Phoronix

With the start of the new year also came the branching of GNU Binutils 2.40 ahead of its expected stable release around early February...

Dragonfly, the open-source project that advertises itself as "Probably, the fastest in-memory store in the universe!" as a high speed in-memory database that is compatible with the Memcached and Redis APIs has out a big release to kick off 2023...

Valve has just published the Steam Survey results for December 2022 that come in at a bit of a surprise...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.2-rc2 as the second weekly release candidate for Linux 6.2 following the merge window's closure last week on Christmas...

A change was merged this holiday weekend ahead of Linux 6.2-rc2 that adjusts the default behavior for AMD Ryzen 6000 series "Rembrandt" laptops and newer...

While there were various holidays in December, there continued to be daily and original content on Phoronix each and every day. During December there were 228 original news articles on Phoronix and 18 featured hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here is a look back at all of the exciting Linux hardware content and software news for closing out 2022...

The D1 is Allwinner's first SoC based on a RISC-V core design. While the Allwinner D1 isn't powerful at all, it's appearance in low-cost boards, RISC-V based design, and the Allwinner development community has made this an attractive entry-level RISC-V target. While various Linux distributions are already supporting D1-based boards, the mainline support for the D1/D1s platform looks like it will finally be merged in 2023...

On New Year's Eve, Greg Kroah-Hartman released a new set of stable kernels with Linux 6.1.2, 6.0.16, and 5.15.86 LTS being the new set...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been working with the Quake II RTX and DOOM Eternal games for a while now and recently the performance has also picked up nicely as shown in recent benchmarks. But for the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions to be exposed has required setting the RADV_PERFTEST=rt environment variable, but that has now changed initially for those two games...

For those Linux gamers and enthusiasts using the current Mesa 22.3 series, Mesa 22.3.2 was released this New Year's Eve for delivering the latest batch of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver fixes...

It shouldn't be too surprising given the pace of beta releases and planning for post-4.0 releases, but the open-source Godot game engine is planning for its major Godot 4.0 stable release to happen in the "first months" of 2023...

AMD in 2022 continued its open-source/Linux support embrace with offering good launch-day support on both the CPU and GPU sides with their new products, continued ramping up their Linux support on the client side, and has worked more on optimizations and other enhancements to their Linux support...

Fedora has a tradition of always shipping with the very latest open-source compiler toolchain components and central to that is always having the very latest GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). At times this up-to-date toolchain quest has meant shipping a release candidate / near-final GCC build when it comes to their Q2 release of the year that often lands right around the same time as the annual GCC feature release. Fedora 38 will be another release to again aim for the very latest GNU compiler toolchain components...

KDE developers have wrapped up another busy year enhancing their open-source desktop environment and application stack...

The Linux USB gadget kernel driver saw a patch published today for exposing of a device's landing page as part of the WebUSB specification. WebUSB as a reminder is the industry standard for providing a JavaScript API to securely access USB devices from web pages and is already supported by the likes of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge...

One of the early alternative spins of Ubuntu back in the day was Edubuntu as an education-focused flavor of Ubuntu shipping with various educational packages pre-installed and an optimized workflow for students. Edubuntu gradually faded away but in 2023 is looking to re-establish itself and become an official flavor under new leadership...

While there still are a few more articles coming up on Phoronix over the next day before closing out 2022, for this year on Phoronix there were 191 Linux hardware reviews and featured articles along with 2,846 original news articles on Linux, open-source, and hardware topics. Here is a look back at what excited our Linux/open-source readers the most over the course of 2022...

For going along with the new keyboard driver and other upstreaming efforts around the PinePhone Pro, getting the display support mainlined has been the latest effort for enhancing this $399 Linux smartphone...

It shouldn't be news to you that most of the corporate-backed developers working on the Linux desktop are no longer investing in new feature work around the X.Org Server and have shifted their efforts to a Wayland-focused environment moving forward. In looking at the Git statistics for the X.Org Server over the course of 2022 it shows how the development has pulled back dramatically and now at a two decade low for the commits and code changes...

Calculate Linux has now issued its v23 release as the project marks fifteen years of being a Gentoo Linux built distribution focused on suitable Linux deployments within organizations / corporate environments...

Merged just over a year ago into the Linux kernel was DAMON as an Amazon-developed solution for monitoring data accesses. In the year since being merged, DAMON has continued to see more functionality added and new users and developers becoming involved with this data access monitoring...

With the end of the year upon us it's a great time to see how the Windows vs. Linux gaming performance is looking as we enter 2023. In particular, it's interesting on the AMD Radeon side with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack having made great gains this year thanks to the continued investment by AMD and heavy contributions by Valve to the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver that is used by the Steam Deck and commonly in general by Linux gamers. Here is a look at the Windows vs. Linux GPU performance both for the mature RDNA2 support as well as the recently-released RDNA3 graphics.

Valve developers investing heavily into the open-source 3D graphics driver stack, AMD continuing their big contributions to Mesa, the Apple AGX Gallium3D driver taking shape, Microsoft continuing to leverage Mesa for various purposes on Windows, Zink maturing for OpenGL atop Vulkan, and other efforts all culminated with the most ever code growth to Mesa in a single year as well as nearly the most ever commits to this 3D graphics driver project...

