Phoronix

Cloud Hypervisor -- the Rust-written open-source VMM that was started by Intel while having evolved into a Linux Foundation project with backing from multiple organizations -- is out with the Cloud-Hypervisor 34 release...

It shouldn't come as much surprise for those familiar with Fedora given its tendency to always ship with the very latest open-source compiler toolchain components, but this autumn's release of Fedora 39 will once again have all the leading-edge GNU compiler pieces...

Intel Arc Graphics customers have been eager to see the new Xe DRM kernel driver merged as a modern alternative to the long-standing i915 Direct Rendering Manager driver. The Xe driver should allow for better performance, is focused just on recent Intel graphics hardware, makes use of modern kernel features, and will allow for new features such as around the Vulkan sparse support. One of the blockers for getting the Xe driver merged at least in experimental form is getting the necessary DRM scheduler changes merged...

Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS is now available as the newest point release to this current long-term support series...

Microsoft has released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230805 as the newest monthly-ish update to their in-house Linux distribution used for purposes from Azure to WSL...

As part of Intel's ongoing AI push, the company announced today they have joined the PyTorch Foundation as a premier member...

OpenELA has been announced as the Open Enterprise Linux Association that brings together CIQ (Rocky Linux), Oracle, and SUSE for collaborating around RHEL-compatible Linux distributions...

After resorting to buying a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card to be able to share Linux performance metrics for that more affordable Ada GPU, last month I posted the Radeon RX 7600 vs. GeForce RTX 4060 benchmarks as well as looking at the GeForce GTX 1060 through RTX 4060 GPU compute and renderer performance across several generations of NVIDIA GPUs. For those considering the RTX 4060 for a Linux gaming system or an upgrade to other recently released AMD or NVIDIA GPUs, here is a fresh round of Linux gaming performance metrics on the newest drivers.

AMD Linux engineers continue work on enabling the Family 1Ah CPU models for the Linux kernel as what would appear to almost surely be the next-gen Zen 5 processors...

A decade ago the Radeon R600g SB shader back-end proved useful for boosting gaming performance on pre-GCN graphics cards of the time and proved useful. But in more recent years in the R600g switch to NIR, the SB path hasn't received much attention and its benefits have diminished. The R600g SB code has now been dropped...

The Nouveau DRM kernel driver changes for new user-space APIs to be used by the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver have now been submitted for pulling to DRM-Next from the current drm-misc-next queue. These Nouveau kernel driver additions for NVK in turn will then premiere with the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle...

Merged for Mesa 23.3 is support for the VirGL code to handle accelerated AV1 video decoding within guest virtual machines...

GRUB2 and Linux bootloaders in general don't get too much attention these days as for the most part they "just work" well and most Linux distributions prefer to keep their GRUB menu hidden if at all possible. But at the same time it's an often overlooked area and not an area where there is an eager and glamorous open-source community behind it. However, it looks like Red Hat at least may have some new ideas brewing and they are hiring now to improve the Linux bootloader experience...

The consulting firm KDAB that is known for their work on the Qt toolkit has released KDGpu as a new library that is a thin wrapper around the Vulkan API and aims to allow for more productive GPU programming...

In addition to Intel posting initial AVX10.1 patches for the GCC compiler, Intel has also begun sorting out their AVX10 plans for the LLVM/Clang compiler stack...

With yesterday's disclosure of the Intel Downfall speculative execution vulnerability and the updated CPU microcode and Linux kernel patches I have been very busy testing the performance impact of this mitigation. Here are some initial numbers and workloads I have found to be impacted as a result of this security mitigation for Skylake to Icelake/Tigerlake client and server processors.

After a rather busy Patch Tuesday with the AMD Inception vulnerability and Intel Downfall going public, the Linux kernel saw a new bug fix merged today for a different issue... It turns out original AMD Zen 1 processors could end up leaking data in certain conditions after a divide by zero occurs...

Following yesterday's disclosure of the AMD "Inception" security vulnerability and the Linux kernel patches merged for reporting the mitigation status as well as the kernel-based handling for earlier generation Zen CPUs, the Family 19h microcode mitigations have now been picked up by the linux-firmware.git repository...

A new set of patches have been posted for the Linux kernel that implement AMD P-State Preferred Core handling for the amd-pstate driver...

As a lot of active development continues around the KDE Plasma 6 desktop and the developers eyeing a beta in a few months, it appears work on this Qt6-ported desktop environment is coming together quite nicely...

The long-in-development Bcachefs file-system driver was submitted for Linux 6.5 but never merged this cycle due to various technical issues and developer in-fighting. Linus Torvalds himself has now gotten around to reviewing the proposed code and chiming in on the situation...

The intel-speed-select tool that lives within the Linux kernel source tree has seen a set of patches prepared for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window. Arguably most interesting with this updated Intel Speed Select tool is now the ability to work with more than eight CPU sockets per platform -- the new limit is 32...

As soon as the AMD Inception CPU vulnerability was made public yesterday, the Linux kernel mitigation patches were merged and within hours appeared in six new stable point releases for the kernel along with the Intel Downfall mitigation patches. Today though these patches are seeing a rework to clean-up this mitigation...

As a result of the AMD INCEPTION and Intel DOWNFALL speculative execution vulnerabilities published this Patch Tuesday, Linux 6.5 Git quickly picked up the patches on embargo expiration and now there are six new stable point releases for back-porting these CPU security vulnerabilites to the supported stable kernel series...

