Phoronix

With the Linux 6.3 merge window opening up following tomorrow's stable debut of the Linux 6.2 kernel, there is a lot to be excited about if you are a customer of AMD's recent CPUs or GPUs...

Exposed via Linux's very versatile perf subsystem has been per-package energy monitoring via the RAPL (Run-Time Average Power Limiting) counters. But AMD's counters also support per-core energy monitoring and now with a tiny kernel patch those sensors too will be exposed via perf...

Ahead of the Linux 6.3 merge window officially opening up following the Linux 6.2 stable release tomorrow, Arnd Bergmann has already mailed in his pull requests of the Arm SoC and defconfig updates for this next kernel version. Most notable is having mainline support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 as well as some other new, high-end embedded SoCs...

After last month's initial Debian 12 freeze, this week the "Bookworm" Linux distribution release entered its soft freeze...

It's not exactly the most applicable configuration for hardware and software, but a 24% performance boost is nothing to sneeze at... A 24% performance boost when for an open-source game when using the Intel ANV Vulkan driver with older Gen8 Broadwell or Gen9 Skylake graphics while using the Zink layer...

This week marked the release of KDE Plasma 5.27 while developers are already busy working on Plasma 6.0 feature work as well as delivering fixes for the current release that will come with Plasma 5.27.1...

As 718,996 lines of newly open-sourced code, Intel recently began opening up their previously proprietary CPU-based OpenCL run-time...

Following the Wine 8.0 stable release from late January followed by Wine 8.1 kicking off the new development series, Wine 8.2 is out today as the second bi-weekly development release of this new series...

This weekend the Linux 6.2 kernel will be released as stable. As it's been two months already since I published the Linux 6.2 feature overview following the closure of the v6.2 merge window, here is a reminder of what makes Linux 6.2 a really exciting kernel update...

In addition to Nouveau developers at Red Hat working on NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) support to ease their kernel driver development and ideally leading to quicker upstream hardware support and finally tackling power management / re-clocking for newer GPUs, another important area on the open-source kernel driver side has been about re-architecting certain interfaces to be able to better support features for the Vulkan API...

The Lenovo ThinkPad X13s is one of the most interesting Arm-powered laptops at the moment with this laptop powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 SoC, 13.3-inch 1920 x 1200 display, up to 32GB of RAM, up to 28 hour battery life, and current pricing starting below $1k USD. Upstream Linux support has been progressing around the ThinkPad X13s and it looks like Ubuntu has also been making some strides on easily supporting this Arm laptop...

Google engineer Yu Zhao known for his work on MGLRU has published a new patch series today that "significantly improves" the KVM guest performance when the host system is under heavy memory pressure...

Intel's Threaded Building Blocks (TBB) has been around for many years while with the recent shift to the oneAPI umbrella as oneTBB, in an effort to improve the usability and simplicity of the API they made a number of changes to its interfaces as well as having removed some previously common interfaces. This has led Fedora Linux to running on an older TBB version the past few years while for Fedora 39 later this year they are planning to modernize their Threaded Building Blocks packaging...

The Mesa 23.1 graphics driver code has added support for software-based decoding of Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) textures via compute shaders...

Hangover 0.8.1 was released today as the newest version of this open-source software project that leverages Wine and QEMU for being able to run Windows x86/x64 applications on 64-bit Arm and other CPU architectures...

Recently we finally received the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards for Linux testing from NVIDIA. For those that have been eager to see how the RTX 40 series hardware performs under Linux, here are my initial Linux gaming benchmarks featuring a variety of Linux native titles as well as with Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux atop Proton + DXVK/VKD3D-Proton. The GeForce RTX 4080/4090 Linux performance is compared against a variety of other graphics cards including the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX with its open-source upstream Linux driver support.

AMD's GPUOpen team has published the source code for their FidelityFX FSR2 v2.2 update. This update brings improved image quality for more cases, integration enhancements, a new debug API checker, and other refinements over the earlier FSR2 code...

