Phoronix

Wine 7.21 is out as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot of this software to enjoy Windows games and applications on Linux...

On Thursday when launching AMD 4th Gen EPYC Genoa processors, AMD also published AOCC 4.0 as the newest version of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler. I've been putting it through its paces the past day and continues showing the positive performance impact of proper compiler tuning.

With yesterday's NVIDIA 525.23 Linux driver beta in addition to many improvements in their closed-source code, their in-development open-source GPU kernel driver has also received some enhancements...

In early 2021 Google announced Lyra as a very low bitrate codec intended for speech with aims of getting Lyra and AV1 possible for video chats on 56 kbps connections...

Back in September AMD posted the Linux driver patches for P-State EPP as their latest effort to improve the power efficiency of Ryzen and EPYC processors. Sent out this week is now the fourth iteration of those CPU frequency scaling driver patches...

With the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel release there is the initial Rust infrastructure merged for enabling the use of the Rust programming language for future kernel drivers and other kernel code. But that state in Linux 6.1 is the very basics and not yet practical while now a secondary sent of "Rust for Linux" patches have been sent out for enabling more kernel development to happen with Rust...

If the royalty free open-source processor ISA RISC-V is to enjoy success on the Linux desktop, obviously it needs an office suite... LibreOffice as the open-source office suite alternative to Microsoft Office is now seeing proper RISC-V 64-bit support...

After showcasing the AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" series and geeking out over AMD's reference platform running the Linux-powered open-source OpenBMC, it's time to move on to benchmarking. For evaluating the EPYC Genoa performance under Linux, AMD kindly provided review samples of the EPYC 9654 flagship 96-core processor, the EPYC 9554 64-core processor, and the EPYC 9374F 32-core high frequency CPU. In today's benchmark review I am looking at the EPYC 9554/9654 CPUs while the EPYC 9374F will be featured in its own review in the coming days on Phoronix.

For as exciting and performant as AMD 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" series processors are with up to 96 cores, AVX-512, and the other impressive Zen 4 enhancements, there was something else subtle that got me really excited with Genoa... AMD's "Titanite" reference board for Genoa is running the open-source, Linux-powered OpenBMC!

Following September's successful launch of the AMD Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" desktop processors, today AMD is lifting the embargo on their EPYC 9004 series "Genoa" server processors. EPYC Genoa takes AMD server processors to the new SP5 socket, up to 96 cores / 192 threads per socket, AVX-512 with Zen 4, twelve channels of DDR5 system memory, and much more -- all combined it puts AMD and the industry at new levels of HPC performance. I've been benchmarking the AMD EPYC Genoa processors the past few weeks to astounding success. This article is looking more at the feature set and platform for Genoa while separately are my initial AMD EPYC 9554 / EPYC 9654 Linux review and benchmarks.

NVIDIA has made available their first public beta in the R525 Linux driver series...

DXVK 2.0 is out as a major update to this Direct3D on Vulkan implementation used by Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying D3D9 to D3D11 Windows games on Linux with great speed...

PipeWire 0.3.60 is out today as the newest update to this software used for managing audio and video streams on Linux. With modern Linux distributions PipeWire is increasingly used now as the replacement to PulseAudio in addition to its video capabilities...

While NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs are shipping, the Nouveau Linux driver stack for open-source support on NVIDIA hardware is finally getting ready to provide basic OpenGL support for the existing RTX 30 "Ampere" graphics processors...

Following AMDVLK 2022.Q4.1 from late October, AMDVLK 2022.Q4.2 is now available as AMD's latest official open-source Vulkan Linux driver update for both gamers and enterprise customers...

Sent out today was this week's batch of "drm-misc-next" code containing Direct Rendering Manager updates to the core infrastructure and smaller drivers of material that is ready for queuing ahead of the Linux 6.2 cycle...

Another point release to the ROCm 5.3 series for AMD's open-source compute stack is now available...

