Phoronix

Canonical has officially released Ubuntu Core 22 as its fully containerized version of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS that is optimized for IoT and edge computing use-cases...

With the in-development Linux 5.19 kernel there is compute engine support for DG2/Alchemist graphics now exposed to user-space. Besides the Intel OpenCL Runtime / oneAPI Level Zero preparing to make use of that compute engine support, patches merged today to Mesa 22.2 also allow enabling the DG2-class Arc Graphics compute support within the OpenGL/Vulkan drivers...

Earlier this year the folks at firmware consulting firm 3mdeb announced a open-source Coreboot port to a retail Intel Alder Lake motherboard. It's very exciting since outside of Chromebooks, IHV reference boards, and custom server platforms at hyperscalers, it's still rare to find Coreboot support on modern, retail boards. That "Dasharo" open-source firmware effort for the MSI Z690-A WiFi DDR4 has come together nicely over a matter of weeks and the developers are now celebrating their v1.0 release...

Merged earlier this year into Mesa was "Dozen" for Vulkan on Direct3D 12 for use with Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux or in Windows cases where there may be a D3D12 driver installed but no Vulkan support. This is akin to the layering work Microsoft already supports for leveraging Mesa to provide OpenCL and OpenGL atop Direct3D 12. That "Dozen" driver is now readying Vulkan 1.1 support...

Earlier this year Pensando engineers began posting Linux patches for enabling their Elba DPU SoC. This data processing unit is powered by 16 x Arm Cortex-A72 cores and designed for supporting up to dual 200GE networking with this SoC intended for high-end networking equipment. It didn't take long for the AMD integration less than one month after AMD completed its Pensando acquisition with the new Linux patches now reflected as the AMD Pensando Elba...

Overnight Intel announced that the Arc A380 desktop GPU has launched in China and will begin appearing in the Chinese market this month...

Valve today promoted Proton 7.0-3 to stable as the newest version of this software based on Wine and leveraging DXVK / VKD3D-Proton and other components for running Windows games with great success on Linux. Proton 7.0-3 is now available for Steam Play when firing up the Steam client while Valve also today issued a new Proton Experimental update...

We have been writing about GIMP 3.0 for nearly a decade and with that stable release still out of sight, GIMP 2.10.32 is out as a six-month update to the aging GIMP 2.10 stable series...

In addition to the Hertzbleed frequency scaling side-channel attack being made public today as part of "Patch Tuesday" and affecting both Intel and AMD CPUs, Intel is additionally disclosing a set of "MMIO Stale Data" vulnerabilities. The Linux kernel has already been patched for these new vulnerabilities affecting multiple generations of Intel CPUs from Rocket Lake back to Haswell X and Skylake...

Hertzbleed has been made public today as a new family of side-channel attacks making use of frequency side channels. Both Intel and AMD have issued security advisories as a result...

Last week with the release of Blender 3.2 bringing AMD HIP support for Linux to provide for Radeon GPU acceleration, I posted some initial benchmarks of AMD Radeon RX 6000 series with HIP against NVIDIA RTX with OptiX. There was interest by some Phoronix readers in also seeing NVIDIA CUDA results even though OptiX is in good shape with RTX GPUs, so with that here are results of NVIDIA CUDA vs. NVIDIA OptiX vs. AMD HIP with Blender 3.2 on Ubuntu Linux.

KDE Plasma 5.25 is now shipping as the latest half-year major update to the KDE desktop...

Earlier this year Wine began experimenting with GitLab to improve their development workflow for this open-source project that allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux. It's now been decided that the GitLab workflow is useful and will now be their path forward...

While there are many exciting new features coming with Linux 5.19, one of the features that wasn't submitted this cycle unfortunately was the Multi-Gen "MGLRU" code led by Google. As covered in several prior Phoronix articles, the MGLRU support has exciting performance implications for making the Linux kernel's page reclaim code far more efficient...

Approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee this week is returning Fedora Cloud base to be listed as an official Fedora edition...

Oracle on Monday released the Oracle Linux 9 Developer Preview as their take on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 that reached general availability last month...

For those interested in open-source CAD solutions, FreeCAD 0.20 is out today as the newest version of this general purpose 3D computer-aided design modeler that has been in development now for nearly twenty years...

