Phoronix

KDE released Plasma 5.25.1 this week with the first batch of bug fixes to the Plasma 5.25 desktop while yet more fixes are coming down the pipe to Plasma and other KDE software components...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers remain very busy preparing the open-source driver stack for Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist hardware. While much of the base enablement work is complete and now with Linux 5.19 the compute support is even exposed to user-space, one of the areas seeing more work in recent times has been around power management...

One of the great defaults when installing Pop!_OS or receiving a pre-loaded laptop/desktop from System76 or the new HP Dev One is that it encourages full-disk encryption and prominently shown during the install process. I highly recommend full-disk encryption especially for laptops. As it's been a few years since running benchmarks looking at the overhead of LUKS encryption, here are some benchmarks of Pop!_OS 22.04 on the HP Dev One with the full disk encryption enabled and then a fresh install without encryption.

While many Red Hat open-source projects end up being relatively instant successes that then end up being widely adopted in the open-source community, Red Hat's Stratis Storage effort seems to be trending as one of the exceptions. Red Hat continues investing in Stratis but it doesn't seem to have the sizable adoption or widespread interest that tends to come with most of their projects. In any event, Fedora 37 later this year should ship with the newest Stratis tech...

Google's Stadia cloud gaming service since its 2019 launch has relied upon custom Vega-based GPUs in their Linux servers but now it looks like they may be quietly transitioning to using NVIDIA GPUs...

Following this week's Chrome 103 release, Google has now promoted Chrome 104 to beta...

With the recent release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS it is shipping systemd-oomd by default on their desktop for trying to better handle low-memory / out-of-memory situations. However, in real-world use systemd-oomd is too easily killing user-space applications like Firefox and Chrome when approaching memory pressure. This is a poor Ubuntu 22.04 user experience but the developers now have an idea for their approach to addressing this solution...

Fedora developers are weighing adding an option to the default compilation flags for Fedora 37 that can enhance the performance profiling and debug-ability of generated packages but possible performance overhead implications -- possibly a few percent based on prior figures...

Stemming from a recent reader request around seeing some fresh OpenJDK performance benchmarks, here are benchmarks of OpenJDK 9 through OpenJDK 18 plus the early access OpenJDK 19 builds. Additionally, OpenJ9 and GraalVM CE were tossed in as alternative implementations.

A set of patches have been posted for making the "-O3" compiler optimization level more easily accessible when building the Linux kernel but still it's not recommended and some kernel developers do not even want to see it as a Kconfig option...

This week's DRM-Misc-Next pull request was sent out of new DRM changes ready for queuing ahead of Linux 5.20. There isn't too much to get excited about for this week's code updates going to DRM-Next, but there is "fbcon: Improve scrolling performance" that did get my attention...

From 2011 to 2017 while Ubuntu had been using the LightDM display manager developed by Canonical, their engineers were actively supporting it and making new releases to coincide with new Ubuntu Linux updates. But with Ubuntu now using GDM as its default desktop display manager, there hasn't been a new LightDM release in three years and not much in the way of upstream activity. Today Canonical's lead LightDM maintainer issued a status update for the project...

The first beta of Krita 5.1 for this leading open-source digital painting program is now available for testing...

Adding to the list of features slowly building up that will be destined for the Linux 5.20 cycle, Jens Axboe has queued up the support for async buffered writes with XFS when using IO_uring can deliver some significant performance advantages...

OpenZFS 2.1.5 was released this afternoon as the newest maintenance release for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation that currently works on Linux and FreeBSD systems...

Last year I signed up for SpaceX's Starlink satellite Internet service with hopes of using it to replace the Internet connection used for running Phoronix. After months of using Starlink and carrying out thousands of benchmarks, Starlink in the US midwest / Chicagoland area has proven reliable but the performance can be rather volatile still and it was frustrating at first waiting for some Starlink accessories to ship, but the self-service nature and simplicity of the setup were great.

Back in March there were Linux kernel patches posted for review to boot Linux on the Nintendo Wii U game console after this Linux porting work has long been done out-of-tree. A new iteration of those Wii U enablement patches for the Linux kernel have now been posted...

Wine developers have released VKD3D 1.4, the newest version of their Direct3D 12 on Vulkan implementation that is useful with Wine for enjoying newer Windows games on Linux...

After AMD announced FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 back in March, as of today they have made good on their word to open-source it...

The open-source Mesa "R600" Gallium3D driver for supporting AMD graphics processors prior to the Radeon HD 7000 series, a rewritten NIR back-end has been published that enables better performance and proper FP64 usage...

With the AMD Radeon "HIP" acceleration in Blender 3.2 with the Cycles back-end, an unfortunate early limitation is that this is limited to just AMD RDNA2 (Radeon RX 6000 series) graphics processors while prior generation RDNA1 GPUs have issues with some textures like those used in the benchmarks. This week though AMD did post a new patch for Blender enabling HIP support on Windows and Linux for Vega/GFX9 graphics...

One of the multi-year efforts in the GNOME Wayland camp has been on deep color support and it's been of interest to Ubuntu developers among other parties. After not hearing about any progress on GNOME Wayland deep color support in a while, some progress is now being made...

Merged yesterday into Linux 5.19 as a post merge window change is making the kernel's signature verification code FIPS compliant...

AMD today released a new update to AMDVLK, their official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems that is derived from their internal Vulkan driver sources while plumbed to use the open-source LLVM AMDGPU shader compiler back-end. For Linux gamers this driver doesn't remain as popular as Mesa's RADV but the update today does deliver on some game performance optimizations...

