Phoronix

Ahead of the KDE Plasma 5.25 desktop release next week, KDE developers have been busy this past week with last minute fixes ahead of that half-year update as well as beginning early work for Plasma 5.26...

PoCL 3.0 has been formally released today for this portable OpenCL implementation that supports execution on CPUs or other back-ends by way of LLVM such as for targeting AMD HSA, NVIDIA GPUs, and other accelerators. With PoCL 3.0 comes initial OpenCL 3.0 support while the actual conformance results are still pending...

This week's release of Blender 3.2 brings AMD GPU rendering support on Linux via AMD's HIP interface in conjunction with their ROCm compute stack. Eager to see the AMD GPU support on Linux finally arrive, I quickly began trying out this new Blender open-source 3D modeling software release while seeing how the AMD RDNA2 HIP performance compares to that of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 GPUs that have long enjoyed top-notch support under Blender.

MIT CSAIL today is lifting the embargo on a new hardware vulnerability affecting the Apple M1 SoCs (no word yet on exposure with the recently announced Apple M2) and dubbed the "PACMAN" attack...

In recent weeks Ubuntu developers have been working on bringing up and improving support for the Starfive VisionFive, which is one of the most promising "low-cost" RISC-V single board computers to date. Hopefully for Ubuntu 22.10 we'll be seeing good support for this sub-$180 RISC-V computer...

With the Linux 5.19 merge window past, the initial batch of drm-misc-next feature changes targeting the Linux 5.20 kernel have been mailed in to DRM-Next for queuing until that next kernel merge window kicks off later in the summer...

It was just back in April that Sound Open Firmware 2.1 released as the newest version of the open-source audio DSP firmware stack started by Intel and also even being used by other select hardware vendors as well. Sound Open Firmware 2.2 is on the way as the newest feature release for Intel's "SOF" project...

This week Phoronix.com turned 18 years old! In marking that milestone, a Phoronix Premium special was offered for enjoying the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits while supporting the site for hoping to help provide a successful 19th year of Phoronix Linux hardware testing and news operations. If you want to participate, that special ends this weekend...

Adding to the list of many exciting features in Linux 5.19 is a new DMA-BUF fence import/export API for improving the usage of explicit synchronization on the Linux desktop to help with Vulkan and allowing more of the Linux desktop to move in the future to a more explicit synchronization model...

AMD today hosted their 2022 Financial Analyst Day where they made some new disclosures and firmed up past product road-map plans...

One of the many changes with the recent Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release was enabling systemd-oomd by default as the out-of-memory daemon that can kill processes when under memory pressure. Unfortunately, for some users this has led to a poor desktop experience with finding their applications being unexpectedly killed. Ubuntu developers are now discussing how to improve this OOMD handling...

PipeWire 0.3.52 was released today as the newest version of this open-source server for handling audio/video streams on the Linux desktop and increasingly being used now as a replacement for PulseAudio...

There was much interest in the recent Python 3.11 beta benchmarks showing much performance uplift from this in-development version of Python compared to prior 3.x releases. While Python 3.11 performance is looking great and huge advantages compared to prior versions, there are also alternative Python implementations like PyPy and Pyston. Stemming from Phoronix reader requests, here are benchmarks showing how Python 3.11 beta performance compares to those alternative Python implementations.

Vulkan 1.3.217 is out this morning as the newest version of the Khronos' high performance graphics/compute API specification. With Vulkan 1.3.217 comes two new extensions...

Earlier this year was an AMD Linux patch to prefer using MWAIT rather than HALT for cases where the CPU idle driver isn't being used. Using MWAIT can lead to significant improvements for the exit latency and now for the Linux 5.20 cycle later this year that change is expected to land...

Intel's open-source Linux driver engineers are busy not only preparing support for next-generation 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" processors but also the follow-on 14th Gen "Meteor Lake" on Linux...

The newest contribution to the open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver in Mesa by Valve's Linux graphics driver developers is for supporting VK_EXT_primitives_generated_query...

The Haiku open-source operating system project building off the success of BeOS continues steadily improving its hardware support and making other improvements...

As added reason for Radeon Linux users to celebrate today beyond Blender 3.2 releasing with AMD HIP Linux render support is that Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" continues maturing with its ray-tracing support...

Blender 3.2 is releasing this morning as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling and animation software package. Blender 3.2 finally adds AMD GPU-accelerated rendering support on Linux and many other refinements...

Following yesterday's release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4, today the openSUSE community has released openSUSE Leap 15.4 that is free and built from the same shared sources as SLE 15 SP4...

Last month I published a review on the TUXEDO Aura 15 Gen2 laptop that is powered by an AMD Ryzen 5000 series SoC and initially shipped with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. But with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS now having been released -- and TUXEDO Computers shifting over to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS -- here is a look at the performance uplift that can be expected from this new Ubuntu long-term support version.

In addition to Intel already starting work on Meteor Lake enablement in Coreboot, this week Intel open-source engineers have also been submitting more code for Raptor Lake as the CPUs expected later this year as the successor to Alder Lake...

In addition to Intel already starting work on Meteor Lake enablement in Coreboot, this week Intel open-source engineers have also been submitting more code for Raptor Lake as the CPUs expected later this year as the successor to Alder Lake...

The GNU C Library (Glibc) now has a memory copy (memcpy) implementation optimized for Arm's Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) that can "significantly" improve performance...

The SDL library that is widely used by cross-platform games as a software/hardware abstraction layer has merged support for the Chinese LoongArch CPU architecture...

For those making use of the lighttpd lightweight and speedy web server, a new release is now available of this BSD-licensed open-source software. Most notable with lighttpd 1.4.65 is support for WebSockets over HTTP/2...

