boasting GBM support and advancing with their Wayland platform support in general, XWayland is letting go of the EGLStream mess...

The Firefox 124.0 release binaries are now available ahead of the official release announcement tomorrow...

With my recent NVIDIA GH200 Grace CPU benchmarks carried out remotely via GPTshop.ai, besides looking at areas like the 64K kernel page size performance benefits I also ran some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance difference when the binaries were generated by LLVM Clang rather than the default GCC compiler on Ubuntu Linux. This article shows off the performance difference for the 72-core Neoverse-V2 server/HPC processor when leveraging LLVM Clang rather than the GNU Compiler Collection.

CoreCtrl 1.4 was released this weekend as the newest version of this open-source, independently-developed GUI utility for managing CPU and GPU performance characteristics and power/thermal monitoring under Linux, among other capabilities. CoreCtrl does a good job at offering basic GUI-driven controls and monitoring for CPUs and GPUs in the absence of any official GUI solutions by the likes of AMD and Intel...

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund continues investing significant sums of money for important open-source projects. Among the latest projects receiving funding from the STF are the Rust-written Coreutils implementation and Reproducible Builds...

Back in February AMD posted GCC compiler enablement support for Zen 5 with the new "znver5" target ahead of launch. Since then it's been rather quiet and nervous not seeing this support merged ahead of the upcoming GCC 14 stable release, but this morning it's finally happened: the AMD Zen 5 processor enablement has been merged to GCC Git in time for the GCC 14.1 stable release that will be out in the coming weeks...

Along with the input subsystem updates for the Linux 6.9 kernel, the HID subsystem updates were also merged in recent days for this next Linux kernel release. Notable of this pull is enabling support for some newer Samsung Wireless input devices...

Last year Linux kernel developers began clearing out code for Intel's nearly two decade old "Carillo Ranch" platform that was a 90nm 32-bit single core processor for embedded devices in the sub 20 Watt space. It was a ~2007 product that never shipped but the Linux kernel code was left in the upstream tree until beginning to see it removed last year...

While AMD P-State driver's Preferred Core support was merged for Linux 6.9, another notable addition to this driver is still undergoing the patch review process: Core Performance Boost...

The input subsystem updates were merged on Sunday for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel merge window, among various other input changes is adding support for Snakebyte GAMEPADs to the XPad driver...

LibreELEC as the Linux distribution that aims to be just enough of an operating system for bringing up Kodi for HTPC / multimedia needs, the LibreELEC 12 "Omega" Beta 1 release is available today for further improving this media center focused Linux OS...

All of the x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.9 merge window. As usual, most of the x86 platform driver work is around better supporting various Intel Core and AMD Ryzen laptops under Linux...

Intel continues leading the development of the Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem for the Linux kernel while at least for the Linux 6.9 cycle are a few feature patch contributions from AMD...

Joining the other file-systems seeing notable updates for Linux 6.9, the XFS file-system is seeing continued work around online repair support and other improvements...

The Hyprland customizable Wayland compositor with dynamic tiling is celebrating its two year milestone by issuing v0.37 (and a v0.37.1 paper bag release)...

The PCI subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 6.9 kernel. Among the changes are the usual code churn around device-specific quirks and tuning of the power management code...

Going back years but documented in 2022 has been a desire for the SDL hardware/software abstraction layer popular with cross-platform games to offer an abstracted file-system API. That's finally come to reality with the new SDL_Storage interface added for SDL 3.0...

While the GNOME 46 desktop is being released next week, one of the very last minute feature items being merged hit the Mutter codebase on Friday...

Mold 2.30 is out this weekend as the newest version of this open-source high speed linker alternative to GNU Gold/LD and LLVM LLD...

Open-source AMD Linux graphics driver engineer Marek Olak who is known for his focus on the Gallium3D code has shown no signs of slowing down when it comes to discovering new areas to further enhance the performance and tune the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

As noted a month ago that IBM was starting on Power11 CPU/platform enablement for the mainline Linux kernel, indeed the first batch of Power11 code has now been merged for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel...

Tomeu Vizoso who recently has been working on extending the Etnaviv open-source graphics driver to also support the Vivante NPU IP has made great progress on that with competitive performance to the proprietary NPU driver and upstreaming the Teflon framework into Mesa for handling the Neural Processing Unit. Tomeu Vizoso has now shifted his attention to working on an open-source, reverse-engineered NPU driver for the AI hardware found in various Rockchip SoCs...