Phoronix

Git 2.36 is out as the newest feature release to this widely-used, open-source distributed revision control system...

Back in January was the change pushed into SDL2 Git where the library prefers Wayland by default where available rather than defaulting to using X11 support. However, pushed today into SDL2 is a revert on that earlier change due to Wayland issues that the developers are more comfortable sticking to X11/XWayland by default until various Wayland problems are addressed...

A Canonical kernel engineer is now proposing an Intel P-State performance fix for latest-generation Intel Alder Lake processors be back-ported to the Linux 5.15 LTS series. In turn this should then be picked up by Ubuntu 22.04's kernel build moving forward and others on this latest long-term support series for Linux...

Back in 2019 Western Digital announced their work on ZoneFS as a new Linux file-system just designed for specialty use-cases and running on zoned block devices. There hasn't been much code churn around ZoneFS in a number of kernel releases since it was merged back in 2020 while for Linux 5.19 this summer a number of fixes/improvements have been queuing up...

Earlier this month the change proposal was laid out for Fedora 37 looking to deprecate legacy BIOS support. That kicked the hornets nest with many Fedora users expressing their desire to see Fedora legacy BIOS support continue whether it be for running the Linux distribution on dated hardware or even just for VMs without UEFI boot. It's looking more like that responsibility of legacy BIOS support may instead be shifted to a new special interest group (SIG) to take up the work of maintaining and testing that pre-UEFI boot support...

In matching behavior already provided by the GCC compiler, LLVM/Clang has landed "RandStruct" functionality to allow optionally randomizing the structure layout for C code...

The "virtio-crypto" kernel driver for supporting the VirtIO-spec'ed virtual crypto hardware accelerator for virtual machines is about to offer significantly better performance...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.18-rc3 as the Easter Sunday kernel for testing as Linux 5.18 works its way toward a stable release toward the end of May...

There have been bug reports recently for those using GNOME Shell 42 whether it be the likes of Ubuntu 22.04 or Fedora (Silverblue) 36 Beta over crashes or blank screens appearing when making use of the Radeon DRM/KMS kernel driver. That older Radeon DRM driver is for pre-GCN 1.2 graphics processors (aside from those on GCN 1.0/1.1 that switch to using the AMDGPU kernel driver with optional module parameters) while now Mutter has landed a fix for this issue...

Two Intel TSX (Transactional Synchronization Extensions) fixes were submitted today ahead of Linux 5.18-rc3 and are also marked for back-porting to existing Linux stable kernels. One of the fixes is for addressing a case where systems could still be left vulnerable to the TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA) vulnerability and the other is where TSX may not get turned off...

Haiku as the open-source operating system continuing the great work inspired by BeOS remains very active in working to accomplish their goals...

Box86/Box64 is out with new versions today for this open-source project getting x86/x86_64 binaries running on other architectures like Arm and possibly RISC-V and more moving forward. Exciting with Box86 v0.2.6 and Box64 v0.1.8 is getting Steam and Steam Play working for at least the basics...

In time for making your open-source Easter basket is the release of LXQt 1.1 as the newest feature release to this open-source, Qt-based desktop environment born out of the merging of the former Razor-qt and LXDE projects...

While Intel Alder Lake has been out for roughly a half-year now and has been working out well on Linux particularly with v5.16+ kernels, the "intel_idle" driver for CPU idle time management hasn't supported these latest Intel desktop/mobile processors but now there is that support on the way for possible power-savings benefits...

The latest GNU C Library (Glibc) development code this week has begun dropping various SSSE3 optimized code paths...

MediaTek this week posted their initial "request for comments" code on stateless AV1 decoder support for their video codec driver...

Since 2015 the Linux kernel has supported UEFI mirrored memory functionality for x86/x86_64 while now Huawei is working on adding that functionality for AArch64...

GNU Coreutils 9.1 is out this weekend as the latest feature update to these widely-used core utilities on Linux and other platforms with supplying cp, cat, ls, and other common commands...

AMD today sent in an initial batch of new feature code today to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the Linux 5.19 kernel cycle...

