As part of the long ongoing work to improve Linux's printk() code, there has been work to allow for threaded console printing and allowing consoles to run at full-speed. That work is still ongoing but Tuesday saw the third iteration of those printk patches posted...
Back in 2020 the University of Illinois released HPVM as a heterogeneous parallel systems compiler. This compiler for CPUs / GPUs / FPGAs / other accelerators reached version 1.0 and this week HPVM 2.0 has been announced by the university research crew...
Following the RHEL 9.0 Beta from last November and CentOS Stream 9 for the bleeding-edge RHEL9, the AlmaLinux crew today announced their 9.0 beta milestone. AlmaLinux over the past year has proven itself capable as a popular, community-based RHEL alternative that started after Red Hat announced it would discontinue the no-cost CentOS Linux downstream...
WebAssembly as the W3C standard for a portable binary-code format for executable programs on the web and elsewhere continues seeing exciting new use-cases for speedy web applications and even desktop purposes. This open standard continues advancing though and the first public working drafts of WebAssembly 2.0 were published today...
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" is set to be officially released this Thursday while available today are the hopefully-final release candidate images...
Being worked on for a while has been a more powerful Motorola 68000 "m68k" virtualization target. It looks like that new virtual machine target will come with Linux 5.19 for allowing m68k guests with up to 3.2GB of RAM and up to 128 VirtIO devices...
Last weekend saw the release of Box86 0.2.6 and Box64 0.1.8 for enjoying x86 and x86_64 Linux binaries on 64-bit Arm and other CPU architectures. Out today meanwhile is the release of FEX-Emu 2204 as another open-source project making it easy to run x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64...
While most Linux distributions will include linux-firmware.git firmware files as the collection of firmware/microcode binaries needed by various mainline Linux kernel drivers, Debian does not. While the kernel drivers are open-source, the firmware files tend to be binary-only/closed-source, but these days are increasingly necessary for any level of functional support. Thus Debian is left in the awkward position of either providing poor hardware support and users left wondering what's going on or to make some improvements to better deal with today's world of firmware necessities...
There are many networking changes already building up in "net-next" ahead of the Linux 5.19 kernel cycle kicking off this summer. Merged yesterday is support within the Mellanox Ethernet "mlxsw" kernel driver for supporting the NVIDIA Mellanox SN4800 modular switch...
With the Arch Linux based Asahi Linux running well on the Apple M1 (aside from accelerated graphics and various other features not implemented yet), one of the areas I was curious about was how well LLVM Clang and GCC C/C++ compilers compete when running on the Apple M1 with Linux. In this article are some quick benchmarks looking at how the stock compilers on Asahi currently compare for Apple's Arm-based SoC.
This year AMD engineers working on hardware enablement for Linux have been busy with EDAC driver improvements like RDDR5 and LRDDR5 handling, AMD Scalable Machine Check Architecture (SMCA) additions for "future" CPUs, and the various other areas outside of the error detection and correction field. Today though is a new patch series back in that hardware error handling space with new SMCA code...
Similar to Sony contributing PlayStation 4 compiler support in LLVM with Clang being their preferred code compiler, Sony has now begun upstreaming PlayStation 5 (PS5) support in the open-source LLVM/Clang compiler stack...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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