Phoronix

The Simple DirectMedia Layer software/hardware abstraction layer commonly used by games and other cross-platform software is out with a new SDL 2.30.2 stable release as well as a new SDL3 preview release...

No, nothing to do with April Fools' Day, but the Steam Survey results are out for March 2024 and they put the Steam on Linux use inching up -- back closer to the Linux gaming highs of around 2%...

A new round of Bcachefs file-system fixes were submitted today for the Linux 6.9 kernel. This round consists of lots of fixes for dealing with "extreme file-system damage" on this experimental open-source file-system...

Intel's Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI) driver will act more efficiently come the Linux 6.10 kernel this summer...

In addition to looking at the open-source/Linux highlights for Q1, here is a look back at the most popular content on Phoronix during the month of March. During the past month were 262 original news articles on Phoronix and another 13 featured benchmark articles / Linux hardware reviews. There's always a lot happening from new kernel developments to exciting open-source GPU driver developments, new compiler initiatives, and a bit of a mailing list drama...

CachyOS as a reminder is the Arch Linux based distribution focused on providing a very performant out-of-the-box experience and supports x86-64-v3 and x86-64-v4 packages along with other default changes compared to upstream Arch Linux. The April 2024 ISO release of CachyOS is now available for those wanting to enjoy a fresh spin of this rolling-release, performance-tuned platform...

In their March status update, the Linux Mint team shares more details on their forthcoming Linux Mint 22 release that will be based off Ubuntu 24.04 LTS...

A patch queued in TIP.git's "x86/cpu" branch for collecting ahead of the Linux 6.10 kernel cycle adds support for handling the AMD 0x80000026 leaf to correct CPU topology information reporting for some newer AMD processors...

Adding to the Linux 6.9 features one of the changes that went under my radar is that the s390 kernel builds can now be carried out using the full LLVM compiler stack...

Ikey Doherty's Serpent OS Linux distribution project is hoping to be able to ship their pre-Alpha ISOs in a matter of weeks as they continue bringing up the initial desktop experience and getting more of their operating system's build tools into good shape...

With Q1'2024 in the books, here is a look back at the most popular Linux/open-source content on Phoronix for the past quarter. During Q1 were 754 original news articles written by your's truly along with another 43 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here's what attracted the most interest from those nearly 800 articles for the past three months...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.9-rc2 as the newest test release of Linux 6.9 that will be out as stable in mid-May...

A new release of Llamafile is available this Easter Sunday from the Mozilla Ocho group. Llamafile is a means of distributing and running large language models (LLMs) from a single file, making LLMs much easier to distribute and use by developers and end-users. Llamafile remains one of the more interesting non-browser projects out of Mozilla in recent times that so far has a bright future...

Along with AMD's upcoming hardware enablement and other Q1 code contributions, Intel's open-source engineers remained very busy this quarter as well. Intel continues upstreaming a lot of new code not only for upcoming hardware but also a lot of exciting Linux kernel features in general, various optimizations and improvements to countless open-source user-space software projects, and their other great open-source efforts in general...

With the first quarter drawing to a close, here's a recap of the most exciting AMD Linux/open-source news from the quarter. During the past three months we've seen AMD finally publish their XDNA Linux driver for open-source Ryzen AI support, their open-source HDMI driver efforts were sadly rejected by the HDMI Forum, the AMD Zen 5 "znver5" compiler support was added to GCC 14, more AMD Zen 5 Linux kernel preparations made, and various other AMD Linux driver enhancements landed...

The open-source Rust-written Redox OS has enjoyed "significant" performance and correctness improvements to its kernel recently as it further shows off the capability of this from-scratch OS...

GNU Poke 4.0 has been released after a year in development for enhancing this open-source software that serves as an interactive editor for binary data accompanied by its own procedural programming language...

Released this weekend is a new version of Flowblade, an open-source video editor for Linux systems. Flowblade brings some new features while the work to upgrade against the GTK4 toolkit remains ongoing and will hopefully be ready in 2025...

After being in development since 2019, the huge NetBSD 10.0 is out today as a wonderful Easter surprise...

