Phoronix

Intel announced this morning on the second day of their Innovation 2023 conference that they are collaborating with software vendors such as Red Hat, Canonical, and SUSE for providing Intel-optimized Linux distributions...

Last year Intel announced Project Amber as an effort to verify the trustworthiness of clouds. Project Amber was talked up as "an innovative service-based security implementation" for the remote verification of the trustworthiness of compute assets. Project Amber is now rolling out as the Intel Trust Authority...

There's just under one month to go now until the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) returns to A Coruna, Spain for the annual development conference focused on open-source graphics drivers (Mesa), Wayland, and related Linux display/graphics infrastructure although the X.Org Server itself hasn't received much attention in recent years. Here's a look at some of the planned talks for the exciting XDC 2023...

When it comes to Glibc HWCAPs for allowing the C library to load optimized libraries based upon the CPU features at run-time, it's mostly been focused on the x86_64 world for targeting higher x86-64 levels or being able to load optimized libraries for systems with AVX support. Loongson though has now contributed initial LoongArch HWCAPs support...

While Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) isn't as common on Arm SoCs as it is in the x86 and POWER worlds, there are some SMT-capable designs like with the HiSilicon Kupeng 930 for Arm servers. HiSilicon engineers are working now to extend Linux's SMT run-time controls to work on ARM64 (AArch64)...

In addition to Oracle releasing OpenJDK 21 / Java 21 on Tuesday, their GraalVM team also carried out a same-day release of GraalVM with the new Java 21 features and more...

NVIDIA's latest patches intended for the upstream Linux kernel are over on the networking side of the house with their Mellanox wares as they prepare 800Gb/s (XDR) support within the RDMA/InfiniBand code...

As a continuation of last week's article looking at Linux 6.6 bringing some impressive gains for AMD EPYC Bergamo, over the past few days I've also tested Linux 6.5 stable and Linux 6.6 Git on Genoa and Genoa-X processors as well as Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" in looking at this next kernel version's performance. The Sapphire Rapids performance was largely flat while for an interesting class of workloads the Linux 6.6 performance drives the AMD EPYC server performance much higher.

Intel is kicking off their Innovation 2023 conference in San Jose with many exciting announcements. Freed from embargo this morning is news around their upcoming mobile and server processors, lots of AI talk, Intel's continued software advancements to complement their hardware, and more...

Java 21 and the JDK 21 release under a general availability (GA) status occurred a short time ago as the newest major update to the Java programming language...

The beta release of Fedora 39 is now available for testing ahead of its planned stable release prior to the end of October...

Here's a surprise announcement I was briefed on last week and now made public by the Linux Foundation and Intel... The Linux Foundation is forming the Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation that is an evolution of Intel's oneAPI initiative and has the potential to make the compute accelerator ecosystem as a whole more open and unified across vendors.

In addition to Fedora 40 planning to ship KDE Plasma 6.0 and without any X11 session support, Fedora stakeholders are also looking at shipping GNOME for the Fedora Workstation 40 release without any X11 session support...

The LLVM 17 compiler stack has been released as stable as LLVM 17.0.1 -- a slight mistake leaving the 17.0.0-rc tag meant the original v17.0.0 tag was skipped. This LLVM 17.0.1 stable release along with sub-projects like the Clang 17 C/C++ compiler bring many new features and improvements...

Hours after posting a large patch series for enabling the Nouveau kernel driver to use NVIDIA's GSP for improving the support for RTX 20/30 series hardware and finally enabling accelerated graphics support on RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs, the Red Hat maintainer has resigned from his duties...

Microsoft has published a big feature update to Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" for running Linux binaries within the confines of Windows 11...

The long-awaited patches for allowing the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" upstream Linux kernel driver to leverage NVIDIA's GPU System Processor "GSP" firmware for handling GPU re-clocking and other hardware tasks with RTX 20 GPUs and newer have been posted. With this set of 44 patches also comes the initial GPU hardware accelerated support for the GeForce RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs that is built upon this new GSP driver code path...

