Phoronix

With Mesa 22.1 due to be branched in the next day or so as the feature freeze for this quarterly Mesa update, Valve developer Mike Blumenkrantz has penned a new blog post outlining all of the Zink changes accomplished this cycle...

Intel via their Intel Labs organization announced last year ControlFlag for finding bugs in code using AI. Intel's ControlFlag is open-source and leverages machine learning for uncovering bugs within arbitrary code-bases. At first ControlFlag was focused on uncovering bugs within C/C++ code but with its new v1.1 release is beginning to uncover PHP bugs too...

Oracle has begun making a new version of Solaris 11.4 available for free/open-source developers and for non-production personal use. Oracle Solaris 11.4 "CBE" was announced to little fanfare last month for what many open-source OS enthusiasts will likely argue is too little, too late...

Git 2.35.2 was just released along with updates to prior series in the form of Git 2.34.2, 2.33.2, 2.32.1, 2.31.2, and 2.30.3 due to a new security issue...

The newest software addition under AMD's GPUOpen software umbrella is HIP-RT as a ray-tracing library for HIP...

When it comes to running open-source Coreboot on retail motherboards it's sadly mostly a matter of generations-old platforms like various AMD Opteron server motherboards, old ThinkPads, many generation old motherboards for out-of-date Intel CPUs, and other dated hardware. To much excitement, 3mdeb has been porting Coreboot and the Dasharo open-source firmware to the MSI PRO Z690-A (DDR4) motherboards... Yes, finally Coreboot on a retail and broadly available motherboard that's latest-generation!..

Ahead of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS shipping next week, a new version of their Zsys daemon/client for ZFS-based Linux installations has been issued...

Last month with the AMD EPYC 7773X Linux benchmarks and Milan-X in the Azure cloud I showed the impressive capabilities of AMD's new Milan-X processors with 768MB of L3 cache per socket (1.5GB cache per 2P server!) for a range of workloads. All of that initial benchmarking as usual was done using the default GCC system compiler across all tested AMD/Intel processors. Of course, there also exists AMD's Optimizing C/C++ Compiler (AOCC) as a downstream of LLVM/Clang with various Zen optimization patches applied. Curious about the AOCC impact for Milan-X, here are some benchmarks looking at the EPYC 7773X 2P performance across AOCC, GCC, and LLVM Clang.

Over a year ago IBM sent out GCC compiler support for "arch14" that at the time we imagined was for IBM z16. Indeed with IBM having announced their z16 last week, the GCC compiler is now being updated to officially recognize z16 and offer that as an option over the "arch14" naming...

The Qt Company has officially released Qt 6.3 as the newest half-year update to their open-source, cross-platform toolkit...

In addition to the AMD Zen 1/2/3 updated CPU microcode and long-awaited NVIDIA Ampere GPU signed firmware being merged today into linux-firmware.git, new AMD graphics firmware was also merged this morning for dealing with a hang with the VCN block under certain situations...

For those looking for an easy-to-use flavor of Arch Linux, EndeavourOS continues in this area of being a robust desktop-minded Linux distribution powered by Arch. Out today is EndeavourOS "Apollo" as its newest ISO of this rolling-release distribution...

Days after new open-source kernel driver code appeared in a Tegra code drop, NVIDIA happens today to have published signed firmware images for their RTX 30 "Ampere" graphics processors for finally allowing open-source driver support to proceed for these latest-generation GPUs...

One of the most prominent features of Linux 5.17 for end-users was the introduction of the AMD P-State driver that is designed to deliver better energy efficiency than the generic ACPI CPUFreq frequency scaling driver relied on by AMD Ryzen processors up to this point. For those wondering how the performance and efficiency currently compare for Ryzen laptops, here are some benchmarks recently carried out on Linux 5.17 for both drivers and testing both the Schedutil and Performance governors.

Following last week's first release candidate of Linux 5.18 that capped off the two week merge window, Linux 5.18-rc2 was just issued as the newest weekly release candidate...

While Reiser4 never made it to mainline and has lacked any major corporate backing while Linux 5.18 is deprecating the older ReiserFS driver for removal later on, former Namesys developer Edward Shishkin continues progressing development on "Reiser5" as the evolution of Reiser4. Out today is the newest Reiser5 snapshot and some performance numbers from Shishkin...

It looks like the initial Linux kernel enablement code around Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) will be mainlined for the Linux 5.19 cycle this summer...

On Friday AMD published new CPU microcode files for both Family 17h and Family 19h for Zen 1/2/3 processors. At the moment there isn't any public insight into the changes with this updated microcode but it may be significant...

While early on DisplayLink's USB2-based devices were friendly with Linux and had upstream open-source driver support, their newer USB3-based display hardware has relied on a binary driver focused on just supporting Ubuntu. Last month DisplayLink released an updated version of that binary blob ahead of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

In addition to removing legacy X.Org drivers, deprecating legacy BIOS support, and signing RPM contents another Fedora 37 change proposal submitted this past week is for upgrading against RPM 4.18...

A new release of OpenRazer is available as the community project providing open-source Linux drivers for various Razer devices from their keyboards and mice to headsets and other peripherals from the popular gaming device manufacturer...

As of this week with openSUSE's Tumbleweed rolling-release distribution it is using GCC 12's libgcc standard libraries and preparing to shift to GCC 12 as the default compiler once ready...

Older AMD GPUs paired with Intel Alder Lake Platforms is leading to hangs during suspend/resume cycles so a patch is pending for the Linux kernel to disable Active State Power Management (ASPM) in such combinations...

