Phoronix

A new driver set to be merged in the upcoming Linux 6.8 cycle is "gigabyte_waterforce" as a new kernel driver for supporting Gigabyte AORUS Waterforce AIO coolers...

For Mesa 23.1 earlier this year initial RADV Vulkan Video decode support was merged for supporting GPU-based video acceleration with this Khronos video API. As we approach the end of the year, RADV's Vulkan Video encode support remains a work-in-progress but hopefully won't be too much longer before being upstreamed...

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has shared a status update on the current state of HDR support for the KDE Plasma desktop...

Linux 6.7-rc6 was released today while the final release of Linux 6.7 is likely to come New Year's weekend and complicating the opening of the Linux 6.8 merge window around the end-of-year holidays...

Since Linux 6.1 when the very initial Rust infrastructure was added to the Linux kernel there's been a lot of other plumbing and house keeping merged since for enabling kernel drivers to be written in the Rust programming language. With the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle, the first Rust network driver is set to be introduced...

While not talked about as much as the AMD open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux, AMD's multimedia stack on Linux continues to be improved upon for supporting new use-cases with AMD-based Linux deployments continuing to come up in the embedded space for all different applications like in-vehicle infotainment systems. The newest AMD video acceleration feature to now be wired up to their open-source Mesa code is enabling region of interest (ROI) encoding functionality...

In at least one game running on Linux via Proton Experimental, the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver paired with the latest Nouveau reverse-engineered kernel driver is delivering better performance than NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver...

A new Long-Term Support version of Cloud Hypervisor was released this week, which is the open-source project originally started by Intel as a cloud-focused and Rust-written VMM that now has wide industry backing including from multiple other CPU vendors...

Back in October the Milk-V Oasis mITX board was announced with this RISC-V board being powered by a 16-core Sophgo SG2380 SoC featuring SiFive-designed cores: 12 P cores and four E cores. While that Milk-V Oasis board isn't expected to ship until Q3'2024, Milk-V shared this week that the SG2380 RISC-V SoC has been revised with additional capabilities...

As part of Intel's ongoing quest for maximizing the compute performance of their GPUs/accelerators, their compiler engineers have proposed introducing a XeGPU dialect for LLVM's MLIR...

There was recently a mini DebConf in Cambridge where the Debian GNU/Linux release team held a spring and figured out some items moving forward, including the dim future for i386 moving forward...

A change merged to the X.Org Server Git for the generic xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver is helping conserve some power consumption at least for Intel graphics by determining the optimal hardware cursor size...

On Friday in addition to Intel submitting their new Xe kernel graphics driver to DRM-Next ahead of Linux 6.8, the red team sent in their latest AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver changes ahead of this next kernel cycle. Exciting on the AMD side is landing the AMD color management properties support! But on the downside, it's compile-time disabled for the time being...

Manjaro 23.1 was released overnight as the newest version of this popular Arch Linux based desktop Linux distribution...

Box64 and Box86 are out with new releases this weekend for these open-source projects allowing x86_64 and x86 binaries to run on ARM64 Linux systems...

KDE developers remain very busy working toward the release of the Plasma 6 desktop in late February...

As I wrote about last week that Intel's modern Xe kernel graphics driver was nearing submission for the mainline kernel and today it's indeed been submitted to DRM-Next. The Intel Xe kernel graphics driver is the modern alternative to the long-used i915 DRM kernel driver and is fitted to support Tigerlake graphics and newer -- both integrated graphics hardware as well as discrete GPUs/accelerators...

Wine 9.0-rc2 is now available as the latest weekly release candidate on the road to the stable Wine 9.0 release in early 2024...

Earlier this month at AMD's AI event in San Francisco they announced ROCm 6.0 while launching the MI300X and MI300A accelerators. While announced back on the 6th, today marks the actual availability of ROCm 6.0 with the source code and binaries now publicly available...

A few months back GNOME developer Christian Hergert noted that Linux terminal emulators could be much faster following his experiments but then concluded at the time he didn't want to develop a new terminal becase "creating your own terminal is like 20 lines of code these days." Well, he ended up shifting stance a bit and has now announced Prompt, a new container-focused terminal emulator for the GNOME desktop...

With Intel's just-launched 5th Gen Xeon "Emerald Rapids" processors headlined by the 64-core Xeon Platinum 8592+, one of the key upgrades with these new server processors is now supporting DDR5-5600 memory compared to DDR5-4800 with Sapphire Rapids and also the memory frequency limit with AMD's EPYC Zen 4 processors. Here are some benchmarks of the flagship Xeon Platinum 8592+ when being tested with DDR5-4800 versus DDR5-5600 memory modules.

While the holidays are quickly approaching, the System76 developers working on their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution and new Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment haven't been losing focus. December has been another busy month so far as they continue crafting this new modern desktop environment...

A quirk has been discovered with the AMD-powered Framework 13 inch laptop where if a user closes the laptop's lid on an already-suspended system, the system will wake up. A set of Linux kernel patches are on the way to workaround this issue...

Intel's VC Intrinsics software package that provides a set of intrinsics atop the LLVM IR instructions to represent SIMD semantics for programs targeting Intel GPUs has been updated for new hardware support...

Tim Holmes-Mitra with Canonical has shared some roadmap highlights for the Ubuntu desktop with the in-development Ubuntu 24.04 LTS...

While some at Intel were busy launching the 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids", other Linux engineers at the company were pushing ahead on their new hardware enablement quest for future platforms. Sent out on the same day as Emerald Rapids being announced were continued patches for enabling Grand Ridge...