As previously talked about on Phoronix with the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel there is a change to the Linux kernel scheduler around the NUMA imbalance handling when spanning multiple LLCs as is the case with AMD Zen CPUs. Already I've carried out benchmarks looking at some of the areas where AMD EPYC CPUs are enjoying speed-ups on Linux 5.18. Since benchmarking the AMD EPYC 7773X with its hefty 1.5GB of L3 cache for 2P servers via AMD 3D V-Cache, I've been curious to try this forthcoming kernel on that Milan-X configuration. Here are such benchmarks looking at the AMD EPYC 7773X 2P performance on Ubuntu 22.04 with its default Linux 5.15 kernel against Linux 5.17 stable and then the 5.18 development kernel.

A new version of Mold has been released, the high-speed open-source linker successfully challenging the likes of GNU Gold and LLVM LLD...

The exFAT file-system driver for the Linux kernel continues maturing nicely with new features, fixes, and performance improvements. The latest Linux exFAT driver improvement worth mentioning is a significant performance improvement from a Sony engineer...

While AMD's official graphics driver on Windows has effectively moved to legacy pre-Polaris graphics card support, in the open-source world on Linux even the old "R600" Gallium3D driver for Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics cards sees the occasional new feature work by the community. The latest is a new NIR back-end being rewritten for this R600g driver and should debut soon...

This week saw KDE developers tackling many bug fixes to their open-source desktop software with Plasma Wayland fixes still being one of the dominant areas receiving bug fixing attention...

FreeBSD 13.1 is working its way toward release later this month and out today is the second to last release candidate...

Following yesterday's Mesa 22.1 code branching / feature freeze, Mesa 22.1-rc1 was released this afternoon as the first step towards releasing Mesa 22.1 next month. Mesa 22.1 is bringing improvements for old NVIDIA graphics on open-source, many Radeon "RADV" Vulkan enhancements, a lot of work as always on the Intel side, the new Imagination Rogue PowerVR driver, and much more...

With the Linux 5.19 kernel there is going to be the initial graphics driver support for Raptor Lake S with the initial batch of PCI IDs being added. Published today in patch form and still potentially making it to mainline in v5.19 is Raptor Lake P support...

The folks at open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb have published a new blog post outlining the current state of open-source firmware on Intel Tiger Lake platforms...

Next week's Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" is using Linux 5.15 by default given that the kernel is also a "Long Term Support" release. While it makes sense in theory, in practice with Linux 5.16 having been out as stable since January and Linux 5.17 out for several weeks already there is a lot of hardware improvements past the v5.15 that haven't been back-ported or otherwise picked up by Ubuntu Jammy's kernel build. The main pain point this presents is for those using the latest-generation Intel "Alder Lake" processors with a mix of performance and power efficiency cores. My testing of Alder Lake this week on the latest Ubuntu 22.04 LTS build still shows that its 5.15-based experience being less than desirable with measurable -- often very significant -- improvements if using v5.16 or later.

Public code reviews started this week on Qt platform support for Google's Chromium open-source browser code...

Going back to last October has been work by AMD developers in leveraging the DRM buddy allocator code started by Intel within their AMDGPU kernel driver. With the Linux 5.19 kernel this summer, AMDGPU is ready to finally make use of that buddy allocator...

Cloud-Hypervisor is the Rust-written, KVM-leveraging VMM started by Intel that is now developed under the Linux Foundation umbrella with Arm, Microsoft, and others also contributing to this project focused on cloud virtualization needs. Cloud-Hypervisor 23.0 is out today with the latest features for this increasingly capable open-source virtual machine monitor...

As anticipated the code for Mesa 22.1 has now been branched with the first release candidate imminent for this quarterly Mesa3D update...

While every few days it seems like we are writing about new DG2/Alchemist graphics code being prepared for the Linux kernel or related components like Mesa -- and it's been something going on for many months now -- knowing the actual working state of Intel Arc Graphics on Linux hasn't been exactly clear given no formal announcements/communication out of Intel yet as to Linux support expectations / version requirements and not yet having any hardware access. While much of the graphics support has been squared away for Intel Arc DG2/Alchemist as covered in prior articles, it turns out the compute support is still settling but there is now a patch series pending for actually exposing it...

Opened up at the end of March is the work-in-progress Intel oneAPI back-end for Blender's Cycles renderer. This Intel GPU back-end focused for supporting the company's forthcoming Intel Arc graphics cards is targeting the open-source oneAPI Base Toolkit and making use of SYCL. There still is more code work needed, but it's good to see this coming together to complement Blender's NVIDIA CUDA and AMD HIP support...