Vulkan 1.3.241 was published today with a range of fixes and clarifications, cleaning up of the XML schema, and also introducing three new Vulkan extensions...

The ACPI, thermal, and power management changes for Linux 6.3 have been submitted early due to traveling next week by ACPI/PM maintainer Rafael Wysocki. Most significant with the Linux 6.3 power management updates is adding of the AMD P-State Energy Preference Performance (EPP) mode for helping to deliver better performance and power efficiency for modern AMD Ryzen and EPYC systems on Linux...

While there has been much work on the Linux kernel's RISC-V CPU architecture support, a feature not tackled until now has been the Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR) support for randomizing the kernel mapping to enhance system security...

These days the MIPS architecture is dead but eight years ago when the Raspberry Pi, the PandaBoard, and other early Arm single board computers were enjoying the limelight, Imagination Technologies decided to release the Creator CI20 MIPS SBC. It's been years since hearing of the CI20 or dusting off my CI20, but a new patch series this week tries to get the mainline Linux kernel to enjoy working WiFi and Bluetooth for this MIPS single board computer...

The Fedora Project has been working on drafting its strategic plan to help shape the Linux distribution over the next five years. A draft of the plan written up by the Fedora Council has been published and is currently seeking community feedback on their road-map planning...

The Linux kernel's SystemV file-system support for enabling Xenix FS, SystemV/386 FS, and Coherent FS access is being orphaned and in turn could be slated for removal in the future...

Intel recently published an open-source C++ header file library for high performance SIMD-based sorting, which initially is focused on providing a lightning fast AVX-512 quicksort implementation. As of today that code has been merged to Numpy and is providing some 10~17x speed-ups...

After going through several release candidates the past few weeks, systemd 253 has officially shipped today as the newest version of this init system and service manager for Linux systems...

For the past few years Ubuntu developer Daniel van Vugt at Canonical has been working on dynamic triple buffering support for the GNOME desktop so that it will switch from double to triple buffering when the GPU is running behind in order to ultimately ramp up the GPU clock speeds / performance state in order to get back to delivering a fluid desktop experience. These triple buffering patches still haven't been upstreamed as of the GNOME 44 release due out next month, but the patches continue to be carried within Debian and Ubuntu among other distributions. An updated version of the code is now on the way to Debian and for April's Ubuntu 23.04 release...

Bavarian Linux computer vendor TUXEDO Computers last year introduced TUXEDO OS as their tailored Linux distribution built atop Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. TUXEDO OS was delivering some performance improvements over stock (K)Ubuntu 22.04, ships with TUXEDO's configuration utilities by default, and other refinements to this desktop OS using the KDE Plasma desktop by default. The team in Augsburg is now preparing to ship TUXEDO OS 2 in the near future while this week they made available a public test snapshot.

A driver submitted for review that hopes to be included upstream in the Linux kernel enhances support for MSI laptops under Linux with more features being enabled...

It's been many years since Intel Itanium processors made a convincing story and faced a slow demise over the past decade. While the last of the Itanium 9700 "Kittson" processors shipped in 2021, just two years later now the Linux kernel is already looking at possibly seeing its IA-64 support removed over having no maintainers or apparent users...

Microsoft on Tuesday released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230208 as the latest version of their in-house public Linux distribution that serves a variety of purposes from the cloud down to the Windows Subsystem for Linux...

While LoongArch merged for Linux 5.19 last year, that initial kernel port to the Chinese CPU architecture wasn't entirely complete and some Loongson 3A5000 features are still being enabled for the mainline kernel. The latest feature work being carried out by Loongson engineers is for supporting hardware virtualization on the 3A5000 processors with KVM...

Patch Tuesday brought AMD disclosing a Ryzen Master security issue on Windows and the Cross-Thread Return Address Predictions bug requiring new handling by Linux's KVM. Over on the Intel side they have disclosed nearly three dozen new issues and as a result also published new Linux CPU microcode files for their recent processors to address the disclosures...

