Phoronix

While this summer I ran some early Python 3.11 benchmarks using the development state at the time, given yesterday's Python 3.11 release I ran some fresh performance tests of the official Python 3.11 version against prior Python 3 releases.

Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering has written a lengthy blog post entitled a "brave new trusted boot world" in which he outlines current issues with the Linux boot process and how there is a trajectory for providing the Linux boot experience with more robustness, simplicity, and trust...

Google today promoted the Chrome 107 web browser to their stable channel across all supported platforms...

Taking place yesterday and today in San Francisco has been the annual OpenZFS Developer Summit. Talks this year ranged from how Amazon AWS is making use of OpenZFS to a number of optimizations and improvements currently being tackled by open-source developers...

After the idea has been discussed for about a year, Mesa 22.3 has landed a new performance option called "block_on_depleted_buffers" to wait on buffers at the end of a swap to reduce latency -- a possible one frame advantage...

While various Linux kernel components are increasingly making use of the Zstandard compression algorithm, the Zstd code in the kernel has tended to trail behind upstream. Fortunately, a push is underway to get Zstd 1.5.2 in the Linux 6.2 kernel cycle that kicks off at year's end...

Memtest86+ v6.0 has been released for this open-source system memory (RAM) testing utility. Memtest86+ v6.0 is the first major release of this program in nearly a decade and comes as a complete rewrite to better deal with modern hardware...

sdl12-compat is the library implementation allowing old SDL 1.2 games/software to work atop SDL2. This sdl12-compat can allow for Wayland support if there is no other direct X11 usage by the software itself, native support for PipeWire, improved input controls, and the many other enhancements enjoyed with the much more modern SDL2 library. Released yesterday was sdl12-compat 1.2.60 as the newest stable release for this conversion/support library for vintage software...

Flatpak 1.15 was released on Monday as the newest test release for this increasingly used open-source sandboxing and app distribution tech...

In addition to supporting the SiFive HiFive Unmatched, Allwinner D1 Nezha, and VisionFive RISC-V board support, Canonical has formally announced Ubuntu 22.10 for the LicheeRV as a $16~19+ RISC-V board...

Python 3.11 stable is out today as a rather big update for this popular scripting language...

AMD today published AOMP 16.0-1 as their newest LLVM/Clang downstream focused on providing the latest Radeon OpenMP GPU offloading support. Notable with this AOMP build is providing initial support for GFX1100 - GFX1103 GPUs. The GFX11 IP block is coming with the soon-to-launch RDNA3 graphics cards and with this AOMP support gives us hope AMD will be providing punctual ROCm support for these next-generation graphics cards...

Last week AMD reaffirmed their 3 November announcement for RDNA3 graphics while today the company announced that one week later on 10 November they will be unveiling their next-gen server processors...

Sony recently announced the DualSense Edge wireless controller for the PlayStation 5 as an "ultra-customizable controller". This $199 USD controller isn't even available for sale until the end of January while already Sony has contributed initial support to their "hid-playstation" open-source Linux kernel driver for supporting the DualSense Edge...

In addition to Alyssa Rosenzweig leading the work on bringing up OpenGL driver support for Apple M1/M2 SoCs with the Mesa "AGX" Gallium3D driver, developer Ella Stanforth has been working on "AGXV" as a Vulkan driver implementation for the Apple Silicon hardware on Linux. As of yesterday, she hit the milestone of being able to run the VKCube demo...

Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin today sent out the third revision to the Apple SoC CPU frequency scaling "CPUFreq" driver that is working its way toward the mainline Linux kernel...

Earlier this month marked the release of IceWM 3.0 as this X11 window manager that has been around since the late 90's. IceWM 3.1 is now available with various fixes and minor additions -- including refinements to the tabbed windows support introduced in IceWM 3.0...

Queued up in FUSE's "for-next" kernel branch is a patch worked on in recent months for allowing non-extending parallel direct writes to the same file...

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.1-rc2 kernel, which he characterized as "unusually large" in what started off as a quiet week...

A set of "x86/urgent" patches were sent out this morning for pulling into the Linux kernel ahead of today's 6.1-rc2 release...

There has long been a debate over an "accelerator" subsystem for the Linux kernel given the increasing number of AI/accelerator devices coming to market. Currently there are accelerator drivers living within the catch-all "char/misc" area of the kernel while some driver efforts have been focused on Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem integration given the commonality with GPUs and some of the core infrastructure and APIs being relevant for both GPUs and these dedicated accelerator ASICs. There finally seems to be some agreement over the future of the accelerator subsystem and some initial patches were mailed out this weekend...

A new Linux driver introduced by Intel earlier this year was the In-Field Scan for making use of new silicon failure testing functionality with upcoming Intel server CPUs. The IFS driver and associated hardware capability is for detecting potential problems not caught by parity or ECC checks on systems in production. In-Field Scan was merged in Linux 5.19 but then shortly thereafter the driver was marked "broken" due to some driver design issues coming to light. New patches for IFS have been posted to improve the driver's design and remove that "broken" tag...

Linus Torvalds has backed the idea of possibly removing Intel 486 (i486) processor support from the Linux kernel...

After being worked on the past year, Mesa 22.3 has landed support for Wayland's DMA-BUF Feedback extension for use by the Mesa Vulkan drivers with the Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code...

In addition to GCC landing patches this week in preparing for Grand Ridge and Sierra Forest, the LLVM/Clang open-source compiler stack has also been seeing patches to prepare for future Intel server processors...

