The colorful fishy codenames are not over for AMD's Linux driver crew! While on the GPU side they have moved to IP block-by-block enablement strategy for their future GPUs, over on the audio co-processor side AMD posted a series of patches today under the "Pink Sardine" codename...
With Mesa 22.2 bringing many new features, you may be curious about how the performance of this next Mesa3D release is looking. For your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of Mesa 22.2 back from the day it was branched against that of the stock Mesa 22.0 on Ubuntu 22.04 if you have been wondering whether it's worthwhile upgrading... Benchmarks for this article from the current-generation Radeon RX 6700 XT and RX 6800 XT graphics cards.
The Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues showing its a formidable file-system option for flash memory devices, especially SSDs and mobile hardware. With Linux 6.0 there are yet more improvements for this file-system driver...
Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz who works on Zink for OpenGL implemented atop Vulkan has managed some more performance optimizations with the upcoming Mesa 22.2 quarterly feature release...
While Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux rolling-release distribution is known for its aggressive performance optimizations, their kernel build had been going with the default "-O2" optimization but last week did switch over to rolling their kernel with -O3...
While support for the loongArch Chinese CPU architecture was merged in Linux 5.19, it wasn't actually enough to yield a booting system due to some driver code not yet being finished and ready for merging in time. LoongArch was allowed to merge that preliminary code in v5.19 so the Glibc support could land and now for Linux 6.0 more of the CPU port is ready to hit the kernel...
When it comes to the Apple M1 and M2 support on Linux, one of the biggest obstacles to suitable daily use for end-users is the current lack of GPU acceleration. Reverse engineering has been happening for the Apple Silicon graphics processor, early experiments being carried out under macOS and Asahi's m1n1 environment, and the next step will be to start writing a Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver. To some surprise, the feasibility of writing this DRM kernel GPU driver in the Rust programming language is being explored...
A number of new Linux kernel stable releases are out this week with new mitigations around the latest batch of published CPU security vulnerabilities. Linux 5.19.1, 5.18.17, 5.15.60, 5.10.136, 5.4.210, and 4.19.255 are the new releases out today...
While all of the key Zen 4 CPU functionality appears in place for the mainline Linux kernel, AMD engineers continue working to enable other new Zen 4 features for use under Linux. The newest patches out of AMD this morning are for LbrExtV2...
Following a one week delay due to a last minute blocker bug being discovered, Canonical today has shipped Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS as the first point release to this current long-term support series...
Following GCC 12 introducing LoongArch support earlier this year, Linux 5.19 adding the initial LoongArch port, and Glibc 2.36 adding LoongArch, LibreOffice is now the latest high-profile open-source project adding support for this Chinese processor ISA that started out derived from MIPS64...
GNOME's Shell and Mutter components have released their beta versions for this GNOME 43 milestone. Particularly on the Mutter side are some very exciting changes from improvements to direct scan-out, high resolution scroll wheel support being completed and merged, various Wayland improvements, and more performance optimizations...
A number of TUXEDO Computers' Linux laptops and Clevo laptops that have had keyboard and/or touchpad issues after system suspend cycles should be properly working now with Linux 6.0...
Xorgproto 2022.2 has been released as the newest version of this collection of X.Org/X11 protocols. Most notable with this rare xorgproto update is the introduction of a new extension, XWAYLAND...
Following last week's branching and feature freeze along with the Mesa 22.2-rc1 release, released on Wednesday evening was Mesa 22.2-rc2 as the first week's worth of bug fixing...
Following recent upstream discussions around the -O3 compiler optimizations for the Linux kernel, the Kconfig switch advertising this option is being removed in Linux 6.0...
While last week saw the main set of thermal and power management updates for Linux 6.0, a few more items were sent in this week for the v6.0 merge window...
Weston 11.0 Alpha is out as the newest feature milestone for this reference Wayland compositor that has seen quite an uptick in development activity this year...
With AMD EPYC showing some nice gains on Linux 6.0, I've been eager to begin testing Linux 6.0 on more systems especially now that the v6.0 merge window is winding down... With now having the shiny new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 5965WX, I decided to take this high-end 24-core chip for a run with Linux 6.0 Git to see how it performs over Linux 5.19 stable...
IPFS as the "InterPlanetary File-System" protocol for peer-to-peer network support in decentralized file sharing as a distributed file-system is now supported with FFmpeg 5.1. IPFS developers at Protocol Labs are also looking at expanding support for this protocol to other open-source projects...
In addition to Intel's busy Patch Tuesday, AMD today made public CVE-2021-46778 that university researchers have dubbed the "SQUIP" attack as a side channel vulnerability affecting the execution unit scheduler across Zen 1/2/3 processors...
Today's busy patch Tuesday for Intel continues with the Linux kernel getting mitigated for EIBRS Post-barrier Return Stack Buffer (PBRSB). This PBRSB is the latest handling on the "CPU vulnerability nightmares front", the pull request calls it...