In addition to Fedora 40 applying systemd hardening settings to bolster system security, another security enhancement now approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) is on having the linker error out on encountering possible security issues...

It's been two weeks since Mesa 23.3 was punctually released and this week has been succeeded by the Mesa 23.3.1 point release with the first batch of bug/regression fixes...

Fedora 40 is planning to provide more hardened system security by leveraging some high level security features provided by systemd...

Back in September AMD released FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR3) and at the time they noted the open-source code would be made available "soon". As a nice Christmas present, the FSR3 source code is public as of today...

Following the 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" overview, you are likely wondering about the performance claims made by Intel and how they shake up in independent testing as well as how Emerald Rapids competes against AMD EPYC Genoa(X) and Bergamo. If so this article is for you with the Phoronix benchmarks of the new flagship Intel Xeon Platinum 8592+ 64-core processors being tested in both single and dual socket modes.

In addition to announcing the Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors, Intel's AI Everywhere event in New York City also served as the launch point for 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" server processors. Emerald Rapids is an incremental improvement over Sapphire Rapids with emboldened AI capabilities, energy efficiency improvements, and now up to 64 cores per socket.

While Intel's AI Everywhere event today was primarily focused on Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" laptop processors and 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" processors, Intel also briefly announced their newest Xeon D and Xeon E series processors...

At Intel's AI Everywhere event they officially launched their new Core Ultra branded Meteor Lake processors that will begin appearing in new laptops. Intel Core Ultra aims to deliver their most power efficient client processors, deliver around twice the GPU performance of existing integrated graphics, and via the NPU feature more robust AI capabilities.

There's been nothing new on the BUS1 front this year for capability-based IPC within the Linux kernel... In fact, the BUS1 out-of-tree kernel module has gone untouched for years now. But out of the BUS1 project has been Dbus-Broker for a high performance D-Bus message broker in user-space that doesn't break existing D-Bus compatibility. Out today is the newest version of that project closely tied to systemd developers...

The unofficial "ALHP" repositories for Arch Linux have begun offering an x86-64-v4 tuned repository for packages built against this current highest x86-64 micro-architecture feature level for the latest Intel and AMD processors with AVX-512 support...

While there has been much talk this year about KDE Plasma 6.0 on the desktop as it gears up for release at the end of February, there's been less talk about the Plasma Mobile work for having the KDE stack on smartphones. But it turns out some progress is quietly being made on KDE Plasma Mobile for bringing it aligned with the "6" platform...

For those that were interested in the openSUSE logo contest, the voting wrapped up on Tuesday and the results of this logo contest for new openSUSE branding have been selected...

Holding up some laptops from shipping Linux pre-loaded around the world come down to regulatory certifications for power management not currently being met on Linux while working fine on Windows...

The GNU C Library "glibc" is the latest free software project to adopt a Code of Conduct (CoC) in aiming to encourage welcoming behavior and less controversy among developers and other stakeholders when engaging this key component to the Linux software ecosystem...

Canonical has decided for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS that they will now enable frame pointers by default when building packages. There will still selectively be some packages where they decide to disable frame pointers due to the performance overhead, but the focus on this change is to improve the out-of-the-box debugging and profiling support on the Linux distribution...

The X.Org Server doesn't see much in the way of feature work these days with Red Hat and others divesting from classic X.Org/X11 sessions. But there continues to be new point releases of the X.Org Server and the XWayland code due to long-standing security issues within the X.Org codebase. New point releases were out last night due to two CVEs for bugs dating back to 2007 and 2009...

LibreOffice 24.2 Beta 1 is available today as the latest test candidate for this cross-platform open-source office suite that is packing many new features while also changing its approach to versioning...

FreeRDP 3.0 stable was released today as this open-source implementation of the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) for allowing nice remote access support...

A few months ago I wrote about AMD Linux engineers working on ACPI PHAT support for the Linux kernel. This week new patches around Linux ACPI PHAT handling have been posted with further confirmation of this functionality coming to "future" AMD SoCs...

With Intel's very timely upstream Linux hardware support going back years, they typically start on the upstream hardware enablement well in advance of the product's planned public launch. On a number of occasions this has meant adding support to the Linux kernel for hardware that never ends up being released to consumers. There's been recent cases like the Thunder Bay support that was dropped from the kernel after it became clear that the SoC would never ship to now a more extreme case of a driver being in the mainline kernel for 15 years to support never-released hardware...

The Linux kernel's thermal driver has the obvious notion of hot and critically-hot trip points while to this point there hasn't been the opposite: cold trip points (events) but that's finally been proposed as we approach the end of 2023...

SVT-AV1 v1.8 was released this week as the newest version of this open-source AV1 video encoder originally started by Intel and continues to be developed by Intel engineers in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media. As with most releases, optimizing this CPU-based AV1 encoder's performance continues to be a key priority...

Canonical is experimenting with x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels! They have produced an experimental build of Ubuntu Server using x86_64_v3 for requiring basically Intel and AMD CPUs with AVX capabilities. But they aren't yet committing to it as a default or when such a change may materialize...

Since the release of the Threadripper 7000 series on 20 November I've carried out and published many benchmarks of these new HEDT/PRO CPUs including the flagship AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX featuring 96-cores / 192-threads. All of my Threadripper PRO 7995WX benchmarks have been carried out using an HP Z6 G5 A workstation and it's proven to be an outright beast for creators, software developers, and others needing immense multi-threaded capabilities at your finger tips. Here's more about my experience with this new high-end HP workstation.