Phoronix

Earlier this month AMD announced the Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX with availability set for 13 December. Meanwhile today the embargo lifts on more details surrounding the RDNA3 architecture and these new graphics cards.

The latest milestone for Rusticl as Mesa's Rust-written OpenCL Gallium3D implementation is that -- when running on Intel Gen12 Xe graphics -- has reached official OpenCL 3.0 conformance as recognized by The Khronos Group...

Going back to late 2020 Intel's open-source/Linux engineers have been working on Linear Address Masking "LAM" enablement for that feature coming with future processors. With the upcoming Linux 6.2, the kernel-side enablement for Intel LAM appears to be finally wrapped up...

For those compiling their programs using the common "-O2" optimization level as is used for the production builds by many Linux distributions and other software vendors, small loop unrolling is being enabled at this level for GCC 13. Enabling small loop unrolling with -O2 should help the performance in some areas of modern Intel and AMD CPUs...

Going back eight years to Linux 3.15 there has been Sony DualShock 4 controller support using the "hid-sony" driver thanks to work from the open-source community. But now Sony is adding DualShock 4 controller support to their newer "hid-playstation" driver that they started for PlayStation 5 controller support and are now extending it backwards for the PS4 controller...

The Linux kernel built with Clang has supported Shadow Call Stack "SCS: to prevent return address overwrites. With patches building up for Linux 6.2, Dynamic Shadow Call Stack is being implemented to avoid the overhead of SCS on processors supporting pointer authentication (PAC)...

Linux 6.1 is inching closer to its early-to-mid December stable release with Linux 6.1-rc5 having just been released...

In addition to AMD this week having released the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler "AOCC" 4.0 as their LLVM/Clang downstream now with various optimizations for Zen 4, the company also released AOMP 16.0-2 as the newest version of their other LLVM/Clang downstream... AOMP is their downstream LLVM/Clang compiler focused on providing the latest Radeon OpenMP GPU offloading support...

This week the release candidate of openSUSE Leap Micro 5.3 was announced for testing. The Leap Micro project is openSUSE's modern and lightweight host Linux operating system intended for edge / embedded / IoT use-cases...

Last month I wrote about a Linux sensor driver being written for the AMD-powered OneXPlayer Mini gaming handheld device. The good news is that this driver has matured enough that it's now queued for introduction in the Linux 6.2 kernel...

Mold is the modern, high performance, and open-source linker taking on the likes of LLVM LLD and GNU Gold. Mold 1.7 has been released as the newest update to this very promising linker, but unfortunately the lead developer is evaluating a license change. Due to still losing money over working on it full-time, he may be forced to change the software license without obtaining sustainable funding...

As of this summer the upstream, open-source Broadcom V3D direct rendering manager kernel driver has enabled support for the Raspberry Pi 4 (and newer). With the latest mainline Linux kernel builds this means the ability to enjoy accelerated graphics on the Raspberry Pi hardware paired with the latest Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver code without worrying about out-of-tree patches...

Google announced funding for silicon manufacturing for participating open-source projects using the process design kit with GlobalFoundries...

MPV as the popular open-source media player forked from MPlayer/mplayer2 and leveraging the FFmpeg library is out with its newest feature release...

The wlroots Wayland compositor support library that started out as a companion project to Sway is out with a shiny new feature release...

Following last week's batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD changes slated for Linux 6.2, on Friday another round of feature patches were sent in for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.2 cycle. There is continued work around new IP blocks presumably for RDNA3 and MI300 graphics while given the more modularized development approach with block-by-block enablement makes it harder to ascertain the current status...

It's been a year and a half already since the release of Mageia 8 for this Linux distribution whose roots trace back to Mandriva and before that the legendary Mandrake. Mageia 9 will be out as the next iteration of this desktop Linux distro in the months ahead while this weekend there is the release of Mageia 9 Alpha 1...

KDE developers remain very busy working on driving improvements for what will be the Plasma 5.27 release next year and also enhancing the various applications on the KDE desktop...

Wine 7.21 is out as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot of this software to enjoy Windows games and applications on Linux...

On Thursday when launching AMD 4th Gen EPYC Genoa processors, AMD also published AOCC 4.0 as the newest version of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler. I've been putting it through its paces the past day and continues showing the positive performance impact of proper compiler tuning.

With yesterday's NVIDIA 525.23 Linux driver beta in addition to many improvements in their closed-source code, their in-development open-source GPU kernel driver has also received some enhancements...

In early 2021 Google announced Lyra as a very low bitrate codec intended for speech with aims of getting Lyra and AV1 possible for video chats on 56 kbps connections...

Back in September AMD posted the Linux driver patches for P-State EPP as their latest effort to improve the power efficiency of Ryzen and EPYC processors. Sent out this week is now the fourth iteration of those CPU frequency scaling driver patches...

With the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel release there is the initial Rust infrastructure merged for enabling the use of the Rust programming language for future kernel drivers and other kernel code. But that state in Linux 6.1 is the very basics and not yet practical while now a secondary sent of "Rust for Linux" patches have been sent out for enabling more kernel development to happen with Rust...

If the royalty free open-source processor ISA RISC-V is to enjoy success on the Linux desktop, obviously it needs an office suite... LibreOffice as the open-source office suite alternative to Microsoft Office is now seeing proper RISC-V 64-bit support...

