As part of my ongoing benchmarking of the newly-released Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Linux distribution, today's focus is looking at the high-end Intel Core i9 14900K and AMD Ryzen 9 7950X desktops while comparing the performance across Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 23.10, and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for dozens of workloads.
This year already marks ten years since the introduction of RHEL 7. While the Red Hat Enterprise Linux support period is typically 10 years, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 they have decided to extend that by up to four years with Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS)...
Intel engineers have just released OpenVINO 2024.1, the newest feature release for this excellent open-source AI toolkit that continues expanding its features and capabilities particularly around Generative AI "GenAI" and Large Language Models (LLMs)...
Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has been making significant, much-needed investments into various open-source upstream projects from the GNOME desktop to Rust-written Coreutils and more. Today the Sovereign Tech Fund outlined their latest funding for advancing the open-source software ecosystem...
The release ISOs for Ubuntu 24.04 "Noble Numbat" are now available! Ubuntu 24.04 is an exciting Long Term Support (LTS) update with this new Linux distribution release being powered by the Linux 6.8 kernel, making use of Netplan for networking on the desktop, features the modernized desktop OS installer, various performance optimizations, and a ton of new features...
Following yesterday's Mesa 24.1 feature branching, Mesa 24.2-devel is now open for the Mesa Git mainline code and some early feature work has begun for that Q3 release series...
Not to be confused with Fedora's "Beefy Miracle" from a decade ago during their entertaining codename days, but a Fedora Miracle spin has been proposed for the now-open Fedora 41 development cycle...
Llamafile has been quite an interesting project out of Mozilla's Ocho group in the era of AI. Llamafile makes it easy to run and distribute large language models (LLMs) that are self-contained within a single file. Llamafile builds off Llama.cpp and makes it easy to ship an entire LLM as a single file with both CPU and GPU execution support. Llamafile 0.8 is out now to join in on the LLaMA3 fun as well as delivering other model support and enhancing the CPU performance...
In addition to many RadeonSI driver optimizations that were merged just prior to yesterday's code branching and Mesa 24.1-rc1 release, a number of Etnaviv driver improvements were also merged for benefiting that recent Vivante NPU IP open-source driver work...
Down to literally minutes before the Mesa 24.1 codebase was branched for making up this quarter's Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver to then be tested and stabilized with a stable release around mid-May, a number of AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver patches were merged...
One of the leading-edge benefits of Fedora Linux is that it always ships with the most up-to-date open-source compiler toolchains at release. For their spring releases each year, it typically means shipping with a GCC compiler that isn't even officially released as stable yet. With this week's release of Fedora 40, it's shipping with GCC 14.0.1 as the development version that will culminate with the inaugural GCC 14 stable release in the coming weeks. Plus Fedora 40 has all of the other latest GNU toolchain components and then over on the LLVM side is with the current LLVM 18 stable series. For those curious how GCC 14 vs. LLVM Clang 18 performance is looking, here is a wide range of C/C++ benchmarks carried out on Fedora Workstation 40 using a System76 Thelio Major workstation powered by the Zen 4 AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X.
A new AMD Linux kernel patch queued today via "x86/urgent" for routing into the Linux 6.9 development kernel expands the range of recognized CPU model IDs for upcoming Zen 5 processors...
Polychromatic is the open-source software package that serves as a GUI front-end to the OpenRazer drivers for allowing Razer devices to be configured under Linux for managing keyboard/mice RGB lighting and other options. With today's Polychromatic 0.9 release there is a port for the Qt6 toolkit...
The folks at iXsystems have released TrueNAS SCALEE 24.04 as the newest iteration of their Linux-based platform for network attached storage (NAS) devices. TrueNAS SCALE 24.04 brings better performance, new features, and additional hardware support...
Nginx 1.26 stable is out as the newest version of this popular alternative to the Apache web server while also able to work as a load balancer, reverse proxy, and HTTP cache. Nginx 1.26 incorporates the great work from the Nginx 1.25 mainline branch such as experimental HTTP/3 support...
Mozilla hopes you'll never have to see it, but they've been rewriting their crash reporting application for Firefox within the Rust programming language...
Intel today sent out more than one hundred new feature patches to DRM-Next of new "Xe" kernel graphics driver material they have readied for the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel merge window...
Adding to the impressive number of features to be found in this quarter's Mesa 24.1 release is now the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver supporting implicit pipeline caching...