Given the significant interest from Phoronix readers about how well Apple M2 performs on Linux, especially after it was noted Linus Torvalds using an Apple MacBook Air M2, here are the first of many benchmark articles to come looking at how well Apple's M2 performs under Linux against Intel/AMD x86_64 competition. The new Apple MacBook Air with M2 was benchmarked for this article against the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U "Rembrandt" Zen 3+, Intel Core i7 1280P "Alder Lake P", an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX "Cezanne H", and also for reference an Apple Mac Mini M1 model. All of these laptops were tested under Arch Linux (x86_64) and the Arch-based Asahi Linux (M1/M2).
As part of today's "Patch Tuesday", Intel has made a new round of security vulnerabilities public -- including a new processor advisory that affects their latest Xeon Scalable and Core wares resulting in new CPU microcode being required...
In addition to NVIDIA being busy working on transitioning to an open-source GPU kernel driver, yesterday they made a rare public open-source documentation contribution... NVIDIA quietly published 73k lines worth of header files to document the 3D classes for their Fermi through current-generation Ampere GPUs!..
AMD engineers have released an updated version of AOMP, their LLVM/Clang downstream that carries the company's latest patches around OpenMP offloading to Radeon GPUs...
Going back years has been an effort to get 30-bit deep color support on the GNOME desktop under Wayland. Ubuntu and others have been interested in getting 30-bit color support working nicely for the Linux desktop, but while that milestone hasn't yet been crossed, thankfully there is some renewed work in that direction...
A patch coming about earlier this year allows setting the system's hostname before user-space starts by way of the hostname= kernel parameter. That patch has now landed as part of Andrew Morton's accumulated changes for Linux 6.0...
Intel used SIGGRAPH to announce their forthcoming Arc Pro A-series professional GPUs. The initial products include the Arc A30M mobile GPU, the Arc Pro A40 single-slot GPU, and the Arc Pro A50 dual-slot GPU...
Intel used SIGGRAPH today to announce OpenPGL as what they say is the industry's first open-source library for path guiding so renderer developers can integrate "start of the art" path-guiding methods...
Red Hat has been working on a web-based UI for its Anaconda operating system installer and for the Fedora 37 release this autumn they are planning to have an optional preview of this new installer interface...
Earlier this year AMD announced the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000 WX series but initially was limited to Lenovo workstations. Earlier this summer it was then announced the Threadripper PRO 5000 WX series would be heading to more system integrators and then the DIY market. Well, finally, these Zen 3 Threadripper chips are heading out to the DYI market and today the review embargo lifts. AMD recently sent over a Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX for my Linux testing at Phoronix and here is my initial review and performance benchmarks for this Zen 3 24-core / 48-thread HEDT chip.
The "char/misc" changes were merged a few days back for the Linux 6.0 kernel with this pull being the rather "random catch-all" area of the kernel for drivers not fitting within other subsystems. Most notable with the char/misc updates for Linux 6.0 is introducing support for Intel's Habana Labs Gaudi2...
OpenBLAS as the high performance, open-source BLAS / LAPACK implementation debuted a new version on Sunday with more CPU optimizations and expanded processor coverage...
You may recall the Phoronix news earlier this year around an AMD "Sabrina" SoC appearing in Coreboot for open-source system firmware support. Over the past few months we've cited a number of AMD Sabrina hits in open-source code but outside of that haven't heard much else about "Sabrina" or seen it on AMD's roadmaps...
The Linux CIFS/SMB3 client updates were merged on Sunday for the Linux 6.0 merge window. Notable with this round of updates is a performance improvement for the multi-channel mode...
SUSE had been one of the big supporters of ReiserFS two decades ago when it was using the ReiserFS file-system by default but that practice ended in 2006. While SUSE/openSUSE hasn't defaulted to ReiserFS for many years, it has remained an install-time option and retained support for mounting ReiserFS file-systems, but that practice is likely soon ending...
Along with his various other pull requests for areas of the kernel he oversees, Greg Kroah-Hartman submitted the Linux 6.0 staging changes this week...
Being merged into Mesa 22.3 this morning for the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" are rewritten acceleration structures for the ray-tracing support...
BUS1 started out as a Linux kernel IPC module following the failure of KDBUS and while there still are occasional commits to that out-of-tree BUS1 kernel module, the involved (Red Hat) developers have been primarily working on Dbus-Broker as the high performance, user-space D-Bus implementation that delivers greater speed and reliability over the reference D-Bus code. Now also popping up under the BUS1 umbrella is "r-linux" as a Rust-written, capability-based Linux runtime...
Each new kernel cycle there continues to be more maturity to the RISC-V processor architecture code. With Linux 6.0 there are a few new features wired up as well as bug fixes / clean-ups...
The ACPI and power management changes for the in-development Linux 6.0 landed this week with continued preparations for upcoming Intel and AMD hardware as well as improving existing hardware support...
Earlier this year a developer stepped up willing to maintain Linux's FBDEV subsystem for frame-buffer device drivers since it fell into an unmaintained state in 2016 but even prior to that had been on the decline in the era of more proper DRM/KMS drivers. Helge Deller continues that work overseeing the frame-buffer device "FBDEV" subsystem and this week sent in the new patches for Linux 6.0...
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