While the Xilinx Alveo PCIe accelerator cards have been around for several years and there has been ongoing Linux driver work equally as long, one element of the support has remained elusive from the upstream Linux kernel: the XDMA subsystem driver...
Intel last week introduced the 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors and kicking off this week is an exciting new development: patches are pending for upstreaming Sapphire Rapids processor support into the open-source Coreboot!..
Intel's FFmpeg Cartwheel is the repository where their latest FFmpeg GPU acceleration patches are housed until being upstreamed into FFmpeg proper. Out today is FFmpeg 2022Q4 as the latest collection of Intel's patches for this open-source multimedia library from new hardware support to enhancing AV1 and HEVC/H.265 accelerated video encoding...
The GCC 13 code compiler has entered its stage four of development today where the focus now is only on regression fixes until eliminating all the highest priority regressions so that the GCC 13.1 stable release can then happen in the next 2~3 months...
Following last week's release of Chrome 109 by Google, Mozilla has uploaded their release binaries today for Firefox 109. Firefox 109 is the web browser's first release of 2023 and has caught up to Google's Chrome with its versioning...
The Aspeed ACRY engine found with new AST2600 baseboard management controllers (BMCs) for accelerating ECDSA/RSA signature and verification tasks is set to see an upstream driver with the Linux 6.3 cycle...
NVIDIA engineers are working on upstreaming support for the new BlueField-3 DPU into the Linux kernel. This DPU rated for 400 Gb/s networking will see Ethernet driver support come Linux 6.3...
With Intel's 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors that launched this week, Intel is betting heavily on the integrated accelerators for offering them an advantage over competitors for modern hyperscaler tasks and other workloads able to take advantage of the In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA), Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA), QuickAssist Technology (QAT), and the Dynamic Load Balancer (DLB). But what does the software landscape currently look like and what's needed to actually make use of these accelerators under Linux? Here is a brief how-to guide / overview for making use of the accelerators on your Linux server.
The SoC tree's "for-next" branch has picked up a big set of patches that is set to lighten the kernel by 154k lines of code, documentation, and DeviceTree files in clearing out some old drivers and obsolete board/machine support...
As part of Intel's forthcoming Flexible Return and Event Delivery (FRED) specification is the new LKGS instruction for managing the state of the GS segment register in a more flexible manner. With Linux 6.3 the kernel will allow making use of the LKGS instruction where supported on future Intel CPUs...
Another batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature code was submitted this week to DRM-Next as additional AMD Radeon kernel graphics driver changes slated for Linux 6.3...
The open-source developers working on developing the Rust-written Linux DRM kernel driver for Apple M1/M2 graphics as well as the Mesa AGX Gallium3D driver in user-space have now managed to successfully run a basic OpenGL ES 3.1 compute shader on the hardware with this open-source driver stack...
Cloud Hypervisor 29.0 has been released as the open-source virtualization hypervisor that was started by Intel but then began seeing support by the likes of Microsoft and Arm. Cloud Hypervisor was since spunoff to the Linux Foundation where it continues seeing more industry support by the likes of AMD and Ampere...
Out today is GNU Binutils 2.40 as the latest feature update to this wide collection of key binary utilities found on Linux systems and other platforms...
One of the exciting Coreboot / open-source firmware milestones of 2022 was a Coreboot/Dasharo port to a readily available Intel Alder Lake motherboard from MSI with the port being carried out by consulting firm 3mdeb. That port started with the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4 and then more recently focused on the DDR5 variant. That MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR5 support has now been upstreamed into mainline Coreboot...
An interesting patch series posted by Intel this week for the Linux kernel is working on implementing Linear Address Space Separation (LASS) as a feature coming with future processors to help fend off speculative address accesses across user and kernel mode...
ROCm 5.4 released in November with a point release then coming out in December and now there is another minor update for January to this open-source AMD Linux GPU compute stack...
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual Saturday weekly recap to highlight all of the interesting KDE desktop developments for the past week...
The fourth release candidate of Wine 8.0 is now available as the project works toward its stable release in the coming weeks. Wine, of course, allows for running Windows programs and games under Linux and other platforms. Valve's Wine fork, Proton, is what powers Steam Play...
Following the Linux kernel deprecating the ReiserFS file-system and with plans to drop the kernel driver in 2025, the next file-system target being evaluated for whether it should stick around the kernel is the Journaled File-System, JFS...
Since Linux 6.0 there has been various graphics driver code being upstreamed for Intel's next-generation Meteor Lake processors, among other Meteor Lake driver enablement work in general. Now coming with the Linux 6.3 cycle is enough of the graphics/display driver support for Meteor Lake being in place that it can actually light up a display...
