Phoronix

Being introduced to the Debian package archive this week is accel-config as Intel's new user-space component for configuring the DSA accelerators found with the new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors...

Since early November AMD has been working on Linux patches for Automatic IBRS. AutoIBRS is a new Zen 4 CPU feature intended to provide better performance than generic Retpolines as part of the Spectre V2 mitigations. Two months later the Linux AutoIBRS patches still haven't been merged yet but up to their sixth revision...

AMD today sent in a batch of AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver fixes for the in-development Linux 6.2. Notable with this week's AMD graphics driver fixes are a few pertaining to the new Radeon RX 7000 series / RDNA3 hardware...

With the Intel VT-d 4.0 specification there is performance monitoring "PerfMon" infrastructure introduced. A new patch series from Intel is preparing for IOMMU performance monitoring with the Linux kernel code...

In addition to the CentOS Hyperscale SIG making great progress on adapting CentOS Stream for hyperscaler needs, at the opposite end of the table is the CentOS Automotive SIG with their "AutoSD" platform they continue working on adapting to make CentOS Stream suitable for use within vehicles...

For those sticking to the bi-weekly Mesa 22.3 point releases rather than riding Mesa Git, Mesa 22.3.3 is out today in providing the very latest fixes to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers...

Following last month's launch of the Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards, AMD's GPUOpen group has now published the instruction set architecture (ISA) programming guide for those interested in RDNA3 GPUs...

ASRock Industrial, the independent company spun out of ASRock that is focused on industrial computers, edge systems, hardware for retail environments, has now partnered with Canonical to begin offering certified devices for Ubuntu Linux...

A six month old merge request to Mesa was finally merged today for enabling Radeon Memory Visualizer (RMV) support with the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver...

The NVK open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs that has seen a lot of progress over the past year is now able to run some games like The Talos Principle, which was the launch title for Vulkan 1.0. While the NVK driver is correctly rendering, it's still slow until the kernel driver side is sorted out with re-clocking...

Google on Tuesday released their first post-holidays update to the cross-platform Chrome web browser...

While many haven't even moved yet to the very speedy Python 3.11 that was released back in October, for those wanting to do some bleeding-edge testing the fourth alpha of Python 3.12 is already out...

At today's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) more features were approved for the Fedora 38 release coming up in April...

Now that the 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" and Xeon CPU Max Series overview is out of the way, you are probably very eager to see some independent performance benchmarks of the much anticipated Sapphire Rapids CPUs that are going up against AMD 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors for 2023... For kicking off our Sapphire Rapids benchmarking, first up is a look at the Xeon Platinum 8490H performance under Linux as the flagship SKU.

Intel has announced the 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" CPUs today along with the Xeon CPU Max Series (Sapphire Rapids HBM) and Data Center GPU Max Series (Ponte Vecchio). Here is an overview of today's announcements prior to getting to some initial Sapphire Rapids Linux benchmarks on Phoronix.

Last year with the release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS there was a beta real-time kernel offering from Canonical...

With the next Linux kernel cycle we could see upstream disable their driver support for Microsoft's Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) protocol due to security concerns...

GCC compiler expert Jan Hubicka at SUSE began working on AMD Zen 4 compiler tuning patches that began landing in December for the GCC 13 compiler that will debut as stable in a few months. It looks like the work isn't over on Znver4 tuning with another patch being sent out today for fine-tuning the latest AMD CPU microarchitecture...

Established two years ago was the CentOS Hyperscale SIG for a group of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and other hyperscalers in making optional changes to CentOS Stream to better suit the Linux distribution to their internal needs...

Microsoft's Dozen "dzn", which was merged to Mesa last year as Vulkan implemented on Direct3D 12, is onto a 98.5% pass rate for its Vulkan 1.0 coverage...

For those making use of AMD's Optimizing C/C++/Fortran compilers, ZenNN library, profiling software, and various other CPU-based software resources for EPYC and Ryzen processors, AMD is in the process of rolling out a new area on the website for highlighting these Zen Software Studio assets...

Last week at the AMD CES 2023 keynote hosted by Lisa Su, new 65 Watt Ryzen 7000 series processors were announced. These more affordable Zen 4 processors are going retail this week and today marks the embargo lift. Up on the Linux testing block are the Ryzen 5 7600, Ryzen 7 7700, and Ryzen 9 7900 processors.

Back in July Intel engineers published the initial open-source driver code around the new Versatile Processing Unit "VPU" coming with Meteor Lake. This VPU block with 14th Gen Core CPUs is intended for AI inference acceleration for deep learning software...

As part of a New Year's Eve patch deluge, XFS developer Darrick Wong sent out patches working on free space defragmenting support, among other work for further enhancing this mature open-source file-system...

In addition to Blender's back-ends for NVIDIA CUDA and OptiX, Intel oneAPI, and AMD HIP, Blender 3.5 is set to have a working Apple Metal back-end for that proprietary graphics/compute API with accelerated UI/viewport handling to complement the Metal Cycles support...

