Phoronix

Earlier this year at the OCP Regional Summit in Prague AMD first presented openSIL as their new open-source CPU silicon initialization effort that can integrate with Coreboot and open-source boot firmware solutions. AMD openSIL is currently being prototyped on Genoa platforms but in a few years will eventually replace AGESA on both client and server processors. Later this month at the OCP Global Summit, there will be a new presentation on AMD openSIL...

Merged to LLVM 18 Git yesterday was the initial support for the OpenMP kernel language, an effort around having performance portable GPU codes as an alternative to the likes of the proprietary CUDA...

A new version of FEX-Emu has been released, the open-source project aiming to be "the greatest x86/x86_64 emulator on Linux" that includes the ability to run Steam and Steam Play Windows games on AArch64 Linux systems...

A new release of Fwupd 1.9.6 is out today and it's notable in that AMD graphics cards can now enjoy firmware upgrades under Linux. This AMD GPU firmware updating works with Navi 3x GPUs and future hardware on recent versions of the Linux kernel...

PipeWire 0.3.81 was released today for what's being treated as the PipeWire 1.0 release candidate ahead of its stable release still comimg up this calendar year...

Intel Linux graphics driver engineers are doing a bit of house keeping to the i915 DRM driver and removing some pre-production hardware bits as well as the incomplete Ponte Vecchio support...

Valve has just released Proton 8.0-4 as stable on the Steam client for enhancing the experience for running Windows games on Linux for this Wine-based software that powers Steam Play...

Ferrous Systems has made available open-source code for Ferrocene, their Rust compiler focused on safety-critical and mission-critical environments. The Ferrocene compiler is being made available under Apache 2.0 or MIT licensing...

For those curious about the performance implications of using DDR5 ECC memory with AMD Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" processors, I ran some benchmarks with ECC memory with the Error Correction Code functionality enabled and then disabled for evaluating the impact.

A fix has made its way into the Linux PCI subsystem's power management branch to address various AMD Ryzen Rembrandt and Phoenix generation laptops failing to resume from suspend when external USB devices are attached for initiating the system resume...

The latest Linux kernel patches for enabling the Milk-V Pioneer board have been posted, which is that interesting 64-core RISC-V micro-ATX board with two PCIe x16 slots and more...

WayVNC 0.7 was released today as the newest feature update to this VNC server for use with wlroots-based Wayland compositors like Sway. WayVNC will dynamically attach to running Wayland sessions and allow for convenient VNC server support...

The Mobileye EyeQ 5 SoC that can power fully-autonomous (Level 5) driving for vehicles and provide other assisted-driving technologies for a variety of automobiles could soon see mainline support in the Linux kernel...

In addition to Vulkan sparse support that works with the existing i915 kernel driver, another exciting open-source Intel Vulkan driver development this week is landing a transfer queue implementation for DG2/Alchemist GPUs. This in turn can help with hybrid graphics systems and other situations...

A set of patches posted last week can improve the Linux kernel's performance of accounted kernel memory allocations by around 30%...

Following discussions on the GCC mailing list in recent weeks, a GCC security policy was added for the GNU Compiler Collection codebase to outline the compiler project's security process...

With the much-delayed Mesa 23.2 finally having been released last week, Mesa 23.1.9 is out the door as the last planned maintenance release for that open-source driver series introduced back in Q2...

Motivated by a 25% performance degradation seen on an Intel Xeon Scalable dual socket server due to Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS), Red Hat's Waiman Long has been working on a patch series to update the IBRS handling in different conditions for affected Intel processors on Linux...

Redox OS, the open-source Rust-written operating system led by developer Jeremy Soller, has been drafting some exciting plans for the rest of this year and moving into 2024...

Google formally unveiled Android 14 today in New York City at its Made By Google event. With that, Google has also published the Android 14 Open-Source Project (AOSP)...

GNOME developer Christian Hergert recently demonstrated how Linux terminal emulators have the potential of running much faster. At the time it didn't sound like he would pursue the matter further but more recently he's begun working on folding some performance improvements into GNOME's VTE for a faster terminal experience...

The newest open-source project hosted by the Linux Foundation is OpenPubkey, which is a collaboration with Docker and BastionZero and will be available for Docker container signing with zero-trust passwordless authentication...

Vulkan 1.3.266 was published a few days ago with a handful of fixes and two new extensions. One of those extensions, VK_NV_low_latency2 is quite interesting...

When it comes to the BSD operating systems, DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 is one of the most interesting innovations. HAMMER2 supports online deduplication, clustering, multiple mountable file-system roots, snapshots, compression, encryption, extensive checksumming, and other features. Over the past decade it's evolved quite nicely and in recent days has seen further enhancements...

Currently when hibernating a Linux system LZO compression is used for preserving the memory contents while a new patch series posted today by Qualcomm allow for changing out the compression API used and makes LZ4 a new option during Linux hibernation...

A nasty vulnerability has been made public today concerning Glibc's dynamic loader that can lead to full root privileges being obtained by local users. This affects Linux distributions of the past two years with the likes of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, 23.04, Fedora 38, and others vulnerable to this local privilege escalation issue...

The biggest hindrance for using Intel Arc Graphics for Linux gaming has been the lack of Vulkan sparse support as needed for running many newer Windows DirectX 12 games atop Valve's Steam Play with Proton using VKD3D-Proton. Intel recently did implement Vulkan sparse support for ANV in Mesa 23.3 but it only works with their yet-to-be-upstreamed and still-experimental Xe kernel driver. But now Intel Linux graphics driver engineers have managed to pull off a solution for getting the sparse resources supported while using the existing i915 kernel DRM driver...

