Phoronix

With yesterday marking the 20th birthday of Phoronix, I was curious what the most popular news articles were over these past two decades. There's a lot of compiler fodder, news from the early days of AMD Ryzen, Linus Torvalds commentary, and more...

The latest funding for open-source from Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund is providing 300,000 over the course of the next year for improving GNU libmicrohttpd for building high performance HTTP web servers...

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer is out with two important updates to the Linux input stack: libinput 1.26 has released for this input handling library used both by X.Org and Wayland systems and then secondly he has announced the "gsetwacom" CLI program as a replacement to the "xsetwacom" program...

For those typically waiting until the first point release of a new Mesa3D driver series before upgrading, today it's your chance to upgrade! Mesa 24.1.1 is now available with the first round of Mesa 24.1 fixes to the prominent OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. Coincidentally the bi-weekly release times nicely for the Phoronix 20th birthday today as a nice present with our love for the open-source Linux graphics stack...

The beta process has begun for the Blender 4.2 open-source 3D modeling software. Making Blender 4.2 all the more significant is that it's a Long Term Support (LTS) release for this widely-used program by 3D artists across platforms...

While the Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver for OpenGL support with Apple Silicon on Linux has been maturing nicely and is quite capable these days, the Vulkan support hasn't been coming together as quick or for as long. But a new Apple Silicon Vulkan driver was recently started by Asahi Linux / Mesa developers and is looking positive for being able to become a compliant Vulkan 1.3 driver for the Apple M1 on Linux...

With the launch day review of the Intel Xeon 6766E and Xeon 6780E "Sierra Forest" processors the focus was on looking at the performance and power efficiency compared to prior Intel Xeon generations as well as the AMD EPYC competition. For those wondering how Intel's new Xeon 6 Sierra Forest processors compete against Amere Computing's "cloud native" Altra Max processors, here are those benchmarks looking at the performance and power efficiency.

A few weeks ago NVIDIA introduced their much anticipated R555 beta driver with NVIDIA 555.42.02 for Linux bringing Wayland explicit sync support, the GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware being used by default, and a variety of Wayland improvements. Today the NVIDIA 555.52.04 beta driver is out that offers additional fixes for the R555 series...

Back in 2022 the KDE project laid out new goals to improve accessibility, develop more environmentally sustainable software, and automate more processes for easing the development of KDE. These overarching KDE Goals are refined every 2~3 years and they are now soliciting ideas from the community for what they should focus on ahead...

The latest performance optimization work for the Linux kernel's Device Mapper (DM) comes thanks to Red Hat's Mikulas Patocka...

Intel released a new version of its NPU Acceleration Library, the user-space Python library for leveraging the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found within their Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" laptops and upcoming Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake hardware as well...

Building off last month's AMDVLK 2024.Q2.1 driver adding Phoenix 2 support, AMD today released AMDVLK 2024.Q2.2 as the newest update to their official open-source Vulkan Linux driver...

Well, it's been a wild ride to say the least... Today marks twenty years since I started Phoronix.com devoted to reviewing Linux hardware and ultimately enriching the Linux hardware experience with more benchmarks, open-source/Linux hardware news, and more over the years...

ROCm 6.1.2 is out today as the newest update to AMD's open-source GPU compute stack for Linux systems and with growing support for Windows Subsystem for Linux...

Queued into the x86 platform drivers' "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.11 kernel cycle is the "Dell PC Extras" driver. Initially this new dell-pc driver is used for controlling fan modes via the Platform Profile setting on capable systems...

Building atop the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver's mesh shader support that's been enabled by default since last year, the newest Mesa 24.2-devel code as of today now adds support for mesh shader queries...

Back in April I noted that Fedora was considering replacing Redis with Valkey given the upstream Redis software licensing changes. At yesterday's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) they have now signed off on replacing Redis with Valkey...

IBM compiler engineers are ready to flip-on their POWER11 support within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) in wiring up the "-mcpu=power11" option...

John Ogness of Linutronix today sent out the second iteration of his patches working on threaded printing support for printk() and related rework of that code that is a necessary step before the real-time (RT) kernel patches can be finally mainlined...

Raspberry Pi teamed up with Hailo to develop the Raspberry Pi AI Kit as a $70 add-on for the Raspberry Pi 5 that offers a 13 TOPS AI accelerator module...

FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE is now available as the newest stable release to this leading BSD operating system. There are a number of package updates, new features, and expanded hardware support to find with FreeBSD 14.1...

With Intel's launch today of the Xeon 6700E series processors formerly codenamed Sierra Forest I am now able to share benchmarks of these new E-core server processors. Here is an initial look at the Intel Sierra Forest Linux performance using the Xeon 6766E and Xeon 6780E 144-core server processors in both single and dual socket configurations compared to prior Intel Xeon processors and the AMD EPYC competition.

Intel is using Computex 2024 for announcing the first Xeon 6 processors, which are the E-Core Sierra Forest models that initially are available in up to 144 cores per socket. Intel is also using Computex to shed more light on the Gaudi 3 AI accelerator and the upcoming P core Xeon 6 Granite Rapids processors and the later launch of the Xeon 6900E models with up to 288 cores per socket.

24 hours ago AMD was in the limelight in announcing the Ryzen 9000 series, the Ryzen AI 300 series, teasing AMD 5th Gen EPYC, etc. Now the tables have turned to Intel with the embargo lifting concerning new details on the Gaudi 3 AI accelerator and upcoming Lunar Lake mobile processors and the launch of the Intel Xeon 6700E (Sierra Forest) E-core server processors. In this article is a look at some of the new disclosures around Lunar Lake...

AMD is hiring engineers to work on build and packaging of their "AMD Unified Linux Driver" to enhance the experience of deploying their packaged graphics driver stack -- including ROCm -- across different Linux distributions...

