Phoronix

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...

LLVM/Clang developers have been working on C23 language support for some time already but to this point it's only been exposed when using the -std=c2x target or -std=gnu2x for the GNU dialect. However, with C2x having been finalized this summer as C23, the LLVM Clang 18 compiler will now honor the -std=c23 option...

Cloud Hypervisor -- the Rust-written open-source VMM that was started by Intel while having evolved into a Linux Foundation project with backing from multiple organizations -- is out with the Cloud-Hypervisor 34 release...

It shouldn't come as much surprise for those familiar with Fedora given its tendency to always ship with the very latest open-source compiler toolchain components, but this autumn's release of Fedora 39 will once again have all the leading-edge GNU compiler pieces...

Intel Arc Graphics customers have been eager to see the new Xe DRM kernel driver merged as a modern alternative to the long-standing i915 Direct Rendering Manager driver. The Xe driver should allow for better performance, is focused just on recent Intel graphics hardware, makes use of modern kernel features, and will allow for new features such as around the Vulkan sparse support. One of the blockers for getting the Xe driver merged at least in experimental form is getting the necessary DRM scheduler changes merged...

Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS is now available as the newest point release to this current long-term support series...

Microsoft has released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230805 as the newest monthly-ish update to their in-house Linux distribution used for purposes from Azure to WSL...

As part of Intel's ongoing AI push, the company announced today they have joined the PyTorch Foundation as a premier member...

OpenELA has been announced as the Open Enterprise Linux Association that brings together CIQ (Rocky Linux), Oracle, and SUSE for collaborating around RHEL-compatible Linux distributions...

After resorting to buying a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card to be able to share Linux performance metrics for that more affordable Ada GPU, last month I posted the Radeon RX 7600 vs. GeForce RTX 4060 benchmarks as well as looking at the GeForce GTX 1060 through RTX 4060 GPU compute and renderer performance across several generations of NVIDIA GPUs. For those considering the RTX 4060 for a Linux gaming system or an upgrade to other recently released AMD or NVIDIA GPUs, here is a fresh round of Linux gaming performance metrics on the newest drivers.

AMD Linux engineers continue work on enabling the Family 1Ah CPU models for the Linux kernel as what would appear to almost surely be the next-gen Zen 5 processors...

A decade ago the Radeon R600g SB shader back-end proved useful for boosting gaming performance on pre-GCN graphics cards of the time and proved useful. But in more recent years in the R600g switch to NIR, the SB path hasn't received much attention and its benefits have diminished. The R600g SB code has now been dropped...

The Nouveau DRM kernel driver changes for new user-space APIs to be used by the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver have now been submitted for pulling to DRM-Next from the current drm-misc-next queue. These Nouveau kernel driver additions for NVK in turn will then premiere with the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle...

Merged for Mesa 23.3 is support for the VirGL code to handle accelerated AV1 video decoding within guest virtual machines...

GRUB2 and Linux bootloaders in general don't get too much attention these days as for the most part they "just work" well and most Linux distributions prefer to keep their GRUB menu hidden if at all possible. But at the same time it's an often overlooked area and not an area where there is an eager and glamorous open-source community behind it. However, it looks like Red Hat at least may have some new ideas brewing and they are hiring now to improve the Linux bootloader experience...

The consulting firm KDAB that is known for their work on the Qt toolkit has released KDGpu as a new library that is a thin wrapper around the Vulkan API and aims to allow for more productive GPU programming...

In addition to Intel posting initial AVX10.1 patches for the GCC compiler, Intel has also begun sorting out their AVX10 plans for the LLVM/Clang compiler stack...

With yesterday's disclosure of the Intel Downfall speculative execution vulnerability and the updated CPU microcode and Linux kernel patches I have been very busy testing the performance impact of this mitigation. Here are some initial numbers and workloads I have found to be impacted as a result of this security mitigation for Skylake to Icelake/Tigerlake client and server processors.

After a rather busy Patch Tuesday with the AMD Inception vulnerability and Intel Downfall going public, the Linux kernel saw a new bug fix merged today for a different issue... It turns out original AMD Zen 1 processors could end up leaking data in certain conditions after a divide by zero occurs...

Following yesterday's disclosure of the AMD "Inception" security vulnerability and the Linux kernel patches merged for reporting the mitigation status as well as the kernel-based handling for earlier generation Zen CPUs, the Family 19h microcode mitigations have now been picked up by the linux-firmware.git repository...

A new set of patches have been posted for the Linux kernel that implement AMD P-State Preferred Core handling for the amd-pstate driver...

As a lot of active development continues around the KDE Plasma 6 desktop and the developers eyeing a beta in a few months, it appears work on this Qt6-ported desktop environment is coming together quite nicely...

