Phoronix

With the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle is support for AMD's Sensor Fusion Hub v1.1 revision being found in newer Ryzen laptops...

Sent in on Friday night were this week's batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver fixes for Linux 5.19-rc8 due out on Sunday. While usually the late-stage changes tend to be not too eventful, this pull does carry some extra interest since it does fix the Intel GuC firmware breakage I wrote about last week that ended up breaking Alder Lake P graphics on Linux 5.19 unless also upgrading the firmware version...

Linux 5.20 is adding Qualcomm Adreno 619 GPU support to the MSM DRM/KMS driver and now the Freedreno Gallium3D driver is also enabling that A619 GPU support which in turn enables open-source OpenGL acceleration on devices like the Fairphone 4...

The arc4random, arc4random_buf, and arc4random_uniform functions have been common on the BSDs for years to provide higher quality random number generation than rand/random and alternative functions. But now as of yesterday the GNU C Library (Glibc) has finally added the arc4random functions for use on Linux!..

The arc4random, arc4random_buf, and arc4random_uniform functions have been common on the BSDs for years to provide higher quality random number generation than rand/random and alternative functions. But now as of yesterday the GNU C Library (Glibc) has finally added the arc4random functions for use on Linux!..

Even with the summer heat, KDE developers remain very busy working towards Plasma 5.26 later this year as well as the next rounds of KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE application updates...

Even with the summer heat, KDE developers remain very busy working towards Plasma 5.26 later this year as well as the next rounds of KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE application updates...

FFmpeg 5.1 "Riemann" was released on Friday afternoon as a new feature update to this widely-used, open-source multimedia project for video encode/decode and a variety of other purposes...

FFmpeg 5.1 "Riemann" was released on Friday afternoon as a new feature update to this widely-used, open-source multimedia project for video encode/decode and a variety of other purposes...

It's been nearly 12 years since LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice.org following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems and then the subsequent creation of Apache OpenOffice in 2011. While LibreOffice has become the dominant open-source office suite, Apache OpenOffice continues limping along and today marks its v4.1.13 release...

It's been nearly 12 years since LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice.org following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems and then the subsequent creation of Apache OpenOffice in 2011. While LibreOffice has become the dominant open-source office suite, Apache OpenOffice continues limping along and today marks its v4.1.13 release...

Yesterday I delivered my initial arsenal of AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U Linux benchmarks against various other AMD Ryzen and Intel Core notebooks. That ongoing Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U is happening from a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen 3 AMD notebook and this new "Rembrandt" device continues looking good under Linux. But prior to installing Linux, I did run some benchmarks of Lenovo's Windows 11 Pro on there for seeing how the Linux vs. Windows performance is looking for this Zen 3+ SoC.

Yesterday I delivered my initial arsenal of AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U Linux benchmarks against various other AMD Ryzen and Intel Core notebooks. That ongoing Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U is happening from a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen 3 AMD notebook and this new "Rembrandt" device continues looking good under Linux. But prior to installing Linux, I did run some benchmarks of Lenovo's Windows 11 Pro on there for seeing how the Linux vs. Windows performance is looking for this Zen 3+ SoC.

Just shy of two weeks since fwupd 1.8.2 was released with supporting more hardware for system and peripheral firmware updating under Linux, Fwupd 1.8.3 has now arrived as the newest version...

Just shy of two weeks since fwupd 1.8.2 was released with supporting more hardware for system and peripheral firmware updating under Linux, Fwupd 1.8.3 has now arrived as the newest version...

Toshiba's Visconti SoC provides an optimized image recognition processor and geared for advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) solutions for automobiles and similar modern use-cases. Toshiba engineers are now publishing patches for their DNN image processing accelerator driver with hopes of getting the code upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel...

Toshiba's Visconti SoC provides an optimized image recognition processor and geared for advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) solutions for automobiles and similar modern use-cases. Toshiba engineers are now publishing patches for their DNN image processing accelerator driver with hopes of getting the code upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel...

Since last year Microsoft has been working on Direct3D 12 video acceleration for Mesa so that Windows Subsystem for Linux can run common applications targeting the VA-API video acceleration API and ultimately enjoy GPU-based video acceleration by way of Direct3D 12. After the initial video encode/decode support for D3D12 was merged to Mesa earlier this year, the latest Microsoft contribution is now handling of video engine based effects...

Since last year Microsoft has been working on Direct3D 12 video acceleration for Mesa so that Windows Subsystem for Linux can run common applications targeting the VA-API video acceleration API and ultimately enjoy GPU-based video acceleration by way of Direct3D 12. After the initial video encode/decode support for D3D12 was merged to Mesa earlier this year, the latest Microsoft contribution is now handling of video engine based effects...

Released last month was AMD ROCm 5.2 for the company's open-source Linux GPU compute stack while out today is the v5.2.1 point release...

When it comes to compressing textures using the Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) format that is supported by the OpenGL / OpenGL ES / Vulkan APIs, Arm's ASTC Encoder has long reigned supreme. Out today is ASTC-Encoder 4.0 as the latest performance-boosting update to this open-source compressor...

Intel's Linux graphics driver developers continue to be very busy polishing the DG2/Alchemist graphics card support for forthcoming Intel Arc Graphics hardware... Merged today to the open-source Intel Mesa Vulkan driver was a ray-tracing focused fix that yields "like a 100x (not joking) improvement." Even more of a kicker? The change is one line of code for the massive improvement...

