Phoronix

Last week Laminar Research promoted X-Plane 12 to its early access public beta phase. This realistic flight simulator continues to natively support Linux -- and doing so well for many years -- and now with X-Plane 12, the Vulkan steps up past their long-used OpenGL renderer...

The Linux Plumbers Conference has returned to being an in-person event and is running today through Wednesday in Dublin, Ireland...

Linus Torvalds has just announced Linux 6.0-rc5 as the latest test release of Linux 6.0 that is working its way toward a stable release in early October...

Disclosed back in March was the Spectre-BHB / Branch History Injection (BHI) speculative execution vulnerability that on the Arm side affected CPUs from the likes of the Cortex-A15 through A78 series as well as the likes of the X1, X2, and A710, plus the Neoverse E1 / N1 / N2 / V1 CPUs. Now for Linux 6.1, a command-line option is being added for ARM64 to be able to disable the Spectre-BHB mitigation due to the "great impact" to performance...

For those recently picking up an ASUS laptop powered by AMD Ryzen Mobile 6000 series "Rembrandt" SoCs or considering such a device, AMD has prepared a set of fixes for the suspend-to-idle support...

The Device Tree (DT) files needed by the Linux kernel for Apple Macs powered by the M1 Pro, Max, and Ultra SoCs have been submitted on the kernel mailing list for review and working their way towards upstream...

As part of the multi-year effort to overhaul the Linux kernel's printk() code there has been much work in recent months around threaded console printing so each registered console would have a kernel thread and console printing would be decoupled from the printk() callers. That work was aimed for Linux 5.19 but then reverted due to troubles. There is now a new implementation in the works...

FLAC 1.4 was released on Friday as the "Free Lossless Audio Codec" that is known for its great, no-cost lossless compression for digital audio...

Last month Intel began landing oneVPL support within FFmpeg as their video processing and acceleration library that is part of their oneAPI toolkit. The oneVPL Video Processing Library supports CPU-based execution as well as native Intel GPU acceleration for their latest Gen12/Xe hardware with a focus on Arc Graphics / DG2 hardware, targeting the Intel Media SDK for their older GPUs, and can be adapted for other possible back-ends...

Canonical used to host a stellar in-person event each Ubuntu Linux development cycle with the Ubuntu Developer Summit. That was over a decade ago and then it became largely a virtual event and then faded away in favor of Canonical's internal road-map planning and other developer sprints among their employees. Coming up in November in Prague is the return of an in-person official event with the Ubuntu Summit...

The Debian project today released Debian 11.5 and Debian 10.13 as the newest versions of their free GNU/Linux operating system...

AMD engineers are working to better optimize the Linux kernel's scheduler for split-LLC (last level cache) processor designs, namely to benefit their EPYC server processors...

Sent out as a "request for comments" on Friday night was a new patch series out of Intel introducing the notion of "classes of tasks" for the Linux kernel so that the scheduler can make better decisions on hybrid processors like with Intel's Alder Lake processors and upcoming Raptor Lake. This also provides a more complete implementation of Intel Thread Director for Linux and may also be used as the basis for instruction set differences between the performance and efficient cores...

Intel engineers have submitted another batch of "i915" kernel graphics driver changes intended for Linux 6.1 that include updated GuC firmware version handling, more DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics work, and also more Meteor Lake "MTL" enablement for that successor to Raptor Lake...

Fedora Linux releases whether they be development/beta snapshots or the stable releases are known for slipping all too often. Fedora will often delay due to blocker bugs as they aim to deliver a bleeding-edge yet reliable Linux distribution and thus a week or two delay here and there isn't uncommon at all. While they have been delivering more timely releases than in the past with their notorious delays, for Fedora Linux 37 Beta they have delivered on the feat of an on-time release...

KDE Plasma 5.26 is due for release on 11 October while the Plasma 5.26 beta is planned for next week. As such the developers involved have been quite busy with finishing touches ahead of the beta...

