Phoronix

While Retbleed was grabbing the headlines last week and attention of kernel developers, an Intel engineer sent out a new patch series adding Linux kernel support for "BHI_DIS" as a new hardware-based mitigation that appears to be coming with future Intel CPUs for better fending off Spectre-BHI (Branch History Injection) that was disclosed back in March. But initial indications are this new hardware-based prevention may be even more costly for performance and is not being enabled by default...

Canonical engineer Daniel van Vugt who is known for his work on enhancing the upstream GNOME desktop stack to improve the experience for Ubuntu has recently taken up interest in getting the AMD-Xilinx Kria KR260 working with the GNOME Wayland session. The Kria KR260 is for the recently-announced AMD/Xilinx Robotics Starter Kit...

After dealing with the Intel Alder Lake P GuC firmware breakage around Linux 5.19 Git that is now to be addressed by the upstream Intel developers, it was on to performance testing the shiny new Core i7 1280P with this kernel due to be released as stable within the next two weeks... For those concerned about maximum performance, there was a glaring performance regression for this Alder Lake P on the new kernel being released as stable later this month. Well, a default change in performance/behavior at least but the power efficiency / performance-per-Watt tended to be better on this new kernel.

AMD today published AMDVLK 2022.Q3.1 as their latest snapshot of this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems...

Asahi Linux has issued an update with initial support for the Mac Studio powered by the M1 Ultra SoC as well as having initial (experimental) suppoirt for the new Apple M2 hardware...

Stemming from my article last week noting how Linux 5.19 Git broke Intel Alder Lake P graphics support due to requiring new firmware while not retaining backwards compatibility with the existing Intel GuC firmware, a solution is still being worked on prior to Linux 5.19 final whether it be a revert or the proposed patch working on GuC v69/70 firmware compatibility. Linux firmware guidelines are also being proposed to ensure kernel developers in the future don't try to break firmware support guarantees...

One of several improvements being prepared for the XFS file-system with the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle is focused on improving the CIL scalability for systems with many CPU cores...

The ASUS-EC-Sensors driver that provides better and faster hardware sensor reading for ASUS motherboards on Linux and premiered earlier this year in Linux 5.18 is continuing to broaden its list of supported ASUS motherboards...

Ben Widawsky who had been at Intel for the past seventeen years, most of which were spent improving their open-source Linux graphics driver as well as other Linux kernel contributions, has joined Google...

Red Hat released Stalld 1.17 this past week as the newest version of this open-source daemon used for thread stall detection and boosting on Linux...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.19-rc7 following a busy week due to the Retbleed security mitigation and not only the CPU overhead performance impact it puts on users but the mess it has on kernel development especially when it comes to embargoed issues that make the patches difficult to review/test well prior to embargo lift...

Following some weekend benchmarks here are more complementary numbers on the Retbleed mitigation performance benchmark costs. These additional numbers are on a Zen 2 based AMD Ryzen 7 4800U APU that has been common both to laptops as well as embedded/low-profile devices for thin client computing, IoT / edge use-cases, and more...

Due to the new "Retbleed" security mitigation further hurting CPU performance for affected processors, Intel engineers have revisited work on call depth tracking mitigation as an alternative to the Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) mitigation to help in lowering the overhead costs...

Raptor Computing Systems that is known for their open-source POWER9-based Talos II and Blackbird systems that are fully open-source designs and running on free software down to the firmware level are preparing for a new product launch...

As of this week in Mesa 22.2, the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for the VK_NV_device_generated_commands extension. This NVIDIA-created extension that has been around for a few years with their hardware allows for the GPU to generate some of the most frequent rendering commands on the hardware itself...

After the COVID-19 pandemic hiatus, Debian's annual conference "DebConf" is back to being an in-person event and started this morning in Kosovo...

Intel this week issued their Compute Runtime 22.28.23726 pre-release for this open-source GPU compute stack on Windows and Linux for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support on their graphics hardware...

