Phoronix

With Linux 6.6 expected to be released tomorrow as stable, the Linux 6.7 merge window in turn will be opened. Here's a preview of some of the changes expected for this next kernel cycle...

A shiny feature landed on Friday for the Intel open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers within Mesa 24.0: Tile-Based Immediate Mode Rendering (TBIMR)...

Tomorrow the Linux 6.6 kernel is expected to be released as stable unless Linus Torvalds has last minute reservations and decides to extend the cycle by an extra week. While there were many last minute fixes this week, the changes don't appear to be too scary or invasive. In any event the Linux 6.6 kernel is bringing some exciting features...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly recap highlighting all of the interesting accomplishments for this open-source desktop for the past week. But with not having posted last weekend, this edition highlights the many achievements made by the KDE camp over the past two weeks...

Patches posted this week by SiFive for the Linux kernel provide cryptographic implementations of various functions inside the Linux kernel using the processor ISA's vector crypto extensions...

With Mesa 24.0 the developers have switched from using Doxygen and Breathe for building documentation comments from source to instead use the newer but less heard of Hawkmoth...

Leah Rowe has announced the inaugural release of Canoeboot, what is another fork of Leah's own Libreboot that continues to serve as a free software minded fork of Coreboot...

AMD today announced the release of HIP RT 2.1, the newest version of its HIP ray-tracing library for use by Blender and other software...

Linux 6.6 is set to be released as stable this weekend unless Linus Torvalds has reservations and decides to extend the cycle by one week. In any case there are some last minute fixes heading in to fix-up nine different Lenovo laptops with AMD Ryzen SoCs to make the hardware more usable under Linux...

Back in August Google Cloud announced the C3D instances powered by AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors while only last week was C3D promoted to general availability. Curious about the performance of C3D after being impressed by AMD EPYC Genoa bare-metal server performance at Phoronix as well as what I've seen with Genoa in the cloud at Microsoft Azure and Amazon EC2 / AWS, here are some benchmarks of the new C3D up against other GCE instances.

For those currently weighing between the (currently) nine different AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors for Linux use, here are fresh benchmarks of the Zen 4 desktop CPU line-up while testing with Ubuntu 23.10 and the Linux 6.5 kernel...

OpenSSL 3.2 is now available in beta form as the newest forthcoming feature update to this widely-used cryptographic library...

Samuel Pitoiset on Valve's Linux graphics driver team has wired up VK_EXT_image_compression_control support to the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) in order to workaround same game bugs being encountered with Steam Play / VKD3D-Proton...

Intel's FFmpeg Cartwheel is where the company continues to stage their latest FFmpeg multimedia library patches prior to upstreaming. FFmpeg Cartwheel ends up containing all the latest and greatest code for leveraging VA-API and Quick Sync Video (QSV) from Intel integrated graphics through their latest DG2/Alchemist class discrete graphics...

While Fedora 39 was aiming for an ideal "early final" release on 18 October, that didn't happen, it was delayed, and then delayed again. Now the earliest Fedora 39 will possibly shift is 7 November...

The Ubuntu 24.04 codename has been revealed as "Noble Numbat" while kicking off this next development cycle that is all the more exciting due to being the next long-term support (LTS) release...

Earlier this month Framework 13 began shipping out their AMD Ryzen powered modular laptop. Unfortunately though the launch-day testing of the Framework laptop under Linux was hampered by a BIOS issue. It's taken longer, but this week a new BIOS is now available for testing that resolves the AMD Linux graphics issue. Here's how to go about easily flashing the system BIOS with Fwupd and LVFS to get up and running well on Linux...

With the newly-started Mesa 24.0 development cycle a very exciting feature landed today... The ACO compiler integration for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has appeared to effectively wrap up for optionally making use of this Valve-developed shader compiler as an alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM shader back-end...

Tucked away within the October 2023 monthly status updates for the Linux Mint project is word they have begun working on their Wayland support...

Given the recent launch of the Intel Arc Graphics A580 for under $200, I've been working on a fresh round of Intel / AMD Radeon / NVIDIA GeForce Linux gaming/graphics and compute benchmark results. Next week that fresh arsenal of Linux graphics benchmarks on the very latest drivers will be published but for today is a look at the most surprising aspect: the OpenCL-focused GPU compute benchmarks.

The Servo open-source web browser engine continues progressing as a community project under the leadership of Linux Foundation Europe. Over the course of October more features were implemented and additional fixes merged...

Ubuntu desktop developer Daniel Van Vugt has been working on enabling zero-copy support for discrete GPUs within GNOME's Mutter compositor to deliver faster performance. This appears to be working so far with the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver...

Adding to the long list of improvements to find with next year's KDE Plasma 6.0 release is better file/folder searching with the "Recent Files" search area...

Blender 4.0 will be releasing in early November but already there is something to look forward to with Blender 4.1 next year...

Shortly after today's Mesa 23.3 branching and opening Mesa 24.0-devel on Git main, Mesa 23.3-rc1 is now formally available as the first weekly release candidate for this quarter's feature series...

For those wishing to interact with Steam from virtual reality (VR) headsets, today Valve promoted SteamVR 2.0 to stable...

Mesa 23.3 has now been branched in Git and in turn that opens up the mainline code to beginning feature work on what will become Mesa 24.0 when it releases in Q1'2024...

Fedora 39 failed to make its "early" release target date, it didn't meet its otherwise targeted release date one week later, and is now facing another possible setback still. These release delays have been due to outstanding blocker bugs all related to the Raspberry Pi...