Variable rate refresh (VRR / FreeSync / Adaptive-Sync) support for GNOME's Mutter compositor is closer to being merged. The native back-end support for VRR that has been in development the past two years is no longer considered a work-in-progress and it's believed there are no longer any blocking issues that would prevent this code from landing...

The real-time (RT) patch series still hasn't been mainlined but the patch delta is slowly winding down with each new kernel version. Out today is the re-based RT patch series for the recently minted Linux 5.19-rc1 with some of the prior real-time patches having been upstreamed this merge window and other patches re-based to work with the newest kernel code...

Last month RHEL 9.0 reached GA as the newest major update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Since then I've been trying out RHEL 9.0 on a few servers. To little surprise, especially for latest-generation Intel Xeon Scalable and AMD EPYC servers, RHEL 9.0 is offering significant uplift compared to the existing RHEL8 series. Here are some Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 benchmarks comparing the performance to RHEL 8.6.

In kicking off SUSECON, SUSE has announced the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 4. Notable with SLE 15 SP4, SUSE is already switching to using NVIDIA's open-source GPU kernel-mode driver that NVIDIA open-sourced last month and is under active development and has a long road ahead before it's even feasible for upstreaming into the mainline kernel...

Intel Meteor Lake as the successor to Raptor Lake has begun seeing Coreboot enablement work by Intel engineers...

While Docker can already run on AArch64 Linux, the mainline Linux kernel's default configuration "defconfig" lacks a few features for allowing it to run out-of-the-box. An Arm engineer is proposing adjusting those defaults to make it more easily/straight-forward to run Docker on 64-bit Arm...

Somewhat surprisingly, the open-source SDL library that is widely used by games for cross-platform handling and abstracting of various software interfaces has added a Microsoft DirectX 12 renderer...

Ikey Doherty started the Solus Linux distribution then disappeared and wrote an open letter on Phoronix about his absence, also was employed by Intel for a year to work on their Clear Linux distribution, had a brief stint starting a game/software development company, and then started the Serpent OS Linux distribution. He's still been working on Serpent OS but then was working full-time elsewhere but now has decided to return full-time to working on his latest Linux distribution...

In addition to announcing the M2 SoC, Apple used its WWDC keynote to also announce macOS 13 "Ventura". One of the interesting technical changes with macOS 13 is the ability to use Apple's Rosetta software for speedy execution of Linux x86_64 binaries running on ARM Linux VMs from Apple Silicon...

Apple's WWDC keynote this year was used to announce the M2 processor alongside a slew of other announcements...

Last month Python 3.11 Beta 1 was released as their first preview of this major update to the Python programming language. Besides new language features and other improvements, Python 3.11 performance is looking fantastic with very nice performance uplift over prior Python 3.x releases.

In addition to Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver prepared for mesh shading with an upcoming Vulkan mesh shader extension besides NVIDIA's NV_mesh_shader, it looks like AMD will be punctually supporting the cross-vendor mesh shader extension too...

With Panfrost Gallium3D patches landing today into Mesa 22.2 and Panfrost DRM kernel driver support slated to land for the Linux 5.20 cycle later this summer, the Mali G57 GPU has conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 support on this open-source driver and the first Mali GPU of the Valhall generation to have this achievement following the Panfrost driver's successes for the older Bifrost and Midgard architectures...

With the Linux 5.19 merge window complete, here is my usual look at all of the interesting changes I've been watching for this next version of the Linux kernel. Linux 5.19 is quite a big summer time upgrade to this open-source kernel with many new and improved features coming for this kernel that will debut as stable in late July.

A last minute change sent in on Sunday and merged prior to Linux 5.19-rc1 disables late microcode loading by default for x86/x86_64 processors over its sad state of affairs...

It's not only the Linux kernel that's been seeing some spring cleaning but Mesa developers have also been quite busy on working to remove some old, poorly maintained code from their open-source 3D driver components...

It was eighteen years ago today that I started Phoronix.com to focus on Linux hardware reviews. Back then it was difficult getting peripherals working under Linux from 56k modems to printers and other components today where Linux support can just be assumed. Open-source graphics drivers back then were also in their infancy and lacking vendor support while NVIDIA was well regarded then for their proprietary driver being at least featureful and performant. It's been quite a journey...

Following a rather eventful Linux 5.19 merge window the past two weeks, Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.19-rc1. It's a great way coincidentally to mark the end of the Phoronix 18th birthday...

While just a day prior Linus Torvalds was questioning the proposed "HTE" subsystem, today on this final day of the Linux 5.19 merge window he decided to land this new subsystem...

Greg Kroah-Hartman on Friday sent in the USB/Thunderbolt updates for the Linux 5.19 kernel that is seeing its merge window end today. With the USB updates, Greg had some remarks on the DWC3 Linux driver that will likely "never be finished" given that this USB IP is appearing in lots of hardware but not consistently being implemented and thus continuing to require a lot of adaptations on the driver side...

Last month Microsoft published their first production release of CBL-Mariner 2.0 as an updated version of their in-house Linux distribution used for a variety of purposes from Windows Subsystem for Linux to Azure. This week Microsoft released a rather hefty stable update to their CBL-Mariner 2.0 distribution...

Greg Kroah-Hartman on Friday submitted the "char/misc" changes for the Linux 5.19 kernel. Char/misc continues to be the "catch all" area of the kernel for drivers and code not fitting formally within other kernel subsystems. Leading on this front for Linux 5.19 is the introduction of the Apple eFuse driver for M1 systems and Intel-owned Habana Labs continues improving their AI accelerator driver...

FEX-Emu 2206 has been released as the newest version of this user-space, open-source software for being able to run x86/x86_64 applications and games on AArch64 (Arm) hardware...