Phoronix

One of the last features to land in Mesa 22.3 prior to yesterday's branching and Mesa 22.3-rc1 release is enabling the Mesa shader disk cache for Panfrost, the Arm Mali open-source driver for Midgard and Bifrost generations...

Feature work on Mesa 22.3 has now concluded as this quarter's feature release to this collection of open-source OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan drivers. Mesa 22.3 was branched this afternoon and Mesa 22.3-rc1 now issued as the first weekly test release leading up to the stable debut in a few weeks...

Ahead of AMD's RDNA3 announcement for tomorrow, 3 November, the Mesa 22.3 open-source Radeon graphics driver code continues seeing more RDNA3/GFX11 enablement work landing...

While initially leary of AMD Zen 4's "double pumped" approach for supporting AVX-512 using a 256-bit data path, it's proven to be very efficient for performance and yield great results without negative clock impairments or wreaking havoc on the power consumption. Back in September I delivered a detailed AVX-512 performance analysis on the Ryzen 9 7950X while in this article is a detailed benchmark look at the Core i9 11900K against the Ryzen 7 7700X. The Core i9 11900K being the currently last Intel desktop CPU officially supporting AVX-512 while the Ryzen 7 7700X was used for matching the core/thread count of that Rocket Lake processor for this AVX-512 on/off comparison.

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver that provides reverse-engineered, open-source OpenGL support for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs is now capable of OpenGL 4.5 with the Adreno 600 series graphics processors...

Merged this morning into Mesa 22.3 are some adjustments to Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for delivering better Vulkan mesh shading performance with Arc Graphics hardware...

It looks like FineIBT as combining the best of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology and Control Flow Integrity as an enhanced, alternative control flow integrity (CFI) implementation could be ready for mainline with the upcoming Linux 6.2 cycle...

JEDEC recently outlined an extension to Universal Flash Storage (UFS) for File-Based Optimizations (FBO) to enhance the performance of UFS devices. A Xiaomi engineer sent out a set of Linux kernel patches for implementing UFS FBO in the name of better performance, but with almost immediate rejection by a veteran Linux kernel maintainer...

With the start of the new month comes updated Steam Survey numbers from Valve for the preceding month. Thanks to the continued growth of the Steam Deck and Valve continuing to ramp up their production, Steam on Linux enjoyed another tick up for October...

The Godot open-source game engine had been part of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) as many open-source projects utilize for handling fiscal sponsorship duties and the like while now the Godot Foundation has been established as its own legal entity...

Going back to late last year Intel began working on a new Linux driver for "Software Defined Silicon" as a means of activating licensed hardware features akin to what they tried a decade ago with the "Intel Upgrade Service" for unlocking extra CPU features. The SDSi driver was merged in Linux 5.18 while this afternoon they sent out a rather sizable update to this controversial driver / hardware feature...

It's been 3+ years that the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been working on NGG Stream-Out support for making use of the Next-Gen Geometry engine that is in workable shape for some RDNA GPUs. Finally with Mesa 22.3 releasing this quarter, a new environment variable option is allowing the NGG Streamout / Transform Feedback functionality to be flipped on with the RADV driver...

Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) is still being eyed for enabling as part of the default Linux x86_64 kernel configurations to provide better out-of-the-box security on supported processors. A patch sent out today continues the upstream discussion over flipping on this feature by default that is part of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) for helping to defend against jump/call oriented programming attacks...

Two high severity security vulnerabilities affecting OpenSSL were made public today, which were the issues that led to Fedora 37 being delayed to mid-November to allow the release images have mitigated OpenSSL packages...

SuperTuxKart 1.4 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source kart racing game originally inspired by Mario Kart...

Clément Lefèbvre has published the latest monthly status report for the Linux Mint distribution that is the popular desktop Linux distribution based on Ubuntu Linux...

Landing in "net-next" on Monday is wired networking support for the MotorComm YT8521 Ethernet Gigabit PHY. This network ASIC may not ring a bell for most folks, but is used so far by one notable RISC-V development board...

With the fifteen Linux hardware reviews and 245 original open-source/Linux news stories written by your's truly last month, here is a look back at what was exciting Phoronix readers the most from Google's new KataOS to the release of the speedy Python 3.11, Linux 6.1 taking shaping, and Intel releasing Arc Graphics A750 and A770 graphics cards...

Adding to the long list of Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver improvements coming with Mesa 22.3 this quarter is now a working Mesa front-end shader caching implementation...

OBS Studio as the leading open-source and cross-platform screencasting/streaming app that is popular with gamers and YouTubers is now out with version 28.1...

Wine 7.20 was released today as a rare Monday debut for this newest bi-weekly development snapshot. Wine continues inching close to its release candidate / feature freeze period for the Wine 8.0 release in early 2023...

Systemd developers are celebrating Halloween by releasing systemd 252...

Following last week's start of the i915 DRM-Next changes intended for Linux 6.2, an initial batch of drm-intel-gt-next feature patches have now also been mailed in to DRM-Next for staging ahead of that next Linux kernel cycle. Notable with today's pull request is a lot of DG2/Alchemist improvements...

Last week I looked at the Intel Core i9 13900K performance under Linux while today the focus is on the Core i5 13600K. The Core i5 13600K is a 14-core / 20-thread processor (6 P cores + 8 E cores), up from 6 P cores + 4 E cores with the prior generation Core i5 12600K. The Core i5 13600K has a recommended customer price of $319~329, which is indeed being honored among Internet retailers and with robust availability. Here is an initial look at how the Core i5 13600K "Raptor Lake" is running under Ubuntu Linux.