With the new AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U Zen 4 mobile processor powering the likes of the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4, I was curious about the performance impact of employing full disk encryption. Here are some benchmarks looking at the performance cost to enabling full disk encryption versus not utilizing any disk encryption while running Fedora Workstation on the new ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 AMD laptop.

Building off the recent release of OSPRay 3.0 with initial GPU acceleration support, OSPRay Studio has now been updated against this new version. As a reminder, OSPRay Studio is Intel's open-source interactive visualization and ray-tracing application...

Fedora Linux is looking at possibly transitioning from Zlib to Zlib-NG for this widely-used compression library. This tentative change request is filed in part by Intel software engineers looking to enhance the Zlib performance on modern processors...

There were many interesting talks last week at XDC 2023 in Spain around Rusticl, the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver, the Raspberry Pi graphics driver, RADV ray-tracing, AMD color management and HDR with the Steam Deck / Gamescope, and others. One of the other talks many Phoronix readers are likely to be interested in is around the state of the Wine Wayland driver...

AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1 was published today as AMD's first Radeon Vulkan open-source driver update since last month. There comes some new features and improvements with this version but they have also decided to drop Polaris (GFX8) and Vega (GFX9) graphics support...

Red Hat engineers continue working on Stratis Storage as a modern Linux storage solution that leverages the Rust programming language and built atop the proven XFS file-system and LVM. Stratis continues to strive for ZFS and Btrfs like functionality although its use in the wild still seems rather limited...

The X.Org Server and XWayland saw new point releases today as a result of three more security vulnerabilities being disclosed...

Most Linux desktop users/gamers/enthusiasts are relying on XWayland for X11 client compatibility atop Wayland compositors in the "rootless" mode. With the XWayland rootless mode, X11 applications and games can integrate nicely within a Wayland desktop environment with just the individual client window presented. However, for those interested, the XWayland "rootful" mode has become more capable this year for those wanting to render an entire X11 environment within the Wayland compositor as a window...

Since AMD's acquisition of Xilinx and working to broaden the portfolio of offerings for the data center, more AMD-Xilinx drivers have been working their way toward the mainline Linux kernel. There's been upstreaming efforts such as the Versal EDAC driver, generating DeviceTree nodes for PCI devices, Versal watchdog driver, QDMA driver, CDX bus support, and more. The latest driver working its way toward the mainline kernel from AMD is the AXI 1-wire driver...

The VKMS driver as a virtual kernel mode-setting solution as a software-only implementation of KMS for use with primarily headless Linux systems continues tacking on more features. Maira Canal and Melissa Wen presented last week at XDC 2023 on the VKMS driver that continues proving very useful for headless platforms as well as for testing purposes...

As yet another open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver change ahead of the upcoming Mesa 23.3 code branching and feature freeze is Vulkan VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix support with the RADV driver for RDNA3 hardware and newer using the GPU's Wavefront Mixed-precision Multiply Accumulate (WMMA) functionality...

As we approach the end of 2023, sadly, the real-time kernel "PREEMPT_RT" support still hasn't been mainlined... The main blocker pending is still the ongoing work around non-blocking consoles / threaded console handling to then allow the few dozen remaining out-of-tree RT kernel patches to be merged. The good news is that when the PREEMPT_RT support is ready for mainline, it looks like the RISC-V architecture support will also be real-time friendly too...

AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has been around for a decade since the Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" graphics card days while finally the OpenGL renderer string is being changed to reflect "RadeonSI" as the name of the driver in use...

Given recent talk of upstream Linux Long-Term Support (LTS) kernels likely being reduced from six to two year support windows moving forward, Canonical today decided to re-affirm their support for ten years of support with Ubuntu Long Term Support versions...

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has landed initial support for GFX11.5 "RDNA3 refresh" graphics within the RADV Vulkan driver for the upcoming Mesa 23.3...

While Meteor Lake isn't shipping until December, Intel's open-source Linux engineers for months have already been working on 15th Gen Arrow Lake (as well as Lunar Lake, among their other processor lines) for getting the driver support in order. The latest early hardware enablement to talk about is the initial Arrow Lake S support coming to their video acceleration drivers...

In addition to old and unmaintained Ethernet driver code set for removal, there is an effort underway to clear out some obsolete and orphaned WiFi drivers from the Linux kernel...

Canonical continues investing in Mir as their Wayland compositor and set of platform abstraction interfaces to make it easier for IoT and other "smart" devices to run atop Ubuntu Core. Most recently the Mir developers have been working to partially re-architect their graphics platform handling to better handle multiple GPU/display devices...

Ahead of the official planned announcement for Tuesday, the Mozilla Firefox 119.0 release binaries have been published for this monthly feature update...

While the recently released Ubuntu 23.10 is bringing some performance improvements to Intel Xeon Max / Sapphire Rapids, Ubuntu Linux still isn't delivering the best possible out-of-the-box server performance. For that Intel continues to show the importance of software optimizations with the likes of their in-house Clear Linux platform as well as the likes of CentOS Stream having more sensible defaults. Here is a look at the Intel Xeon Max 9480 performance across Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 23.10, CentOS Stream 9, Fedora Server 39, and Clear Linux 40130.

While most hardware vendors are relying on LLVM when it comes to offloading compute work to GPUs, AI accelerators, FPGAs, and similar heterogeneous compute environments, right now each vendor is basically creating their own LLVM offloading run-time among a lot of other duplicated -- and often downstream only -- code. The new "llvm/offload" project hopes to lead to better collaboration in this area...

Following an FCV optimization for the latest Intel graphics hardware, ASTC LDR emulation, some still-pending Vulkan sparse support for ANV atop the existing i915 driver, and other recent Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver optimizations, another optimization was just merged into Mesa 23.3...