While the release next month of Blender 3.4 is planning to ship with Wayland enabled, Fedora Linux 37 users are expected to soon find their packaged Blender versions already running with the Wayland support enabled...

Following last week's release of Mesa 22.3-rc1 that also marked the feature freeze for this quarter's release cycle, Mesa 22.3-rc2 is out today with an initial batch of bug fixes...

Fwupd 1.8.7 is out today with support for updating more device firmware under Linux for different hardware as well as various fixes and other enhancements...

With SC2022 kicking off next week and AMD set to unveil their next-generation server processors tomorrow, Intel is using today to announce the Xeon Max Series and the Data Center GPU Max Series.

Microsoft on Tuesday released .NET 7 with improved Linux support, better performance, and many new features throughout this Microsoft platform stack...

For those working on RISC-V software development on bare metal hardware, the in-development LLVM Clang 16 compiler has added support for allowing "-mtune=native" and "-mcpu=native" to work properly on this CPU ISA...

While the VGA_Switcheroo has long been part of the Linux kernel for laptops with hybrid (dual GPU) graphics for switching between the GPUs on platforms with a hardware mux switch, this current API has been found to be ineffective for the latest laptops like those with "NVIDIA Advanced Optimus" support. Thus NVIDIA is working on and proposing a new Linux user-space API around dynamic mux switching...

The Khronos Group that is known as the standards body behind OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, SPIR-V, glTF, OpenXR, and other industry APIs announced that their next API will be called Kamaros...

Linux kernel developers are looking at deprecating and ultimately removing the SLOB memory allocator...

In addition to Fedora 38 looking at creating Phosh images for mobile devices, Fedora developers now have clearance to go ahead and overhaul how their Fedora Linux live images are assembled...

Intel today published their "20221108" CPU microcode collection alongside announcing various security disclosures for the quarter. Fortunately on the CPU microcode side, the changes are all focused on functional issues...

Over the past three years one of Intel's many promising open-source software projects has been the Rust-written Cloud Hypervisor. Cloud Hypervisor started as just a modern, security-focused, cloud-centric Rust VMM hypervisor for modern hardware/software. It began as just one of many open-source software projects at Intel but last year was folded into the Linux Foundation umbrella while Intel continues to be a major contributor to the project. Coming as a bit of a surprise today is AMD announcing they have joined the Cloud Hypervisor project...

It looks like Fedora could be taking on more mobile ambitions with a Phosh image now proposed for running that Wayland shell focused on smartphones and tablets while delivering a good GNOME-based experience. Separately, a change proposal is expected for also introducing a Fedora Linux image with KDE Plasma Mobile...

Back in 2019 NVIDIA open-sourced the PhysX 4.1 SDK and was working on a PhysX 5.0 open-source code drop while we haven't heard anything more on the matter in the past two years. Coming out this morning as a surprise is the NVIDIA PhysX 5.1 SDK open-source release...

When it comes to new AMD AM5 motherboards featuring an X670 series chipset, one of the cheapest options right now is the ASRock X670E PG Lightning that retails for around $249 USD. I picked up one of these motherboards at launch and has been working out well on Linux for those wanting to build a cost-minded AMD Zen 4 desktop system.

New to the upcoming Mesa 22.3 release is Rusticl as a Rust-written OpenCL implementation for Mesa drivers. Rusticl supports OpenCL 3.0, handles OpenCL images and other features, works with multiple drivers, and is modern and maintained. Already among Mesa developers is a discussion that has begun around removing the older "Clover" OpenCL Gallium3D implementation once Rusticl has firmly hit parity with that older, unmaintained state tracker...

It's been a long time since there has been much in the way of notable Nouveau DRM driver changes merged to the Linux kernel for improving the open-source NVIDIA graphics support. Fortunately, that is changing with Linux 6.2 set to receive a rather big update...