Released late on Friday was the much anticipated SteamOS 3.5 preview for the Steam Deck with ongoing work around HDR and enhancing color management, VRR for external USB-C displays, various platform issues resolved, auto-mounting external storage, and more. With SteamOS 3.5 it also means some lower-level OS upgrades too like moving to the Linux 6.1 LTS kernel. For those wondering about the performance impact of going from SteamOS 3.4 stable to the SteamOS 3.5 preview release, here are some early benchmarks on the Steam Deck.

Since March of 2022 the ReiserFS file-system has been deprecated and with Linux 6.6 ReiserFS is marked outright as "obsolete" with plans to remove the file-system from the mainline kernel code-base in 2025. In stepping toward that eventual milestone, a new kernel patch series begins removing ReiserFS from the default kernel configurations...

XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.18 is out today as the newest stable release for this leading open-source app sandboxing and distribution tech. Flatpak's XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.18 adds yet more features for this cross-distribution solution for software deployment and package management...

Last November AMD introduced the first of the 4th Gen EPYC series with the EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors and that was then complemented earlier this year by the July launch of the Genoa-X processors for sporting AMD 3D V-Cache to help technical computing workloads and as well launching Bergamo for the Zen 4C based processor designs that allow up to 128 cores / 256 threads per socket. While AMD has a very robust portfolio for the high-end server space with 4th Gen EPYC, today AMD is introducing the EPYC 8004 "Siena" processors for "intelligent edge" servers. Siena is a step below Genoa but still very capable offering and coming in at a lower price point while being geared more for maximizing power efficiency and opening up EPYC to more deployments outside of the data center.

Stemming from Intel engineers finding significant overhead in some Linux scheduler functions when running PostgreSQL within a Docker instance, a new scheduler patch is on the way for Linux 6.7 that will help out at least Ice Lake and Sapphire Rapids with some migration-heavy workloads. With the change being in the common scheduler code, it's also likely to help out other hardware platforms too...

Since 2021 the Itanium IA-64 code was orphaned in the Linux kernel and over the course of this year there's been talk of retiring the Itanium code from the kernel, a.k.a. strip it out. It looks like 2023 will end with the Itanium IA-64 code indeed being removed from the Linux kernel...

Given the recent discussions stemming from Fedora 40 planning to ship KDE Plasma 6 and drop the KDE Plasma X11 session to focus solely on Wayland for the next-gen KDE desktop, prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has written a lengthy blog post to outline the current state and his thoughts on KDE Wayland support...

Intel's OpenVINO 2023.1 was just published to GitHub as the newest version of this open-source toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI workloads across their CPUs, GPUs, and now also having official support for the new VPU being found with Meteor Lake SoCs...

While there is (sadly) once again no Phoronix pilgrimage/meet-up at Oktoberfest this year, there is the annual Phoronix Premium sale special for those wishing to support the site at a discounted rate to enjoy ad-free viewing, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode, and other benefits...

Linus Torvalds released Linux 6.6-rc2 today and it also happens to be 32 years to the day since he introduced the Linux 0.01 kernel version...

For those curious about the power consumption of USB-C devices, there are some nifty devices out there that have a LED display and can report the voltage, Amps, Wattage, and USB power delivery protocol version of connected devices. It's a neat display but with a new POWER-Z driver coming to the Linux kernel it's possible to propagate that information from the system itself with this new driver...

Following SLOB's removal and SLAB being deprecated and set for removal, the Linux kernel is all-in on the SLUB allocator. A new patch series posted on Friday is aiming to help prevent the possibility of cross-cache attacks with the SLUB memory allocator in the kernel...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.16 is now Wine-Staging 8.16 for this experimental blend of Wine that offers up nearly 500 additional testing/in-development patches...

The threaded / atomic console support for the Linux kernel is the last main blocker before the real-time "RT" patches can finally be mainlined...

With the AMD performance uplift on the Linux 6.6 kernel due to the EEVDF scheduler code, the workqueue enhancements for chiplet-based processor designs, and other improvements, many Phoronix readers have speculated over AMD Linux gaming performance improvements with this in-development kernel...

