Phoronix

Genode Labs as the creators of the open-source Genode Operating System Framework have released Sculpt OS 22.10 as the newest version of their general purpose operating system...

This shouldn't be too surprising to long-time Phoronix readers, but Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux operating system is yielding great performance with AMD Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" processors. Intel's Clear Linux has long shipped HWCAPS support and tuning for AVX-512 and the like to be able to provide optimized libraries when running on their own AVX-512 processors. But with AMD now joining the AVX-512 party -- and Zen 4's AVX-512 implementation performing great -- Intel's Clear Linux distribution is showing leading performance numbers on these new AMD desktop processors.

Intel has today sent out new compiler patches as they work to get their next-generation processors all set for the open-source GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), including the introduction of some new x86_64 instruction set extensions coming with the high core count Sierra Forest processors...

Brought up in September was the proposal of moving the GNU toolchain infrastructure under the Linux Foundation's IT services. The GNU Toolchain leaders have now come out formally in support of this proposed move...

The 9P network protocol is commonly used -- such as with QEMU's 9pfs pass-through file-system -- for being able to share certain directories/files on host machines with the guest operating systems. With Linux 6.1 the 9p code has seen a nice set of optimizations that can allow for faster communication between the host and guest(s)...

Intel has published their "2022Q3" releases for their open-source Media Driver with VA-API support as well as their Intel oneVPL GPU Runtime...

The NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver is the open-source, community-developed Video Acceleration API (VA-API) implementation that is built to make use of NVIDIA's NVDEC interface exposed by their proprietary Linux graphics driver stack. In turn this VA-API implementation is notable since it allows for NVIDIA GPU video acceleration with Firefox that targets VA-API but not the NVIDIA interfaces...

Merged for Mesa 22.3 one month ago was Rusticl as a new OpenCL implementation written in Rust. Since then Karol Herbst of Red Hat, who has led the work on this new driver front-end, has been working to get Rusticl running on more Gallium3D drivers and even atop Zink for execution with Vulkan drivers. Much of his testing/focus so far has been making use of integrated GPUs while an important patch series was merged this evening for discrete GPU fixes...

A set of Linux kernel WiFi stack security issues were made public today. The Linux 6.1 Git kernel has now merged fixes for these vulnerabilities while the fixes also work their way to being back-ported to existing stable series...

The "char/misc" changes landed recently into mainline for the ongoing Linux 6.1 merge window. In addition to many FPGA subsystem updates, this random catch-all driver area of the kernel has also seen many updates to the Habana Labs AI driver for supporting Intel's forthcoming Gaudi2 accelerator...

PostgreSQL 15 is out today as the newest major feature release of this leading open-source database solution...

FEX-Emu as the open-source project aiming for speedy x86/x86_64 games and other software on Arm AArch64 including the likes of Steam has issued their newest feature update. FEX-Emu 2210 is today's newest release for this binary emulator and continues on a nice trajectory for being able to enjoy x86 64-bit binaries on modern Arm Linux systems...

The upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 12 release is codenamed "Bookworm" and is expected to be released in 2023. Meanwhile Debian 13 will be out around 2025 and it was already announced under the Trixie codename. Now today it's been announced that Debian 14 come 2027 will also be known as the "Forky" release...

AMD has been on a streak recently of improving their open-source video acceleration capabilities for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

While initial LoongArch CPU support merged in Linux 5.19, it was still in an immature state and since then missing features and functionality continue to be ironed out. With Linux 6.0 came LoongArch PCI support and other changes while for Linux 6.1 come additional features for this Chinese CPU architecture derived from MIPS64 and some elements of RISC-V...

Longtime open-source developer Keith Packard has announced the release of Picolibc 1.7.9, the newest version of his C library for embedded systems. Picolibc 1.7.9 adds support for several new CPU architectures and other enhancements for his miniature libc implementation...

Mesa's Venus driver provides Vulkan support for VirtIO-GPU since it was merged last year as a creation by Google. As of yesterday, the Venus driver has moved on to exposing Vulkan 1.3 capabilities...

One of the leading test requests at Phoronix around my AMD Zen 4 Linux benchmarking has been some side-by-side comparisons against Microsoft Windows 11. While older, high core count AMD systems have particularly performed very well under Linux against Windows, with new hardware there is sometimes hiccups and various limitations with the at-launch support especially on the open-source Linux side. So for your viewing pleasure today are some initial AMD Ryzen 9 7950X benchmarks under Microsoft Windows 11 22H2 up against Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS and a near-final development snapshot of the upcoming Ubuntu 22.10.

The staging changes for Linux 6.1 aren't particularly notable but of the code churn is lightening the kernel a bit by dropping the old "fwserial" driver that allows for TTY support over IEEE-1394 Firewire connections...

While LLVM Clang is increasingly being used by various developers and organizations for building the mainline Linux kernel as complementary support to the GCC compiler that has long been the predominant compiler target, Intel's ICC compiler has also been able to build the Linux kernel albeit not widely used. Kernel developers are now looking at removing that ICC compiler support...

With the GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards shipping today, NVIDIA has published their first R529 series Linux driver with initial support for the GeForce RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" graphics cards...

For those that have been holding off on upgrading to the Mesa 22.2 open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers until the first point release arrives with any early fixes and fallout corrections, that v22.2.1 release is now available...

The Unigine game and simulation 3D engine has released version 2.16 and with this update finally comes the much anticipated Vulkan and Direct3D 12 graphics API support...