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been enjoying many performance optimizations and other improvements in recent months around its ray-tracing capabilities. Merged today is another significant optimization to better the Radeon Vulkan ray-tracing support and coming days ahead of AMD's RDNA3 announcement...

As part of Intel's compiler enablement work for Sierra Forest and Grand Ridge CPUs, support for x86_64 AVX-NE-CONVERT is the latest feature being merged into GCC Git in time for GCC 13...

GNU Make 4.4 is now available as the first major release in more than two and a half years. GNU Make 4.4 has many improvements to this important build automation tool that is still widely used by countless free software projects...

Following yesterday's article about Google Chrome preparing to deprecate the JPEG-XL image format, a Google engineer has now provided their reasons for dropping this next-generation image format...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.1-rc3 as the third weekly test release of the in-development Linux 6.1 kernel...

While Intel contributed oneVPL support to FFmpeg this summer that can be used for video encoding/decoding to AV1 and other formats, this past week Intel engineers contributed an AV1 encode Quick Sync Video (QSV) encoder too for FFmpeg. This AV1 encode path using their Media SDK with QSV is ultimately building atop oneVPL...

Sigstore that is backed by Google, Red Hat, GitHub, and other prominent organizations with an aim to secure the open-source software supply chain has reached general availability and issued the "v1.0" releases for their key software components...

For those interested in the OneXPlayer handheld gaming consoles, a x86 platform driver for the Linux kernel has been posted for getting working sensor support on the AMD-powered OneXPlayer Mini...

Back in Linux 5.19 the initial code for Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) was merged while still an ongoing matter is getting the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) integration merged that is now up to its tenth revision and spans 108 patches...

Back in late 2020 FreeBSD initially landed WireGuard support ahead of FreeBSD 13. But then during the FreeBSD 13 release candidate phase, the WireGuard driver was removed over concerns over the quality of the initial implementation...

JPEG-XL has been looked on rather favorably as a royalty-free, next-generation lossy/lossless image format with much better performance than JPEG. To much surprise, Google Chrome is already making preparations to deprecate JPEG-XL image support in their browser...

While Asahi Linux has been running on the higher-end Apple M1 SoC variants and those Macs utilizing them, with the mainline Linux 6.2 kernel will finally be the upstreaming of the Apple M1 Pro/Max/Ultra support with the various device trees set to be added...

Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet on Friday published a new status update on this original file-system born out of Linux's block cache (BCache) code. Bcachefs has been in development for years though it isn't quite yet in a position for landing in the mainline kernel. In any event a lot of feature work continues happening and Overstreet remains dedicated to the file-system's success...

Picked up this week in the "net-next" code ahead of the Linux 6.2 merge window in December is support for TCP Protective Load Balancing (PLB)...

In addition to this week having brought the announcement of GraalVM 22.3 as the newest quarterly feature release and also Oracle announcing that GraalVM CE code will be contributed to OpenJDK, the Eclipse Foundation is ending out their week by having shipped OpenJ9 v0.35.0...

KDE developers remain very busy planning for Plasma 6.0 as well as working various changes into Plasma 5.27 as the desktop's last Plasma 5 series release...

Intel today submitted their initial batch of "i915" kernel graphics driver changes to DRM-Next of new driver material slated for the Linux 6.2 cycle...

Intel has published the Intel Extension for TensorFlow that makes use of TF's PluggableDevice mechanism to now provide an Intel GPU back-end for TensorFlow that works with the Data Center GPU Flex Series as well as Arc Graphics discrete GPUs...

Linux PC retailer TUXEDO Computers earlier this month released TUXEDO OS 1. The Bavarian Linux PC vendor has long modified their stock Ubuntu installations to cater toward their intended customers/audience and ship with the various software modifications while now with TUXEDO OS is an easy-to-setup ISO image of their customized Ubuntu-based Linux OS. I've been trying out TUXEDO OS on the AMD Ryzen powered TUXEDO Aura 15 Gen2 and ran some comparison benchmarks against (K)Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS.

In addition to the exFAT Linux kernel driver for supporting Microsoft's exFAT file-system on Linux, in user-space is "exfatprogs" providing the various utilities for interacting with this file-system popular on SD/SDCX storage and flash drives. The exfatprogs 1.2 release today brings fsck.exfat support for repairing corrupted exFAT file-systems on Linux...

Earlier this month one of the interesting milestones for Mesa's Rust-based OpenCL "Rusticl" implementation was getting Rusticl running on Zink so that this OpenCL implementation was running atop this Gallium3D driver in turn running atop a bare metal Vulkan driver. As of yesterday some of that necessary code was merged to Mesa 22.3...

While the Intel Core i9 13900K is running fast and well on Linux, a few Raptor Lake IDs have come to light that have been missing from various drivers and only now being addressed...

Just last week I wrote about Glibc preparing more optimizations for AVX-512 CPUs with implementing more C library functions in EVEX512 enhanced vector extension versions. This week there is more EVEX512 function work...

Btrfs' async discard functionality will likely be turned on by default with the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel cycle when running on an SSD...

With Ubuntu 22.10 "Kinetic Kudu" having shipped last week, Canonical engineers are moving ahead and beginning to get things going for the Ubuntu 23.04 development cycle now under the "Lunar Lobster" codename...

Fedora Linux 37 has been running behind schedule and today it was decided to push it back now to mid-November over a "critical" openSSL vulnerability yet to be made public...