Phoronix

Rocky Linux 9.0 was officially released today that joins the likes of AlmaLinux 9.0 and Oracle Linux 9.0 as free alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0...

Recently on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS I've noticed that after installing dependencies for a number of benchmarks that the Ubuntu Linux installation is simply broken... I can start off with a clean install of Ubuntu 22.04 desktop but then after installing the dependencies for a number of tests, the Ubuntu installation is effectively unusable until going back and reinstalling numerous default packages. The desktop is no longer installed, networking support was dropped, and many other packages went missing. It turns out it's due to problematic and unintentional APT package management behavior that is now being fixed...

Merged last year for Linux 5.16 was the FUTEX2 system call for improving the FUTEX interface on Linux and with the original motivation for those improvements to wait on multiple futexes so Wine/Proton can better match Microsoft Windows' behavior for a more optimal Linux gaming experience. Beyond the performance/efficiency benefit of FUTEX2, other improvements have also been talked about while we are now beginning to see action on one of them: NUMA awareness...

GNOME Builder as the desktop's integrated development environment (IDE) is the latest software project to be ported to the GTK 4 toolkit...

The last set of drm-intel-gt-next changes intended for Linux 5.20 have now been submitted for pulling into DRM-Next. This pull has some notable changes, including initial Meteor Lake graphics bring-up...

The RkVDEC driver that is mainlined in the Linux kernel for supporting accelerated video decoding on select Rockchip SoCs has so far been focused on H.264 and VP9 video codec support. With a new patch series out on Wednesday, HEVC/H.265 acceleration is being ironed out...

Yesterday Retbleed was made public as a new speculative execution attack exploiting return instructions. While the "good" news is Retbleed only impacts prior generations of AMD and Intel processors, the bad news is the mitigated performance impact on Linux is quite severe. Since yesterday I have been benchmarking the newly-merged Linux patches on various Intel and AMD processors affected by Retbleed. It's very bad if you are on an affected processor.

DXVK 1.10.2 has been released as the newest version of this Direct3D 9/10/11 implementation atop the Vulkan API that is most notably used with Proton for Steam Play to enjoy Windows games on Linux...

Following the upstream discussions over -O3'ing the Linux kernel last month I ran some fresh benchmarks of the Linux kernel built with -O2 versus -O3. After the -O3 optimized kernel build results weren't too impressive, a number of Phoronix readers were virtually shouting that "-O3 -march=native" is where it's at for fun and performance... To appease those even though in the past it hasn't proven worthwhile and upstream kernel developers are against it, here are those numbers...

There hasn't been much to report on lately for the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver providing open-source NVIDIA GPU driver support on Linux. Several recent Linux kernel series haven't even seen any Nouveau DRM/KMS driver pull requests with changes. For the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle, a Nouveau set of changes were sent in today to DRM-Next but it's quite tiny...

Intel's effort to add oneAPI/SYCL support to Blender for GPU acceleration with forthcoming Arc Graphics hardware appears all buttoned up for the upcoming Blender 3.3 release...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver contributor Timur Kristóf known for being one of the Valve contractors to improve the open-source Linux graphics stack has shared his experiences working on the Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) support for AMD RDNA GPUs with this open-source driver...

Disclosed on Tuesday were two new X.Org Server security vulnerabilities concerning possible local privilege escalation and remote code execution. X.Org Server 21.1.4 was released with these mitigations to the XKB extension while XWayland is also vulnerable and has now been patched with XWayland 22.1.3...

Being made public this Patch Tuesday is "RETBLEED" as two new CVEs for the latest speculative execution attacks affecting today's hardware. Retbleed exploits return instructions and is able to undermine existing defenses against Spectre Branch Target Injection (BTI)...

Intel today announced the release of open-source "AI Reference Kits" to help in the development of artificial intelligence software around healthcare, manufacturing, and other fields...

Back in March when AMD Milan-X rolled out I published a number of EPYC 7773X benchmarks as well as Milan-X benchmarks in the cloud. Since then there have been new Linux kernel improvements and other changes in the ever-advancing open-source world. Plus simply more time to conduct additional tests over the summer. Here is the latest round of my AMD EPYC 7773X 1P and 2P benchmarking compared to the Milan EPYC 7713/7763 SKUs as well as Intel's Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" competition.

Getting things started for this "Patch Tuesday" are the disclosure of two new X.Org Server vulnerabilities...

The Document Foundation has made available this morning the LibreOffice 7.4 release candidate as the newest test version of this cross-platform, open-source office suite...

Last month Intel began publishing the Linux kernel driver changes needed for Habana Labs' Gaudi2 AI accelerator. That enablement and subsequent kernel review process has went well and that hardware support has now been queued into char-misc ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.20 merge window...

IBM this morning announced more Power10 servers being added to their portfolio, now including mid-range and scale-out platforms based on this latest POWER architecture...

While AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver stack is wonderful if living on the bleeding-edge with a modern Linux distribution, for those on enterprise Linux distributions that tend to stick to older versions of packages for the support lifetime or where wanting to run a vetted/qualified driver stack, it can be more of a pain. For AMD's packaged Linux driver stack it only supports those select enterprise Linux distributions and can run into pain points trying to run elsewhere or even say running brand new LTS distributions at times can lack support. There are also challenges in installing/running the ROCm compute stack outside of the few officially supported Linux distributions by AMD. Fortunately, they are now hiring Linux build engineer(s) to work on such issues...

Merged prior to the weekend into LLVM 15 was a basic web server implementation...

The GCC Steering Committee has approved of the GCC Rust front-end providing Rust programming language support by the GNU Compiler Collection. This Rust front-end will likely be merged ahead of the GCC 13 release next year...