Earlier this month prolific open-source GPU driver developer David Airlie at Red Hat picked up work again on Vulkan Video support for the RADV driver. Initially that RADV Vulkan Video work was focused on H.264 and H.265 video decoding while since then he has shifted focus to preliminary video encode support with H.264...

When the Retbleed security vulnerability was introduced earlier this year mitigating it for Intel Skylake and Skylake-derived CPU cores required imposing Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) that further tanked the out-of-the-box performance for these aging Intel CPUs. But being introduced now with Linux 6.2 is a new mitigation technique named Call Depth Tracking that is helping recover some of that lost performance and in turn extending the usefulness of the Skylake-derived processors still in service.

More than a few Phoronix readers have written in that have been early adopters to the Linux 6.1 kernel released as stable earlier this month and now finding their HDMI audio outputs no longer working. Fortunately, the issue has been sorted out by upstream developers and a fix is on the way...

OpenCV 4.7 was released today as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source computer vision library...

With the end of the year upon us, it's interesting and fun running GitStats on various prominent open-source projects and looking at some of the key growth metrics over the past year. Here is a look at how systemd's Git activity has paced in 2022 compared to years prior...

LLVM's GPU/device offloading support continues to advance and this open-source compiler stack has now added basic JIT (Just In Time) compilation support to its OpenMP offloading capabilities...

Following yesterday's article looking at the performance of Intel's Clear Linux running on AMD EPYC 4th Gen "Genoa" with great performance results even though Clear's kernel was limited to 320 of the 384 available logical CPU cores for the EPYC 9654 2P setup, the kernel has now been adjusted to handle up to 512 CPUs...

Now that the merge window for Linux 6.2 is over, here is a look at all the prominent features on deck for the Linux 6.2 kernel that will be released as stable in about eight weeks.

Updated patches were sent out today that aim to reduce the maximum memory usage while compiling the Linux kernel. In turn for memory constrained systems that attempt to compile the kernel this should lead to less swapping and faster build times...

The Restartable Sequences "RSEQ" system call merged a few years ago into the Linux kernel and is now used by the GNU C Library and friends for faster user-space operations on per-CPU data. Now coming next year with Linux 6.3 is set to be some notable additions to the RSEQ support...

Intel engineer Huang Ying sent out a set of patches today to implement batch TLB flushing for page migration within the migrate_pages() function and is showing very promising results...

For a long while there has been requests for having a dark mode version of Phoronix.com available for reading content that matches your system's dark theme. The lightened work around Christmas and the holidays finally allowed for me to tackle that sought after feature with CSS dark mode integration...

Intel engineers had submitted support for Linear Address Masking (LAM) with the recently-closed Linux 6.2 merge window but it was rejected by Linus Torvalds. In working toward re-submitted it for the v6.3 cycle or later, an updated Linux LAM patch series was posted today...

Ahead of the early February planned debut of the LibreOffice 7.5 open-source office suite, the release candidate was made available today for testing...

Similar to the great results of Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux on the Ryzen 9 7950X, making use of Clear Linux on the new 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors also helps in maximizing performance for these AVX-512 server processors. Here are some initial benchmarks.

With the in-development Linux 6.2 kernel there is the new compute accelerator "accel" subsystem/framework as part of the Direct Rendering Manager area. The creation of that new subsystem was pulled together by Intel (Habana Labs) and now their AI accelerator driver is preparing to move from the "char/misc" catch-all to this new subsystem...

As a long awaited gift for those using UBports' Ubuntu Touch, for Christmas the open-source, community-driven crew published a beta/RC build of Ubuntu Touch re-based atop Ubuntu 20.04 LTS...

A few months back we looked at the Solidigm P41 Plus NVMe SSD from this company that formed when SK hynix acquired Intel's NAND/SSD business. The P41 Plus was a budget-friendly consumer SSD with QLC memory while recently they launched the P44 Pro as a step-up and based on the SK hynix Platinum P41 design. I've been testing the Solidigm P44 Pro 1TB and 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs under Linux to great performance.

While the Linux 6.2 kernel merge window just wrapped up, AMD's P-State EPP driver was deemed not ready for making it this cycle. However, with AMD having now iterated it to a ninth revision, it's looking like this P-State "Energy Performance Preference" functionality over the existing P-State driver support will be ready for merging come Linux 6.3...

The xf86-video-modesetting work covered a month ago over "TearFree" page flipping support has been merged to the X.Org Server for whenever the next release ends up happening...

It's been one year and a few days since the introduction of Mold 1.0 as a high performance linker alternative to GNU Gold and LLVM LLD while debuting today is Mold 1.8 as the newest feature release...

Prior to the holiday weekend Qualcomm engineers posted a set of "request for comments" Linux kernel patches to implement USB audio offloading support for Qualcomm SoCs with a dedicated audio DSP...

Following the two week long Linux 6.2 merge window colliding with Christmas day, Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.2-rc1 as capping off the merge window and moving on to the testing and bug fixing phase of this release cycle...

Sway 1.8 is out this Christmas as the newest feature release to this i3-inspired Wayland compositor...

Ruby programming language developers have issued a Christmas release of the latest iteration of this language focused on simplicity and productivity...

The IRQ pull request that was merged early in the Linux 6.2 cycle has a big rework to the Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI) subsystem...

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all those celebrating at the end of 2022 as we get ready for the New Year...