Phoronix

Intel engineer Huang Ying sent out a set of patches today to implement batch TLB flushing for page migration within the migrate_pages() function and is showing very promising results...

For a long while there has been requests for having a dark mode version of Phoronix.com available for reading content that matches your system's dark theme. The lightened work around Christmas and the holidays finally allowed for me to tackle that sought after feature with CSS dark mode integration...

Intel engineers had submitted support for Linear Address Masking (LAM) with the recently-closed Linux 6.2 merge window but it was rejected by Linus Torvalds. In working toward re-submitted it for the v6.3 cycle or later, an updated Linux LAM patch series was posted today...

Ahead of the early February planned debut of the LibreOffice 7.5 open-source office suite, the release candidate was made available today for testing...

Similar to the great results of Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux on the Ryzen 9 7950X, making use of Clear Linux on the new 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors also helps in maximizing performance for these AVX-512 server processors. Here are some initial benchmarks.

With the in-development Linux 6.2 kernel there is the new compute accelerator "accel" subsystem/framework as part of the Direct Rendering Manager area. The creation of that new subsystem was pulled together by Intel (Habana Labs) and now their AI accelerator driver is preparing to move from the "char/misc" catch-all to this new subsystem...

As a long awaited gift for those using UBports' Ubuntu Touch, for Christmas the open-source, community-driven crew published a beta/RC build of Ubuntu Touch re-based atop Ubuntu 20.04 LTS...

A few months back we looked at the Solidigm P41 Plus NVMe SSD from this company that formed when SK hynix acquired Intel's NAND/SSD business. The P41 Plus was a budget-friendly consumer SSD with QLC memory while recently they launched the P44 Pro as a step-up and based on the SK hynix Platinum P41 design. I've been testing the Solidigm P44 Pro 1TB and 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs under Linux to great performance.

While the Linux 6.2 kernel merge window just wrapped up, AMD's P-State EPP driver was deemed not ready for making it this cycle. However, with AMD having now iterated it to a ninth revision, it's looking like this P-State "Energy Performance Preference" functionality over the existing P-State driver support will be ready for merging come Linux 6.3...

The xf86-video-modesetting work covered a month ago over "TearFree" page flipping support has been merged to the X.Org Server for whenever the next release ends up happening...

It's been one year and a few days since the introduction of Mold 1.0 as a high performance linker alternative to GNU Gold and LLVM LLD while debuting today is Mold 1.8 as the newest feature release...

Prior to the holiday weekend Qualcomm engineers posted a set of "request for comments" Linux kernel patches to implement USB audio offloading support for Qualcomm SoCs with a dedicated audio DSP...

Following the two week long Linux 6.2 merge window colliding with Christmas day, Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.2-rc1 as capping off the merge window and moving on to the testing and bug fixing phase of this release cycle...

Sway 1.8 is out this Christmas as the newest feature release to this i3-inspired Wayland compositor...

Ruby programming language developers have issued a Christmas release of the latest iteration of this language focused on simplicity and productivity...

The IRQ pull request that was merged early in the Linux 6.2 cycle has a big rework to the Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI) subsystem...

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all those celebrating at the end of 2022 as we get ready for the New Year...

A request for comments patch series sent out by AMD Linux graphics driver engineers ahead of the holidays is implementing support for user-mode queues in conjunction with Radeon RX 7000 "Navi 3x" graphics cards and newer...

After two years of work, the Serpent OS Linux distribution has released its first public image for this innovative and original open-source operating system...

Among many open-source software project releases timed for the holidays is Manjaro 22.0 now being available for this popular desktop distribution built atop Arch Linux...

Christmas week didn't slow down KDE developers with there still being a number of features and fixes for this open-source desktop environment to land...

It was back in July 2021 that Haiku R1 Beta 3 was released for this spiritual successor to the BeOS operating system. Now before Christmas and closing out 2022, Haiku R1 Beta 4 has been released as the latest major milestone for this open-source operating system effort...

As a timely gift to programmers using the speedy and very successful Meson build system, the Meson 1.0 stable release has debuted just in time for Christmas. Besides the holiday, today is also notable in marking ten years to the day since Meson started development...

While AMD provided upstream open-source driver support for the Radeon RX 7900 series launch, the initial user experience can be less than desirable if running a new Radeon GPU but initially running an out-of-date kernel or lacking the necessary firmware support. With a new patch series posted AMD is looking to improve the experience by being able to more easily fallback to the firmware frame-buffer when their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver fails to properly load...

A change proposal to be evaluated still by FESCo would help ensure that system shutdowns and reboots can happen faster on Fedora Linux...

Embark Studios has released a new version of Rust-GPU that has a goal of making Rust a first-class programming language and ecosystem for GPU shader development...