Following the news from this summer of Zstd compression being eyed for use within LLVM, the code has begun being merged to allow for Zstd-compressed ELF debug sections as an alternative to the long-used Zlib...

Wine 7.17 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release but due to the US Labor Day this past week seems to be a driving factor in this update coming in rather small...

Over the past year AMD engineers have been developing the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver as an alternative to the long-used ACPI CPUFreq driver to provide better performance/power efficiency with Zen 2 and newer Ryzen/EPYC processors. Today they have now introduced AMD P-State EPP as they aim to deliver better performance-per-Watt...

VMware's performance engineering team today announced a performance regression in Linux 5.19 affecting compute performance up to -70%, networking up to -30%, and storage up to -13%. But the unfortunate thing is the heavy hitting regressions are known and a side effect of the Intel Retbleed mitigation for older processors...

OpenSUSE has today made available their Leap Micro 5.3 Beta operating system as the lightweight, immutable OS intended for edge / embedded / IoT use-cases...

Last month I wrote about the work being done by Jason Ekstrand for switching RADV completely over to dynamic rendering. That work has now panned out and as of a few minutes ago the transition to "100%" dynamic rendering for RADV has landed in Mesa 22.3...

AMD has submitted an initial big batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.1 merge window...

For the past two decades Red Hat has been behind Sourceware.org for providing hosting for open-source projects like Cygwin, GNU GCC, GDB, Glibc, and many other projects. While Red Hat continues to sponsor the hosting and having their employees be involved with the Sourceware.org maintenance, etc, for ensuring a secured future they have been looking to hookup with the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). The SFC has now voted in favor of accepting this long-time open-source hosting service into their umbrella...

Thanks to Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team, the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" now works with the AMD/GPUOpen Radeon GPU Profiler...

In addition to the drm-misc-next pull from earlier in the week, another set of Direct Rendering Manager updates for the core DRM code and smaller drivers has now been submitted for DRM-Next...

In addition to Intel acquiring Linutronix as the company known for their work on the real-time (RT) kernel patches and other contributions and then back in June acquiring Codeplay Software, Intel has today made another notable software talent acquisition... Intel announced this afternoon that the team behind ArrayFire has joined the company to further their ambitious software endeavors...

Intel has detailed more of the Arc Graphics A-Series hardware specifications for upcoming models, including the A700 series...

With yesterday's release of Blender 3.3 much of the excitement has been about the new Intel oneAPI back-end for Arc Graphics acceleration and also improvements to AMD's HIP back-end for supporting GPUs back to Vega. However, even if you are using CPU-based rendering, Blender 3.3 LTS is looking like a nice upgrade for better performance...

AMD's GPUOpen group has released an updated version of FidelityFX Super Resolution 2. The new FSR 2.1 brings quality enhancements and a reduction in artifacts as the primary benefits over the original FSR2 that was unvelied earlier this year and open-sourced during the summer...

With the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D as the first consumer processor with AMD 3D V-Cache technology that launched earlier this year, the Linux performance has been fantastic for a variety of workloads especially in areas of technical computing and other non-gaming workloads -- similar to the great results we've enjoyed with AMD EPYC Milan-X processors too. One of the areas I hadn't had a chance to look at until recently was how the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance is looking for this Ryzen CPU with its 96MB L3 cache. Here are those quick benchmarks.

Distrobox is the open-source software that quickly and easily fires up Linux distributions in containers for helping to augment the package selection from your host distribution, easily experiment with different distributions, and other use-cases. Distrobox 1.4 is out this week with the latest enhancements for this project...

Last week saw the debut of Vulkan 1.3.226 with mesh shader support introduced as a new cross-vendor extension while out this morning is Vulkan 1.3.227 with a new extension for helping the layering of OpenGL atop Vulkan...

One day shy of a year since Qt 5.15.6 LTS Commercial was released, The Qt Company has now published that point release as open-source...