For over two years Canonical has been working on dynamic triple buffering for the GNOME desktop with the Mutter compositor. This triple-buffering-when-needed can dramatically boost the desktop performance especially in cases like Intel integrated graphics and Raspberry Pi boards. The triple buffering work hasn't been upstreamed yet but the hope is that it may finally be ready for upstream inclusion with GNOME 44...

While the open RISC-V processor architecture has proven to be highly successful, one of the features that it hasn't yet supported with the Linux kernel to this point has been system hibernation / suspend-to-resume, but that support is now on the way...

Linus Torvalds released Linux 6.2-rc3 a few hours early today and noted that things are "starting to look a lot more normal" in terms of the code churn for this stage of the Linux 6.2 development cycle now that the holiday period has passed...

The ARIA block cipher devised by South Korean researchers is being sped up by AVX2 and AVX-512 for its Linux kernel implementation...

AMD sent out an initial batch of "new stuff" for their AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel graphics driver code to begin queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.3 cycle kicking off during the back-half of February...

While DragonFlyBSD has previously praised the performance of AMD Ryzen Threadripper CPUs going back to the Zen 2 days, it's taken them until this weekend to get temperature sensor monitoring working for Family 19h processors: Zen 3, Zen 3+, and Zen 4 CPUs...

A new version of Mir has been released, which in recent years has been serving as a Wayland compositor and used for various niche use-cases like smart exercise mirrors and other IoT and kiosk-type deployments...

OBS Studio 29.0 is out this weekend as the latest major feature release to this very popular, cross-platform software for screencasting and screen recording purposes...

The Linux 4.9 kernel was released back in 2016 and Greg Kroah-Hartman today issued the final point release for that kernel series with the Long Term Support (LTS) period now expired...

Following GCC Rust being merged and the Modula-2 front-end, a developer hopes to restore the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) Java front-end, GCJ...

For years Intel has been developing HAXM as a hardware-accelerated execution manager with a focus on using it for the Android Emulator and QEMU in conjunction with Intel VT enabled processors. HAXM works not only on Linux but Windows, macOS, and some BSDs. Unfortunately, Intel has decided to discontinue development of HAXM. Oh yeah, they also note there are security issues with the code so it's best to just stop using it...

Wine 8.0-rc3 is now available as the latest test release for this software to enjoy Windows games and applications on Linux and macOS...

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of notoriety for being with Valve's Linux team and leading the work on VKD3D-Proton has been experimenting with the Vulkan Video API initially for his personal Vulkan renderer, Granite...

KDE developers had a busy first week of the new year as they work toward the big Plasma 5.27 release...

OpenMandriva ROME 23.01 is now officially available as this Mandriva/Mandrake-derived Linux distribution in rolling-release form...

FEX as the open-source project working on allowing x86_64 software to run atop Linux AArch64 (64-bit Arm) systems -- including games and the likes of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) -- is out with its newest monthly feature release...

A very nice feature pull request was merged to OpenZFS that can provide a nice performance improvement to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation to kick off the new year...

In addition to the big performance uplift from AVX-512, up to 96 cores per socket, and other Zen 4 architectural improvements, also empowering the EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors is the support for up to 12 channels of DDR5-4800 memory. In this article is a wide assortment of benchmarks looking at the AMD EPYC 9654 performance across varying numbers of populated DDR5 memory channels.

Following the recent discussions around Fedora planning to disable byte swapped clients support for the X.Org Server in order to close another "large attack surface" with the aging X11 server codebase, the upstream X.Org Server has now dropped this support by default...

Linspire as the Linux distribution whose roots go back two decades ago to when it originally started out as "Lindows" is preparing a new major release. The current incarnation of Linspire though started five years ago when PC/OpenSystems acquired the Linspire and Freespire rights from Xandros. Linspire claims to be "the easiest desktop Linux" and are looking to improve things further with their v12 release...

While MGLRU is a nice performance win for the Linux kernel now available when enabling it for v6.1+ kernel builds, during my testing I did encounter a regression around the SVT-AV1 video encode performance at least and a fix is working its way toward mainline...

Mold as the high performance linker alternative to GNU Gold and LLVM LLD is out with another feature release...

Over the past few years it's become possible to compile the mainline Linux kernel with LLVM/Clang compared to the long-standing dependence on using the GCC compiler. While it's been possible for 3+ years to use the mainline Linux kernel and mainline Clang for building a working x86_64 and AArch64 kernel, the process and support continues to mature...

Firewalld 1.3 is out today as the newest version of this open-source firewall daemon used on Linux systems...

Following the year-end looks at Windows 11 vs. Linux graphics/gaming performance for AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, today's article is my first look at the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance for Intel Arc Graphics with the flagship A770 graphics card.