After showcasing the AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" series and geeking out over AMD's reference platform running the Linux-powered open-source OpenBMC, it's time to move on to benchmarking. For evaluating the EPYC Genoa performance under Linux, AMD kindly provided review samples of the EPYC 9654 flagship 96-core processor, the EPYC 9554 64-core processor, and the EPYC 9374F 32-core high frequency CPU. In today's benchmark review I am looking at the EPYC 9554/9654 CPUs while the EPYC 9374F will be featured in its own review in the coming days on Phoronix.

For as exciting and performant as AMD 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" series processors are with up to 96 cores, AVX-512, and the other impressive Zen 4 enhancements, there was something else subtle that got me really excited with Genoa... AMD's "Titanite" reference board for Genoa is running the open-source, Linux-powered OpenBMC!

Following September's successful launch of the AMD Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" desktop processors, today AMD is lifting the embargo on their EPYC 9004 series "Genoa" server processors. EPYC Genoa takes AMD server processors to the new SP5 socket, up to 96 cores / 192 threads per socket, AVX-512 with Zen 4, twelve channels of DDR5 system memory, and much more -- all combined it puts AMD and the industry at new levels of HPC performance. I've been benchmarking the AMD EPYC Genoa processors the past few weeks to astounding success. This article is looking more at the feature set and platform for Genoa while separately are my initial AMD EPYC 9554 / EPYC 9654 Linux review and benchmarks.

NVIDIA has made available their first public beta in the R525 Linux driver series...

DXVK 2.0 is out as a major update to this Direct3D on Vulkan implementation used by Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying D3D9 to D3D11 Windows games on Linux with great speed...

PipeWire 0.3.60 is out today as the newest update to this software used for managing audio and video streams on Linux. With modern Linux distributions PipeWire is increasingly used now as the replacement to PulseAudio in addition to its video capabilities...

While NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs are shipping, the Nouveau Linux driver stack for open-source support on NVIDIA hardware is finally getting ready to provide basic OpenGL support for the existing RTX 30 "Ampere" graphics processors...

Following AMDVLK 2022.Q4.1 from late October, AMDVLK 2022.Q4.2 is now available as AMD's latest official open-source Vulkan Linux driver update for both gamers and enterprise customers...

Sent out today was this week's batch of "drm-misc-next" code containing Direct Rendering Manager updates to the core infrastructure and smaller drivers of material that is ready for queuing ahead of the Linux 6.2 cycle...

Another point release to the ROCm 5.3 series for AMD's open-source compute stack is now available...

While the release next month of Blender 3.4 is planning to ship with Wayland enabled, Fedora Linux 37 users are expected to soon find their packaged Blender versions already running with the Wayland support enabled...

Following last week's release of Mesa 22.3-rc1 that also marked the feature freeze for this quarter's release cycle, Mesa 22.3-rc2 is out today with an initial batch of bug fixes...

Fwupd 1.8.7 is out today with support for updating more device firmware under Linux for different hardware as well as various fixes and other enhancements...

With SC2022 kicking off next week and AMD set to unveil their next-generation server processors tomorrow, Intel is using today to announce the Xeon Max Series and the Data Center GPU Max Series.

Microsoft on Tuesday released .NET 7 with improved Linux support, better performance, and many new features throughout this Microsoft platform stack...

For those working on RISC-V software development on bare metal hardware, the in-development LLVM Clang 16 compiler has added support for allowing "-mtune=native" and "-mcpu=native" to work properly on this CPU ISA...

While the VGA_Switcheroo has long been part of the Linux kernel for laptops with hybrid (dual GPU) graphics for switching between the GPUs on platforms with a hardware mux switch, this current API has been found to be ineffective for the latest laptops like those with "NVIDIA Advanced Optimus" support. Thus NVIDIA is working on and proposing a new Linux user-space API around dynamic mux switching...

The Khronos Group that is known as the standards body behind OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, SPIR-V, glTF, OpenXR, and other industry APIs announced that their next API will be called Kamaros...

Linux kernel developers are looking at deprecating and ultimately removing the SLOB memory allocator...

In addition to Fedora 38 looking at creating Phosh images for mobile devices, Fedora developers now have clearance to go ahead and overhaul how their Fedora Linux live images are assembled...

Intel today published their "20221108" CPU microcode collection alongside announcing various security disclosures for the quarter. Fortunately on the CPU microcode side, the changes are all focused on functional issues...

Over the past three years one of Intel's many promising open-source software projects has been the Rust-written Cloud Hypervisor. Cloud Hypervisor started as just a modern, security-focused, cloud-centric Rust VMM hypervisor for modern hardware/software. It began as just one of many open-source software projects at Intel but last year was folded into the Linux Foundation umbrella while Intel continues to be a major contributor to the project. Coming as a bit of a surprise today is AMD announcing they have joined the Cloud Hypervisor project...

It looks like Fedora could be taking on more mobile ambitions with a Phosh image now proposed for running that Wayland shell focused on smartphones and tablets while delivering a good GNOME-based experience. Separately, a change proposal is expected for also introducing a Fedora Linux image with KDE Plasma Mobile...

Back in 2019 NVIDIA open-sourced the PhysX 4.1 SDK and was working on a PhysX 5.0 open-source code drop while we haven't heard anything more on the matter in the past two years. Coming out this morning as a surprise is the NVIDIA PhysX 5.1 SDK open-source release...

When it comes to new AMD AM5 motherboards featuring an X670 series chipset, one of the cheapest options right now is the ASRock X670E PG Lightning that retails for around $249 USD. I picked up one of these motherboards at launch and has been working out well on Linux for those wanting to build a cost-minded AMD Zen 4 desktop system.