Phoronix

Following recent rumors of Broadcom pursuing a VMware acquisition, Broadcom announced today their intent to acquire the virtualization company for $61 billion (USD)...

In addition to the many HPC workloads and other scientific computing tasks where Intel's AVX-512 performance on their latest processor proves very beneficial, it also turns out AVX-512 can provide significant benefit to a much more mundane web server task: JSON parsing. The simdjson project that is focused on "parsing gigabytes of JSON per second" this week issued simdjson 2.0 and is headlined by an Intel-led contribution of AVX-512 support.

While from the outside it looks like DG2/Alchemist enablement under Linux is starting to settle down with Linux 5.19 beginning to expose compute support for these new Arc Graphics discrete GPUs, beginning to add in production PCI IDs, and other refinements, the enablement battle isn't yet over...

Since last year CUPS development shifted to the OpenPrinting project with Apple no longer pursuing feature development on this long-time open-source Unix print server. That led to the release then of CUPS 2.4 and work on this open-source print server has revived. Out today is CUPS 2.4.2 with a few new features...

Both the KVM and Xen changes are ready to go with the other code piling on for the Linux 5.19 merge window...

In addition to the buttery Btrfs feature updates for the in-development Linux 5.19 kernel, the exFAT, EXT4, and EROFS file-system changes have all landed too so far in the first few days of the v5.19 merge window...

Cloud-Hypervisor as the open-source, Rust-based virtual machine monitor with a focus on security is out with its latest feature release. Cloud-Hypervisor started as one of many Intel open-source projects that last year shifted to under the Linux Foundation umbrella but still sees contributions from Intel as well as other industry leaders like Microsoft and Arm. Cloud-Hypervisor 24.0 is the newest version of this Rust VMM..

The networking subsystem updates have landed in the Linux 5.19 kernel with big updates to core networking code as well as a lot of individual driver work this cycle both for wired and wireless networking...

The open-source, unofficial project providing a NVIDIA VA-API driver on Linux systems built atop the proprietary driver's NVDEC video decode interface is out with a new feature release. This NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver effort continues to be driven in large part for allowing GPU-accelerated video acceleration in Firefox and other software only targeting the open Video Acceleration API...

Landing today in the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code-base for Mesa 22.2 is support for the EGL_IMG_context_priority extension. The RadeonSI EGL_IMG_context_priority support was contributed by a KDE developer with the motivation of ensuring Wayland compositors can have high priority for rendering...

Way back in 2019 the Linux kernel deprecated a.out support given that it was superseded by ELF, which itself has already been supported for over two decades going back to Linux 1.x kernels. With Linux 5.19, the obsolete 32-bit x86 a.out support is finally being removed for good from the kernel...

The power management, ACPI, and thermal control updates are ready for Linux 5.19. This cycle there is a lot of PM/thermal work as usual on the Arm side while Intel also continues with a lot of changes from new hardware support to improving overheat handling of laptops for S0ix handling...

Bavarian PC vendor TUXEDO Computers that specializes in various Linux pre-loaded notebooks and desktop computers recently launched their Aura 15 Gen2 laptop focused on being an "affordable business allrounder" and powered by AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors with integrated Vega graphics to make for a nice open-source driver experience. TUXEDO sent over the Aura 15 Gen2 for a round of testing and here's a look at this Ubuntu Linux laptop's performance and capabilities.

It was over a year ago that AMD initially added the "GFX90A" target to their LLVM AMDGPU compiler back-end while now this week added to the GNU Compiler Collection for the GCC 13 release not due out until next year is its GFX90A support for the GNU toolchain...

David Airlie this morning sent in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates for the Linux 5.19 merge window. Most notable with the DRM display/graphics driver updates for this next kernel version is a lot of work on Intel Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist in getting that support ready plus initial Raptor Lake enablement. as well as AMD preparing for next-generation CDNA Instinct products and RDNA3 Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards...

It's been five years already since Red Hat started Stratis as a configuration daemon built atop LVM and XFS in aiming to provide advanced storage functionality in user-space akin to what is offered by the advanced Btrfs and ZFS file-systems...

The 64-bit Arm (AArch64) architecture changes have been merged into the in-development Linux 5.19 kernel...

Security researcher Jason Donenfeld known as the founder of the WireGuard project has recently been focused on modernizing the Linux kernel's random number generator (RNG/random) code. With the Linux 5.19 kernel there is yet more work landing...

David Sterba of SUSE has submitted the ~4k lines of code worth of feature changes for the Btrfs file-system driver in the Linux 5.19 kernel...

Google just promoted Chrome 102 to stable as the latest feature update to their cross-platform web browser...

The Linux x86/x86_64 kernel has long honored the "clearcpuid=" kernel parameter to disable select CPUID features from being used by the kernel or readily advertised. However, it hasn't been very intuitive to use since it relied on passing the bit numbers for the specific features. With Linux 5.19 it's much easier to deal with in now allowing the CPUID string from /proc/cpuinfo to be passed if wanting particular CPUID features disabled...

Vulkan 1.3.215 is out today with a handful of fixes/clarifications to the Vulkan specification plus one new extension...

Nginx as the lightweight web-server known for its speedy performance is out today with the version 1.22 feature release...

At the end of last year Amazon announced their new Graviton3 processors with around 25% more compute performance than their prior Graviton2 AArch64 processors, up to 2x the FP and crypto performance, DDR5 system memory support, and other improvements to their in-house processor for the AWS cloud. Yesterday the C7g instances reached general availability for making Graviton3 processors available to AWS customers. Here are some initial benchmarks.