Among the many Rust-written projects that have been gaining steam in recent years has been uutils as a Rust-based replacement to GNU Coreutils that is commonly used on Linux systems. Out today is uutils 0.0.16 as the latest step in this Rust-replacement quest...

Not that you are likely to connect a CD/DVD drive to a RISC-V system in 2022+, but RISC-V's default kernel configuration with the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel is adding support for CD-ROM file-systems...

In addition to Linux 6.1 x86_64 defaulting to warning over W+X mappings and other security-minded improvements this merge window, another benefit of this next kernel is the mainlining of the Kernel Memory Sanitizer (KMSAN)...

The 64-bit Arm (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture changes were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.1 merge window...

Released last month was LLVM/Clang 15 and since then a number of Phoronix readers have been inquiring about Clang 15 compiler benchmarks or there the lack of on Phoronix. I've been testing various Intel and AMD systems with Clang 15, but it hasn't been particularly exciting -- but that's not a bad thing, just that it doesn't make for particularly compelling benchmark articles...

Mesa's Zink driver implementing the OpenGL API atop Vulkan continues advancing at a rapid pace and today the latest major addition landed: async pipeline precompiles...

In addition to MGLRU and Maple Tree having been merged overnight, Linus Torvalds also picked up the x86/mm changes for Linux 6.1 that will now by default warn about W+X mappings...

Last week Valve launched their much anticipated Steam Deck Docking Station as the official "dock" for the Steam Deck to allow connecting up to two external displays, power, additional USB ports, and Gigabit Ethernet. I've been testing out the Steam Deck Docking Station and it's been working out well but on the pricier side compared to alternatives.

The KDE community has just published Plasma 5.26 as the newest update to this open-source desktop environment and as the end of Plasma 5 feature development quickly approaches...

While 2023 is quickly approaching and the Modula-2 programming language has since been succeeded by the Modula-3 and Oberon languages since the late 80's, GNU Modula-2 continues to be worked on as a front-end to the GNU Compiler Collection for this structured, procedural programming language...

For more than a year AMD engineers have been working on IOMMU v2 page table support and with the in-development Linux 6.1 kernel the initial patches are finally being merged...

The latest daily development builds of the Blender 3D modelling software have enabled native support for Wayland. If all goes well, the Blender 3.4 release coming up will ship with this native Wayland support for Linux...

MGLRU has successfully landed in Linux 6.1 as one of the best kernel innovations of the year to be mainlined. Along with that the new Maple Tree data structure was also merged...

At last week's XDC 2022 conference, Google engineer Rob Clark presented on VirtGPU DRM Native Contexts and the potential there for much better performance - especially for gaming - within virtual machines than using API-level virtualization like with Virgl...

Back in 2019 the Linux kernel finally deprecated a.out support for that format superseded by ELF long ago. Since earlier this year kernel developers moved ahead with beginning to remove a.out support, including the old x86 a.out support. Now with Linux 6.1 some lingering remnants of a.out are being cleared away...

This should come as little surprise with the GeForce RTX 4090 series releasing this week as the first Ada Lovelace GPUs, but NVIDIA is releasing a new feature branch driver for Linux users...

It's been a long time since last having anything significant to report on for Oracle's VM VirtualBox software: VirtualBox 6.0 debuted in 2018 and VirtualBox 6.1 in 2019, but since has been rather quiet... But out today is now VirtualBox 7.0 with big features like support for full virtual machine encryption and a new Direct3D 11 based graphics stack, which for Linux use is now going through DXVK...

The "perf" kernel subsystem for Linux with the perf performance analyzing tool has picked up some new AMD processor capabilities for Linux 6.1...

The platform drivers x86 updates were merged a few days ago for the Linux 6.1 kernel. Most notable is the introduction of the AMD Platform Management Framework (PMF) while there are also a number of laptop driver updates too as part of this feature update...

For those wondering the difference using the aging ACPI CPUFreq driver or the newer AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling drivers make for modern Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" desktops, here are some CPUFreq/P-State driver tests using the Ryzen 9 7950X as well as testing the various governor options and looking at the impact on the CPU power consumption, peak frequency, and thermals too.

Over the weekend code began landing in mainline Coreboot for an AMD SoC codenamed Morgana -- another new codename -- as well as prepping for an AMD Glinda SoC too...

Following the recent HID driver updates for Linux 6.1, the other input subsystem driver updates for this new kernel version have been submitted. The input driver updates this cycle range from supporting the optional PinePhone keyboard to a driver enabling the IBM Operation Panel used by some IBM servers...

Wayland-Protocols 1.27 was released this morning by Jonas Ådahl in pushing out two new protocols under the staging umbrella...

A big chunk of new EFI feature code was merged for Linux 6.1...

Among the new applications becoming available with Ubuntu 22.10 "Kinetic Kudu" later this month is GNOME-Network-Displays for dealing with Miracast wireless displays...

In early September AMD announced their new P-State "EPP" driver for Linux systems to further evolve their P-State driver effort started last year. This P-State EPP driver effort is aiming for better performance and power control while this weekend they sent out the second iteration of these Linux kernel patches...

Erik Faye-Lund of Collabora raised an interesting discussion this past week at XDC 2022 about leveraging Zink for post-OpenGL graphics development. With Zink able to run "anywhere" and currently focused on existing OpenGL APIs atop Vulkan, Zink could be used as a vehicle for developing new OpenGL APIs or trying to evolve the API in its own right while being able to run atop Vulkan API drivers on Windows or Linux...