Last year AMD issued an advisory around "intermittent system stutter" when engaging the Firmware Trusted Platform Module "fTPM" with newer Ryzen systems running Windows 10 and Windows 11. While at first this only manifested on Windows, with Linux 6.1+ enabling the AMD fTPM RNG by default when present, this system stuttering issue has begun affecting Linux users too...

If you enjoy the daily open-source/Linux every day of the year on Phoronix along with all of the original Linux benchmarking and hardware review content, you can show your support this Valentine's Day with a special offer...

Yet another prominent open-source software release for Valentine's Day today is... dav1d v1.1! This leading open-source AV1 video decoder is out with its first major update in nearly one year and comes with more AVX-512 tuning as well as more work on Arm NEON optimizations...

Mozilla has pushed out Firefox 110 today as the latest major version of their open-source web browser...

CVE-2022-27672 is being made public today as the "Cross-Thread Return Address Predictions" bug affecting various AMD and Hygon processors. This vulnerability affects the SMT mode where one sibling thread transitions out of the C0 state and the other sibling thread could use return target predictions...

It's GNOME 44 Beta week and today marked the tagging of the beta updates for the GNOME Shell and Mutter...

Following last month's release of Wine 8.0 stable with much of Wine's upstream development being carried out by CodeWeavers employees, CodeWeavers has now released CrossOver 22.1 as their commercial product for enjoying Windows games and applications on both Linux and macOS...

Planning and early preparations are underway to get out XWayland 23.1 as the next feature release by the end of March...

Nearly one year ago with the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS premiere came a beta real-time kernel offered by Ubuntu maker Canonical and intended to help with Ubuntu Linux deployments in industrial environments, automotive, and other sectors with real-time computing needs. This Valentine's Day the Ubuntu real-time kernel has been promoted to general availability (GA) status...

The KDE developers have used Valentine's Day to release Plasma 5.27 as the last feature release of the Plasma 5 series with development attention now turning to Plasma 6.0...

The first beta of the upcoming FreeBSD 13.2 point release is now available for testing this Valentine's Day with some great features in tow...

New releases of the xf86-video-trident and xf86-video-s3virge X.Org drivers are now available for those still rocking out to old Trident and S3 graphics hardware...

Google engineers last week released libvpx 1.13 as the newest feature release to this library that serves as the reference software implementation for the VP8 and VP9 codecs. While Google engineers have already spent years tuning libvpx for maximum performance with Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), the game is not over and v1.13 has yet more tuning there -- along with continued Arm Neon optimizations too...

Back in November Wayland Protocols 1.31 released and was headlined by a new extension to handle fractional scaling. The latest Wayland compositor adding support for fractional scaling is now the popular i3-inspired Sway compositor as well as the wl-roots library used by it and other compositors...

For over a year I have been writing about how Microsoft has been working on Direct3D video acceleration for Mesa, getting VA-API mapped atop Direct3D 12 video APIs, video engine based effects, and other enablement around Direct3D 12 video support. Microsoft has today officially released the Direct3D 12 GPU video acceleration support now for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) users...

Arthur Cohen with Embecosm presented at the FOSDEM developer conference earlier this month on gccrs, the ongoing effort to provide a Rust language front-end to the GCC compiler. While the GCC Rust front-end has been merged for the upcoming GCC 13 release, it's not yet in a state that will really be usable to most Rust developers yet as an alternative to Rust's official LLVM-based compiler...

The first tagged release of libdisplay-info (v0.1) is now available for this new library that aims to reduce code duplication and fragmentation among Wayland compositors and other software making use of monitor EDID and DisplayID parsing...

It's been a while since there has been any major additions to Mesa's Rusticl OpenCL implementation led by Red Hat's Karol Herbst while today he merged support for SPIR-V programs to this Rust-written driver. This SPIR-V support is necessary for eventually supporting SYCL and HIP...