Released today was Vulkan 1.3.222 as the newest Vulkan spec with various clarifications/corrections plus two new extensions coming out of Qualcomm...

The Linux game porters at Feral Interactive have released GameMode 1.7 as the newest version of their daemon that can ensure your CPU frequency scaling governor is set to "performance" mode, among other system performance optimizations, automatically when launching games...

I've begun testing the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U "Rembrandt" SoC under Linux and have some preliminary benchmarks of this Zen 3+ chip up against a variety of Intel and AMD notebooks on hand. Here is the first of several articles looking at the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U Linux performance using a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen3.

AMD today posted new open-source Linux driver code for enabling the audio co-processor (ACP) with the upcoming Raphael platform with the Ryzen 7000 series processors...

Merged yesterday into RADV for Mesa 22.2 is implementing task/mesh shader draw support...

In addition to Red Hat being busy working on their new web-based Anaconda installer for future Fedora and RHEL releases, SUSE engineers have also been pursuing their own web-based installer built atop YaST. D-Installer 0.4 was released recently as the latest improvements on that front...

NVIDIA released new Vulkan beta driver builds last night for Linux and Windows users...

Canonical and Dell are jointly announcing that the new Dell XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition laptop has been officially certified for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

Merged this afternoon to the mainline Linux 5.19 Git kernel and set for back-porting is a fix for a new security bug. Oracle made public CVE-2022-21505 on Tuesday as a trivial bypass to the Linux kernel's lockdown mode...

In addition to Dart, Golang, and being involved with other programming language initiatives over the years, their latest effort that was made public on Tuesday is Carbon. The Carbon programming language hopes to be the gradual successor to C++ and makes for an easy transition path moving forward...

Epic Games is the latest company joining the Open 3D Foundation as a premier member alongside Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, and others...

Last week I posted my initial benchmarks for the Linux impact of mitigating Retbleed as the newest CPU speculative execution vulnerability. As noted in the prior Retbleed articles, on the AMD side it's Zen 1/1+/2 processors affected as well as older Bulldozer CPUs. That earlier article included Zen 2 benchmarks while in this article are Zen 1 tests given its situation is slightly different.

The long in development work around IO_uring zero-copy send for the Linux kernel's networking subsystem is now ready for mainline...

Released this morning was the alpha of the GNOME 43 desktop...

The Mesa Lavapipe driver that provides a CPU-based Vulkan implementation is now officially compliant with the Vulkan 1.3 specification...

The Btrfs send/receive functionality allows for generating a stream of changes between two sub-volume snapshots, which can be useful for efficient backup/archive purposes, among other uses. With the Linux 5.20 kernel is send/receive support for the new "stream v2" format...

The Hantro VPU driver that has been developed the past several years for supporting the Hantro video/image processing IP found on various Rockchip and NXP SoCs is set to be promoted out of the Linux kernel's staging area...

Mesa's Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation is finally ready to enable lazy descriptors by default, which in turn will mean better performance for this generic OpenGL implementation across many games/applications...

Google engineers have released Cirq 1.0 as their first full version -- and stable API -- of this open-source programming framework for quantum computing and written in Python...

Last week AMD quietly released AOCL 3.2 as the newest version of their optimized CPU software libraries for use across Ryzen, Ryzen Threadripper, and EPYC platforms...

NVIDIA engineers have been working on NUMA distance metrics within the Linux kernel to replace the simple local/remote NUMA preference interface currently used by some drivers for NUMA-aware memory allocations. In their testing this improved NUMA distance handling is leading to "significant performance implications" for throughput and CPU utilization...

Following the recent discussions about -O3'ing the Linux kernel and other compiler optimizations, a request came in to see some fresh GCC compiler optimization benchmarks with the recently released GCC 12. So here is a fresh look at various GCC optimization levels up through -Ofast as well as with link-time optimizations (LTO) and "-march=native" tuning on the new GCC 12 with the mature AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X platform.

Added to Intel's documentation in late 2020 and initial kernel patches out since early 2021, Intel has been slowly working on Linear Address Masking (LAM) support for the Linux kernel. Out this past week was finally the latest iteration of this work for leveraging untranslated address bits of 64-bit linear addresses to be used for storing arbitrary software metadata...

A feature supported by the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that sadly isn't used more often is function multi-versioning (FMV) for supporting multiple versions of a function with the given function selected based upon the target processor in use. GCC FMV on x86_64 allows for different functions to be used whether supporting SSE4.2, AVX, or even a particular CPU micro-architecture. Arm is finally working on GCC function multi-versioning support for AArch64...

Nadav Amit who previously spearheaded work on reducing unnecessary TLB flushes, concurrent TLB flushes, and other low level optimizations over the years. The latest work is now on "relaxed" TLB flushes as another low-level performance improvement...

Yesterday marked the release of LightDM 1.32 as the first official release of this display manager since 2019...

In addition to AMD engineers being busy working on RDNA3 graphics support for their open-source Linux graphics driver stack, concurrently they have also been working on enabling GFX940 as their next-gen CDNA part, presumably to launch as the AMD Instinct MI300 if traditions hold...

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...