Phoronix

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes were submitted today that are ready for introduction in the Linux 6.5 kernel...

GNU Binutils 2.41 was branched today in its Git repository in preparations for releasing this collection of binary utilities widely relied upon by Linux and other platforms...

Last year the USB4 v2.0 specification was published as the next iteration of the USB4 standard. USB4 v2 supports 80 Gbps transfer rates with USB Type-C active cables and the ability to handle up to 120 Gbps in one direction and 40 Gbps for the other direction. Intel is contributing initial support for USB4 v2 to the Linux 6.5 kernel along with initial enablement on their new Intel Barlow Ridge discrete controller...

After being in development for more than one year, Perl 5.38 released today as the latest feature update to this programming language...

Jonas Adahl of Red Hat today published a new version of the Wayland-Protocols package that consists of all the stable and staging protocol definitions for use in the Wayland world...

The Virtual Function I/O "VFIO" changes were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.5 kernel merge window. This IOMMU/device agnostic framework has added an AMD CDX driver this cycle along with other improvements for this subsystem that is important to the Linux virtualization stack...

The in-development GCC 14 compiler has added support for the MIPS16e2 processor ISA...

Besides being curious about the Steam Survey results for indicating the size of the Linux gaming marketshare as an overall percentage, one of the interesting metrics we are curious about each month is the AMD vs. Intel CPU marketshare for Linux gaming. AMD has been on quite an upward trajectory among Linux gamers/enthusiasts in recent years not only for their Radeon graphics cards with their popular open-source driver stack but their Ryzen CPUs have become extremely popular with Linux users. With the new Steam Survey results for June, AMD CPUs are found on nearly 70% of Linux gaming systems polled by Steam...

This past week at the Linux Foundation's Embedded Open-Source Summit in Prague, Sony engineer Tim Bird who is prominent in the embedded Linux community provided another insightful presentation to sum up the current state of the embedded Linux ecosystem...

In a move similar to GCC's implementation, LLVM Git landed this week initial support for fat LTO objects. This "-ffat-lto-objects" support will be found with the LLVM/Clang 17 release this autumn...

Valve has shared their Steam Survey results for the month of June which shows the Steam on Linux marketshare holding steady...

The visually-stunning Unigine Engine that these days is most commonly used in commercial simulation applications recently published Unigine 2.17 where they have finally made their Vulkan and Direct3D 12 renderers production-ready...

The IBM PowerPC feature updates were merged on Friday to the Linux 6.5 kernel...

This week NVIDIA and their AIB partners began shipping the GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card with pricing starting out at $299 USD. Like the recently-launched Radeon RX 7600, the RTX 4060 is geared mostly for 1080p gaming but how does it compare against the RX 7600 that is priced starting at $249? Here are some initial Linux gaming benchmarks of the GeForce RTX 4060 against the Radeon RX 7600.

An independent developer has posted an open-source Linux driver for review in order to handle the Apple Studio Display backlight control under Linux. The Apple Studio Display uses a Thunderbolt (DP) interface for display but lacks any hardware controls. Thus a USB interface is used by the monitor for controlling attributes like the display backlight brightness...

Lavapipe as the software-based Vulkan implementation within Mesa has now landed support for Vulkan descriptor extensions and in turn this CPU-based Vulkan implementation can begin running some Direct3D 12 games with VKD3D-Proton. Keep in mind, however, the performance is severely limited...

Currently most avionics real-time operating systems for airplanes are proprietary and very specialized for safety assurance reasons. Using Linux though and other open-source software would ease development, open more developers to being able to work on said avionics platforms, have much better documentation, and lower other barriers, but there are challenges currently involved...

Linux creator Linus Torvalds doesn't write as much actual kernel code these days as he used to. These days he's often busy overseeing the upstream kernel development community with reviewing code, managing releases, and chiming in on mailing list discussions. Once in a while though he gets down and dirty with some low-level kernel hacking just as he's done now for Linux 6.5 with improving the user-mode stack expansion code...

The Compute Express Link (CXL) enablement in the Linux kernel remains ongoing and with the in-development Linux 6.5 kernel are yet more features now being enabled for this exciting industry standard...

KDE developers finished out June on a high note with many features and new fixes landing for Plasma 6.0 development as well as refinements for later Plasma 5.27 point releases...

With the first-half of the year amazingly already in the books, here is a look back at what's captivated Linux/open-source fans the most from all the content on Phoronix. So far this year I have personally written 1,407 original news articles on software/hardware topics and another 74 original Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles...

While OpenZFS 3.0 has been talked about for a few years with macOS support, it doesn't appear to be on the immediate horizon and the OpenZFS 2.2 release is being worked on currently for providing a few new features to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation on Linux and FreeBSD systems...

Following the path of SLOB, Linux's SLAB memory allocator is now officially deprecated beginning with the Linux 6.5 kernel series...

The Linux 6.5 networking subsystem changes include more preparations around the ongoing WiFi 7 wireless standard as well as bringing up support for a number of newer network adapters...

Sound Open Firmware 2.6 was released on Thursday for this Intel-started open-source software project for having a fully open audio DSP firmware stack and related development tooling. While initially limited to Intel hardware support, SOF has since grown and seen support from the likes of Mediatek, Realtek, NXP, and even recent AMD SoCs...

China's Loongson continues preparing the software support for their upcoming 3A6000 processors that will feature several new capabilities over their inaugural LoongArch-based 3A5000 series...