Intel earlier this year more formally announced DAOS as its distributed parallel file-system designed for NVMe storage and aims to be more efficient than other parallel file-systems. Yesterday marked the release of DAOS 2.2 as the newest step forward for Distributed Application Object Storage...

FreeBSD had a busy Friday with releasing their first beta of the upcoming FreeBSD 12.4 as well as publishing their third quarter development summary...

Last week saw the release of Plasma 5.26 while this week KDE developers moved on to more feature work for Plasma 5.27 while also addressing some fall-out and fixes for Plasma 5.26...

While Intel with the rest of the tech industry continue investing immense resources in areas around AI and talking it up, one of the efforts that has been slow to materialize on the Linux side has been for enabling their Gaussian and Neural Accelerator (GNA) with the mainline Linux kernel. This week the latest Intel GNA driver patches were posted for this neural co-processor...

The very promising Rusticl Rust-based OpenCL implementation within Mesa has landed a set of patches today that make it easier to enable the OpenCL compute device support with the various Gallium3D drivers...

Linux's universal TUN driver that provides packet reception and transmission for user-space programs may soon see a 1000x speed-up with a proposed patch sent out today for this network driver...

AMD today published their latest open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver update, AMDVLK 2022.Q4.1, as their first source update in three weeks...

Last Thursday AMD finally sent out the basic enablement patch for AMD Zen 4 "znver4" with the GCC compiler. Once again it was tardy with Ryzen 7000 series processors already shipping and sadly the cost tables (tuning) is still catering to Zen 3 rather than updated for Zen 4. While as of today this -march=znver4 support has been merged into GCC 13...

Red Hat's storage team responsible for the Stratis solution has released a new feature update...

Windows users are increasingly making use of Mesa with Microsoft investing in supporting a number of different open, industry standard APIs and then layering them atop the underlying Direct3D 12 driver for the likes of WSL2 usage. OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and VA-API video acceleration have been the primary targets for Microsoft engineers working on Mesa with the Windows Subsystem for Linux in mind while also posing other possible use-cases where the host may lack native drivers for those APIs. For bettering Mesa on Windows, Microsoft has now added support for compiling against the DirectX 12 Agility SDK...

Thanks to a Google engineer in communication with Microsoft engineers, the "hid-microsoft" upstream Linux driver is seeing work to support the rumble mode on newer Xbox controllers...

As part of Intel's work starting to enable the compiler support for their Sierra Forest CPUs, AVX-VNNI-INT8 and AVX-IFMA support has been merged into the GCC 13 compiler for supporting these instructions being first introduced with Intel's Sierra Forest and Grand Ridge...

If as an Ubuntu Linux user you have been held off on purchasing one of the new Arc Graphics discrete graphics cards due to the prospects of having to upgrade your own kernel, Mesa, and linux-firmware packages, Intel has a solution for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS users in the form of a packaged driver...

Earlier this year Coreboot and the Dasharo downstream were ported to the MSI PRO Z690-A DDR4 motherboard. This was very exciting in that a current-generation Intel desktop motherboard could run Coreboot and readily available through various Internet retailers. But many inquired about whether the MSI PRO Z690-A DDR5 variant would see similar support and now that too is being worked on...

After last month launching the redesigned Thelio chassis, System76 today has rolled out their latest System76 Thelio desktop options with Intel 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" and AMD Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" processor options now available...

Coming on the same day as Ubuntu 22.10, Theo de Raadt has released OpenBSD 7.2 as the latest version of this popular BSD operating system...

Canonical has formally released Ubuntu 22.10 "Kinetic Kudu" as the latest six-month, non-LTS update to Ubuntu Linux...

Last month Intel announced 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" processors while today these processors officially go on sale. Today also marks the review embargo lift with Intel having provided Phoronix with the new Core i5 13600K and i9 13900K processors for Linux testing.

The widely depended upon GNU C Library "glibc" has seen another round of optimization work for benefiting those with AVX-512 processors from Intel or now on the AMD side too with Zen 4...

Back in August 2021 saw initial patches by Intel for "FineIBT" for the Linux kernel as aiming to combine the best of their Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) and Control Flow Integrity for upping the kernel security protections in an efficient manner...

A first batch of "drm-misc-next" patches have been sent in for DRM-Next to queue until the Linux 6.2 merge window comes about in December. With this initial batch of new material for v6.2 is a new Direct Rendering Manager driver: OFDRM...

The open-source SVT-AV1 encoder for AV1 content that is primarily developed by Intel software engineers continues getting faster and finding new ways to provide better tuned presets and yield better performance for AV1 encoding on CPUs...

Corsair this summer launched the HX1500i power supply as the latest in their HX series. The Corsair HX1500i provides three EPS12V connectors, a fully modular design, and as implied by the model is sized for providing 1500 Watts. This $399 USD power supply can now also interface with the Linux kernel for monitoring support...

While the Linux 6.1 merge window just passed and the "Call Depth Tracking" patches have been in development the past few months, it looks like that for the Linux 6.2 kernel is where that alternative mitigation technique will be introduced for helping offset some of the significant performance regressions incurred for Intel Skylake era processors as a result of recent CPU security vulnerability mitigations...

Two weeks ago was the release of systemd 252-rc1 with introducing the new systemd-measure command, a "support-ended" taint flag for OS images detected past their end-of-support date, and a wide variety of other changes and feature additions. Systemd 252-rc2 is now available for additional testing with various fixes plus a few more additions...