Phoronix

Red Hat engineers are working to deal with Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) being too costly for mitigating Spectre V2 and Retbleed on older Intel Xeon Scalable processors. A new patch has been floated to disable IBRS when idle and is working out well at least for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 while isn't clear yet if it will be accepted into the upstream kernel...

SVT-AV1 1.6 is now available as the latest version for this leading CPU-based AV1 encoder that is now enjoying 30~40% faster performance with high quality presets...

Intel engineers had sent in Shadow Stack support for Linux 6.4 as this feature part of Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) but it hit a last-minute snag during the merge window with issues raised by Linus Torvalds. Now it looks like the cleaned-up Shadow Stack code will be re-submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.5 cycle...

Stemming from looking at the generated x264 video encode binary and some performance inefficiencies, SUSE engineers have worked out AVX-512 fully masked vectorization support for the GCC 14 development code...

While the Linux 6.5 merge window isn't opening for another week, Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda has already submitted the pull request of the new Rust kernel code destined for this next kernel cycle...

The "Terakan" Vulkan driver continues to be developed as an open-source Vulkan API implementation catering to the aging Radeon HD 6000 series graphics processors...

Linus Torvalds took time out of his Father's Day to release Linux 6.4-rc7 as the newest weekly test candidate for this kernel that's likely to be officially released next weekend...

In going through my recent RADV-Zink vs. RadeonSI OpenGL benchmarks, Valve's Mike Blumenkrantz has already been landing optimizations/fixes and there is another one on the way as a result...

NVK as the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver being developed for NVIDIA graphics hardware will hopefully see YCbCr format support this summer...

This month the FreeBSD project is celebrating its 30th anniversary since this open-source BSD operating system project was established...

Following yesterday's KDE weekly development summary, prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has published an update on the current state of affairs for KDE Plasma 6 along with when we may potentially see Plasma 6.0 actually released...

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su has reaffirmed the company's commitment to the open-source ROCm compute stack and working with the community and ultimately improving their software support...

Some Fedora Enterprise Linux Next (ELN) plans were shared on Friday with the process of launching CentOS Stream 10 getting underway that will ultimately form the basis of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10...

As a follow-up to yesterday's article about the believed fix for the Nouveau use-after-free bug plaguing Linux 6.3 users of this open-source NVIDIA driver, the fix has now been merged to Linux 6.4 Git and in turn should also be picked up for an upcoming Linux 6.3 point release...

Distrobox is the open-source project for quickly and easily firing up other Linux distributions as containers on your desktop. Distrobox is a delight to use if needing to try different Linux distributions on your system or wishing to leverage different distributions for specialized workloads...

It may be the middle of summer but there are no signs of Plasma 6.0 development efforts slowing down at all with this being another interesting week for KDE development...

Python 3.12 isn't even being released until October and Python 3.13 won't be out until H2'2024, but already the developers working on tuning CPython performance are aiming to make more enhancements this next development cycle...

Mozilla's Firefox 116 web-browser should have experimental PipeWire camera capturing support available for Linux users...

As a follow-up to the potentially nasty open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver bug in Linux 6.3, the issue is believed to have been figured out and a patch is pending that appears to address the issue...

Similar to prior Wayland vs. X.Org desktop comparison impact on Linux gaming, here is a fresh round of tests looking at the (X)Wayland vs. X.Org GNOME session performance with Ubuntu 23.04 and the latest NVIDIA proprietary and AMD open-source graphics drivers on Linux.

The Vulkan API v1.3.254 specification update was published today with just a few fixes/clarifications to the documentation but also two new extensions...

AMDVLK 2023.Q2.3 is out today as the newest snapshot of AMD's official open-source Vulkan driver...

FreeSync Panel Replay is a new feature for AMD Ryzen laptops with the DCN v3.1.4 display block or newer for helping to reduce power usage when the screen contents are unchanged...

Arm and NXP engineers have posted the initial open-source Linux driver patches for an Ethos-U driver for their machine learning processor to enable Linux to dispatch AI inference jobs to the hardware. It's yet another inference/accelerator driver working its way toward the mainline kernel but is off to a rocky start with many code issues being raised...

A new version of the "Not so Common Desktop Environment" is now available, a modern Linux desktop that continues to mimic the look and feel of the old CDE Unix desktop environment...

While IO_uring has been one of the greatest Linux kernel innovations in recent years for helping to deliver more performant and efficient I/O, it's also been home to various security vulnerabilities. Due to ongoing security issues, this interface for asynchronous I/O is being restricted or outright disabled across Google products...