Cloud Hypervisor has advanced quite nicely in the half-year it's been around since Intel software engineers began writing this Rust-based cloud-focused virtualization hypervisor. This VMM project has since become more independent and regularly receiving code contributions from the likes of Arm, Microsoft, and Tencent while also gaining the support of companies like AMD and Ampere. On Thursday marked the release of Cloud Hypervisor 33...

The PCI subsystem updates have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 6.5 development...

Following Red Hat's decision earlier this month to limit access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code and that leading to downstreams scrambling to figure out their paths forward to avoid tracking CentOS Stream instead and still aiming to offer 1:1 RHEL compatibility without being restricted by the Red Hat Customer Portal, the Rocky Linux distribution today expressed a few of the ideas they are considering...

The Arm (and RISC-V) SoC updates have been submitted for merging to the Linux 6.5 kernel. Additions this cycle include an exciting RISC-V processor now supported, NVIDIA Tegra234 "Orin" upstream additions, and other new SoCs and devices/boards being upstreamed...

As part of our Linux-focused look at the ASUS ROG Ally handheld, last week I provided a number of Windows 11 vs. Linux gaming performance on this gaming handheld with RDNA3 graphics found on the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC. Today's testing is not about the gaming but looking more at the general CPU performance for this Zen 4 powered SoC.

AMD has issued a formal announcement now for the ROCm 5.6 compute stack release that was already covered on Phoronix earlier today. In AMD's announcement of ROCm 5.6 though there is a tease of what's to come later this year.....

For those that have been fans of System76's Thelio desktop computer cases but prefer building your own systems, System76 today officially launched their "Nebula" line of PC cases...

There's been hopes of seeing the GIMP 3.0 release in 2023 or at least release candidates. GIMP developers recently finished a week-long meet-up and it's looking like they may be on track for at least beginning the GIMP 3.0 release candidate phase this year. GIMP 3.0 has remained quite elusive and in the works for the past decade as the much anticipated port to GTK3 and a host of other enhancements to this open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop...

Linaro engineers have been working out support for the latest-generation Qualcomm Adreno 700 series graphics processors found in the newest Snapdragon SoCs. Published on Wednesday were the initial MSM DRM kernel driver patches for bringing up the A700 series open-source graphics support...

It was just one month ago that ROCm 5.5.1 debuted while overnight AMD has promoted ROCm 5.6 to stable with more improvements and a particular focus on enhancing the AI capabilities for Radeon GPUs and Instinct accelerators. The ROCm 5.6 release also arrives just two weeks after AMD CEO Lisa Su re-affirmed their support for ROCm and working with the community to further enhance it...

DRM subsystem maintainer David Airlie of Red Hat has sent out the big batch of feature updates to this collection of open-source graphics/display drivers for Linux 6.5...

OpenCV 4.8 was released yesterday as the newest feature update to this leading open-source computer vision (CV) library...

Herbert Xu has submitted the crypto subsystem updates for the ongoing Linux 6.5 merge window with new hardware support and some crypto API enhancements...

For months there have been rumors whether Intel would cancel Meteor Lake-S desktop processors and leave next-generation Core desktop CPUs solely to a Raptor Lake Refresh or rumors as well Meteor Lake-S would be just for lower-end Core i3 and Core i5 level processors. Whatever Intel ends up doing, their Linux engineers continue pushing Meteor Lake-S related code into the Linux kernel...

Today is a very fun and interesting round of benchmarking... Recently Supermicro sent over their Hyper SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR and Intel supplied the Xeon Max 9468 and Xeon Max 9480 for finally being able to benchmark Xeon Max processors, the Sapphire Rapids parts featuring 64GB of HBM2e memory. For this initial benchmarking article is a look at the Xeon Max 9468/9480 dual socket performance when running in HBM-only mode and HBM-caching mode for showing some of the workloads where Xeon Max can deliver significant uplift compared to when running in flat (1LM) mode without assigning anything to the HBM memory for seeing the impact when the specialized memory goes unused.

NVIDIA CUDA 12.2 is out today and while it's just an update to the CUDA 12 series, it's actually quite an exciting release...

While Intel Xeon server processors have supported sub-NUMA clustering (SNC) for a while, HPE SGI UV servers with SNC enabled haven't worked under Linux... But with Linux 6.5 that is changing...

The sound subsystem updates were sent in today for the in-development Linux 6.5 kernel merge window...

Nearly a decade ago when there was more hope for the MIPS open-source ecosystem and the initial growth of lower-cost single board computers the MIPS Creator CI20 was launched by Imagination Tech. It wasn't too successful and MIPS development has since reached the end of the road, but finally with Linux 6.5 is the Bluetooth and WiFi on this MIPS single board computer going to finally be supported by the mainline kernel...

Well, here is something nifty being worked on by Oracle. Oracle engineers have been developing "bpftune" as a new always-on, automatic tuning of Linux systems -- in particular, the many different Linux kernel tunables available and this tuning system leverages the kernel's Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) observability features to carry out its work...

The HID subsystem updates have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 6.5 merge window. Most notable is NVIDIA contributing a Linux kernel driver six years late for their SHIELD controller...

Microsoft's latest contribution to the Mesa 3D graphics driver stack is enhancing their Direct3D 12 driver to support AV1 video encoding with the VA-API interface...

Ted Ts'o has submitted all the EXT4 feature changes for the Linux 6.5 merge window. EXT4 this round is seeing various clean-ups, bug fixes, and other enhancements but there is one performance optimization worth calling attention to...

The in-development Linux 6.5 kernel is shifting to initializing the x86 floating-point unit (FPU) initialization later in the boot process as part of a broader effort for trying to clean-up the Linux kernel boot process at least on x86/x86_64 systems...