With the very popular HP Dev One that is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO SoC and running Pop!_OS, a number of Phoronix readers inquired about seeing benchmarks of some of the alternative kernel flavors on the device. So here is a look at the stock Linux 5.17 kernel up against the Linux 5.18 and 5.19 (Git) kernels and then Liquorix and XanMod tossed in as alternative flavors running on the Pop!_OS 22.04 installation.

LVFS/fwupd lead developer Richard Hughes at Red Hat has released Fwupd 1.8.2 as the newest version of this open-source solution for handling firmware updates under Linux and other platforms...

While no new X.Org "katamari" releases are planned for a collection of all the X.Org component updates combined, this weekend longtime X.Org contributor Alan Coopersmith of Oracle issued many new updates to various old, seldom-maintained X.Org projects...

One of the newest extensions now supported by the RADV Vulkan driver is VK_KHR_performance_query, which can be used by RenderDoc and other utilities...

In gearing up for the GNOME 43 Alpha release coming out soon, this weekend marked the release of the new alpha versions of GNOME Shell and Mutter...

Rob Clark as the lead developer of the MSM DRM kernel driver and the Freedreno/TURNIP Mesa drivers for open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics driver support has submitted the Direct Rendering Manager driver changes for the upcoming Linux 5.20 merge window...

Linus Torvalds just announced the availability of Linux 5.19-rc6 as the latest routine test release for the upcoming Linux 5.19...

A set of proposed patches promise to make the Linux kernel's memchr() implementation faster for locating a character within a block of memory. In tests carried out by the developer, the new implementation can be nearly four times faster on large searches...

Intel's open-source Compute Runtime for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support on their graphics hardware appears to be in roughly good shape now for DG2/Alchemist based on external/independent monitoring of the effort...

The Linux kernel has long honored the "nordrand" kernel parameter to disable kernel use of the Intel RDRAND and RDSEED instructions if not trusting them -- either out of security concerns that they could be compromised by the vendor or running into hardware/firmware issues around RdRand usage. But the Linux kernel is preparing to drop that kernel parameter with users encouraged to use the more generic "random.trust_cpu" parameter...

WayVNC 0.5 was released on Saturday as a feature update to this VNC server for Wayland compositors leveraging the WLROOTS library...

Leah Rowe has announced the release of Libreboot 20220710, the downstream of Coreboot that takes a firm approach to ensure boot firmware freedom with avoiding proprietary blobs even when it means reduced hardware coverage/support. As such with avoiding the likes of the Intel FSP, the supported list of motherboards is quite limited...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap of all the interesting KDE changes this week, which includes building up of more work targeting Plasma 5.26 this autumn as well as KDE application enhancements and more...

Debian 11.4 is out as the fourth stable release update to "Bullseye" of this popular community-based Linux distribution...

In addition to the OpenChrome DRM/KMS driver hoping to be finally mainlined in 2022 for supporting aging VIA graphics hardware from the long-ago days of their x86 chipsets, separately there is a DRM/KMS kernel driver in the works for something even older... A Linux DRM graphics driver for the Atari Falcon from the early 90's...

Gentoo developer Andreas Hüttel "Dilfridge" is experimenting with binary Gentoo package hosting and finding out what improvements to Portage are needed for making it more of a reality at a larger scale...

Intel this week submitted to DRM-Next what it anticipates to be the last batch of "drm-intel-next" feature changes for the upcoming Linux 5.20 merge window...

KDE developers are looking at possibly making use of C++20 language features within the Plasma 5.26 desktop and the newer C++ usage could work its way to other KDE components with time too...

Cloud Hypervisor as what started out as an Intel open-source project and now lives under the Linux Foundation umbrella as a virtual machine monitor (VMM) for use with Linux KVM and Windows MSHV is out with a new feature release...

Following last week's release of Vulkan 1.3.219 that introduced the VK_EXT_shader_module_identifier extension and Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) adding support for it earlier this week, Intel's open-source Vulkan driver "ANV" has landed support for this new extension to close out the week...

The past few months we have been closely covering the Coreboot port to an MSI retail motherboard for Intel Alder Lake. This port carried out by the 3mdeb consulting firm has been with their downstream "Dasharo" firmware based on Coreboot while as of yesterday the motherboard port has begun landing in upstream Coreboot...

Canonical engineers have been continuing their quest to improve the start-up time for the Snap version of Mozilla Firefox that is used by default on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. With the latest improvements now pushed to the Firefox Snap, they are seeing around a 50% reduction in start-time for the web browser...

Last year when the Intel Core i9 12900K "Alder Lake" processor launched, Windows 11 was outperforming Linux to much surprise in general but explainable due to some late Linux kernel patches around Intel's hybrid architecture. Back in February I looked at the situation again and Linux started outrunning Windows 11 on the i9-12900K with the latest Linux kernel at the time. But with a few more months having passed and for the Intel Alder Lake hybrid processors to mature under Windows and Linux, how do things stand now? Here are some new benchmarks.

With the upcoming feature-packed Linux 5.20 kernel adding to the growing list of features is Intel SGX2 support looking like it is set to land...

At least some of Lenovo's new AMD Rembrandt powered laptops with Microsoft Pluton security co-processor are set by default to only trust Microsoft's key and not the Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA Key that Linux distributions and others use for UEFI Secure Boot support. Thus by default only Microsoft Windows will boot with the default firmware configuration on some new Lenovo laptops...

Wayland-Protocols 1.26 was released on Thursday as the collection of protocol specifications for Wayland. With Wayland-Protocols 1.26 is the new Single Pixel Buffer protocol and enhancements to existing protocols...

Red Hat engineers continue working on Stratis Storage as their means of providing Btrfs and (Open)ZFS like features atop the mature XFS paired with DM + Clevis + LUKS. Stratis 3.2 is out today as the newest update to this Linux storage stack...