Phoronix

In-step with early Power11 patches in Linux 6.9, IBM engineers have posted the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) patches for enabling -mcpu=power11 targeting within this open-source compiler...

Tiny Corp has been frustrated before with AMD / ROCm and planned to drop AMD graphics cards in their planned compute boxes over it only to go back to AMD GPUs with their open-source driver stack later. It's now happened again following frustrations over firmware binaries. After recently lobbying AMD to at least open-source some relevant pieces of their firmware and at ~70% confidence over their plans, Tiny Corp announced on Tuesday they are dropping AMD GPUs again from their compute plans...

Following the revised Bcachefs code making it into Linux 6.9 and a warning for Bcachefs multi-device users to move past Linux 6.7, a batch of fixes was merged overnight for Linux 6.9 while further fixes to this file-system are expected soon...

Running XWayland in rootful mode now allows for working HiDPI and fractional scaling support...

It has taken many years but the Mesa 3D open-source graphics drivers have proven very successful from the open-source AMD Vulkan and OpenGL drivers proving they can be capable of competing with the closed-source drivers not only for gaming but also workstation tasks, the Windows vs. Linux graphics driver performance gap largely closed, Microsoft even leveraging Mesa for their translations to the D3D12 API, vendors like Imagination developing once unthinkable open-source drivers, etc. But with the increasing importance to corporations, so has the responsibilities and concerns of Mesa driver developers...

More AMD SEV-SNP bits are upstreamed now for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel that is putting the EPYC processor support on the mainline kernel trajectory for "the ultimate goal of the AMD confidential computing side" to hopefully be in great shape come Linux 6.10 later in the year...

Following recent benchmarks looking at how the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release is looking on Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids as well as the performance gains for AMD EPYC 9004 series on Ubuntu 24.04, I next turned to the Ampere Altra ARM64 server processor for seeing what the performance is looking like there with this Long Term Support Linux distribution release due out in just over one month.

Oracle has announced the general availability of OpenJDK Java 22...

Announced last summer was the Ultra Ethernet Consortium started by the Linux Foundation along with AMD, Intel, Cisco, Meta, Microsoft, Broadcom, and other organizations. Ultra Ethernet aims for high performance networking for the likes of AI and HPC. The group announced today they've courted an additional 45 organizations to become members of this consortium and they are on track for their v1.0 specification in Q3...

Following last week's main set of power management updates for Linux 6.9 that saw AMD P-State Preferred Core support and tuning for Intel Meteor Lake, a secondary set of power management subsystem changes were sent out today for this new kernel...

The x86 cache updates for Linux 6.9 offer an improved memory bandwidth throttling heuristic such as used by Intel Resource Director Technology (RDT) and also AMD EPYC CPUs with the resctrl code...

The Linux 6.9 kernel has a big rework to the CPU timer code that has been years in the making and has some power and performance benefits...

Merged today were all the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel...

XWayland had targeted both the Generic Buffer Management (GBM) and EGLStream APIs due to NVIDIA not supporting GBM like all of the other Linux drivers. But now that the NVIDIA proprietary Linux graphics driver has been boasting GBM support and advancing with their Wayland platform support in general, XWayland is letting go of the EGLStream mess...

The Firefox 124.0 release binaries are now available ahead of the official release announcement tomorrow...

With my recent NVIDIA GH200 Grace CPU benchmarks carried out remotely via GPTshop.ai, besides looking at areas like the 64K kernel page size performance benefits I also ran some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance difference when the binaries were generated by LLVM Clang rather than the default GCC compiler on Ubuntu Linux. This article shows off the performance difference for the 72-core Neoverse-V2 server/HPC processor when leveraging LLVM Clang rather than the GNU Compiler Collection.

CoreCtrl 1.4 was released this weekend as the newest version of this open-source, independently-developed GUI utility for managing CPU and GPU performance characteristics and power/thermal monitoring under Linux, among other capabilities. CoreCtrl does a good job at offering basic GUI-driven controls and monitoring for CPUs and GPUs in the absence of any official GUI solutions by the likes of AMD and Intel...

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund continues investing significant sums of money for important open-source projects. Among the latest projects receiving funding from the STF are the Rust-written Coreutils implementation and Reproducible Builds...

Back in February AMD posted GCC compiler enablement support for Zen 5 with the new "znver5" target ahead of launch. Since then it's been rather quiet and nervous not seeing this support merged ahead of the upcoming GCC 14 stable release, but this morning it's finally happened: the AMD Zen 5 processor enablement has been merged to GCC Git in time for the GCC 14.1 stable release that will be out in the coming weeks...

Along with the input subsystem updates for the Linux 6.9 kernel, the HID subsystem updates were also merged in recent days for this next Linux kernel release. Notable of this pull is enabling support for some newer Samsung Wireless input devices...

Last year Linux kernel developers began clearing out code for Intel's nearly two decade old "Carillo Ranch" platform that was a 90nm 32-bit single core processor for embedded devices in the sub 20 Watt space. It was a ~2007 product that never shipped but the Linux kernel code was left in the upstream tree until beginning to see it removed last year...

While AMD P-State driver's Preferred Core support was merged for Linux 6.9, another notable addition to this driver is still undergoing the patch review process: Core Performance Boost...

The input subsystem updates were merged on Sunday for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel merge window, among various other input changes is adding support for Snakebyte GAMEPADs to the XPad driver...

LibreELEC as the Linux distribution that aims to be just enough of an operating system for bringing up Kodi for HTPC / multimedia needs, the LibreELEC 12 "Omega" Beta 1 release is available today for further improving this media center focused Linux OS...

