Phoronix

The x86 platform driver updates have been submitted for the Linux 5.18 kernel merge window. This pull request includes a number of notable additions we have been talking about over recent weeks and months on Phoronix...

Following our how-to guide for enabling the new AMD P-State driver that premiered in Linux 5.17 after finding many users were unsure to go about using this new CPU frequency scaling driver, AMD is now making it easier to switch from ACPI CPUFreq to AMD P-State...

Introduced back in 2019 by the VIA + Shanghai owned Zhaoxin was the ZX-E / KX-6000 series x86_64 processors. Finally in 2022 the proper GCC compiler tuning support has been published for these processors that are part of the "Lujiazui" microarchitecture...

While Compute Express Link (CXL) is an open industry standard backed by many notable hardware vendors, Intel engineers as usual are leading the charge when it comes to the Linux kernel bring-up. Intel engineers continue working on the Linux support around this high speed CPU-to-device/memory interface built atop PCIe...

FreeBSD 13.1 Beta 3 is out as the latest weekly test build for this upcoming BSD operating system update...

The HID subsystem updates have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 5.18 merge window...

Valve's Gamescope Wayland compositor is what was born out of their former Steamcompmgr effort but rewritten to target Wayland, interfacing directly with DRM/KMS APIs for enhanced efficiency, and making use of Vulkan. To date Gamescope has worked with the Intel and Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver stacks while the NVIDIA proprietary driver is seeing work in the direction of supporting it...

As a follow-up to last week's article looking at how AMD is making an interesting case for budget-friendly Ryzen dedicated servers and not only in Europe but throughout the world more hosting providers are offering cost-conscious AMD Ryzen powered dedicated server options, here is a look at how various Linux distributions run on an ASRock Rack based AMD Ryzen server up against Microsoft Windows.

Chuck Lever III has submitted the NFSD file-system server changes for the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel with a few interesting changes in tow...

After launching an improved MDN earlier this month and teasing their "MDN Plus" subscription service, today that Mozilla Developer Network premium service is now available...

The upcoming Linux 5.18 kernel has mainline support available for Tesla's full self-driving SoC along with other interesting Arm hardware...

For those relying on software that leverages the GStreamer multimedia framework and you use the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack on Windows or Linux, with the next release you will be able to enjoy a better NVIDIA GPU-based video encoding experience...

The networking subsystem updates are busy as always with each Linux kernel merge window...

The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is open-source and used by the driver stacks on both Windows and Linux is up to version 1.0.10713 and with this milestone is functional ray-tracing support in preparation for upcoming Intel Arc graphics processors with hardware ray-tracing support...

David Airlie has submitted the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates for the Linux 5.18 kernel that includes the many graphics/display driver changes this cycle...

The crypto subsystem updates have landed in the Linux 5.18 kernel...

It was just back in 2018 that Andes' NDS32 CPU architecture support was added with the Linux 4.17 kernel. But now with Linux 5.18 the AndesCore NDS32 architecture is being removed over lack of active maintenance...

AMD continues improving their Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver code within the Linux kernel ahead of next-generation processors debuting later this year...

Last Friday the crew at Asahi Linux led by Hector Martin released the first alpha release for running Linux on Apple Silicon hardware. I eagerly loaded up Asahi Linux on an M1-powered Apple Mac Mini knowing the various early limitations of the Linux kernel support that is still settling. Overall the Apple M1 Linux performance ended up exceeding my expectations for the performance in its early alpha state. Here are some benchmarks.

In addition to the Imagination PowerVR Series 1 code drop of their late 90's era driver code, Imagination Tech has managed to successfully land its new PowerVR Rogue "PVR" Vulkan driver in time for Mesa 22.1's release next quarter...

GNOME 42 is out today as the latest half-year update for this widely-used, open-source desktop environment...

Back in the day, 2.5 million IOPS per core was an impressive feat... That day was little more than one year ago. With faster hardware and relentless optimizations by Linux kernel developers, 14 million IOPS per core is the new record now achieved...

In addition to Imagination working on a open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver for their newest graphics IP within Mesa, Imagination Technologies has also decided to go back and publish their original PowerVR Series 1 macOS/Windows driver as open-source...

Intel announced yesterday that they in cooperation with Microsoft have contributed the Scalable I/O Virtualization (SIOV) specification to the Open Compute Project for being an open standard moving forward...

While GCC 12 is in stage four development and focused just on regression fixes, a few notable patches were merged this week into the codebase ahead of its official release expected in roughly a month or so...

LLVM 14.0 and sub-projects like Clang 14 have been tagged with the official sources now available and the binaries for various platforms are beginning to be uploaded...

It's been a decade since the calls began for deprecating Linux's frame-buffer drivers "FBDEV" and the push for replacing FBDEV with DRM/KMS drivers. While DRM/KMS drivers are now commonplace even in the embedded space, FBDEV still won't die and with Linux 5.18 is seeing another round of fixes going in...

