Phoronix

Along with the Linux kernel preparing for its initial Rust integration, Rusticl landing in Mesa this week as the first major Rust usage within Mesa, and Cloudflare announcing an Nginx HTTP proxy replacement written in Rust, some additional Rust adoption news for the week is that the GStreamer project is now ready to ship Rust-written plug-ins as part of their official binary releases...

Proposed a few years ago was Kernel Address Space Isolation (KASI / ASI) for limiting data leaks with the growing number of speculative execution attacks on CPUs. Several organizations have been involved with Address Space Isolation efforts for the Linux kernel including IBM, Oracle, and Google with various approaches. Google engineers earlier this year posted a newer iteration of ASI focused on KVM use for the cloud / VMs. ASI still hasn't made it to the mainline kernel but Google engineers this week at LPC argued that it should be the path forward for mainline in better dealing with these CPU security vulnerabilities...

Over the past year since launching Intel Alder Lake processors, Intel engineers have made a number of improvements to the Linux kernel for better dealing with the hybrid processor approach mixing P and E cores. While Alder Lake is running great with recent kernels and the P vs. E core selection for tasks on Linux is better than it was at launch, there still are areas for improvement as raised by Intel engineers this week...

Longtime Linux kernel engineer Peter Zijlstra with Intel has sent out his latest "Call Depth Tracking" patches as a mitigation for Retbleed that aims to be less costly on system performance than the current mitigation approach. With this latest patch series, he indicates he hopes to soon get this code mainlined...

Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been involved with many great Linux desktop/laptop hardware improvements over the years for work that would have otherwise likely gone unaddressed. One of the initiatives he has been focusing on recently that has long been a sore point for Linux laptops has been the user-space backlight/brightness interface. This week at Linux Plumbers Conference was a presentation on this effort that has long been ripe for improvement...

HarfBuzz is the text shaping library used by many open-source projects from UI toolkits to directly by desktops like GNOME and KDE and then over to other notable software like Java, Android, Firefox, Chrome, and many others. Out this weekend is HarfBuzz 5.2 and most notably adds support for Unicode 15...

While Plasma 5.26 beta released this week, KDE developers didn't kick back and relax but have pressed on with continuing to make improvements to this open-source desktop environment...

Well known NVIDIA AIB partner EVGA made a rather surprising and unfortunate announcement this Friday afternoon,..

You may recall a few days ago how Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz boosted the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver draw throughput by +55%. Well, he now had a go at optimizing the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver and has squeezed out a 60% improvement to the draw throughput. Even more interesting is that it was just a few lines of code...

Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem maintainer has shared some notes following this week's Linux Plumbers Conference in Dublin. In particular, the matter of whether the growing number of accelerators / AI devices belong within the DRM subsystem or elsewhere and separately there is renewed talks of user-space consoles to potentially push Linux distributions towards moving away from the in-kernel VT...

Intel announced today that beginning with 2023 notebooks, the Intel Pentium and Intel Celeron brands will be replaced by... Intel Processor...

Along with the fresh look at the Intel Core i9 12900K vs. AMD Ryzen 9 5950X on Linux using the latest development kernel and other bleeding-edge software packages, today's article is a fresh look at how the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with 3D V-Cache is performing relative to the Ryzen 7 5800X.

Intel submitted their final set of "drm-intel-gt-next" feature changes intended for merging in the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel merge window that opens in early October...

Canonical announced this morning that they have partnered with ASUS IoT, the division of ASUS focused on providing "Internet of Things" hardware, to certify Ubuntu Linux for their devices...

Qt 6.4 is continuing to run on-schedule and out today is the release candidate ahead of the stable release expected around the end of the month...

Merged last year for the Linux 5.16 cycle was FUTEX2's futex_waitv() system call for waiting on multiple futexes in order to better match the behavior of Microsoft Windows. This FUTEX2 initiative was driven as an effort to further enhance Linux gaming performance/efficiency particularly for Valve's Steam Play. Originally there were other goals with FUTEX2 and now we are seeing another one of those being worked on: NUMA awareness...