The long-in-development Bcachefs file-system driver was submitted for Linux 6.5 but never merged this cycle due to various technical issues and developer in-fighting. Linus Torvalds himself has now gotten around to reviewing the proposed code and chiming in on the situation...

The intel-speed-select tool that lives within the Linux kernel source tree has seen a set of patches prepared for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window. Arguably most interesting with this updated Intel Speed Select tool is now the ability to work with more than eight CPU sockets per platform -- the new limit is 32...

As soon as the AMD Inception CPU vulnerability was made public yesterday, the Linux kernel mitigation patches were merged and within hours appeared in six new stable point releases for the kernel along with the Intel Downfall mitigation patches. Today though these patches are seeing a rework to clean-up this mitigation...

As a result of the AMD INCEPTION and Intel DOWNFALL speculative execution vulnerabilities published this Patch Tuesday, Linux 6.5 Git quickly picked up the patches on embargo expiration and now there are six new stable point releases for back-porting these CPU security vulnerabilites to the supported stable kernel series...

NVIDIA today rolled out a new stable point release in their R535 series for Linux users to provide a handful of bug fixes...

In addition to the Linux kernel patches for GDS/Downfall for reporting the mitigated state and handling around Intel's latest speculative execution vulnerability, the updated CPU microcode has now been published on GitHub. In addition to having the Downfall mitigations for Skylake through Icelake/Tigerlake, there are also other security updates and functional issues resolved by this Intel 20230808 CPU microcode release...

This Patch Tuesday brings a new and potentially painful processor speculative execution vulnerability... Downfall, or as Intel prefers to call it is GDS: Gather Data Sampling. GDS/Downfall affects the gather instruction with AVX2 and AVX-512 enabled processors. At least the latest-generation Intel CPUs are not affected but Tigerlake / Ice Lake back to Skylake is confirmed to be impacted. There is microcode mitigation available but it will be costly for AVX2/AVX-512 workloads with GATHER instructions in hot code-paths and thus widespread software exposure particularly for HPC and other compute-intensive workloads that have relied on AVX2/AVX-512 for better performance.

There used to be a time when Patch Tuesday wasn't so busy in the Linux space, but certainly not this month... Linus Torvalds just pushed the kernel code changes around AMD INCEPTION and Intel DOWNFALL as well as other security patches...

AMD has kicked off a busy Patch Tuesday by disclosing INCEPTION, a new speculative side channel attack affecting Zen 3 and Zen 4 processors that require new microcode while prior Zen CPUs require a kernel-based solution...

Go 1.21 is now available as the latest version of this popular programming language...

The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express Consortium today published the UCe 1.1 specification for helping to standardize die-to-die connectivity with multi-die SoCs...

The GNOME 45 Beta release is imminent and this morning the "45.beta" milestones were tagged for the GNOME Shell and Mutter components...

Last month Intel announced APX and AVX10 as the successor to AVX-512 that will see both P and E cores in the future supporting this updated Advanced Vector Extensions implementation. Delightfully, today Intel engineers began posting GCC compiler patches for beginning to enable AVX10 support...

Those running Intel Arc Graphics on Linux can now enjoy the Hogwarts Legacy game under Valve's Steam Play. Intel engineers were able to get this open-world action RPG game running on their open-source Vulkan driver by hiding the fact that Intel graphics were rendering this game...

Merged into the GCC 14 codebase is initial support for gprofng, the new GNU profiler...

Rhino Linux has rolled out of beta as a community-based, rolling-release Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu...

Another change that has now landed in Mesa 23.3 is enabling support in the TURNIP Vulkan driver for running atop the VirtIO GPU kernel driver in virtualized scenarios...

As a follow-up to the first-on-Phoronix article last month that highlighted Linus Torvalds' frustrated views on the AMD fTPM random number generator continuing to cause problems for users even with updated firmware/BIOS, as of today the Linux kernel has gone ahead and blanket disabled RNG use for all current AMD fTPMs...

AMD last week launched the Radeon PRO W7500 and Radeon PRO W7600 professional graphics cards built on RDNA3. Due to AMD's unique position with their open-source Linux graphics driver stack, I decided to see how these new Radeon professional GPUs compare to FirePro hardware from 13 years ago for the raw performance and power efficiency.

Following Canonical deciding to pull in control of the LXD project and LXD maintainership being limited to Canonical employees, the Linux Containers project has announced the forking of LXD as Incus...

Last year Google decided to deprecate JPEG-XL image support within their Chrome/Chromium web browser. They expressed not enough interest and other factors for so quickly removing JPEG-XL support from their browser. They went ahead and removed the support for this next-gen JPEG standard while now a half-year later they may be having second thoughts...

For those that have fond memories of the NeXTSTEP days and in particular its graphical user interface during the pre-Apple times, Window Maker 0.96 was released this weekend for that X11 window manager inspired by the NeXTSTEP GUI...