Phoronix

With this weekend's release of helloSystem 0.8 as a macOS-inspired open-source desktop OS built atop FreeBSD, I decided to try out this new release on an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X desktop to see how it would go.

The Armv8.1-M based Cortex-M85 processor support has made it into the GCC 13 compiler for this highest performing Cortex-M processor use for MCUs and embedded applications...

Fwupd 1.8.10 is out this morning to kickoff a new week and continuing to enhance the open-source firmware updating support on Linux systems...

It's been a while since last having a fresh look at the Mozilla Firefox vs. Google Chrome performance on the Linux desktop, but with a slow Linux/open-source news weekend, here are some fresh numbers with their latest browser releases...

A new feature with Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" that hasn't been talked about too much is the new User Interrupts (UNITR) functionality. The Linux kernel support for it still also hasn't been merged but has shown promising results in patch form...

Two quality of service features new with the Zen 4 processors are still seeing their software support squared away ahead of mainlining in the Linux kernel...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.2-rc5 a day early compared to his usual Sunday ritual as a result of traveling. Due to an uptick in activity this week and the downtime around Christmas / end-of-year holidays, Torvalds is planning on this cycle spanning through Linux 6.2-rc8 before going gold...

Following the demise of PC-BSD/TrueOS, the most compelling BSD-based desktop operating system with a pleasant out-of-the-box user experience is helloSystem. The helloSystem OS has been aiming to be the macOS of the BSDs and for the past few years has been building a macOS-inspired desktop atop FreeBSD. Out today is helloSystem 0.8 as their newest version built atop FreeBSD 13.1...

On Friday AMD sent out another round of feature patches for new kernel graphics driver material they have readied in advance of the Linux 6.3 kernel cycle...

NVIDIA engineer Austin Shafer has contributed linux_dmabuf v4 feedback protocol support for upstream XWayland. This is working towards allowing scan-out modifiers that a compositor advertises to be delivered to X11 applications under (X)Wayland...

Back in November IBM engineers sent out compiler patches for "future" CPUs and notably added new dense math instructions. At the time they noted the new target "may or may not be present" in future IBM Power processors but now they are hoping to get these "future" patches squeeze into the GCC 13 compiler...

With the Linux 6.2 kernel Sony DualShock 4 controller support was added to the "hid-playstation" driver as the newer open-source driver maintained by Sony and started out originally in supporting the PlayStation 5 DualSense controllers. The DualShock 4 controller was long supported by the "hid-sony" driver while now in the Linux 6.3 kernel that support will be removed...

KDE developers have had a busy start to 2023 with preparing Plasma 5.27 for release as the final feature version in the Plasma 5 series. Work on Plasma 6.0 and KDE Frameworks 6 continues heating up...

While the much anticipated OpenZFS 3.0 hasn't yet materialized as it was originally hoped for in 2022, OpenZFS 2.x continues on maturing nicely with fixes and other updates to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently supported on FreeBSD and Linux systems...

Work on Wine 8.0 is winding down and it looks like the stable release could be out next week or otherwise very soon...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for dynamic blend equations to help with the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation and ideally lead to less stuttering...

Intel Sandy Bridge processors launched 12 years ago this month and if you still are relying on these 32nm CPUs, it's really time to consider an upgrade for not only the performance but also security and power efficiency reasons. But if you are content with still churning away on a Sandy Bridge desktop under Linux, picked up for upstream and marked for back-porting is another attempt at dealing with visual glitches and GPU hangs that have been affecting some users with the integrated graphics...

A patch worked on by an Intel engineer for batched TLB flushing for page migration with folios is showing some promising results and currently working its way to the mainline kernel...

Microsoft's Dozen "Dzn" code within Mesa is a Vulkan implementation built atop Direct3D 12 for enjoying this modern industry-standard graphics/compute API atop Microsoft's D3D12 API, should the system lack an underlying native Vulkan driver or in cases like using Windows Subsystem for Linux. Dozen is now above 99% for its conformance pass rate for Vulkan 1.0 and more of Vulkan 1.1 is now being worked on by Microsoft's engineers that contribute the open-source code to Mesa...

Released on Thursday was the oneAPI Level Zero Loader v1.9.4 as the newest open-source software release from the company...

Mold 1.10 was released today by lead developer Rui Ueyama as the newest version of this high speed linker that has been outperforming GNU Gold and LLVM LLD...

The Ubuntu xx.04.2 LTS releases tend to be a bit more meaningful for long-term support users since it includes the back-ported hardware enablement "HWE" stack with updated Linux kernel from the newer non-LTS release. Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS had been due for release on 9 February with that updated stack but is now pushed back to the end of the month over technical issues...

As I wrote about earlier this week, Linux 6.3 is positioned to support AMD Zen 4's Automatic IBRS feature. AMD's Linux enablement code around Automatic IBRS has been undergoing review the past few months and now via TIP's x96/cpu Git branch is to be sent in next month for the Linux 6.3 merge window. I've run some preliminary benchmarks of the Automatic IBRS support on Zen 4 and it's looking positive for further enhancing the performance of AMD's new Ryzen 7000 series and EPYC 9004 series processors.

While we await the next post-R525 driver series feature release, NVIDIA today issued their newest production driver update for this current stable series...

Today a new drm-misc-next pull request was submitted for DRM-Next of various Direct Rendering Manager changes queuing for Linux 6.3. Most significant with today's pull request is eliminating seven old DRM drivers that are for vintage hardware and these open-source drivers are no longer maintained...

The KDE Plasma 5.27 beta is available for testing today as the next big update to the KDE desktop due out as stable next month...