The Servo Web Engine under the stewardship of Linux Foundation Europe and with ongoing contributions by the likes of Igalia and other developers continues having a very vibrant year. The open-source developers involved remain very busy getting this Rust-written web layout engine into good shape for possible use as an embed-friendly solution for other software...

After putting their AMD GPU powered Tinybox "on hold" only to decide a few days later to offer both AMD and NVIDIA graphics options for Tinybox compute systems, George Hotz' Tiny Corp has now shared more specifications for these planned "green" and "red" Tinybox designs...

Disclosed last August was the AMD Inception vulnerability also known as SRSO for the Speculative Return Stack Overflow. The kernel-side patches for the AMD SRSO mitigation were quickly merged. Following that were more clean-ups and fixes to the SRSO mitigation code. It's been a quiet few months since while merged on Friday was fixing some of the mitigation code due to being ineffective...

With time Microsoft's Linux kernel contributions have extended beyond just the initial business focus on Hyper-V support and other needs for Azure as well as around Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to more general contributions. Microsoft has also hired more key Linux contributors along with stakes in other projects like systemd. Earlier this week were patches from a Microsoft engineer working out Rust language improvements for the Linux kernel while now in ending out the holiday weekend are patches for making the Linux kernel language more inclusive...

A new version of Flax Engine 1.8 has been released, the open-source game engine that's available for free for non-commercial and education use but with a 4% royalty for commercial games...

KDE developers have announced the first release of Marknote, a new note-taking application for the KDE Plasma desktop...

Lead Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver developer Alyssa Rosenzweig has carried out a big sync to upstream Mesa 24.1 for this open-source Apple Silicon OpenGL graphics driver...

For the weekly "This Week In KDE" development summary, developer Nate Graham highlighted the opt-in DrKonqi crash reporting wizard. Thanks in part to that opt-in automatic crash reporting, details were gathered for fixing at least three important crashes within Plasma 6 this week...

Today's disclosure of XZ upstream release packages containing malicious code to compromise remote SSH access has certainly been an Easter weekend surprise... The situation only looks more bleak over time with how the upstream project was compromised while now the latest twist is GitHub disabling the XZ repository in its entirety...

AMD GPUOpen's Orochi project as a reminder is the effort for allowing dynamic runtime switching between the Radeon HIP and NVIDIA CUDA APIs to allow better cross-GPU portability. Today marks the availability of Orochi 2.0 for enhancing this API to target NVIDIA CUDA and AMD HIP hardware...

Red Hat today issued an "urgent security alert" for Fedora 41 and Fedora Rawhide users over XZ. Yes, the XZ tools and libraries for this compression format. Some malicious code was added to XZ 5.6.0/5.6.1 that could allow unauthorized remote system access...

Now that the Linux 6.9 merge window is past I've begun testing out this in-development kernel on more hardware platforms in the lab. While some performance boosts like Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" running faster on Linux 6.9 was to be expected given EPP tuning in the new kernel specific to those SoCs, one of the unexpected delights has been seeing AMD 4th Gen EPYC performance with some nice performance gains over Linux 6.8 stable.

Fedora 39 had hoped to use the DNF5 package manager by default as the next iteration of this package management solution for RPM-based distributions. But DNF5 wasn't ready and then delayed to Fedora 41 -- skipping over the Fedora 40 series due to the RHEL 10 branching from it and not wanting the very new DNF5 to be part of that merge. Now the change proposal has been re-filed for introducing DNF5 by default in Fedora 41...

Merged on Thursday to GNOME's Mutter compositor is support for the linux-drm-syncobj-v1 Wayland protocol that is used to handle the global migration to explicit synchronization...

Intel is ending out the month and quarter with the latest update to its open-source Compute Runtime and Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) code that enables OpenCL and Level Zero support on Linux systems and is also used by their Windows driver too...

CodeWeavers' Elizabeth Figura has been working on the NTSYNC driver to implement Windows NT synchronization primitives for the Linux kernel in order to help the performance of various Windows games running on Linux by the likes of Wine / Valve's Proton (Steam Play). The third iteration of that driver was posted overnight as it seeks to go into the mainline Linux kernel...