Since the Linux 5.19 kernel there have been many reports on Twitter, Reddit, or forums, and elsewhere over open-source AMD Radeon driver users experiencing crashes that often then appear in the kernel log around fences timing out. A fix for this show-stopping bug for AMD gamers looks like it will be coming to the Linux 6.2 kernel...

Towards the end of October there finally came about a patch series fleshing out the "accel" subsystem for the Linux kernel in preparing this new subsystem/framework that builds atop the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code and is designed for all the up and coming AI accelerator drivers for the kernel. Given the number of accelerator drivers from different vendors eyeing mainline kernel adoption, this new compute accelerator framework is quickly being formed...

The NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver that was started earlier this year and has been progressing nicely the past few months is starting to see work now on its own shader compiler where as up to this point has been relying on existing Nouveau Mesa code for code generation...

Texinfo as the GNU typesetting syntax and the project's preferred documentation format is out with a major update...

Upstream Coreboot has phased out support for older AMD 14h / 15h / 16h series processors and associated motherboards...

Following my Core i5 13600K and Core i9 13900K Linux reviews for these new Raptor Lake processors, which were carried out under Ubuntu Linux, I've been carrying out my usual follow-up tests like looking at how well these new Intel CPUs are running under other distributions. To little surprise, Intel's own rolling-release Clear Linux distribution can offer some big-time improvements over a stock Ubuntu installation.

There has long been plans for supporting the Vulkan API with the Blender 3D modelling open-source software but there has been a lack of developers working on it. Fortunately, things are starting to (slowly) come together on Vulkan enablement for Blender...

With the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT / RX 7900 XTX having been announced last week and set to ship on 13 December, it's down to crunch time for ensuring that the open-source Linux driver support is in shape. Unlike on the Windows side where it's just expected of the user to navigate to AMD.com and download a convenient driver installer, on Linux that's not exactly the case. AMD will likely have their Radeon Software for Linux driver package on their website but that is limited in scope to their few supported enterprise/LTS Linux distributions supported, while most gamers/enthusiasts will be left wondering about the Linux kernel and Mesa versioning requirements...

An ugly hack within the Linux kernel that has been in mainline for over three years has been called out. Due to a buggy X.Org Server / xf86-video-modesetting DDX, the Linux kernel has been imposing different behavior on whether a process starts with "X" and in turn disable the atomic mode-setting support...

With next-generation Meteor Lake CPUs the integrated graphics are set to have native HDMI 2.1 display capabilities. Intel's open-source Linux kernel driver has begun those HDMI 2.1 preparations and sent out today were early patches for enabling HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link (FRL)...

Intel compiler engineers continue being very busy working to land as much of the new CPU feature support as they can into GCC 13 for what is the next annual compiler release that will debut as GCC 13.1 in the early months of 2023...

Debuting on Sunday was Meson 0.64 as the newest version of this open-source build system that is increasingly being used by a variety of software projects for its speed, good cross-platform support, and overall feature set compared to alternatives...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.1-rc4 as the latest weekly test release for the in-development Linux 6.1 kernel...

Along with the likes of OBS Studio adding NVENC AV1 support for enjoying GPU-accelerated AV1 video encoding with GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs, the widely-used FFmpeg library has merged its support for NVIDIA NVENC AV1 video encoding...

Last month Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede warned that old and "weird" laptops could see broken backlight controls with the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel. He issued a call for testing and as a result was provided valuable feedback that led to some new fixes now on the way. But there still is more work ahead and he's requested further testing by Linux laptop users to ensure the reworked backlight handling is in good shape...

Made public earlier this year was Spectre-BHB / BHI as a speculative execution vulnerability similar to Spectre V2 and affecting Intel and Arm CPUs. At the time Neoverse N2 / N1 / V1 and older cores like Cortex-A15 / A57 / A72 were known to be vulnerable and required software mitigations. The upcoming AmpereOne is also vulnerable to Spectre-BHB and has a patch now on its way to the Linux kernel for mitigating this Spectre class vulnerability...