Added to the Linux kernel last year was Amazon's DAMON for data access monitoring that has seen public patches since early 2020. Since its Linux 5.15 introduction, this kernel functionality has continued to see new functionality tacked on and now for Linux 5.18 is DAMOS...

In addition to a slew of exciting NVIDIA announcements from GTC 2022, released today was a new 510 series Linux driver build...

Jaegeuk Kim submitted the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates on Monday that today were merged to mainline for the Linux 5.19 cycle...

Oracle today announced the general availability of JDK/OpenJDK 18 as the reference implementation of Java 18...

After earlier this month announcing Steam for Chrome OS following months of rumors/leaks around the initiative, Google today has made an alpha build of Steam available for select Chromebooks...

Jensen Huang has just wrapped up his GTC Spring 2022 keynote and thus the embargo has lifted on several exciting announcements from NVIDIA. NVIDIA has a lot of interesting hardware and software to talk about at this "#1 AI developer conference" from the Hopper H100 to next year's Grace CPU Superchips to the Jetson Orin.

CodeWeavers is out today with CrossOver 21.2 as the newest version of their commercial downstream based on Wine that offers Windows application and game support across Linux, macOS, and Chrome OS...

Since the release of the Linux 5.17 kernel the leading question in my inbox has been from readers asking how to actually make use of the AMD P-State driver. Right now this driver isn't the default over ACPI CPUFreq and I haven't seen any Linux distribution vendors announce their plans to immediately default to this new driver, but over the months ahead I expect that to change. In any case, if wanting to use amd_pstate on Linux 5.17 today here is a brief how-to guide for making the transition...

A change that had been expected but finally buttoned up in time for next month's Jammy Jellyfish release: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will now default to using the GNOME Wayland session when running the NVIDIA proprietary driver. The caveat/limitation is that's only the case when using the NVIDIA 510 series driver or newer and not when using any of the older legacy driver branches...

SUSE's David Sterba on Monday submitted the Btrfs file-system updates for the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel...

Going back to 2019 the open-source ecosystem has been working on ENQCMD/ENQCMDS support for introduction with Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" as part of the Data Streaming Accelerator work. ENQCMD support was added to the Linux kernel but last June was outright disabled for being "broken beyond repair". It's now managed to be repaired and for Linux 5.18 this instruction usage is being re-enabled...

GNU Linux-Libre 5.17 is out as the downstream flavor of Linux 5.17 that strips out code/support depending upon closed-source microcode or other non-free fragments as well as removing the ability to load proprietary kernel modules...

Thanks to the nature of open-source and independently-controlled projects like the Linux kernel, there is already much code sharing among competitive hardware vendors in areas where applicable. Much of the Linux kernel's x86/x86_64 code is shared between AMD and Intel (and VIA, Centaur, and Hygon for that matter) where relevant while due to different supported features and implementation differences there is divergence at times. With Linux 5.18 there are two features currently with unique AMD and Intel code paths that are working towards more unification...

As expected, the thermal subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel is bringing the new Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI) for benefiting their hybrid architecture processors as introduced recently with Alder Lake...

Samba 4.16 is out as the newest feature release for this leading SMB / CIFS implementation for improving Windows file/print interoperability with Linux-based systems...

While Milan-X was announced back in November, today is the day of the Milan-X embargo lift for reviewing these new processors and sharing more about these high-end server processors focused on delivering even greater performance for high performance computing (HPC) workloads. In this review is a look at the performance of the AMD EPYC 7773X series against other AMD EPYC parts and the Intel Xeon Scalable competition under Linux.

Today the AMD EPYC 7003 Milan-X processors are officially shipping. See my AMD EPYC 7773X Linux review for more details and plenty of benchmarks. The 768MB of L3 cache per CPU won't be of benefit to all workloads, just as the forthcoming Ryzen 7 5800X3D is focused on gaming. Aside from the dozens of benchmarks covered in my review, if you are still left wondering about whether other workloads stand to benefit from Milan-X, thankfully it's easy to already test drive it in the cloud with Microsoft Azure. Here are some Microsoft Azure HBv3 benchmarks looking at the Milan-X uplift in the cloud.

Intel has added a little OpenCL C compiler binary to Mesa 22.1 today in the latest development code-base...

Ingo Molnar has begun sending out the pull requests for the code he oversees in the kernel for the newly-opened Linux 5.18 merge window. The scheduler updates this cycle are rather notable especially for AMD Linux server users...

TornadoVM continues advancing as the open-source plug-in to OpenJDK and GraalVM that allows Java programs to run on heterogeneous hardware from GPUs to FPGAs and other targets...

The recent work by Mike Blumenkrantz on getting Lavapipe to advertise Vulkan 1.3 has successfully landed within Mesa 22.1...

It's been a while since having any shiny new features to talk about for FSCRYPT, the Linux kernel's file-system encryption framework that is used by the likes of EXT4 and F2FS. With Linux 5.18 that changes with FSCRYPT adding direct I/O support...

Following yesterday's Linux 5.17 release, HWMON subsystem maintainer Guenter Roeck was quick to send in the feature updates for the hardware monitoring subsystem for Linux 5.18...