The existing GTK-based Anaconda installer is to remain the default installation experience for Fedora 37 this autumn but a change proposal has been filed with hopes of having a public preview image for Anaconda's next-gen web-based interface for installations...

Igalia developer Christopher Michael has begun a blog post series outlining the consulting firm's work on improving the accelerated 2D rendering for the Raspberry Pi 1 through Raspberry Pi 3 single board computers...

Arcan 0.6.2 was released this week as the newest version of the open-source display server built atop a game engine and aiming to compete with the likes of X11 and Wayland while focusing on advanced capabilities...

Vulkan 1.3.221 was released this week as the newest spec update for this industry-standard graphics/compute API...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with another great weekly recap of all the interesting changes coming together in the KDE desktop space...

Wine 7.13 is now available as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

While AMD is normally fairly good at promptly supporting major new enterprise Linux distribution releases from Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical (Ubuntu), this time around with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS it's taken just shy of three months since the official release for them to formally release a new packaged driver supporting it...

While there are many shiny new features coming in this next kernel version, the Linux 5.19 cycle hasn't been particularly smooth for Intel. In addition to now needing to deal with their GuC firmare breakage for Alder Lake P "ASAP", their brand new In-Field Scan (IFS) driver set to premiere in Linux 5.19 has been marked as "broken" after it was determined its exposed interface may need some alterations...

Earlier this week Linux security researcher Matthew Garrett shared that Lenovo's newer AMD Rembrandt laptops with Microsoft's Pluton security co-processor would not boot Linux by default. The issue stems from the third-party UEFI certificate not being enabled by default and it turns out is something Microsoft is seemingly now enforcing. Fortunately, I had a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen3 with Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U on the way and so was now able to test this experience under Linux.

Earlier this year TUXEDO Computers announced their Stellaris 15 Gen4 laptop that when stationary could be water-cooled using their TUXEDO Aquaris water-cooling solution. Oddly for this Bavarian Linux PC retailer that was a Windows-only feature, but today they have announced Linux support for this laptop water cooling solution...

Developer "adlo" announced to Wayland developers today the work on porting Xfce's Xfwm4 window manager code to Wayland and this new "Xfway" compositor is being brought up using the wlroots library that is becoming increasingly common among the smaller Wayland compositors...

The openSUSE project is talking up their first-class support for the Nim programming language in joining Arch Linux for shipping up-to-date packages for this compiled programming language...

Coming for the Linux 5.20 cycle is a IO_uring user-space block driver developed by a Red Hat engineer...

The AMDGPU kernel graphics driver had been preparing to make use of the buddy allocator started by the Intel Linux graphics driver. But now with today's batch of DRM fixes that AMDGPU support is being reverted for Linux 5.19 due to it causing garbled screens for some users...

A final batch of feature updates for the AMDGPU/AMDKFD drivers were mailed in this afternoon to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the Linux 5.20 merge window opening later this month...

As a public service announcement for those who already have bought an Alder Lake P laptop or thinking of getting one, with kernel upgrades you need to be cautious/aware now of breaking accelerated graphics support due to versioned firmware requirements around the GuC micro-controller. While I am surprised Linus Torvalds allows this or wonder if he even is aware of it given his past statements on Linux kernel updates not breaking user-space, the Intel GuC firmware handling being versioned and not supporting backwards compatibility can throw a wrench into your upgrade experience like with the upcoming Linux 5.19 kernel...

Launched earlier this year was Alder Lake P series for modern Intel laptops with up to 14 cores / 20 threads for modern Intel laptops. Many Phoronix readers have been inquiring about Alder Lake laptop support and performance under Linux and recently I finally got my hands on an Alder Lake P device in the form of the MSI Prestige 14Evo A12M-231 that features the flagship ADL-P model of the Core i7 1280P. Today's article is focused on the Linux performance of that flagship Core i7 1280P compared to other AMD and Intel laptop processors.

Out today is the beta of the upcoming Linux Mint 21 "Vanessa" desktop-oriented Linux distribution that is built off Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

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...