Phoronix

There should be "slight improvements for I/O performance" coming to Intel Xeon Scalable Ice Lake and Sapphire Rapids servers on a future kernel release with a patch having surfaced to remove a check that led to these newer processors not seeing HWP I/O boosting enabled...

Merged last cycle was a big Zstd update for Linux 6.2 that took the kernel's Zstandard compression/decompression implementation to match that of upstream v1.5 after being stuck in the v1.4 series for more than a year. Following that, Zstd 1.5.4 was released last month. The hope was Zstd 1.5.4 would quickly follow into the mainline kernel while that is now delayed to Linux 6.4 and for the 6.3 kernel cycle seeing just a few fixes...

A set of patches sent out this morning lay out the initial foundation for RISC-V auto-vectorization support within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...

After earlier this week providing the initial Linux benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D across many Linux gaming tests as well as nearly 400 other tests, in today's article I am looking at the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D as the 12-core / 24-thread processor with the hefty 128MB L3 cache on this Zen 4 desktop processor. Due to having less time with the 7900X3D thus far, today's article is just getting things started in looking at the Linux gaming performance -- both native Linux games as well as many Windows games running on Linux thanks to Valve's wonderful Steam Play (Proton + DXVK / VKD3D-Proton) software.

Posted today was the "v1" patch series implementing threaded/atomic console infrastructure for printk. This is one of the last steps needed before the real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support can be finally mainlined into the Linux kernel...

The rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed package has begun rolling out a new "patterns-glibc-hwcaps-x86_64_v3" package that is automatically installed on supported systems and allows for automatically installing "recommended" x86-64-v3 optimized packages where available in the name of enjoying greater performance...

For those doing large Linux kernel builds such as with the "allyesconfig" build option for including as many of the available drivers as possible into the assembled Linux kernel image, objtool improvements ready to go with Linux 6.3 should cut down on the RAM usage and also speed-up the kernel build time. These improvements were motivated by Linux kernel developers beginning to run out of memory when trying to carry out the "allyesconfig" kernel builds on desktops with 32GB of RAM...

Going back to 2016 Intel began work on the SoundWire support for Linux, the MIPI standard started in 2014 to help consolidate audio interfaces between PC and mobile hardware. In preparation for seemingly new AMD hardware coming to market with SoundWire support, AMD engineers recently began working on an AMD SoundWire driver...

While the open-source Mesa 3D drivers are most well known for use on Linux, they are used by other platforms too like Haiku, the BSDs, and even Microsoft Windows with WSL and the like. For those making use of the Mesa 3D drivers on the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system to enjoy OpenGL support, merged for Mesa 23.1 is an improved EGL implementation for that platform...

A lot of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates were merged for the Linux 6.3 cycle to further enhance the open-source virtualization stack...

Following last week's SoC and platform updates that included mainlining of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 support, new Qualcomm 5G RAN platform support, and many more Arm boards being enabled, this week saw the SoC driver updates now submitted...

Valve has just published the Steam Survey results for the month prior and it points to Steam on Linux as a percentage dropping as well as a similar pullback in the Steam Deck hardware usage...

Earlier this week Greg Kroah-Hartman submitted the USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates for the ongoing Linux 6.3 kernel merge window...

Following a three month lull, last week Intel got back to releasing Compute-Runtime and IGC compiler updates. They have been working to shift to a monthly release cadence while during this transition period they needed extra time as it also rolled out some compiler/runtime interface changes. Now back into their swing of things, for kicking off the new month they have the Compute Runtime 22.53.25242.13 release...

The Godot engine developers are starting off March with a bang... The much anticipated Godot 4.0 engine that has been in development for years has been released as stable!..

An updated scheduler model for Intel Alder Lake P processors has been merged into the LLVM compiler after finding some differences compared to Intel's documentation/guidance...

In addition to the in-development Apple M1/M2 DRM kernel graphics/display driver being written in Rust, there is now a second graphics-related kernel driver seeing early work in Rust. The existing VGEM driver is being rewritten in the Rust programming language...

Microsoft engineers continue to work heavily on enhancing the Linux support for Hyper-V considering that in the Azure public cloud at last report was more than 50% of their VMs running Linux. Microsoft has continued implementing more Hyper-V features within the Linux kernel and their latest is working on Virtual Trust Level (VTL) integration as part of Virtual Secure Mode (VSM) handling...

A few months back the generic xf86-video-modesetting X.Org driver added TearFree page-flipping support. The option eliminates screen tearing without the use of a compositor and was seen as a win by many for this generic DDX driver that works atop the modern DRM/KMS kernel drivers. But a rather annoying issue was discovered that could lead to audio/video synchronization problems was uncovered and is now fixed in the latest driver code...

Loongson engineers continue working to improve their MIPS64-derived, RISC-V-inspired LoongArch CPU architecture code. With the in-development Linux 6.3 kernel are yet more improvements, including now supporting Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR) for better security...

The BFQ I/O scheduler has long been suited well for MMC/SD card storage devices with a single queue now finally with Linux 6.3 the Kconfig setup will suggest/imply that I/O scheduler to help ensure it gets built...

While a short month there still were 243 original news articles on Phoronix written by your's truly about various open-source and Linux topics. There were also nine additional Linux hardware reviews looking at the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, the long-awaited NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080/4090 Linux performance results, and more. Here is a look back at what excited open-source/Linux enthusiasts in February...

