Phoronix

Ahead of hopefully enabling the RADV Vulkan Graphics Pipeline Libraries "GPL" support by default for this quarter's Mesa 23.1 release, the RADV driver has now landed on-disk shader caching support for GPL libraries...

The CentOS Hyperscale special interest group that is focused on providing new packages and features atop CentOS Stream for use by hyperscalers like Meta and Twitter have now established a "hyperscale-intel" repository for Intel-optimized packages...

While for a number of years now System76 has manufactured their own Thelio desktop line of Linux PCs from their facility in Denver, Colorado (and their Launch Keyboard), they have long talked up ambitions for eventually manufacturing their own Linux laptops rather relying on other white-label manufacturers as they currently do. Today a first glimpse of their in-house laptop prototyping was shared,..

As part of the process for getting Intel's new Xe DRM kernel driver upstreamed as the eventual replacement to the existing i915 driver for Gen12 graphics hardware and newer, Intel engineers on Monday posted the initial Xe DRM scheduler patches that have been separated out to get review on them, figure out what can be common/shared among drivers, and get those bits upstreamed...

NVIDIA has published updated NVIDIA TU10x /TU11x "Turing" GPU firmware to support newer RTX 20 hardware revisions and fix outstanding issues affecting the open-source Nouveau driver...

As I pointed out at the end of March, AMD has begun bringing up a new CDNA GPU in their Linux kernel driver code, past the currently known Instinct MI300 "GFX940" series. This "GFX943" part is some new CDNA multi-XCC accelerator and the open-source AMD engineers have begun posting many patches for this new GPU target. The initial bits of that support will appear in the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle...

A currently-testing implementation of VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock has been published for Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver. This Vulkan fragment shader interlock support is used by some game emulators as well as being useful in running Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan and similar purposes...

Peter Hutterer, Red Hat's leading Linux input expert, today released xf86-input-libinput 1.3 as the newest version of this X.Org Server driver for making use of libinput in an X.Org Server world...

Wayland 1.22 is now available as the newest feature update to this core set of Wayland protocol and helper code...

Fedora Workstation developers and those involved at Red Hat have been working to improve the state of disk encryption on Fedora with a end-goal of possibly making the installer encrypt systems by default...

The Debian Installer for the upcoming Debian 12 "Bookworm" release has reached its release candidate phase...

SUSE announced today the release of "Piz Bernina", its latest quarterly update to the SUSE Adaptable Linux Platform that is working to establish the next-generation SUSE/openSUSE computing platform...

Among the many new features coming in Linux 6.3 -- including many AMD additions -- is the AMD P-State EPP "Energy Performance Preference" support being merged for modern Ryzen and EPYC systems. AMD P-State EPP can further help tune the performance and power efficiency of AMD Linux systems beyond the existing basic AMD P-State driver support and address some existing deficiencies. Here are some benchmarks of the AMD P-State and ACPI CPUFreq driver configurations benchmarked on an EPYC Milan-X server with the in-development Linux 6.3 kernel.

A rather profound change is pending for Mesa 23.1 that should lead to this OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver's memory utilization being cut in half for most games without negatively impacting the performance and likely closing a number of bugs in the process...

One of several notable open-source projects to rewrite key Linux software components with the memory-safety-focused Rust programming language is uutils as an alternative to GNU Coreutils. Released this weekend was uutils v0.0.18 that continues to enhance compatibility with the upstream GNU Coreutils programs...

Intel compiler engineers have sent out the initial GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler patches for enabling the newly-disclosed AMX-COMPLEX extension with next year's Xeon Scalable "Granite Rapids" processors...

In addition to today marking the release of Qt 6.5 LTS, Slint 1.0 has been released as a Rust-focused graphical toolkit that also supports bindings for other programming languages. Slint aims to deliver efficient and fluid GUIs from embedded to desktop and features its own markup language...

Apache IoTDB 1.1 has been released today as this database for the "Internet of Things" as a high performance time-series database solution. Like with most time-series databases, ApAche IoTDB aims to provide a high performance solution for data management and analysis from the edge to the cloud with high throughput, efficient data storage, and robust open-source software integration...

While WebKitGTK already provides accelerated compositing support, there are different code paths depending upon whether Wayland or X11 are used and various other complexities involved as well as differences between using the GTK3 and GTK4 toolkits. WebKitGTK developers have been working to instead shift their multiple different code paths toward one route by way of DMA-BUF...

Out today is the Qt 6.5 toolkit that is also now the second Qt6 long-term support release...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.3-rc5 and it's looking to be in good shape for this stage of development...

Along with the Phoronix Q1'2023 recap, here is a look back at what excited Phoronix readers the most in March when it came to all of the original open-source and Linux focused content. During March on Phoronix were 240 original news articles and 15 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles written by your's truly...

If you have been wanting to experiment with running the open-source Coreboot on a modern Intel Alder Lake (Z690) motherboard, the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4 that works thanks to 3mdeb's Dasharo is now for sale at its lowest price ever at just over $150...

Earlier this week I wrote about a budget Gigabyte motherboard for AMD Ryzen CPUs seeing Linux sensor monitoring support with the addition to the Gigabyte WMI sensors driver. Two more Gigabyte motherboards are now enabled for this driver in time for the Linux 6.3-rc5 release...