If you are running the newest Intel Raptor Lake processors with integrated graphics and the latest Intel Arc Graphics discrete graphics cards under Linux, you are currently relying on the Intel "i915" DRM kernel graphics driver... As implied by the name, it's been used with Intel graphics going back to the old 915G chipset days nearly twenty years ago. But Intel has been working on a new "Xe" kernel graphics driver they have initially announced today and aim to make it production-ready in 2023 for supporting their modern Xe Graphics hardware...

Ahead of the Linux 6.2 merge window ending this weekend, a second batch of the perf subsystem changes have been submitted for this next Linux kernel version. Notable among the various additions to the powerful Linux kernel perf code is handling for various new performance monitoring events with new AMD Zen 4 processors...

The Qt Group has released Qt 6.5 beta just in time for Christmas as what will be their next toolkit feature release premiering as stable around the end of Q1...

Following the basic AMD Zen 4 "znver4" target enablement that was merged for the GCC 13 compiler in October, patches to begin providing tuned support have begun merging for this next GNU Compiler Collection release...

While this week saw the ratification of the Vulkan Video 1.0 extensions in stable form after being out as provisional extensions since early 2021, one of the sad aspects of it is still lacking support for the popular royalty-free VP9 and AV1 codecs. Fortunately, at least, it's been re-affirmed for VP9/AV1 support in 2023...

Fedora is looking at disallowing X.Org/XWayland clients of difference CPU endianness from connecting to the X.Org Server. Such a combination of different endianness between the X.Org Server and clients is rather rare these days but is yet another "large attack surface" of the X.Org Server that needs addressing...

Ampere Computing's SMPro is a system control processor that is an Arm Cortex-M3 serving as a co-processor and handles interfacing with the BMC, error handling, system booting, power fail detection, and other tasks. The SMPro is found starting with Ampere Computing's current Ampere Altra server processors while in Linux 6.2 a lot of its functionality is finally being upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel...

OpenBMC 2.12 has finally been tagged as the first new version since January 2021 for this open-source, Linux-powered baseboard management controller (BMC) software stack...

Intel's OpenVINO toolkit for deep learning is out with a major release ahead of the holidays and now has full support for Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" as well as full support now for their discrete GPUs...

Following the Wine 8.0-rc1 and code freeze from earlier this month, Wine 8.0-rc2 is out today as an off-schedule-due-to-holidays release...

It turns out the hand-written Assembly code providing an optimized string comparison "strcmp" function for the Motorola 68000 (m68k) processor architecture has "always been broken" and only now uncovered at the end of 2022...

One of the security improvements made by AMD with their 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors is upping their Secure Memory Encryption (SME) support from 128-bit to now 256-bit AES-XTS. AMD Secure Memory Encryption can be used for helping thwart attacks on the main system memory, but at what performance cost? In this article is an initial look at the AMD EPYC Genoa performance with AMD SME enabled/disabled.

For those dealing with RAW photos around the holidays, Darktable 4.2 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source photography workflow software that aims to compete with the likes of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom...

Merged last week to Linux 6.2 as part of Andrew Morton's memory management related patches is support within ZRAM for multiple compression streams...

With last week's release of Xfce 4.18 there was some disappointment expressed among readers over the lack of any major Wayland progress in this desktop release. While not part of Xfce 4.18, the work on adapting the Xfwm4 compositor / window manager code to using Wlroots for Wayland has continued progressing...

One of the best features to make it into the mainline Linux kernel this year is MGLRU as the Multi-Gen LRU for overhauling the kernel's page reclamation code. The MGLRU code that premiered in Linux 6.1 has been showing off very well in a variety of benchmarks...

The USB and Thunderbolt driver updates were merged a few days ago for the Linux 6.2 kernel with its merge window open until Christmas...

Red Hat and Fedora engineers are plotting a path to supporting Unified Kernel Images (UKI) with Fedora Linux and for the Fedora 38 release in the spring they are aiming to get their initial enablement in place...

After being in development for three years the first beta builds of the upcoming NetBSD 10.0 operating system release are now available for testing...

As of today with Mesa 23.0 Git the EXT_mesh_shader extension is finally enabled by default for AMD Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA2" graphics hardware when running on a new Linux kernel build...

The NTFS3 kernel driver, which was contributed to the mainline kernel by Paragon Software for read/write NTFS file-system support and other features while being faster than the NTFS-3g FUSE driver, is seeing a number of updates with the Linux 6.2 kernel...

SUSE has released a new prototype build of their Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) that will serve as the basis for the next-generation SUSE Enterprise Linux...

While NVIDIA is already out with multiple GeForce RTX 40 series products, coming only now with the Linux 6.2 kernel is initial open-source 3D acceleration support for the GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" graphics processors. Here is my initial experience with this open-source NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series support in Linux 6.2.

Intel last year published documentation concerning a feature for future CPUs that they dubbed FRED, the Flexible Return and Event Delivery. FRED has the capability of helping system performance and response time while now initial patches for the Linux kernel have been published for supporting FRED...