Phoronix

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...

While there has been progress with the Mesa code targeting Apple M1 to run basic tests like glmark2, that has traditionally been an effort running under macOS with its kernel driver. This week the Asahi Linux crew celebrated their first rendered triangle running with a fully open-source driver stack...

Along with his other pull requests for areas of the kernel he oversees, Greg Kroah-Hartman on Friday submitted all of the staging area changes for the kernel in this "proving grounds" of sorts for the kernel. Thanks to some spring cleaning, the staging area is 13k lines of code less this cycle...

Building off yesterday's release of Wine 7.10, Wine-Staging 7.10 is now available as the newest release of that experimental/testing flavor of Wine that ships with more than 500 extra patches...

Being submitted as a new subsystem for the almost wrapped up Linux 5.19 merge window is the Hardware Timestamping Engine "HTE" code. Linus Torvalds though has yet to pull in this new code and has raised concerns around some elements of it...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly report on all of the KDE development activities. In particular, for starting June the KDE developers have been very busy fixing bugs for Plasma 5.25 that is due to be released mid-June. While Plasma 5.25 is getting into good shape, they still could use more help from experienced developers in fixing more bugs...

It's been a busy day in the space for running Windows games and applications on Linux. Wine 7.10 was released as the newest bi-weekly development feature release while Valve and CodeWeavers also issued the release candidate for Proton 7.0-3 as the newest update to that Wine-based software powering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

This Sunday, 5 June, marks the 18th birthday for Phoronix.com since I started this website to focus on Linux hardware reviews and performance testing. To mark the occasion, there will be a Phoronix Premium special if you wish to go ad-free on the site and enjoy multi-page articles on a single page while helping to hopefully ensure a successful 19th year for Phoronix...

Following a mad dash this week to get the LoongArch CPU architecture support readied for Linux 5.19, Linus Torvalds successfully merged this MIPS64-inspired Chinese architecture code today into the mainline kernel. However, due to some of the code not yet passing review, while the CPU architecture code is in place some crucial drivers have yet to land and thus Linux 5.19 cannot boot on said hardware...

An open letter started by the Open-Source Firmware Foundation and seeking community support for this letter is calling on Intel to open-source their Firmware Support Package (FSP). The FSP binary blob has been a big limitation to the level of openness around firmware for Intel systems and has been a limiting factor in supporting the likes of Coreboot, LinuxBoot, and other technologies on Intel hardware...

A new patch series posted today by AMD is enabling peer-to-peer support within their AMDKFD kernel compute driver for allowing communication between multiple AMD GPUs over the PCIe bus without needing intermediate copies through system memory. In turn this should help with the multi-GPU compute performance for the Radeon ROCm stack...

A few days ago the RISC-V pull request landed in Linux 5.19 with support for RISC-V 32-bit (RV32) binaries on RV64, enabling the new Svpbmt extension, and other improvements. On Friday a secondary set of RISC-V changes were sent in for Linux 5.19 that includes adding the DeviceTree files for another new RISC-V board...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has gotten onto submitting his feature pull requests to Linux 5.19 for various areas of the kernel he oversees. With the driver core changes with this new kernel is now the ability to compress firmware files using the popular Zstd...

While SiFive has sadly shutdown production on the current HiFive Unmatched development board in order to focus on new products expected later this year, those with a SiFive HiFive Unmatched RISC-V developer board can enjoy seeing continued performance improvements with newer Linux distributions. Here is a look at the SiFive FU740 SoC performance under the recently released Ubuntu 22.04 LTS compared to the prior 21.10 and 20.04 releases.

Following the recent concerns around maintenance for the NTFS3 kernel driver and other developers stepping up to maintain the "NTFS3" kernel driver contributed by Paragon Software, there is now a batch of fixes ready to go for Linux 5.19...

Adding to the list of planned changes for the Ubuntu 22.10 release this October is transitioning from WPA_Supplicant to Intel's IWD daemon for Linux wireless needs...

It appears that with upcoming AMD Zen 4 processors there will finally be Virtual NMI (VNMI) support for virtualization, a feature Intel CPUs have supported for well more than the past decade...

Fedora Server working group stakeholders are looking at offering an optimized KVM VM disk image as part of their offerings with the F37 release later this year...

Another set of Arm SoC and platform changes have been submitted for the in-development Linux 5.19 merge window...

Potentially for the Mozilla Firefox 103 release we could see VA-API video acceleration for Linux users finally enabled by default while as of today has been flipped back on again in Firefox Nightly builds...

Last month System76 and HP began teasing an HP developer laptop with AMD Ryzen SoC and running Pop!_OS while today that HP Dev One laptop has formally launched...

Following the recent news about Nouveau shifting code around so their shader compiler can be used outside of Nouveau Gallium3D, Red Hat's Karol Herbst who has been a longtime Nouveau developer has been posting patches for his new "NVK" Nouveau Vulkan driver effort...

The perf events changes that landed last week for the Linux 5.19 kernel bring some exciting platform PMU updates on the AMD side while also supporting newer CPUs on the Intel side...

Coreboot developers are releasing Coreboot 4.17 today with various new motherboards supported, support for GRUB2 atop SeaBIOS as a payload, and various low-level code improvements too. Plus Coreboot 4.17 brings the "coreDOOM" payload -- yes, it's possible to get the game Doom running atop this system firmware. There is also AMD Platform Secure Boot (PSB) support introduced to Coreboot too...

Since 2020 the Vulkan API has offered a fragment shading rate extension for allowing games to provide higher levels of detail in a scene compared to other less important areas of the screen. Desktop OpenGL has also offered a fragment shading rate extension while this week a similar extension has been added for OpenGL ES...

Tuxera has issued its first new release of the NTFS-3G FUSE driver for NTFS read/write support on Linux and other platforms since last August's prior stable release. This new version was issued last week in order to ship security fixes...

The PCI subsystem changes have landed for the in-development Linux 5.19 kernel...

The Steam Survey results are in for May 2022 and while it shows Linux slightly down on a percentage basis, it shows a new top-spot for the most popular Linux distribution unseating Ubuntu LTS...

Last month marked the debut of Mesa 22.1 as the newest quarterly release to this open-source Linux graphics driver stack. For those that prefer waiting until the first point release before upgrading, today is the day with Mesa 22.1.1 now available...

The Kernel Recipes 2022 conference kicked off today in Paris, France. Kicking off the event was Linux block subsystem maintainer and lead IO_uring developer Jens Axboe to talk about all of the recent and ongoing work around this major advancement to Linux I/O in recent years...

Google has been helping small open-source projects get started in chip fabrication with Google covering the costs and partnering with SkyWater Technology using their open-source process design kit (PDK). While the chip manufacturing is done on a 130nm process (SKY130), this effort has proven to be a big success for open-source hardware projects with limited funding and Google today announced a new silicon design portal...

Back in February Intel announced it was acquiring Linutronix as the folks maintaining real-time Linux (PREEMPT_RT) and other prominent Linux contributions. Today Intel announced another exciting software acquisition for bolstering their open ecosystem...

While Ubuntu 22.04 LTS was just released over one month ago, it is shipping on the Linux 5.15 kernel that was already two stable series behind at release time but chosen as the default due to its long-term support status. Ubuntu 22.04 also shipped with Mesa 22.0 as the latest stable version albeit the open-source OpenGL/Vulkan graphics drivers are quick to advance. So if you've been thinking about upgrading Mesa or the Linux kernel on your Ubuntu 22.04 system for better Linux gaming performance, here are some benchmarks looking at such performance impact for AMD RDNA2 / Radeon RX 6000 series graphics.