With Fedora 37 approaching release at the end of October, more feature changes for Fedora 38 next spring are continuing to be discussed. One of the interesting proposals this week is enabling acceleration of GnuTLS using the kernel TLS (kTLS)...

While LLVM 15.0 was just released this week with many new compiler features, a big change just merged for next spring's LLVM/Clang 16.0 release: C++17 with GNU extensions is now the default C++ and ObjectiveC++ version...

Ahead of the upcoming Godot 4.0 Beta, this impressive open-source game engine has been tacking on a few more improvements in another Godot 4.0 alpha build...

Due to bringing a number of new SoC designs to market next year and trying to make their model numbers easier to decipher, AMD announced this morning a new naming system for Ryzen mobile processors...

Blender 3.3 is out this morning as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source and cross-platform 3D modeling software...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced a new release of their Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian) as their reference Linux distribution for running on these low-cost Arm single-board computers...

The latest open-source Radeon Vulkan driver work for Mesa 22.3's RADV is enabling 3D sparse image support...

Blender 3.3 is set to be released today and one of the exciting enhancements with this open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software update is initial support for Intel oneAPI/SYCL GPU acceleration. Intel Arc Graphics discrete GPUs can now enjoy this accelerated Cycles back-end, permitting your driver stack is new enough on Windows or Linux and are using their new dGPUs and not existing integrated graphics. But this is just the start of their oneAPI GPU-accelerated push for Blender...

Since Apple introduced the M1 two years ago as their in-house Apple Silicon for laptops and desktops with a powerful AArch64 processor and custom-designed graphics processor, there has been much speculation about whether the Apple M1 (and now M2) graphics are a clean-sheet Apple design or derived from Imagination PowerVR graphics that Apple had been using with earlier SoCs. There has been some similarities brought up before with the Asahi Linux team working on enabling the Apple M1/M2 under Linux while the latest Mesa driver activity points to more common bits between PowerVR graphics hardware and the Apple AGX graphics...

Formed back in 2019 by Intel, Mozilla, and Red Hat was the Bytecode Alliance to promote running WebAssembly (WASM) everywhere. As part of the Bytecode Alliance initiatives they have been developing Wasmtime as a WebAssembly run-time and later this month they plan to christen version 1.0...

Following a slight release delay, yesterday saw the release of NetBeans 15 by the Apache Software Foundation as this Java-focused integrated deevelopment environment that also supports C/C++, PHP, JavaScript, and other languages...

While Intel Arc Graphics is already running on the open-source Linux driver stack, Intel engineers continue improving upon and refining that DG2/Alchemist graphics card support. Overnight some fresh workarounds were merged into Mesa 22.3-devel as the latest Linux driver improvements for Intel's forthcoming discrete graphics cards...

Back in July I called attention to the issue how Linux 5.19 was set to break Alder Lake P graphics support unless moving to new graphics micro-controller "GuC" firmware in tandem. That user-space breakage is frowned upon and following that article the upstream DRM kernel maintainers outlined explicit requirements around firmware not breaking driver support. Intel engineers ended up submitting a quick fix for Linux 5.19 to still support the existing firmware while now a more adequate solution has been devised...

With Fedora 39 next spring it will likely replace DNF, libdnf, and dnf-automatic with the new DNF5 packaging tool and libdnf5 support library. DNF5 should improve the user experience and deliver better performance for dealing with software management on Fedora Linux...

Following the July disclosure of the Retbleed CPU security vulnerability affecting older processors and an AMD change made in August, here is a fresh look at the performance impact of the Retbleed mitigations on Linux, including if opting for the IBPB-based Retbleed mitigation, and the accumulated CPU security mitigation impact for Zen 2 with the flagship Ryzen 9 3950X processor.

GNU founder Richard Stallman has recently been working on crafting a GNU C Language introduction and reference manual...