Google today released Chrome 103 as the newest monthly feature update to its cross-platform web browser...

The PCI SIG today announced the PCI Express 7.0 specification that doubles the data rate to 128 GT/s and should be released to members in 2025...

To complement the AMD HIP, NVIDIA CUDA, and NVIDIA OptiX acceleration in Blender 3.2, Intel engineers are still hoping to have their Intel oneAPI SYCL support ready to premiere in Blender 3.3 for Intel GPU-based Cycles acceleration with Intel integrated and discrete graphics processors...

It's been known for a while that The Khronos Group and its Vulkan working group has been working on a cross-vendor extension for mesh shaders akin to what is offered already by Direct3D 12 and with NVIDIA by their VK_NV_mesh_shader extension. A few more details about the forthcoming Vulkan mesh shader support were detailed today...

Last week Feral Interactive released Total War: WARHAMMER III for Linux as a native port of this game that debuted earlier this year on Windows. This latest Total War game port to Linux by Feral relies on the Vulkan API for graphics and comes with a modest system requirements. For those curious about the performance of this latest high profile game port, here are benchmarks across 24 different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux.

RISC-V International announced their first batch of new specifications for 2022. This includes approving of Efficient Trace for RISC-V (E-Trace), RISC-V Supervisor Binary Interface (SBI), RISC-V UEFI, and RISC-V Zmmul multiply-only extensions...

At the Embedded World conference happening this week in Nürnberg, Think Silicon is showing off the first production RISC-V 3D GPU design...

AMD is using the Embedded World conference in Nürnberg to launch the Ryzen Embedded R2000 series for industrial use-cases along with IoT, thin clients, and edge computing...

Meta (Facebook) engineers on Monday announced CIR, a proposed new intermediate representation (IR) for LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler front-end that is based on the MLIR representation...

Earlier this month the TI Sitara AM62 series SoCs were announced for low-power IoT, AI, and other use-cases. While being powered by uninteresting Arm Cortex-A53 cores, with the AM625 SoC part of this new Sitara line-up there is an Imagination PowerVR GPU and that is now being enabled by the new open-source Vulkan driver...

Meta's engineering team today published an interesting blog post about Transparent Memory Offloading (TMO) as a new Linux kernel feature they developed that is already used in production on Facebook/Meta servers. Within Meta's data centers this TMO functionality is saving 20~32% memory per server across their millions of servers...

AlmaLinux today made public ALBS, the AlmaLinux Build System used to construct the recent releases of AlmaLinux 8.6 and AlmaLinux 9.0 across all supported architectures...

After announcing the Threadripper PRO 5000 WX series back in March and with Lenovo being their launch partner for these Zen 3 Ryzen Threadripper CPUs, AMD today shared an update on availability...

Stemming from my recent AWS Graviton3 benchmarks and looking at Graviton3 against Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC, a number of Phoronix readers expressed interest in seeing some compiler tuning benchmarks for the Graviton3 around its Arm Neoverse-V1 cores with SVE support. Here are some benchmarks for those interested in the compiler tuning impact for this new high performance Arm cloud processor.

Found with Intel mobile SoCs since Ice Lake is their Gaussian and Neural Accelerator "GNA" that has been supported by an out-of-tree Linux driver while over the past year Intel engineers have been working to upstream an Intel GNA Linux driver into the mainline kernel. They have most recently been adapting this GNA driver to become a Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver alongside their Intel i915 kernel graphics driver and other conventional graphics drivers...

Due to the early state of Imagination's PowerVR Rogue open-source Vulkan driver within Mesa a "hard coding" infrastructure has been added for helping to load hard-coded graphics/compute shaders into this driver until its compiler is far enough along to be useful and mark this infrastructure as unnecessary/redundant...

This weekend marked 38 years since the inaugural release of the X Window System at MIT...

Sunday marked the release of the Meson 0.63 release candidate for this increasingly popular open-source, cross-platform build system...

Linus Torvalds spent some of Father's Day today merging last minute pull requests for the week and issuing Linux 5.19-rc3 as the newest weekly test kernel...

Out this weekend is a new version of GhostBSD, the desktop-focused operating system built atop a FreeBSD base and catering to the MATE desktop environment...

Statistics published by Fedora for the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) usage point to a recent surge in Rocky Linux usage -- at least for those with EPEL enabled -- and at least recently appears to surpass the usage for the likes of CentOS Stream, AlmaLinux, and even the RHEL usage with EPEL enabled...

When an EXT4 file-system is running low on free space (or when toggled via the "nodelalloc" mount option), EXT4's delayed allocation mode can be disabled. This can result in a significant performance hit but now a patch is pending for what should land in Linux 5.20 with recovering that performance when delayed allocation is disabled...

Following an initial rc0 tag earlier in the week, Git 2.37-rc1 was released on Friday for helping to facilitate testing for the next version of this leading, open-source distributed revision control system...

Yesterday I posted benchmarks of six Linux distributions on the HP Dev One, the exciting new Linux laptop launched by HP in collaboration with System76 that is using their Pop!_OS distribution. From those benchmarks one of the bizarre findings was that the Zstd compression performance on Arch Linux simply sucked, but some interested developers dove in and found the rather bizarre culprit why their Zstd performance is so poor in relation to other Linux distributions on the same version...

Mold 1.3 has been released today as the newest version of this high-speed linker that serves as an alternative to GNU Gold and LLVM's LLD...

Google engineers on Friday released AOM AV1 v3.4 as the newest version of this open-source AV1 CPU-based video encoder...