Phoronix

While over the past several years AMD landed numerous significant improvements to their RadeonSI driver for benefiting OpenGL workstation use-cases, that quest isn't yet over and more optimizations continue to be pursued. There are additional optimizations on the horizon for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for benefiting OpenGL on Linux workstations...

While back in November was when AWS originally announced new EC2 instances powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC "Genoa" processors, only this week did they bring their M7a general purpose instances to a general availability state where anyone can access them. Being very impressed with 4th Gen EPYC bare metal as well as with Azure's HPC cloud, I fired up some benchmarks of the new Genoa-powered EC2 M7a instance compared to the new M7i instances powered by Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" as well as showing how the competition is to Amazon's in-house Graviton ARM-based server processors.

Intel engineer Ilpo Jarvinen posted a set of Linux kernel driver patches to introduce a new "bwctrl" PCI Express Bandwidth Controller driver and associated PCIe cooling driver to allow for limiting the PCIe link speed in the event of any system thermal issues...

While Intel has maintained the QATzip open-source compression library for demonstrating data compression using QuickAssist Technology (QAT) with DEFLATE/LZ4/LZ4s, Intel has also been working on QAT'ed Zstd for achieving some sizable victories in performance and power efficiency...

It was less than one month ago that Intel announced AVX10 as the successor to AVX-512. In that time Intel engineers have begun posting AVX10.1 enablement patches for GCC as well as beginning AVX10 discussions for the LLVM compiler stack. Overnight already the initial AVX10.1 enablement code has been merged into the GNU Compiler Collection...

The reverse-engineered Etnaviv DRM driver for providing open-source graphics support for Vivante graphics IP has prepared a new set of improvements for the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel cycle...

The first beta release of the forthcoming OBS Studio 30 screencasting software is now available for testing...

While waiting for the belated Mesa 23.2 to eventually surface, the Mesa 23.1 branch remains the latest stable series for this collection of open-source OpenGL/Gallium3D and Vulkan graphics drivers...

SiFive's HiFive Unmatched development board was interesting when it began shipping in 2021 with 16GB of RAM and four U74-MC RISC-V cores along with one S7 core. But pricing was rather steep at $665 USD. Fast forward two years, the StarFive VisionFive 2 has begun to enjoy wide availability and for $100+ this RISC-V development board features a quad-core RISC-V processor via the StarFive JH7110 SoC with integrated GPU, up to 8GB of RAM, HDMI 2.0 output, dual Gigabit Ethernet, dual USB 3.0 ports, and more for around $100 USD. Here are some benchmarks of this most interesting RISC-V single board computer in the ~$100 space to be released yet.

While many Linux gamers are all-set these days by making use of Steam and leveraging Valve's Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux, for those running macOS or also wishing to enjoy more office/application-oriented Windows software on Linux support, CodeWeavers is out today with CrossOver 23 as the newest release of their commercial Wine-based software...

With the Intel Downfall vulnerability made public last week (also known as GDS - "Gather Data Sampling") there can be a sizable hit to AVX workloads making use of the GATHER instructions. For helping to lower the impact of Downfall/GDS on mitigated systems, Intel has made a change to the GNU Compiler Collection to disable GATHER generation in vectorization for Intel CPU families affected by this vulnerability...

Distrobox as the open-source project allowing easy access to running other distributions/apps via Podman and Docker has merged support for ChromeOS...

In addition to Debian promoting RISC-V to an official CPU architecture for the newly in development Debian 13 cycle, another CPU architecture/port change is adding LoongArch "Loong64" as a new Debian Port...

XWayland 23.2 is out as stable today for this X.Org Server code for enjoying X11 window/client support within Wayland compositors. Several new features are implemented for this XWayland 23.2 milestone...

Mozilla Firefox has merged Wayland fractional-scale-v1 protocol support for handling fractional scaling with the web browser on the Linux desktop...

Imagination Technologies has posted the fifth iteration of their driver patches for supporting PowerVR Rogue graphics with an open-source Linux kernel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver that will go along with their Mesa PVR Vulkan driver...

Back in February 2022 Intel announced plans to acquire Tower Semiconductor. However, one and a half years later the deal is now being called off due to failure to obtain regulatory approval...

Intel this afternoon released the Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) v1.2 SDK as this gaming image upscaling tech that leverages AI deep learning for better performance and less image degradation on Intel Arc Graphics as well as from other GPU vendors...

Chrome 116 is out today as the newest stable version of Google's web browser...

Last week the AMD Inception vulnerability was made public as a speculative side channel attack affecting Zen processors and different mitigation options based on the CPU generation. There wasn't too much communication around the performance implications of mitigating Inception while over the past week I have begun benchmarking the software and microcode updates on Ryzen and EPYC processors.

Devuan is still alive and well for those wanting to run Debian GNU/Linux but without systemd. Devuan 5.0 is out today as the newest distro release that is now rebased atop Debian 12 Bookworm...

Mozilla developers are celebrating that they are now faster than Google Chrome with the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, although that test has been superseded by the JetStream benchmark...

Maira Canal with Igalia has sent out a set of patches for exposing GPU usage statistics for the Broadcom graphics processor found within the Raspberry Pi 4 single board computers...