In recent kernel versions there has been an uptick in new driver activity around improving hardware sensor monitoring support for AMD/Intel desktop motherboards, but still it's generally behind that of the support found under Microsoft Windows. With Linux 5.19 there is more hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem work with improving sensor coverage on various motherboards and other components...

Mir 2.8 is now available as the newest feature update to this Wayland compositor developed by Canonical for various Ubuntu use-cases, primarily around IoT, digital signage, and similar fields...

Among many Intel driver improvements in Linux 5.19, Intel's new "In-Field Scan" (IFS) driver has now premiered in the mainline kernel for testing future processors against any silicon issues prior to deployment or as the processors age...

What started out as hopes of enabling RADV ray-tracing by default has led to initially ray queries being enabled by default...

Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) as security-related extensions to their processors that allow for protected memory enclaves has had a rather bouncy journey. Intel continues supporting SGX on their latest Xeon processors but on the client side have been deprecated since 11th Gen Core. Over the years SGX has been found vulnerable to various attacks from speculative execution exploits to Plundervolt. It also turns out under Linux until now was also open to crashing under memory pressure...

The Linux kernel's printk() function for printing messages to the kernel log continues to be improved upon in 2022...

Back in 2020 Intel engineers working on the Linux kernel added split lock detection to provide a warning when an atomic operation spans multiple cache lines and requires a global bus lock for atomicity. A warning is now deemed not useful enough so instead the intent moving forward is to "make life miserable" for such misbehaving user-space applications by slowing down the performance with hopes of the app developers better handling their code...

If release trends hold, we should be roughly half-way through the PHP 8.2 development cycle with the annual feature releases normally out toward the end of November. Given that, this weekend I decided to try out the state of PHP 8.2 Git and carry out some early benchmarks to get an idea where things are headed...

The Motorola 68000, Xtensa, and C-SKY processor architectures all saw notable additions for the in-development Linux 5.19 kernel...

The Linux 5.19 kernel is adding a new make x86_debug.config build target as a set of defaults in enabling a variety of recommended debugging features for x86/x86_64 kernel builds...

Sent in this morning for Linux 5.19 is AMD SEV-SNP support for that hardware feature introduced last year with AMD EPYC Milan 7003 series processors. Meanwhile Intel's alternative technology, Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) is coming with Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" and also with Linux 5.19 that functionality is being readied on the software side...

It was just last October that Mesa's V3DV driver achieved Vulkan 1.1 conformance for this Broadcom Vulkan open-source driver most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer. Now Vulkan 1.2 is just on the horizon...

Last year with the launch of AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors one of the new security features was SEV-SNP, or the "Secure Nested Paging" update to the Secure Encrypted Virtualization functionality that has built up with succeeding EPYC generations. While AMD published out-of-tree kernel patches in a GitHub repository to enable SEV-SNP and has been volleying several revisions to them on the kernel mailing list, one year later it's finally arriving in mainline with the Linux 5.19 kernel...

While not marked as a pull request yet for mainlining to the kernel, Miguel Ojeda this morning sent out an updated set of patches adding in the Rust programming language support for the Linux kernel. Separately, a new version of Uutils was released this weekend as the Rust language implementation of GNU Coreutils...

Adding to the many changes expected for Linux 5.19, block subsystem maintainer and IO_uring creator Jens Axboe has submitted his several pull requests for this now-open new kernel development cycle...

AMD CEO Lisa Su keynoted this morning for Computex 2022 where she talked up some of the company's processor plans for the rest of the year. The focal points were on the much anticipated Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors as well as announcing the "Mendocino" APUs that will be coming to affordable laptops later in the year...

Building off yesterday's release of the Linux 5.18 kernel, the GNU FSFLA folks have released GNU Linux-Libre 5.18-gnu kernel as their downstream that strips out support for using proprietary microcode/firmware or the ability to load binary-only kernel modules...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.18 on-time as the newest stable kernel release...

Unless Linus Torvalds has reservations today about the changes to land in the kernel this past week and decides to issue an extra RC, Linux 5.18 is expected to be christened as stable today and that in turn will mark the start of the Linux 5.19 merge window. Based on the "-next" activity, here is a look at the many changes expected to be merged for Linux 5.19...

As I've written about since last year the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been working on experimental mesh shader support and more recently in Mesa Git code around task shaders for RADV have been landing. Timur Kristóf who is contracted by Valve to work on the open-source Linux graphics stack has been working on the mesh/task shader support in preparation for an upcoming cross-vendor Vulkan extension around mesh shading...

With NVIDIA's recent R515 Linux driver beta that ushered in their new open-source GPU kernel driver in development, NVIDIA posted a list of their known Wayland implementation issues/shortcomings affecting users...

The PostgreSQL 15 database server will be releasing in a few months and is yet another major release to this open-source relational database system when it comes to performance...

Back in 2019 Chinese CPU company Zhaoxin introduced "LuJiaZui" as their 16nm x86 CPU design for use from laptops up through servers. LuJiaZui is much improved from their earlier chips though still well behind AMD and Intel performance. Proper GCC compiler support for LuJiaZui was sent out again this week after their previous upstreaming attempt hadn't made it into GCC 12 due to being late in the cycle...

With Linux 5.18 expected to be released as stable tomorrow and that opening up the Linux 5.19 merge window, feature work aimed for this next kernel should be largely wrapped up. Within the RISC-V architecture's "for-next" branch is several interesting additions...

Systemd 251 is officially out this Saturday as the first feature update to this Linux init system for 2022...

An early change made this week to Ubuntu 22.10 in its early development state is replacing the PulseAudio sound server with PipeWire...