Being a week out past the end of the Linux 5.18 merge window, today Intel sent out their first batch of "i915" DRM graphics driver updates to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of what will be the Linux 5.19 kernel this summer. There is a lot of code churn still happening around enabling Intel's discrete graphics hardware and other open-source driver happenings...

With the dozens of 4U rackmount enclosures used at Phoronix, when it comes to the high-end desktop systems the Noctua NH-U9 series has been the go-to choice for CPU cooling. The Noctua NH-U9 series has been capable of cooling HEDT systems even with Threadripper / EPYC processors using the NH-U9 TR4-SP3 while fitting within 4U height requirements. For the Noctua NH-U9 series and other 4U compatible heatsinks they've tended to be limited to 80~92mm cooling fans due to height requirements. Noctua though recently introduced the NH-D12L as offering a dual tower CPU heatsink design capable of fitting 120mm fans and has been the focus of our recent testing.

SUSE with the openSUSE community is embarking on the development of the "Adaptable Linux Platform" (ALP) as what will eventually be the successor to SUSE Linux Enterprise 15...

While during these crazy times it feels like Fedora transitioned from Yum to DNF yesterday, it's already been a half-decade since the DNF package manager has been the default on Fedora. Next year with Fedora 38 they are looking at further evolving package management by way of MicroDNF...

LLVM 14.0 was just released last month while shipping today is already the LLVM 14.0.1 release with this point milestone coming much sooner than usual...

Red Hat continues advancing the GNU Compiler Collection's static analysis capabilities. With the upcoming GCC 12 release are yet more improvements to this still-experimental static analyzer...

With Mesa 22.1 due to be branched in the next day or so as the feature freeze for this quarterly Mesa update, Valve developer Mike Blumenkrantz has penned a new blog post outlining all of the Zink changes accomplished this cycle...

Intel via their Intel Labs organization announced last year ControlFlag for finding bugs in code using AI. Intel's ControlFlag is open-source and leverages machine learning for uncovering bugs within arbitrary code-bases. At first ControlFlag was focused on uncovering bugs within C/C++ code but with its new v1.1 release is beginning to uncover PHP bugs too...

Oracle has begun making a new version of Solaris 11.4 available for free/open-source developers and for non-production personal use. Oracle Solaris 11.4 "CBE" was announced to little fanfare last month for what many open-source OS enthusiasts will likely argue is too little, too late...

Git 2.35.2 was just released along with updates to prior series in the form of Git 2.34.2, 2.33.2, 2.32.1, 2.31.2, and 2.30.3 due to a new security issue...

The newest software addition under AMD's GPUOpen software umbrella is HIP-RT as a ray-tracing library for HIP...

When it comes to running open-source Coreboot on retail motherboards it's sadly mostly a matter of generations-old platforms like various AMD Opteron server motherboards, old ThinkPads, many generation old motherboards for out-of-date Intel CPUs, and other dated hardware. To much excitement, 3mdeb has been porting Coreboot and the Dasharo open-source firmware to the MSI PRO Z690-A (DDR4) motherboards... Yes, finally Coreboot on a retail and broadly available motherboard that's latest-generation!..

Ahead of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS shipping next week, a new version of their Zsys daemon/client for ZFS-based Linux installations has been issued...

Last month with the AMD EPYC 7773X Linux benchmarks and Milan-X in the Azure cloud I showed the impressive capabilities of AMD's new Milan-X processors with 768MB of L3 cache per socket (1.5GB cache per 2P server!) for a range of workloads. All of that initial benchmarking as usual was done using the default GCC system compiler across all tested AMD/Intel processors. Of course, there also exists AMD's Optimizing C/C++ Compiler (AOCC) as a downstream of LLVM/Clang with various Zen optimization patches applied. Curious about the AOCC impact for Milan-X, here are some benchmarks looking at the EPYC 7773X 2P performance across AOCC, GCC, and LLVM Clang.

Over a year ago IBM sent out GCC compiler support for "arch14" that at the time we imagined was for IBM z16. Indeed with IBM having announced their z16 last week, the GCC compiler is now being updated to officially recognize z16 and offer that as an option over the "arch14" naming...