The Khronos Group has published OpenCL 3.0.12 as the newest version of this API for compute across heterogeneous platforms, but mostly known for GPU compute...

Cloudflare has long relied upon Nginx as part of its HTTP proxy stack but now has replaced it with their in-house, Rust-written Pingora software that is said to be serving over one trillion requests per day and delivering better performance while only using about a third of the CPU and memory resources...

The Khronos Group's Vulkan Working Group today released Vulkan API 1.3.228. Aside from the usual assortment of fixes/clarifications to the Vulkan spec, this spec update promotes one of Valve's existing extensions aimed at enhancing Direct3D 12 emulation with Vulkan into being a formal "EXT" extension...

It was just a few days ago that Godot 4.0 Alpha 17 was released while also announcing that W4 Games as the start-up created by Godot Engine developers has raised $8.5M USD to advance the open-source Godot ecosystem. They are now celebrating by releasing the long-awaited Godot 4.0 beta release...

In addition to Microsoft continuing to work on OpenGL and OpenCL atop Direct3D 12 by leveraging Mesa in order to benefit Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) and related use-cases, Microsoft engineers have also been working on exposing video acceleration to Linux software backed by Direct3D 12 Video Acceleration...

The KDE community has today released the beta of the upcoming Plasma 5.26 desktop...

While we are used to seeing Intel engineers dominating the speaker lists at various Linux events around the world, it's been a number of years since AMD engineers held multiple presentations like they did this week for the Linux Plumbers Conference and now the Open-Source Summit EU taking place in Dublin, Ireland...

There has been a number of different efforts in recent time to further enhance the Linux kernel's scheduler to better adapt to modern hardware architectures whether it be for Intel hybrid CPU designs, adapting to new CPU cache configurations, or just better scaling with today's ever-increasing core counts. Another scheduler effort detailed this week is "Nest" that aims to keep tasks on "warm cores" with hopes of lower latency due to being already at higher clock/performance states and ideally operating at an optimal turbo/boost frequency. The Nest developers find that their scheduler "improves performance 10%-2x and can reduce energy usage" with modern hardware...

Ever since OpenPrinting took over CUPS upstream from Apple, this widely-used, open-source print server has been back to having a vibrant future. CUPS development ceased at Apple and there wasn't much going on until last year when CUPS founder Michael Sweet and OpenPrinting provided new life to the project...

For a number of years Arm CPUs on the mainline Linux kernel have supported Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) as a means of providing the kernel's scheduler with the information to influence its scheduling decisions based on the estimated energy consumed by the CPU cores. EAS employs an energy model for helping to place tasks between the big.LITTLE cores for optimal energy efficiency and a minimal impact on throughput. Intel has been working to eventually support Energy Aware Scheduling on their x86 hybrid CPUs too...

Released last month was Cemu 2.0 as open-source software and with Linux support for this Nintendo Wii U emulator that for years has been in development but up to that point closed-source and Windows-only. Cemu 2.0 continues advancing with another bug-fixing update out today...

Endeavour OS 22.9 "Artemis Nova" is out today as the newest version of this enthusiast-oriented Linux distribution built around Arch Linux...

Ahead of Intel Raptor Lake and AMD Zen 4, it's a lot of fresh CPU re-testing at Phoronix under Linux with the bleeding-edge software stack of the latest Linux kernel as well as many new/updated benchmarks, the latest motherboard BIOSes, and more. As over the past year there has been a lot of work by Intel open-source engineers around better tuning the Linux kernel for their hybrid architecture, here are some fresh side-by-side benchmarks of the Intel Core i9 12900K against the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X.

Mike Blumenkrantz has been working under contract for Valve on the open-source Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation for Mesa but that work has carried over into the Mesa Vulkan drivers too where there is common overlap. His recent work has been focused on lowering the CPU overhead of some operations with the RADV Vulkan driver...

Red Hat engineer and systemd developer Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek presented on Monday at the Linux Plumbers Conference on a new design for inital RAM disks (initrd) making use of the new systemd mkosi-initrd project...