With the Fedora Linux change completion deadline passed, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has been eyeing up their approved list to see what didn't make the cut for Fedora 38 that is due out in April...

After publishing their initial Quantum software development kit beta last year, Intel today released the Quantum SDK 1.0 version to help grow the developer ecosystem for quantum computing...

NVIDIA today released their first beta driver in the R530 driver series for Linux users...

While in recent days there has been much talk around the new, experimental and currently out-of-tree SSDFS file-system for NVMe ZNS drives, when it comes to a modern flash-optimized Linux file-system today, the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues handling that space well and has been battle-tested via deployment on Android devices and more. With Linux 6.3, F2FS continues to be refined with more fixes and other minor enhancements...

The HP Dev One Linux laptop is now sold-out and the production on it has ended. The HP Dev One that launched last year was the very interesting collaboration between HP and System76 for coming out with a Linux laptop catering to developers and running Pop!_OS...

With the EXT4 file-system being quite mature at this stage, with many kernel cycles these days this widely-used file-system just sees bug fixes and other minor work. But for the newly-opened Linux 6.3 cycle, EXT4 is seeing a nice performance boost under certain conditions with direct I/O...

As was expected given the FFmpeg 6.0 FOSDEM presentation earlier this month in Brussels, this multimedia open-source project is now celebrating its latest major release...

Making its debut today as their latest open-source project receiving optimizations for 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors, Intel has rolled out ISPC 1.19 as their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler...

As of today the KDE Plasma development branch is now made Qt6-only as development work on Plasma 6.0 heats up...

While GIMP 3.0 will hopefully release this year after years of waiting, for those using the current GIMP 2.10 stable series the v2.10.34 release is now available to round out the day...

Ahead of tomorrow's launch of the AMD Ryzen 7800X3D / 7900X3D / 7950X3D processors, today marks the embargo expiry on the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X3D 3D V-Cache processor. Today I can share with you the initial performance around the performance of this $699 USD processor that features a 144MB cache.

LibreOffice 7.5 released earlier this month as just the latest six-month update to this cross-platform, open-source office suite while today the Apache Software Foundation released OpenOffice 4.1.14. While the prior release, Apache OpenOffice 4.1.13, happened all the way back in July, there isn't much to show for today's update...

Armbian as the Ubuntu and Debian based Linux distribution that is optimized for single board computers primarily in the ARM/AArch64 and RISC-V space is out with its first major update of 2023...

The Vulkan 1.3.242 spec is now available with a handful of clarifications and fixes to the existing text as well as introducing the new VK_NV_low_latency extension...

The Linux kernel since last year has mistakenly left systems relying on the original Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) for Spectre V2 mitigation without Single Threaded Indirect Branch Predictor (STIBP) coverage for cross-HyperThread dealing with this Spectre vulnerability. There is a patch underway that is resolving this issue for Intel Skylake era systems...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is seeing work towards being able to support Direct3D 12 Feature Level 12.2 with VKD3D-Proton to further enhance the Steam Play gaming experience on Linux...

A change made to the Linux kernel back in 2016 is causing issues with NVMe PCIe support on some ARM64 devices like the Microsoft Surface Pro X and Lenovo ThinkPad X13s. A new kernel quirk is on the way for aiming to address that and yield working NVMe storage...

Merged this past week into Mesa 23.1 is initial support for Loongson's LoongArch CPU architecture...

While two years ago in Linux 5.16 multi-actuator hard drive support was merged, with the in-development Linux 6.3 kernel the BFQ I/O scheduler is now seeing some tuning for multi-actuator drives...

The hardware monitoring support among consumer desktop motherboards continues to improve with Linux 6.3 adding sensor support for many ASUS B650/B660/X670 AMD Ryzen motherboards...

While Cloudflare is in the process of replacing Nginx with their in-house, Rust-written alternative, the Cloudflare infrastructure is vast and has many different services at play. For one of the areas they are still currently relying on Nginx, this week they published a blog post outlining how they rewrote an Nginx module in the C programming language to instead make use of Rust...

Cloud Hypervisor as a reminder is what started out as an open-source Intel project to develop a modern hypervisor focused on cloud workloads and with security being among the leading concerns. Cloud Hypervisor more recently is developed as a Linux Foundation project but with Intel's software engineers being among the leading contributors to the project along with the likes of Arm, Tencent, Bytedance, and Microsoft...

The cryptography subsystem updates for the Linux 6.3 merge window landed earlier this week with a few notable additions this cycle...

FreeBSD 13.2 Beta 3 is now available in providing the latest test release for this forthcoming update to the FreeBSD 13 stable series...

The RISC-V architecture updates were merged this Saturday for the Linux 6.3 merge window...

Sent out for review on Friday evening were 76 patches implementing SSDFS, the newest open-source Linux file-system and catering to flash-friendly drives and particularly those with NVMe Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) support...

For modern Intel platforms supporting Coreboot whether it be for Chromebooks or on server platforms, they are still beholden to the Intel Firmware Support Package (FSP) binary blobs. But Google and Intel engineers have been working to enable more flexibility around the FSP binaries by being able to optionally reduce the amount of proprietary firmware executed on the CPU, optionally weeding out some of the optional FSP components, and optimizing the status quo to achieve greater boot speeds...

For those with an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT or RX 7900 XTX graphics card, the latest Mesa 23.1-devel code as of Friday has seen a number of fixes land for benefiting the GFX11/RDNA3 graphics processors...