While yesterday brought a major update to the Steam client stable series, tonight brings a new update to the Steam beta series with some notable enhancements to the Linux client...

As part of Linux hardware vendor System76's ongoing work around their COSMIC desktop for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution, recently their development team has been working on enhancing the automatic window tiling capabilities...

Following last month's announcement, this week marks the start of the ASUS ROG Ally shipping as the most compelling alternative to date for Valve's Steam Deck. The ASUS ROG Ally features the new AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme CPU that's interesting in its own right for being based on Zen 4 and RDNA3 integrated graphics. There will be many benchmark articles on Phoronix over the days ahead looking both at the ASUS ROG Ally itself for Linux gaming/performance as well as focusing more generally on the Ryzen Z1 Extreme. In today's article is a few words to get started on the Linux support.

The recent leaks and reports around Intel Core Ultra were true and today Intel unveiled what they call their biggest brand update in 15 years for their consumer CPU line. Beginning with the upcoming Intel Meteor Lake processors is this new client branding...

Working towards a stable release in September, today marks the release of the first Qt 6.6 Beta...

For helping to ensure optimal performance of AArch64 binaries generated by LLVM/Clang for the Neoverse-V2 processor cores, LLVM 17 Git has received a proper Neoverse-V2 scheduling model...

Since last month Loongson engineers have begun posting Linux patches enabling their upcoming 3A6000 series LoongArch processors under Linux. Yesterday they posted new patches and revealed that Loongson 3A6000 processors support Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT)...

Following Oracle releasing an updated GraalVM this week, released yesterday was a new version of Eclipse OpenJ9 for this high performance, open-source JVM...

Microsoft's CBL-Mariner team has published v2.0.20230609 as the newest update to their in-house Linux distribution that is used for a variety of purposes inside and outside the Redmond company...

Following recent Steam client beta updates that have introduced many new features, Valve tonight rolled out a rather big Steam client update to stable users...

Following an exciting AMD AI Day yesterday where they launched the Ryzen PRO 7000 series for desktops and laptops, launched Genoa-X and Bergamo server processors, and introduced the MI300X, there is additional exciting news today... AMD just published the code for their new openSIL project that is working on open-source CPU silicon initialization with Coreboot support and in the coming years will ultimately replace AGESA...

It's recommended to avoid using the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" graphics driver on the current stable Linux 6.3 series as there is a serious bug present that could cause varying issues to your system...

Ahead of the stable release being planned for August, today marks the availability of LibreOffice 7.6 Beta 1 for those wanting to help in testing this leading open-source, cross-platform office suite...

Following last month's NVIDIA 535 Linux driver beta that was launched at the end of May, NVIDIA has now released the 535.54.03 Linux driver as the first stable R535 driver in this new series...

Thomas Gleixner of Linutronix, which was acquired by Intel last year, and his team are working on cleaning up the Linux x86/x86_64 boot process. A set of 17 patches that touch the early Linux kernel initialization code and other tree-wide changes have now been posted for discussion...

Microsoft has published the latest release of their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) implementation for running Linux distributions within the confines of Windows. With the WSL 1.3.10 update there is now experimental memory reclaim support and other changes...

Oracle has published the latest community edition releases of GraalVM targeting JDK17 and JDK20. GraalVM also continues to support a variety of other languages beyond Java as well...

While Imagination continues bringing-up their PowerVR Vulkan driver within Mesa, when it comes to their open-source Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver it for now continues living out-of-tree. On tuesday though marked their third version of the PowerVR kernel driver being published...

Ahead of the planned full specification release in 2025, the PCI-SIG has now shared with its members the first review draft "v0.3" of PCI Express 7.0...

For some months now RADV ray-tracing has been enabled on a per-game basis while finally today in a change for next quarter's Mesa 23.2 release is RADV ray-tracing support being exposed by default for all software...

Beyond launching Bergamo and Genoa-X, AMD's AI Day also showcased the new AMD-Pensando DPU offerings and also previewed more of their next-gen Instinct MI300 accelerator APU...

In addition to AMD announcing the Ryzen PRO 7000 series this morning, they have now announced Bergamo, Genoa-X, and other new data center offerings...

AMD is kicking off what is going to be an exciting day with announcing the Ryzen PRO 7000 series processors for upcoming laptops and desktops.

Thanks to the driver being open-source, the ATI (AMD) R300 Gallium3D driver within Mesa is still seeing new (occasional) optimizations for Radeon graphics cards launched nearly two decades ago...