Version 3.3.3 of the Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) is now available for this Java library that makes it easy to utilize native APIs from OpenGL and Vulkan to OpenCL compute and other OS APIs within Java's confines. LWJGL is used for Java games and can also be used with other Java software looking for rich API support particularly around GPU integration...

Just as anticipated, the Linux 6.5 kernel has landed in the Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic archive as the default kernel powering this next Ubuntu distribution release due out in October...

ROCm 5.7 was released on Friday with the introduction of a new "hipTensor" library, the ROCgdb debugger being extended with Fortran and OMPD support, and new optimizations to the rocRAND and MIVisionX libraries. AMD has also announced end-of-support for the AMD Instinct MI50 accelerator while not yet formally announcing any new RDNA3 GPU support...

KDE developers continue adding new functionality and performance optimizations for the Plasma 6.0 desktop that is aiming for its release in early February...

While the Ubuntu desktop has been using the GNOME Wayland session by default, Ubuntu's default Firefox browser build within its Snap confinements has continued relying upon XWayland. But the Firefox Snap beginning with Ubuntu 23.10 is now enabling the native Wayland support by default...

In time for the weekend gamers, SteamOS 3.5 has just rolled out into Valve's preview channel for the Steam Deck. Those switching over to the "Preview" mode from the System Update Channel setting can begin to enjoy this huge feature update for the Arch Linux based SteamOS...

Following discussions among compiler developers and other stakeholders, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is preparing to add a "-fhardened" compiler option that will enable various hardening features aimed at increasing the security/robustness of the generated binaries...

Wine 8.16 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

The Servo web rendering engine that is written in Rust and started originally by Mozilla while now being developed as a Linux Foundation Europe project has issued a status update around recent changes to this memory-safe and modular web browser engine...

It turns out that Ubuntu Linux installations of Ubuntu 23.04, 22.04.3 LTS, and installs done since April 2023 that accepted the Snap version update haven't been following Ubuntu's own recommended security best practices for their security pocket configuration for packages. A new Subiquity release was issued today to fix this problem while those on affected Ubuntu installs are recommended to manually edit their /etc/apt/sources.list file...

Tucked away within a merge to Mesa entitled, "intel/genxml: Support importing, which cuts the overall xml file size almost in half" Intel Linux graphics driver engineers are slowly beginning to start work on the "Xe2" graphics support to be found with Lunar Lake processors...

AMD on Thursday released ZenDNN 4.1 as the newest release of their Zen Deep Neural Network Library for accelerating inference workloads on AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors. The ZenDNN library remains API compatible with Intel's oneDNN library and helps for building out optimized AI workloads for use on AMD Zen processors...

A Red Hat engineer has published patches to optionally allow delayed module signature verification in an effort to have a secure Linux system but to allow for faster boot times...

PostgreSQL 16 released today as a very exciting update for this popular open-source SQL server...

The sdl12-compat project is an interesting effort to allow for aging software and games targeting the SDL 1.2 APIs to work atop this compatibility layer so it in turn runs atop the SDL2 libraries. With the sdl12-compat 1.2.66 release more games and other software are now successfully working on this library...

From my early testing thus far of the Linux 6.6 kernel in its very early state, some of the most impressive gains are happening on AMD's high core count server processors, the EPYC 9754 "Bergamo" in particular is enjoying some stellar improvements for various server workloads on this forthcoming kernel.

The Linux kernel currently allows disabling support for 32-bit programs and 32-bit system calls at compile-time, but a new option expected to be introduced with Linux 6.7 this winter will provide a new "ia32_emulation" boot time option to allow unconditionally disabling support for 32-bit programs and system calls...

Back in July Intel announced AVX10 as the future of AVX-512 and how they ultimately plan to support more Advanced Vector Extensions capabilities on both future P and E cores. Since then they've begun making preparations to the open-source compiler toolchains around enabling AVX10...