Back in December AMD posted P-State Linux driver patches for implementing a "Guided Autononmous Mode" of operation to complement the existing the passive mode used by the amd_pstate driver and the pending fully-autonomous/EPP mode that has seen many patch revisions in recent months. While much of AMD's engineering focus has been on getting the P-State EPP code upstreamed, out today is the second iteration of that Guided Autonomous Mode support...
The open-source WebKit browser engine used by Apple's web browsers as well as relied upon by several other vendors and software solutions is out with a notable technology preview update...
Intel overnight released the Media Driver v22.6.6 release that serves as their 2022Q4 quarterly feature release. Most notable with this updated open-source media acceleration stack is adding initial support for next-generation Meteor Lake processors...
Google announced today that moving forward they will be allowing Rust code into the Chromium code-base, the open-source project that ultimately served as the basis for their Chrome web browser...
Following the Windows vs. Linux benchmarks with Intel Arc Graphics from last week, in today's article is a look at how the Intel Arc Graphics A750 and A770 are competing to the AMD Radeon graphics when using the very latest Linux 6.2 kernel along with Mesa 23.0-devel for providing the very latest open-source graphics driver support from each vendor.
Intel today officially announced the Core i9 13900KS as what they claim to be the "world's fastest desktop processor" with up to a 6.0GHz maximum turbo frequency...
Being introduced to the Debian package archive this week is accel-config as Intel's new user-space component for configuring the DSA accelerators found with the new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors...
Since early November AMD has been working on Linux patches for Automatic IBRS. AutoIBRS is a new Zen 4 CPU feature intended to provide better performance than generic Retpolines as part of the Spectre V2 mitigations. Two months later the Linux AutoIBRS patches still haven't been merged yet but up to their sixth revision...
AMD today sent in a batch of AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver fixes for the in-development Linux 6.2. Notable with this week's AMD graphics driver fixes are a few pertaining to the new Radeon RX 7000 series / RDNA3 hardware...
With the Intel VT-d 4.0 specification there is performance monitoring "PerfMon" infrastructure introduced. A new patch series from Intel is preparing for IOMMU performance monitoring with the Linux kernel code...
In addition to the CentOS Hyperscale SIG making great progress on adapting CentOS Stream for hyperscaler needs, at the opposite end of the table is the CentOS Automotive SIG with their "AutoSD" platform they continue working on adapting to make CentOS Stream suitable for use within vehicles...
For those sticking to the bi-weekly Mesa 22.3 point releases rather than riding Mesa Git, Mesa 22.3.3 is out today in providing the very latest fixes to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers...
Following last month's launch of the Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards, AMD's GPUOpen group has now published the instruction set architecture (ISA) programming guide for those interested in RDNA3 GPUs...
ASRock Industrial, the independent company spun out of ASRock that is focused on industrial computers, edge systems, hardware for retail environments, has now partnered with Canonical to begin offering certified devices for Ubuntu Linux...
A six month old merge request to Mesa was finally merged today for enabling Radeon Memory Visualizer (RMV) support with the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver...
The NVK open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs that has seen a lot of progress over the past year is now able to run some games like The Talos Principle, which was the launch title for Vulkan 1.0. While the NVK driver is correctly rendering, it's still slow until the kernel driver side is sorted out with re-clocking...
While many haven't even moved yet to the very speedy Python 3.11 that was released back in October, for those wanting to do some bleeding-edge testing the fourth alpha of Python 3.12 is already out...
Now that the 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" and Xeon CPU Max Series overview is out of the way, you are probably very eager to see some independent performance benchmarks of the much anticipated Sapphire Rapids CPUs that are going up against AMD 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors for 2023... For kicking off our Sapphire Rapids benchmarking, first up is a look at the Xeon Platinum 8490H performance under Linux as the flagship SKU.
Intel has announced the 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" CPUs today along with the Xeon CPU Max Series (Sapphire Rapids HBM) and Data Center GPU Max Series (Ponte Vecchio). Here is an overview of today's announcements prior to getting to some initial Sapphire Rapids Linux benchmarks on Phoronix.
With the next Linux kernel cycle we could see upstream disable their driver support for Microsoft's Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) protocol due to security concerns...
GCC compiler expert Jan Hubicka at SUSE began working on AMD Zen 4 compiler tuning patches that began landing in December for the GCC 13 compiler that will debut as stable in a few months. It looks like the work isn't over on Znver4 tuning with another patch being sent out today for fine-tuning the latest AMD CPU microarchitecture...
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