At the end of March ROCm 5.1 released with CRIU checkpoint/restore support, continued enabling more ROCm components like MIOpen with RDNA(2) GPU compatibility, and other changes. Meanwhile on Friday the ROCm 5.1.1 release was published...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly summary of all the interesting changes to have landed this week for benefiting this open-source desktop environment...

Wine 7.6 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

Ahead of next week's expected feature freeze / code branching for Mesa 22.1, Intel today committed Arctic Sound M "ATS-M" support for their open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers...

Introduced last year with the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors was SEV-SNP as the latest iteration of their Secure Encrypted Virtualization technology. SEV-SNP adds additional integrity protections and safeguards as part of this "Secure Nested Paging" extension of SEV. Finally with Linux 5.19 the SEV-SNP support should premiere in the mainline kernel...

Appearing with NVIDIA's latest Linux4Tegra code drop is a new open-source kernel graphics driver not previously published. This driver isn't based on the existing Nouveau driver but rather appears to be derived from their internal driver code-base with some copyright references going back to 90's...

This week marks one year since Intel formally introduced their Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" processors led by the flagship Xeon Platinum 8380. Given the occasion, here are benchmarks looking at the Linux performance at-launch across CentOS, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu and then again against those latest Linux distributions in their current state now for seeing how the Linux performance has evolved over the past year.

Adding to the interesting changes being worked on for Fedora 37 due out later this year is the removal of legacy X.Org drivers. Fedora is looking at removing the legacy graphics driver paths that are incompatible with running Wayland...

OpenSSH 9.0 is available today as the latest version of this widely-used, open-source SSH implementation. With OpenSSH 9.0 comes new features as well as changes like scp using the SFTP protocol by default...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation on Thursday introduced an updated version of its Raspberry Pi OS operating system derived from Debian Bullseye...

Mainlined into the Linux kernel last year was the Aquacomputer HWMON driver initially for their D5 Next water cooling pump. That driver was then extended to support the Aquacomputer Farbwerk 360 RGB controller and now for Linux 5.19 is extended to also support Aquacomputer's OCTO fan controller...

Building off last week's FreeBSD 13.1 release candidate, a second release candidate has been issued ahead of this incremental FreeBSD operating system update due to be formally released before month's end...

Added back in 2019 to the Linux staging area was the "WFX" WiFi driver for low-power IoT hardware from Silicon Labs. After three years of hard work by Silicon Labs engineers and open-source developers, this driver for the WF200 series of wireless chips is set to be promoted in the Linux 5.19 cycle...

Earlier this week was the news of AMD acquiring Pensando in a $1.9B deal expected to close in Q2. The acquisition announcement isn't slowing down their efforts with today bringing the latest version of their Linux kernel patches for bringing up the Elba SoC...

ADLINK Technology today announced a new developer platform based on Ampere Altra for software development, cloud, and related workloads. The ADLINK Ampere Altra Developer Platform is based on their COM-HPC module and pairs with 32, 64, or 80-core Ampere Altra processors...

It's been nearly one year since Khronos released OpenCL 3.0 while today they are shipping some improvements to the OpenCL Software Developer Kit (SDK)...

Merged into Mesa 22.1-devel this morning is Kopper, a big improvement particularly for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver code...

Last year Fedora developers and users were discussing the packaging of ROCm components to make it easier to deploy this Radeon open-source GPU compute stack. Five months later, some of the Radeon Open eCosystem components have made it into Fedora for easier installation but the HIP and OpenCL front-ends to ROCm haven't yet been successfully packaged...

Linux 5.18 is bringing many random/RNG improvements thanks to the work of kernel developer Jason Donenfeld. One of the changes though that had to be backed out during the merge window was trying to get /dev/random and /dev/urandom to behave exactly the same. While reverted for now with the 5.18 code, Donenfeld has prepared a change that should get it into good shape for major architectures with the next kernel cycle...

We are less than one week out from the Linux 5.18 merge window having ended and already the first pull request of "drm-misc-next" material has been submitted to DRM-Next for staging until the Linux 5.19 cycle rolls around in late May...

Google engineer Yu Zhao has sent out the "v10" patches of the MGLRU Linux kernel feature for enhancing system performance and especially for providing a better experience in dealing with system memory pressure...

As a Linux kernel change for benefiting AMD CPUs going back to Zen 1 and for matching behavior Intel has had in place since the Core 2 times, AMD submitted a patch for having the Linux kernel use the MWAIT instruction instead of HALT for when the system isn't using the CPU idle driver either for C-states being disabled by the BIOS or the driver not part of the kernel build. In turn this can lead to around a 21% improvement in exit latency on affected systems...

Here is a combination not normally expected... Microsoft engineers have submitted patches for review enabling AMD GPU hot-plugging support with the Radeon "AMDGPU" Linux kernel driver...

At the end of March Ubuntu 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish" successfully transitioned from the former Mesa 21.3 series to Mesa 22.0 as the current stable series for these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers. There are also a few changes to mention with Ubuntu 22.04's Mesa support this LTS cycle...

Back in February AMD engineers sent out a "request for comments" on x2APIC virtualization (x2AVIC) support. Those patches have now been refined beyond the RFC state and sent out today as a patch series for further review on the Linux kernel mailing list...

Tachyum is a startup working on "the world's first universal processor" that can be used from AI to HPC to hyperscale computing needs. The Tachyum processor aims to replace the needs of discrete TPUs / GPUs / XPUs into a single homogeneous processor architecture. While still running as an emulated platform, Tachyum has announced that in addition to Linux they have managed to boot and run FreeBSD on their ISA...

Ahead of the upcoming Mesa 22.1 feature freeze, the Mesa Vulkan drivers both big and small have been preparing merge requests for wiring up a number of recently introduced Vulkan extensions...