While there tend to be new Vulkan API specification updates weekly or bi-weekly for most of the year, there was a one month hiatus due to Christmas and other end of year holidays with many of the corporate developers taking time off work. But that is now over and out today is Vulkan 1.3.239 as the first update in exactly one month...

Debian 12 (codenamed "Bookworm") is expected to be released later this year and as such the first of several code/package freezes has begun...

Linux game porter and developer Ethan Lee has added initial support to Mesa for Microsoft's Xbox Game Development Kit (GDK). In turn this early code can allow running the "GLon12" Mesa driver atop the Xbox One and Xbox Series X / S game consoles that can ease porting OpenGL games to the Xbox...

Intel yesterday submitted another batch of material from drm-intel-gt-next to DRM-Next as new feature code and fixes to queue ahead of the Linux 6.3 merge window opening next month...

Squeezing into the current Linux 6.2 kernel cycle is support for the XP-PEN Deco 01 V2 drawing tablet...

With last week's launch of Intel's 4th Gen Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids server processors, Intel heavily talked up the shiny new accelerators and the big performance potential of AMX, but not really showcased and only heard through the grapevine was the improved AVX-512 implementation found with these new processors. With Sapphire Rapids there is reduced penalties from engaging AVX-512 -- and for some AVX-512 instructions, no longer any measurable impact -- compared to prior generation Xeon processors. In this article is a look at the performance for a wide variety of workloads with AVX-512 on/off not just for Sapphire Rapids but also for prior generation Ice Lake as well as AMD's new EPYC 4th Gen "Genoa" processors where they have introduced AVX-512 for the first time.

Last month a change proposal was filed for aiming to yield faster reboots and shutdowns of Fedora Linux by shortening the time window that services can block the shutdown process. A modified version of that change proposal has now been cleared by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee...

Starting to appear in Linux 6.2 as part of the various "fixes" pull requests are new device IDs for adding Intel 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" support for drivers not requiring any other code changes over the existing Sapphire Rapids code path.s..

With AMD Zen 4 processors there is a new Automatic IBRS (Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation) similar to Intel's Enhanced IBRS (eIBRS) functionality for offering lower-overhead Spectre V2 mitigations compared to the Retpoline approach used on Zen 3 and prior. Finally with Linux 6.3 that Auto IBRS support is now set to be merged...

Over the past year NVK has taken shape as a -- currently out-of-tree -- Mesa Vulkan driver for supporting NVIDIA graphics hardware. This open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver is inching closer to the point of being upstreamed into Mesa, but before it's usable for gamers/enthusiasts there is kernel work that must happen too...

One of the exciting announcements Intel made just before Christmas was announcing their work on the new "Xe" kernel graphics driver for Linux. This new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver will eventually replace the long-standing i915 kernel driver when it comes to handling Gen12 integrated and discrete graphics as well as future Intel graphics hardware...

The Windows game Control that runs via Valve's Steam Play no longer needs the RADV_PERFTEST=rt environment variable override to enjoy the ray-tracing support but with Mesa 23.1 (and potentially backported for 23.0) will work out-of-the-box...

The Genode open-source operating system framework that pursues a micro-kernel design has published their technical roadmap for the 2023 calendar year...

Stemming from the X.Org Server change to no longer allow byte-swapped clients by default due to the feature being rarely used but of significant security concerns with being a large attack surface, GNOME's Mutter compositor has added optional support for being able to enable byte-swapped XWayland clients...

Earlier this month at CES, Intel announced the 35 and 65 Watt Raptor Lake processors alongside the 13th Gen Core Mobile CPUs. Those new Raptor Lake desktop CPUs are now available from multiple Internet retailers and the mid-range Core i5 13400 recently arrived at Phoronix to put it through its paces under Linux.

After quietly posting a "request for comments" patch series a few months back to no fanfare, AMD today published their post-RFC patch series today for introducing the AMD CDX bus to the Linux kernel. AMD CDX is ultimately for the interface/bus between the APU and FPGA(s) with future hardware...

Apple today announced their M2 Pro and M2 Max SoCs found in new Apple MacBook Pro devices and they have also updated their Mac Mini computers with the M2 and interestingly even offering a model with the M2 Pro SoC...

SUSE compiler engineer Jan Hubicka has landed some additional AMD Zen 4 "znver4" CPU target tuning ahead of the upcoming GCC 13 stable compiler release...

For over a decade now RebeccaBlackOS "RBOS" has been around as a live Linux environment intended to showcase the latest Wayland code from various desktops/compositors to other Wayland-native software. RBOS pre-dates many of the major Linux distributions offering any Wayland support out-of-the-box...

While the Vulkan Video extensions were introduced provisionally nearly two years ago and Vulkan Video 1.0 firmed up in December, sadly to date they have been focused on H.264 and H.265 video acceleration. VP9 and AV1 extensions for Vulkan Video are expected in 2023, but in advance of the cross-vendor extensions, VK_MESA_video_decode_av1 has been devised as an extension enabling RADV accelerated video decode with AMD Radeon GPUs...

In addition to Intel engineers this past week releasing the newest Intel Media Driver quarterly release, they have also published libva 2.17 as the newest version of this open-source Video Acceleration API library that is used across VA-API vendor/driver implementations...

Libvirt 9.0 was released on Monday as the newest version of this Linux Virtualization API. This virtualization API backed by Red Hat continues to support a wide range of hypervisors and with the v9.0 release has added additional functionality...

If things go as planned, the TPM2 device found within Microsoft's Pluton security processor on the latest AMD Ryzen SoCs will be supported by Linux 6.3...

One of the most exciting features of Intel's 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors is the introduction of Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). The Intel AMX ISA extensions are intended for speeding-up AI and machine learning related workloads. In this article is a look at the AMX performance on the Xeon Platinum 8490H processors on/off for machine learning performance.