NVIDIA today rolled out a new stable point release in their R535 series for Linux users to provide a handful of bug fixes...

In addition to the Linux kernel patches for GDS/Downfall for reporting the mitigated state and handling around Intel's latest speculative execution vulnerability, the updated CPU microcode has now been published on GitHub. In addition to having the Downfall mitigations for Skylake through Icelake/Tigerlake, there are also other security updates and functional issues resolved by this Intel 20230808 CPU microcode release...

This Patch Tuesday brings a new and potentially painful processor speculative execution vulnerability... Downfall, or as Intel prefers to call it is GDS: Gather Data Sampling. GDS/Downfall affects the gather instruction with AVX2 and AVX-512 enabled processors. At least the latest-generation Intel CPUs are not affected but Tigerlake / Ice Lake back to Skylake is confirmed to be impacted. There is microcode mitigation available but it will be costly for AVX2/AVX-512 workloads with GATHER instructions in hot code-paths and thus widespread software exposure particularly for HPC and other compute-intensive workloads that have relied on AVX2/AVX-512 for better performance.

There used to be a time when Patch Tuesday wasn't so busy in the Linux space, but certainly not this month... Linus Torvalds just pushed the kernel code changes around AMD INCEPTION and Intel DOWNFALL as well as other security patches...

AMD has kicked off a busy Patch Tuesday by disclosing INCEPTION, a new speculative side channel attack affecting Zen 3 and Zen 4 processors that require new microcode while prior Zen CPUs require a kernel-based solution...

Go 1.21 is now available as the latest version of this popular programming language...

The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express Consortium today published the UCe 1.1 specification for helping to standardize die-to-die connectivity with multi-die SoCs...

The GNOME 45 Beta release is imminent and this morning the "45.beta" milestones were tagged for the GNOME Shell and Mutter components...

Last month Intel announced APX and AVX10 as the successor to AVX-512 that will see both P and E cores in the future supporting this updated Advanced Vector Extensions implementation. Delightfully, today Intel engineers began posting GCC compiler patches for beginning to enable AVX10 support...

Those running Intel Arc Graphics on Linux can now enjoy the Hogwarts Legacy game under Valve's Steam Play. Intel engineers were able to get this open-world action RPG game running on their open-source Vulkan driver by hiding the fact that Intel graphics were rendering this game...

Merged into the GCC 14 codebase is initial support for gprofng, the new GNU profiler...

Rhino Linux has rolled out of beta as a community-based, rolling-release Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu...

Another change that has now landed in Mesa 23.3 is enabling support in the TURNIP Vulkan driver for running atop the VirtIO GPU kernel driver in virtualized scenarios...

As a follow-up to the first-on-Phoronix article last month that highlighted Linus Torvalds' frustrated views on the AMD fTPM random number generator continuing to cause problems for users even with updated firmware/BIOS, as of today the Linux kernel has gone ahead and blanket disabled RNG use for all current AMD fTPMs...

AMD last week launched the Radeon PRO W7500 and Radeon PRO W7600 professional graphics cards built on RDNA3. Due to AMD's unique position with their open-source Linux graphics driver stack, I decided to see how these new Radeon professional GPUs compare to FirePro hardware from 13 years ago for the raw performance and power efficiency.

Following Canonical deciding to pull in control of the LXD project and LXD maintainership being limited to Canonical employees, the Linux Containers project has announced the forking of LXD as Incus...

Last year Google decided to deprecate JPEG-XL image support within their Chrome/Chromium web browser. They expressed not enough interest and other factors for so quickly removing JPEG-XL support from their browser. They went ahead and removed the support for this next-gen JPEG standard while now a half-year later they may be having second thoughts...

For those that have fond memories of the NeXTSTEP days and in particular its graphical user interface during the pre-Apple times, Window Maker 0.96 was released this weekend for that X11 window manager inspired by the NeXTSTEP GUI...

Sourceware.org that provides the open-source hosting for projects like GCC, Cygwin, and more had long been sponsored by Red Hat and a rather opaque organization. Earlier this year SourceWare.org became part of the Software Freedom Conservancy. In addition to now calling the SFC home, they are planning other changes ahead to expand their hosting services, diversifying hardware and software partners, and other changes...

AMDVLK 2023.Q3.1 is out this morning as the first update to AMD's official open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver since mid-June...

The Linux kernel's "dimmtemp" driver allows for reporting memory temperatures with capable memory modules and when exposed by the Intel processor's PECI (Platform Environment Control Interface). Currently though the DIMM temperature driver is hard-coded to only allow reporting up to 32 DIMMs while a change queued for Linux 6.6 will extend that limit...

Recently merged to GNOME's Mutter compositor development code is implementing a dedicated kernel mode-setting (KMS) thread and allows for pointer motions to bypass the main thread during cursor sprite movements. Ultimately this effort is around lower-latency cursor movements...

Google's open-source BBR TCP congestion control algorithm is widely used within Google and its v3 iteration is already proving a success within the company and they are working toward upstreaming BBRv3 into the mainline Linux kernel...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.5-rc5 as the newest test candidate aiming for the stable Linux 6.5 kernel around the end of August...

Available now for testing is the release candidate of Python 3.12 ahead of its formal release later this year...

The open-source FEX-Emu project continues advancing as an emulator to run x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on 64-bit ARM (AArch64), even for games, Valve's Steam Play / Proton, and other complex software. FEX-Emu 2308 is out today with more performance optimizations and other features implemented for this emulator...