Meta/Facebook has turned to kernel live-patching (KLP) with Red Hat's Kpatch the the Linux kernel livepatch infrastructure to handle live updates to "several million servers". Meta engineers shared during this week's Linux Plumbers Conference around the successes they've had with it as well as troubles encountered along the way...

As a follow-up to the recent article about Mesa preparing a software fallback for S3TC, that code was merged for next quarter's Mesa 22.3...

A change queued in HID-next ahead of the Linux 6.1 cycle aims to enable HID++ protocol usage for all Logitech Bluetooth devices...

Hopefully being mainlined next cycle with Linux 6.1 is the Multi-Gen LRU, or better known as MGLRU, as a superior alternative to the kernel's existing page reclamation code. Assuming it lands for Linux 6.1 as the last complete kernel cycle of 2022, this would make it one of the most exciting innovations to make it into the kernel this year...

AMD Linux graphics driver engineer Pierre-Eric Pelloux-Prayer has made an improvement to Mesa's common code that should yield much faster start-up times for Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive...

Longtime open-source Linux graphics driver developer and DRM subsystem maintainer, David Airlie of Red Hat, took the stage at Linux Plumbers Conference today to talk about Nouveau and the state of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver...

Samba as the open-source re-implementation of the SMB networking protocol for better file and print server interoperability with Microsoft Windows platforms is out with a new release. In the nearly six months since Samba 4.16 was introduced, Samba 4.17 has built up performance improvements/fixes and other enhancements for this widely-used open-source project...

Godot 4.0 Alpha 17 is out today as the newest development release for this open-source game engine. Also announced today that the new start-up W4 Games that was started by Godot Engine developers has managed to raise $8.5M USD to support this open-source game engine ecosystem...

Fedora 37 beta has been successfully released on-time as a development test release ahead of next month's planned stable release...

AMD landed several new GPU firmware binaries into the linux-firmware.git repository this morning for unreleased hardware...

Development on Zink as the OpenGL implementation atop the Vulkan API within Mesa remains very vibrant with a lot of optimizations and other improvements ongoing...

TrenchBoot is the project backed by Oracle and other stakeholders for providing a boot-time integrity framework that builds upon boot integrity technologies and roots of trust for ensuring system integrity, network attestation launch, and other security use-cases...

AMDVLK 2022.Q3.4 was published this morning and significant with this new open-source Vulkan driver version is finally seeing ray-tracing support from this driver...

A new open-source driver has been posted for supporting the WMI interface found with newer Dell systems. This platform driver allows for reading battery properties like the temperature and IDs as well as additional fan/thermal sensor information...

Held today during the first day of Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin was a Rust mini-conference about the ongoing work on making Rust a suitable systems programming language and integrating support for Rust within the mainline Linux kernel. There were many interesting talks from the status of the Rust integration from the Linux kernel to a Rust-written NVMe driver that can perform as well as the C written driver...

Google for quite some time now has been working on "Ghost" as a means of controlling the Linux kernel scheduler from user-space and/or eBPF programs. Ghost provides an extensive API so developers can alter the kernel's scheduler behavior from user-space or eBPF and fine-tune the scheduling behavior based on system preferences...

Since NTFS3 was mainlined last year in the Linux kernel as a modern NTFS read/write file-system driver developed by Paragon Software, it's mostly just been some fixes since then and other minor updates. A new NTFS3 patch series sent out today is at least preparing a new feature for this kernel driver...

One of many changes to find with next month's Ubuntu 22.10 release is Debuginfod integration...

Now that Ubuntu 22.10 is into its feature freeze and its Linux 5.19 based kernel landed as well as moving to the GCC 12.2 compiler, I've begun testing this forthcoming Ubuntu Linux (non-LTS) release on more systems. For the current-flagship Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" processors, Ubuntu 22.10 does deliver some performance advantages over the current Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS release. However, Ubuntu 22.10 still trails in a distance behind Intel's own Clear Linux platform for the most aggressive out-of-the-box performance.