One of my personal gripes with AMD's Zen CPU support on Linux has been the lack of timely support for CPU temperature monitoring with their "k10temp" driver. Even though usually just new IDs are often needed and sometimes needing to adjust offsets or other minor changes, it has traditionally been done post-launch and sometimes left up to patches from the open-source community. Thankfully that has been changing and with Zen 4 it looks like that support will be ready for launch-day with the mainline Linux kernel...

To organize efforts around improving Fedora Linux for heterogeneous computing, a new special interest group "SIG" is looking to be established to help ensure the success of Fedora in the world of XPUs, the growing and very diverse software ecosystem around accelerators, etc...

While not record-shattering like the 1.1 Exaflops Frontier supercomputer at ORNL that took the Top500 spot this year from Fugaku, LUMI was inaugurated today with the claim of Europe's most powerful supercomputer...

AMD's Radeon Memory Visualizer "RMV" tool from their GPUOpen initiative has allowed better understanding video memory usage with Windows across multiple APIs. In citing the "rising popularity of gaming on the Linux OS", AMD has now enabled Linux support for this tool...

After battling Ceph storage issues and related problems for the past day after two solid-state drives failed, the FreeDesktop.org GitLab that is used for the centralized, coordination of the open-source Linux graphics driver development and other open-source software is back online...

A patch from AMD to further tune the Linux kernel's scheduler around NUMA imbalancing has been queued up and slated for introduction in Linux 5.20. For some workloads this scheduler tuning can help out significantly for AMD Zen-based systems and even on Intel Xeon servers has the possibility of helping too...

Earlier this month marked the launch of the HP Dev One as an interesting collaboration between HP and System76 for a laptop optimized for Linux developers and running System76's Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS operating system. It's a very interesting laptop and well thought out for Linux use with an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U SoC and integrated Radeon graphics for satisfying the preferences of many Linux developers preferring a fully open-source driver stack. Thanks to the large scale manufacturing of HP, it's also a competitively-priced Linux laptop compared to many of the Linux laptops from smaller vendors that are based on Clevo or other white box laptop designs.

GNOME developers are working on supporting the Linux KMS "Max BPC" connector property that is supported by some of the Direct Rendering Manager drivers for limiting the maximum bits per color permitted. In turn properly supporting this setting can take care of monitor issues seen on some systems where the monitor may randomly flicker or have other issues unless otherwise lowering the refresh rate or resolution...

EROFS-Utils 1.5 has been released as the set of user-space utilities for the EROFS Linux read-only file-system that is increasingly popular with Android/embedded use-cases and growing container usage...

Centralized development around Mesa, the X.Org Server, and dozens of other open-source projects is at a stand-still this weekend due to FreeDesktop.org GitLab crashing with the entire service down...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.19-rc2 with the fixes that have trickled in for this week past the closure of the Linux 5.19 merge window...

In addition to all of the Linux 5.19 feature changes, sent in today for the Linux 5.19-rc2 release later today were some additional x86 platform driver updates. Sent in as part of the "fixes" for the week were some new device IDs adding in some new hardware support to existing drivers...

Introduced in the early 80's for the Motorola 68000 series was Versa Module Eurocard "VMEbus" standard that continues to see industrial uses. While still seeing some reported use today, unfortunately the same cannot be said for the quality of the VMEbus Linux support. After the VME subsystem was promoted out of staging a decade ago, the VME hardware drivers failed to ever leave staging and the code has fallen into disrepair and no maintenance now for the past half-decade. So the VME subsystem support is preparing to depart back to the land of the kernel's staging area...

Well known AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák landed more than two dozen patches this weekend fixing up Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) Stream-Out / Transform Feedback functionality for RDNA/RDNA2 GPUs ahead of the NGG Stream-Out enabling for upcoming RDNA3 graphics cards...

Last month I wrote about a new set of Linux patches that provide for better power management on AMX-enabled "Sapphire Rapids" servers. The patches help ensure AMX-enabled CPUs can reach their lower power states for maximum power-savings and that also helps ensure other CPU cores have a larger thermal/power budget for hitting their rated turbo frequencies. That change/fix will be coming in the Linux 5.20 cycle later this summer...