Sent to Linus Torvalds on Saturday and already merged ahead of today's Linux 6.3-rc5 release were a set of input driver fixes. Most notable with that round of fixes were addressing some touchpad and keyboard issues with some TUXEDO Computers laptops when resuming from suspend...

FreeBSD 13.2-RC4 was scheduled to be the last release candidate for this BSD operating system update but then 13.2-RC5 came with one fix. Now in dragging out the release into April, FreeBSD 13.2-RC6 has been released with another fix...

Introduced with Intel Xeon Scalable 4th Gen "Sapphire Rapids" processors was the In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA) for hardware accelerating data compression/decompression combined with primitive analytics functions for helping to accelerate the likes of RocksDB and ClickHouse. Intel IAA with Sapphire Rapids has already been supported for some time on an open-source stack as laid out in the Intel Sapphire Rapids accelerator setup guide while now Intel engineers are preparing Linux for IAA 2.0...

The Blender open-source 3D modeling software as well as the GTK toolkit are the latest open-source projects this week ironing out support for Wayland's fractional scaling protocol...

Following yesterday's Wine 8.5 bi-weekly development release, Wine-Staging 8.5 is out for this experimental/testing version where some 500+ extra patches are applied atop the upstream Wine code-base...

The KDE developers ended March on a high note with more fixes, continued porting around Qt 6, and also taking care of more Plasma Wayland issues...

During the first quarter of 2023 on Phoronix I wrote 708 original news articles pertaining to Linux, open-source, and hardware. That was complemented by another 45 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured articles for the quarter. Here is a look back at what excited Linux/open-source enthusiasts for the quarter...

Wine 8.5 is out to end out the month as the newest bi-weekly development release for enjoying the ability to run Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

Intel's oneAPI software engineers are closing out the quarter by releasing oneDNN 3.1 as the newest version of this neural network library that is used by the likes of PyTorch, Tensorflow, PaddlePaddle, ONNX, OpenVINO, MATLAB's Deep Learning Toolbox, Apache MXNet, and many other applications...

The Panfrost DRM driver providing open-source kernel graphics driver support for modern Arm Mali graphics in various SoCs is seeing some new hardware support for the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle as well as now supporting speed binning functionality...

Vulkan 1.3.246 has been published with one prominent new extension introduced that was started by Nintendo and worked on by several other hardware/software vendors...

Google engineers on Thursday posted initial "request for comments" patches on their KVM-CPUFreq driver that is part of their effort to improve the dynamic voltage and frequency scaling behavior and task placement within KVM-based virtual machines. This effort is leading to big improvements in raw performance and performance-per-Watt for tasks running within Linux VMs...

Sound Open Firmware "SOF" 2.5 has been released as this open-source sound/DSP firmware initiative that was originally started by Intel but now is a Linux Foundation project and seeing hardware support from multiple vendors...

The Bloomberg financial, software, and media company has announced their FOSS Fund as a small step for helping open-source projects they rely on and of interest to their employees...

With the Fedora 39 release later this year the developers are planning on moving to RPM 4.19 as the newest version of their packaging format...

The beta of Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" and its various spins/flavors were released overnight for testing...

Since last year AMD-Xilinx has been posting Linux patches for enabling CDX as a new bus between application processors (APUs) and FPGAs. The AMD CDX bus is now poised for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle...

While last week NVIDIA promoted their 530 Linux driver series to stable, for those using the prior NVIDIA 525 series production branch a new point release was issued today that backports several fixes...

Modern MSI laptops will see improved feature support with the upstream Linux 6.4 kernel this summer thanks to a new driver set to be merged...

While waiting for AMD 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" instances to become available via the major public cloud providers, I was curious to see how existing AMD EPYC Milan instances compare to Intel's new Sapphire Rapids instances in public preview on Google Cloud. While expecting some friendly competition, at the same vCPU size EPYC Milan was managing to deliver not only better performance-per-dollar but also even better raw performance in numerous workloads against the Google Cloud C3 Sapphire Rapids.

VP8 and H.264 have long been supported as part of WebRTC simulcast in the Chrome web browser while with the upcoming Chrome 113 release, VP9 and AV1 simulcast support is being enabled...

Intel Linux engineer Peter Zijlstra has sent out updated patches on the kernel patch series he's been working on the past several months around the "EEVDF" CPU scheduler for improving upon the current CFS scheduler code...

For those that happen to have a Gigabyte A320M-S2H V2 micro-ATX motherboard or you have been looking out for a low-end, budget motherboard for an AMD Ryzen AM4 build, the A320M-S2H V2 is the latest seeing working sensor support with the mainline Linux kernel...

Toward the end of last year Arm detailed Scalable Matrix Extension 2 (SME2) for adding more capabilities to Armv9-A around speedy matrix processing. Merged this morning is initial support for SME2 within Binutils as part of the GNU compiler toolchain for the GNU Assembler...

The AMDGPU kernel driver patch flow has ticked up in recent days with working on new hardware support/features...

Earlier this month I wrote about Intel engineers working on more big optimizations to the Linux kernel with a focus on enhancing the kernel's performance at high core counts. The numbers shared then were very promising and since then I've had more time looking at the performance impact of Intel's stellar software optimization work and its impact on real-world workloads. Here is a look at how Intel's pending kernel optimization patches are a huge deal for today's high core count servers.