All of the x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.9 merge window. As usual, most of the x86 platform driver work is around better supporting various Intel Core and AMD Ryzen laptops under Linux...

Intel continues leading the development of the Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem for the Linux kernel while at least for the Linux 6.9 cycle are a few feature patch contributions from AMD...

Joining the other file-systems seeing notable updates for Linux 6.9, the XFS file-system is seeing continued work around online repair support and other improvements...

The Hyprland customizable Wayland compositor with dynamic tiling is celebrating its two year milestone by issuing v0.37 (and a v0.37.1 paper bag release)...

The PCI subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 6.9 kernel. Among the changes are the usual code churn around device-specific quirks and tuning of the power management code...

Going back years but documented in 2022 has been a desire for the SDL hardware/software abstraction layer popular with cross-platform games to offer an abstracted file-system API. That's finally come to reality with the new SDL_Storage interface added for SDL 3.0...

While the GNOME 46 desktop is being released next week, one of the very last minute feature items being merged hit the Mutter codebase on Friday...

Mold 2.30 is out this weekend as the newest version of this open-source high speed linker alternative to GNU Gold/LD and LLVM LLD...

Open-source AMD Linux graphics driver engineer Marek Olak who is known for his focus on the Gallium3D code has shown no signs of slowing down when it comes to discovering new areas to further enhance the performance and tune the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

As noted a month ago that IBM was starting on Power11 CPU/platform enablement for the mainline Linux kernel, indeed the first batch of Power11 code has now been merged for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel...

Tomeu Vizoso who recently has been working on extending the Etnaviv open-source graphics driver to also support the Vivante NPU IP has made great progress on that with competitive performance to the proprietary NPU driver and upstreaming the Teflon framework into Mesa for handling the Neural Processing Unit. Tomeu Vizoso has now shifted his attention to working on an open-source, reverse-engineered NPU driver for the AI hardware found in various Rockchip SoCs...

If you were feeling adventurous and began using the Bcachefs file-system upon its introduction in Linux 6.7 mainline and using it for a multi-device setup, you are best off upgrading to Linux 6.8 as soon as possible due to known issues with the code in v6.7...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his latest weekly development summary to outline all of the new KDE features and bug fixes that have come about for the KDE desktop and apps over the past week...

A slew of new Linux stable kernel point releases were issued today, driven in part for getting out the Intel Register File Data Sampling "RFDS" mitigations for the kernel code as part of this week's disclosure and microcode updates and kernel patches...

The FUSE passthrough mode that's been years in the making for better performance was merged upstream today for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel!..

Earlier this week on Patch Tuesday was the disclosure by Intel of the Register File Data Sampling (RFDS) vulnerability and mitigation via updated CPU microcode and a kernel patch. RFDS is around malicious user-space software potentially being able to infer stale register values from kernel space. Register File Data Sampling affects recent Intel Atom / E-core bearing processors including the latest Raptor Lake Refresh processors. In this article are some initial benchmarks of the RFDS performance impact under Linux when using the Core i9 14900K processor.

Earlier this week with the original Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.9 Linus Torvalds wasn't happy with some of the code pertaining to spinning out a new library code so that it could be re-used by at least the XFS file-system. A revised pull request was since submitted without that library spin-out and Torvalds today went ahead and merged that updated file-system driver...

VKD3D-Proton 2.12 is out today as the newest version of this software used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for implementing Direct3D 12 over the Vulkan API. With VKD3D-proton 2.12 is initial support for NVIDIA Reflex technology along with various other features...

Ahead of next month's Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release, Canonical has released LXD 5.21 as the newest feature update to this container and VM manager. LXD 5.21 now ships with a production-grade graphical user interface by default, brings AMD SEV support for memory encryption of VMs on EPYC CPUs, object storage support, and other features...

All of the ARM64 (AArch64) feature updates have been merged for the Linux 6.9 kernel. Besides the new SoC and platform hardware support, there are a few ARM64 architecture updates worth pointing out...

Intel has published SVT-AV1 2.0 as the newest major feature release to this leading open-source CPU-based AV1 video encoder. Along with various API changes, SVT-AV1 2.0 has yet more encode performance optimizations...

While Mobileye has already announced EyeQ6 and EyeQ7, being upstreamed in the Linux 6.9 kernel is finally support for the EyeQ5 SoC used for advanced driver-assistance systems in various automobiles. The EyeQ5 is a MIPS-based platform now capable of running an upstream kernel...

The Virtual Function I/O (VFIO) updates for the Linux 6.9 merge window bring a mostly mundane assortment of driver patches and other routine changes. But there is a new driver for NVIDIA's Grace-Hopper superchip...

A few days ago I had the chance to indulge on an incredible compute nirvana: eight AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators at my disposal for some albeit brief testing. Not only was it fantastic from the sheer compute performance, but for Phoronix fans, all the more exciting knowing it's atop a fully open-source software stack from the kernel driver up through the various user-space libraries (well, sans the GPU microcode). This first encounter with the AMD MI300 series was eye-opening in seeing how far the ROCm software stack has come and the increased challenges for NVIDIA going forward with the rising competitiveness of AMD's hardware and software efforts.

AMD's HIP Ray-Tracing library "HIP RT" has been one of the few projects under the GPUOpen umbrella that starts off as closed-source software but then is eventually open-sourced... That happened now with the HIP ray-tracing code becoming publicly available...

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai with SUSE has submitted all of the core sound updates and driver changes for the ongoing Linux 6.9 kernel merge window...