On Wednesday, 5 June, marks 20 years since I started Phoronix.com for covering the Linux hardware ecosystem! It's sure been a long and tough journey with more remarks I'll reserve for Wednesday, but given the two decade mark, there's a Phoronix Premium special for those wishing to mark the special occasion and help ensure the site's healthy continuance into the next decade...

The Rust-written Redox OS operating system issued their May monthly status report to highlight the various improvements made to this original open-source OS...

Debian developer Luca Boccassi has begun working on systemd-boot support for using it as an alternative to the GRUB bootloader...

The Linux Mint project is out with its monthly newsletter that highlights recent progress made on this Ubuntu (and Debian) derived, desktop-focused Linux distribution. In May they worked out enhancements to Linux Mint's software manager and also continued working on optimizing their package archive hosting...

With the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel Eric Biggers of Google landed new AES-XTS implementations for much faster performance for Intel/AMD processors via new AES-NI + AVX, VAES + AVX2, VAES + AVX10/256, and VAES + AVX10/512 code paths. Biggers has since begun tackling even better AES-GCM encryption/decryption performance by leveraging a new code path to utilize AVX-512/AVX10 and/or VAES...

The latest feature work around Intel's Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) that is merged for the in-development GCC 15 compiler is supporting APX NF functionality for suppressing the update of status flags on arithmetic operations...

OpenCV 4.10 is out today as the newest version of the Open Computer Vision Library for this widely-used library with machine learning support, object detection, segmentation and recognition, motion video tracking, gesture recognition, and a variety of other features important for today's diverse workloads...

Arguably most exciting out of AMD's slew of Computex 2024 announcements is finally making official the Ryzen 9000 "Granite Ridge" processors built atop the new Zen 5 cores...

In addition to all of the AMD client-side news during Lisa Su's keynote at Computex 2024 (see AMD Ryzen 9000 Series and AMD's Ryzen AI 300 Series Mobile APUs), the AMD CEO also teased the upcoming 5th Gen EPYC processors. AMD 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" processors are still on the way for releasing in H2'2024...

In addition to announcing the AMD Ryzen 9000 series desktop processors powered by Zen 5, Lisa Su at Computex 2024 also announced the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series as the next-generation mobile processors powered by Zen 5 CPU cores while sporting RDNA 3.5 (also referred to as RDNA 3+ and RDNA3 refresh) integrated graphics and an XDNA 2 NPU...

At Computex 2024, AMD confirmed the Instinct MI325X will be released in Q4'2024 as the successor to the MI300X accelerator. Next year will be the AMD Instinct MI350 series based on the new CFNA 4 architecture. AMD is committing to an annual Instinct accelerator roadmap moving forward as they further up their AI game...

While the AMD Ryzen 9000 series (Zen 5) details are arguably the most exciting aspect of Lisa Su's keynote at Computex 2024, over on the Radeon side is the announcement of the AMD Radeon PRO W7900 Dual Slot graphics card intended for compact workstations and Gen AI...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.10-rc2 with a busy week's worth of fixes...

Controversial free software developer Eric S Raymond has been spending a lot of time recently on the new Autodafe project as a means of free software projects from relying on Autotools. This "De-Autoconfiscation" has now led to the release of Autodafe 1.0 with the tool now being considered production-ready...

Now past the Linux 6.10 merge window, this week brought an initial batch of drm-misc-next changes submitted to the Direct Rendering Manager subsystem's DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 6.11 merge window opens up in July. The changes this week include a notable addition for the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver and some improvements for the Intel iVPU driver for their Neural Processing Unit (NPU)...

Ahead of today's Linux 6.10-rc2 kerne weekly test release a few "x86/urgent" patches were submitted for addressing some fallout on Intel and AMD processors...

ASUS used Computex 2024 for announcing the ROG Ally X, the latest version of their handheld gaming console. The ASUS ROG Ally X continues to be powered by the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC but now having more storage, faster RAM, a larger battery, updated controls, and other refinements...

When Steam on Linux debuted a decade ago it maintained around a 2% marketshare before receding and then beginning its long climb back up following the debut of Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux and then with the much anticipated Steam Deck handheld game console and the modern Arch-based SteamOS. Valve just published their May 2024 numbers for the Steam Survey and they indicate the Linux marketshare is finally back above 2%...

It's been another busy week with the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack with continued preparations around enabling support for next-generation RDNA4 graphics (as well as continued RDNA3+ / RDNA 3.5 tuning)...

As some more exciting news for upcoming Xe2 graphics with Lunar Lake integrated graphics and Battlemage discrete GPUs, the latest open-source driver activity for Linux has confirmed Xe2 supporting native 64-bit integer arithmetic...

While the Gentoo Linux project recently established an AI policy to forbid contributions to the project made using any AI tools/assistance and NetBSD also came out with a similar policy against AI-generated code, the Debian project for now has no project-wide policy regarding AI...

May 2024 is now in the books with 285 original news articles written by your's truly last month along with another 14 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. It was an interesting month with some fun new hardware launches, the Linux 6.10 merge window taking place, and other open-source software progress...

It's not too common for Intel to publish new CPU microcode updates outside of their "Patch Tuesday" regiment but that happened yesterday with a Friday night release of new CPU microcode although this time is limited to the Celeron and Pentium Silver families...

Expressed last week was a "major issue" from the GNOME Foundation side with regard to the Sovereign Tech Fund partnership for funding a number of useful improvements to the GNOME software stack just as Germany's STF has been doing to a number of other prominent open-source projects. While there still aren't many clear public details on this "major issue", a Friday night update from the GNOME side seems to indicate all is well and they are also embarking on additional development funding initiatives...

Vulkan 1.3.286 was released today with a handful of corrections/clarifications as well as one new extension...