AMD's Preferred Core feature continues working its way toward the Linux kernel for this functionality that's been around since Zen 2...

The Intel Platform Environment Control Interface (PECI) changes have been prepped for the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel cycle and include extending support for including 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" server platforms...

A few days ago Intel compiler expert H.J. Lu landed an FMA-optimized log2 function for the GNU C Library that could yield up to a 69% performance improvement on tested Intel Skylake processors. Merged today to Glibc Git was another FMA-optimized function...

Intel engineers are working on enhancing the x86_64 CPU microcode updating experience under Linux and in particular the work is ultimately around better supporting of late microcode loading on Linux for Intel systems with a primary focus on Intel servers / enterprise users...

An update on the Go programming language roadmap was shared today that highlights some recent improvements for backward compatibility to Go and why the developers now no longer expect to ever have a "Go 2" release that would break compatibility with existing Go 1.x programs...

With the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle another exciting change was recently queued up within the block subsystem's "for-next" branch: IO_uring futex/futexv support...

While Linux 6.1 added the initial Rust infrastructure as an alternative programming language for writing new kernel modules, so far as of Linux 6.5 much of the upstreaming effort has been around adding new abstractions and supporting additional subsystems for making the Rust capabilities in the kernel more complete. The latest patch series is working on adding Rust abstractions for networking sockets and other fundamental networking bits...

In addition to all the interesting open-source graphics driver updates coming with Linux 6.6 like AMD FreeSync Panel Replay, Nouveau uAPI additions for NVK, Intel PSR for old laptops, and many other GPU driver changes, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem with its AI accelerator "accel" framework/subsystem is rolling out initial support for the VPU4 coming with Intel Lunar Lake processors...

Released last week was Eclipse OpenJ9 v0.40 as the latest feature update to this high performance JVM that focuses on being optimized for a small footprint...

Following last week's AMD Inception vulnerability another AMD Zen CPU bug came to light and that was performing a divide by zero on Zen 1 could end up leaking data with this DIV0 speculation bug. The original workaround was performing a dummy division 0/1 within the #DE exception handler but that's now turned out to be inadequate...

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 6.5-rc6 kernel a few hours early today after capping off a busy week...

The Bcachefs file-system continues to work its way toward the mainline kernel while interestingly this weekend a Valve developer posted patches for implementing case-folding (case insensitive) feature support for this open-source file-system...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver ray-tracing support is about to become much faster with a pending improvement that is currently undergoing review...

Last month the Mold 2.0 high-speed linker was released that shifted from AGPL to MIT licensing after their monetization strategy didn't pan out. This weekend the project is out with its Mold 2.1 release as another step forward for this alternative linker to GNU Gold and LLVM LLD...

Future LibreOffice releases will finally better handle animated PNG (APNG) files. After initial import support was added back in June, merged this week was initial export support for APNG files...

Intel engineer and open-source compiler expert H.J. Lu has landed a much faster log2() implementation within the GNU C Library (glibc) that makes use of FMA instructions with modern x86_64 CPUs...

AMD submitted more "new stuff" for their AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel graphics and compute drivers for the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel cycle...

Last month when the Linux kernel was mitigated for Zenbleed as a CPU vulnerability affecting AMD Zen 2 processors, it turns out the Steam Deck APU was accidentally left without coverage. An x86/urgent pull request sent out today for the Linux 6.5 kernel and for back-porting to current stable Linux kernel releases will extend the Zenbleed mitigation to protect Steam Deck gamers...

Last year the DisplayPort 2.1 specification was published and now Intel's open-source Linux engineers are working on adding support to the kernel for handling of the DisplayPort Alternate Mode 2.1 support for that DP operation over USB Type-C connections...

One of the new Linux kernel patch series out of AMD this week is for exposing ACPI PHAT, the Platform Health Assessment Table...

While KDE developers are busy working on Plasma 6, System76's software developers are busy working on their new Rust-based "COSMIC" desktop environment. System76 on Friday published a new blog post outlining their efforts in recent weeks...

KDE developers continue to be quite busy working on Plasma 6 development and related enhancements to this popular open-source desktop environment...

With the in-development NVK driver merged for Mesa 23.3 to provide open-source NVIDIA Vulkan API support when paired with the Nouveau kernel driver and the necessary Nouveau kernel driver improvements coming with Linux 6.6 for supporting this driver, Phoronix readers have been eager for some benchmarks... Well, here are some benchmarks on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 and RTX 30 series when comparing the latest NVK+Nouveau code compared to the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack.

Following the new Linux stable kernels this week to quickly mitigate the Intel Downfall and AMD Inception vulnerabilities, today brings another set of stable point releases. Among the fixes to be picked up since Tuesday is the other AMD fix for the week of a Zen 1 bug that could leak data following a divide by zero operation...

The upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel will finish removing old remnants of Wireless USB support...

Developers of the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system have long been carrying patches for supporting the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) on their platform while this week the code was upstreamed for GCC 14...

Sent out today was the drm-intel-gt-next and drm-intel-next pull requests of the latest Intel graphics driver feature code for DRM-Next to then be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle. Both pull requests indicate these are the last planned feature updates ahead of Linux 6.6 but what's interesting is that with the latest code upcoming Meteor Lake graphics are still being treated as experimental...