Since the mid-90's with the P6 micro-architecture for the Pentium Pro as the sixth-generation x86 microarchitecture, Intel has relied on the "Family 6" CPU ID. From there Intel has just revved the Model number within Family 6 for each new microarchitecture/core. For example, Meteor Lake is Family 6 Model 170 and Emerald Rapids is Family 6 Model 207. This CPU ID identification is used within the Linux kernel and other operating systems for identifying CPU generations for correct handling, etc. But Intel Linux engineers today disclosed that Family 6 is coming to an end "soon-ish"...

Given the recent change by Redis to adopt dual source-available licensing for all their releases moving forward (Redis Source Available License v2 and Server Side Public License v1), the Linux Foundation announced today their fork of Redis...

While the uutils Rust-written Coreutils effort has been chugging along, the upstream GNU Coreutils effort is showing no signs of slowing down. Out today is GNU Coreutils 9.5 with yet more feature work and bug fixes including a security fix for a chmod issue that's been around since the beginning...

While Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" has been working out well under Linux already -- especially with regards to the enticing integrated Arc Graphics -- with the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel it's looking even better for the CPU performance. Here are some initial benchmarks looking at the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H Meteor Lake performance with Linux 6.8 vs. 6.9 Git.

Arm China is looking at upstreaming their "Zhouyi" NPU driver into the Linux kernel via the recently-created accelerator "accel" subsystem. The Arm China Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver in its current form has both an open-source kernel and user-space stack...

Simon McVittie issued the Flatpak 1.15.7 pre-release on Wednesday with a few notable changes for this widely-used open-source app sandboxing and distribution framework...

Patches posted today by an Intel engineer allow for importing scanout buffers from other devices with the VirtIO DRM driver that is used in the virtualization space. The importing of scanout buffers from other devices/drivers can allow for more efficient use by avoiding excess copies...

Adding to the Linux 6.9 features is a minor post merge window change: the read-only EROFS file-system is no longer treading its FSDAX support as experimental...

Open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso recently began the effort of creating an open-source, reverse-engineered driver for the Rockchip NPU found in some of the latest Rockchip SoCs. After succeeding at open-source NPU driver support for the VeriSilicon NPU IP, Vizoso took up the challenge of working on Rockchip NPU support. With his open-source user-space driver he's already got his first model running. Not only is it running but it's doing so at similar performance to the proprietary driver...

Some time ago I ran through a number of benchmarks of Google Cloud's C3D VMs powered by AMD EPYC Genoa processors. The AMD EPYC 9004 series showed terrific performance with strong generational improvements over the Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Following that a request came in to examine the PingCAP TiDB database performance given its growing popularity. In this article we'll review those benchmarks showing how GCE C3D delivers strong performance advantages for TiDB.

Samba 4.20 is out as the newest feature update to this free software implementation for SMB networking protocol support and others to enhance file/print interoperability with Microsoft Windows systems...

Besides its desktop-level customizations, further differentiating System76's Pop!_OS Linux distribution from its Ubuntu LTS package base is the tendency to roll down newer versions of the upstream Linux kernel once validated across System76's portfolio of laptops and desktops. The latest on that front is Pop!_OS now shipping with the fresh Linux 6.8 stable series...

Following several days of discussions from both sides of the table over whether SDL 3.0 should revert its Wayland over X11 preference in light of some aspects of the Wayland ecosystem support not being in good shape, for now at least SDL 3.0 is sticking to the Wayland support by default. It may be revisited though closer to release to see how the upstream support is for users of this hardware/software abstraction library widely used by cross-platform games...

Ubuntu maker Canonical has spent the past several months exploring Ubuntu x86-64-v3 based images for leveraging the x86_64 micro-architecture feature level capabilities to target the level embracing AVX/AVX2, FMA, BMI2, and other instructions supported largely since Intel Haswell and AMD Excavator era processors. As shown in benchmarks Ubuntu x86-64-v3 builds can deliver better performance for the AMD/Intel systems of the past number of years. Canonical's latest foray in this area is offering up Microsoft Azure images that are tailored for x86-64-v3...

Blender has long enjoyed faster CPU rendering under Linux compared to using Microsoft Windows. Across many different processors over the years consistently we see faster Linux CPU render performance than under Windows, though that's typically the case for most renderers. With yesterday's release of Blender 4.1, there is even faster Linux CPU render speeds. Here are some initial Blender 4.0 vs. 4.1 benchmarks...