It was a decade ago that a security researcher commented on X.Org Server security being even "worse than it looks" and that the GLX code for example was "80,000 lines of sheer terror" and hundreds of bugs being uncovered throughout the codebase. In 2023 new X.Org security vulnerabilities continue to be uncovered, two of which were made public today and date back to X11R2 code from the year 1988...

Today the review embargo lifts on the first AMD-powered Framework laptop. There's one of the AMD Framework laptops in the lab for Linux testing and benchmarking but unfortunately no review for launch day due to being held up by a BIOS regression and thus unable to properly utilize accelerated graphics until a new BIOS revision is made available in the coming days...

GNU Binutils has added support for the ARCv3 32-bit and 64-bit CPU architecture...

Rust bindings are coming to the Linux kernel's workqueue (WQ) infrastructure that is used for deferring work to a kernel thread for asynchronous process execution...

As written about last month, AMD Linux engineers have been working on PMF Linux driver support for a "Smart PC Solutions Builder". The AMD Smart PC Solutions Builder feature is intended to provide OEMs with more control over system power/performance policies. It looks like systems making use of this feature are already to the marketplace or imminent with AMD having already landed the PMF firmware...

Adding to the list of notable features coming with Mesa 23.3 later this quarter is enabling delta color compression (DCC) for multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) images on AMD RDNA3 (GFX11) graphics processors...

A Phoronix reader recently published a guide that at its heart is a set of commands aimed at boosting the performance of SteamOS on the AMD APU powered Steam Deck. Here are some benchmarks showing the performance impact from these changes on the SteamOS 3.5 Preview release.

Checking for the presence of Intel virtualization (VMX) support and it being enabled can be easily achieved by looking at the flags in /proc/cpuinfo. But to this point AMD virtualization (SVM) has always been shown to user-space via /proc/cpuinfo even when the BIOS/platform has disabled SVM functionality. Finally for Linux 6.7 this oversight is being corrected...

Similar to Embree 4.0 adding Intel graphics acceleration earlier this year via SYCL, Intel's OpenVKL library that is also part of their oneAPI rendering toolkit has now added SYCL graphics acceleration with OpenVKL 2.0...

Python 3.12 is out today as the latest major feature release for this extremely popular programming language. Python 3.12 continues the trend of recent releases of enhancing the performance while continuing to introduce exciting new functionality...

The Linux kernel's Fair Queue "FQ" network packet scheduling algorithm that is celebrating its 10th anniversary since being mainlined in the Linux 3.12 kernel cycle is celebrating by rolling out some performance optimizations with the next version of the Linux kernel...

The long ongoing saga of upstreaming AMD's Pensando Elba SoC support is now partially over with the initial enablement patches around the DeviceTree being queued as part of the SoC changes destined for the Linux 6.7 kernel cycle...

The Linux Mint project has released an "Edge" ISO of Linux Mint 21.2 that is intended for users of new PC hardware where it's unable to boot the current Linux Mint release due to its older kernel version...

The past several Linux kernel cycles has seen Loongson engineers working on implementing more kernel features for LoongArch, the MIPS-derived and RISC-V-inspired architecture out of China for domestic PCs. The performance of LoongArch CPUs so far still aren't competitive to x86_64 or Arm hardware but at least slowly are becoming more practical with more features being wired up. The latest milestone is the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization support appearing ready ahead of Linux 6.7...

A newly-opened merge request for GNOME's Mutter compositor adds hardware acceleration for the NVIDIA proprietary driver for secondary GPUs such as in the case of hybrid systems and other setups with multiple monitors whereby the NVIDIA GPU with proprietary driver is powering some of those outputs...

After Steam on Linux usage topped to nearly 2% in July with the phenomenal success of the Steam Deck and with greater marketshare than Apple macOS, in August it took a dip and now the September numbers are out and points to a second consecutive month of the Linux percentage receding...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.6-rc4 as the newest test release for this kernel that is looking to be released as stable around the end of October...

Several months back was work to disable all Microsoft Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) drivers in the Linux kernel on the basis of being insecure and other factors. That plan of disabling the RNDIS drivers was faced by opposition around concerns of potentially disrupting USB tethering support and the like. It's been months since hearing anything about updated plans for disabling or dropping the RNDIS drivers but the Git branch was updated today for disabling this class of drivers...

Prolific RADV developer Samuel Pitoiset with Valve's Linux graphics driver team has re-enabled Delta Color Compression (DCC) with mipmaps for AMD GFX11 (RDNA3) hardware for the Mesa 23.3 release...

Microsoft released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230924 this week as the newest version of their in-house Linux distribution. The driving force behind this release is to get out rebuilt AArch64 packages following the recent GCC security vulnerability that affected Arm 64-bit built software...

ReactOS Deutschland e.V. has hired a longtime contributor to this "open-source Windows" project to spend the next five months working on the ReactOS GUI setup mode as an alternative to their classic text-based setup mode...

Disclosed back in August was the Inception vulnerability affecting all Zen processors. It took until today though for the mainline Linux kernel to mitigate Hygon processors for this vulnerability for those Zen 1 CPUs formed from the AMD-Chinese joint venture...

The xf86-video-siliconmotion X.Org driver has seen its first new release in six years for supporting the Silicon Motion Lynx and Cougar chipsets found in vintage laptops...