José Expósito continues with recently stepping up to manage libinput releases, the input handling library that for the modern Linux desktop is now widely used across both X.Org and Wayland environments. Libinput 1.21 debuted this weekend with various improvements over the prior release...

Established a few months ago was the Open-Source Firmware Foundation to promote open-source firmware usage throughout the industry. LinuxBoot is now the latest party joining the Open-Source Firmware Foundation...

DragonFlyBSD 6.2 was introduced back in January with the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver port, HAMMER2 improvements, and the NVMM hypervisor port, among other improvements. Out this weekend is DragonFlyBSD 6.2.2 with various bug-fixes atop that stable code-base...

Ahead of the KDE Plasma 5.25 desktop release next week, KDE developers have been busy this past week with last minute fixes ahead of that half-year update as well as beginning early work for Plasma 5.26...

PoCL 3.0 has been formally released today for this portable OpenCL implementation that supports execution on CPUs or other back-ends by way of LLVM such as for targeting AMD HSA, NVIDIA GPUs, and other accelerators. With PoCL 3.0 comes initial OpenCL 3.0 support while the actual conformance results are still pending...

This week's release of Blender 3.2 brings AMD GPU rendering support on Linux via AMD's HIP interface in conjunction with their ROCm compute stack. Eager to see the AMD GPU support on Linux finally arrive, I quickly began trying out this new Blender open-source 3D modeling software release while seeing how the AMD RDNA2 HIP performance compares to that of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 GPUs that have long enjoyed top-notch support under Blender.

MIT CSAIL today is lifting the embargo on a new hardware vulnerability affecting the Apple M1 SoCs (no word yet on exposure with the recently announced Apple M2) and dubbed the "PACMAN" attack...

In recent weeks Ubuntu developers have been working on bringing up and improving support for the Starfive VisionFive, which is one of the most promising "low-cost" RISC-V single board computers to date. Hopefully for Ubuntu 22.10 we'll be seeing good support for this sub-$180 RISC-V computer...

With the Linux 5.19 merge window past, the initial batch of drm-misc-next feature changes targeting the Linux 5.20 kernel have been mailed in to DRM-Next for queuing until that next kernel merge window kicks off later in the summer...

It was just back in April that Sound Open Firmware 2.1 released as the newest version of the open-source audio DSP firmware stack started by Intel and also even being used by other select hardware vendors as well. Sound Open Firmware 2.2 is on the way as the newest feature release for Intel's "SOF" project...

This week Phoronix.com turned 18 years old! In marking that milestone, a Phoronix Premium special was offered for enjoying the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits while supporting the site for hoping to help provide a successful 19th year of Phoronix Linux hardware testing and news operations. If you want to participate, that special ends this weekend...

Adding to the list of many exciting features in Linux 5.19 is a new DMA-BUF fence import/export API for improving the usage of explicit synchronization on the Linux desktop to help with Vulkan and allowing more of the Linux desktop to move in the future to a more explicit synchronization model...

AMD today hosted their 2022 Financial Analyst Day where they made some new disclosures and firmed up past product road-map plans...

One of the many changes with the recent Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release was enabling systemd-oomd by default as the out-of-memory daemon that can kill processes when under memory pressure. Unfortunately, for some users this has led to a poor desktop experience with finding their applications being unexpectedly killed. Ubuntu developers are now discussing how to improve this OOMD handling...

PipeWire 0.3.52 was released today as the newest version of this open-source server for handling audio/video streams on the Linux desktop and increasingly being used now as a replacement for PulseAudio...

There was much interest in the recent Python 3.11 beta benchmarks showing much performance uplift from this in-development version of Python compared to prior 3.x releases. While Python 3.11 performance is looking great and huge advantages compared to prior versions, there are also alternative Python implementations like PyPy and Pyston. Stemming from Phoronix reader requests, here are benchmarks showing how Python 3.11 beta performance compares to those alternative Python implementations.

Vulkan 1.3.217 is out this morning as the newest version of the Khronos' high performance graphics/compute API specification. With Vulkan 1.3.217 comes two new extensions...

Earlier this year was an AMD Linux patch to prefer using MWAIT rather than HALT for cases where the CPU idle driver isn't being used. Using MWAIT can lead to significant improvements for the exit latency and now for the Linux 5.20 cycle later this year that change is expected to land...