The latest Compute Express Link (CXL) feature work being pursued for the mainline Linux kernel is a driver to create CXL block devices for storage. On Monday a "request for comments" patch series sent out the initial code for setting up CXL shared memory to be used as Linux block devices...
The AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for Zen 2 and newer processors has been working out well in its roughly two years of being in the mainline Linux kernel. The AMD P-State driver has helped with ensuring modern Ryzen systems are delivering optimal performance and power efficiency. Recently AMD Linux engineers have been working on a few fixes and enhancements to this CPUFreq driver...
NetBSD 10.0 debuted last month with a long list of improvements and other enhancements that built up over the past several years. For those not yet taking the leap to this big NetBSD update, NetBSD 9.4 is out today for those relying on the stable NetBSD 9 series...
LACT 0.5.4 is out as the open-source and independently developed "Linux AMDGPU Control Application" for this community AMD Linux graphics driver control panel option given the lack of any official Radeon GUI management solution from AMD...
Richard Hughes of Red Hat has announced the released of Fwupd 1.9.17, the newest update to this open-source solution for system and device firmware updating under Linux that is paired with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for a streamlined user experience...
Submitted for code review this weekend was a new MSI WMI Platform driver that was developed via reverse engineering MSI laptops. Initially this MSI WMI Platform driver is just exposing fan speed sensors but ultimately can be more useful for other Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) features...
While there is a growing number of PCIe 5.0 consumer NVMe SSDs available through Internet retailers, when it comes to PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD data center / enterprise grade solid-state drives there aren't as many yet and even for announced ones they have been relatively in short supply. In preparing for some upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS tests and ahead of next-gen servers arriving, I was recently searching for some new PCIe 5.0 data center solid state drives. Arriving so far are the Kioxia KCD8XPUG1T92 CD8P-R and Kioxia KCMYXVUG3T20 CM7-V PCIe 5 SSDs. Here are a few benchmarks of those drives for those curious about the performance.
A patch is undergoing work to add Steam Deck IMU support to the HID-Steam kernel driver for supporting the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors of the Steam Deck controller...
Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have been busy working to enable the display support for the upcoming Battlemage graphics cards as the successor to DG2/Alchemist...
After recently announcing they'd be working to get out Micro-Engine Scheduler (MES) firmware documentation and open-source code, AMD said they would be working to open-source more of their software stack and hardware documentation. AMD repeated those calls over the weekend...
AMD's upstreaming effort around Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) to the mainline Linux kernel appears to be nearly wrapped up with the latest hypervisor patches now at their fourteenth revision...
Right now for buggy HID hardware or other input devices not exactly aligning to specs or having known hardware workarounds required, a new Linux kernel driver tends to be needed or at least quirks to be added to existing kernel driver code. There's no shortage of wonky HID hardware/drivers out there to deal with such odd cases. Due to the lengthy kernel cycles and other factors involved, leveraging (e)BPF has long been talked about as one of the areas where it may make sense for being able to more quickly send out hardware support fixes in the form of eBPF programs. The Rust-written udev-hid-bpf project is ready to help in that enabling effort...
The Intel Media Driver 2024Q1 release is now available that serves as the company's modern Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver for Linux systems. The Intel media driver allows for iGPU/dGPU-based video encode/decode for HEVC, VP9, AV1, and other formats supported by the respective graphics hardware...
This weekend AMD upstreamed a number of new AMDGPU firmware files into the linux-firmware.git repository that serves as a basis for all of the binary firmware/microcode files used by the Linux kernel drivers. This big set of new AMDGPU firmware files is likely for the upcoming RDNA 3.5 / "RDNA3 refresh" / RDNA3+ as it appears will be called updated RDNA3 graphics for upcoming AMD Ryzen SoCs...
GNOME Mutter 46.1 was released this weekend as the developers prepare to release the GNOME 46.1 point release. This Mutter update brings several exciting feature/bug changes back-ported for the GNOME 46 series...
The GNU Portability Library for common portability code across platforms has seen a major rewrite to gnulib-tool, the program for importing modules from gnulib into their packages. This code rewrite of gnulib-tool is said to offer between eight and 100 times faster performance than the existing implementation...
The good news is that with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle the ARM-based Acer Aspire One laptop will feature "almost full" support for this Qualcomm Snapdragon powered laptop. The downside though it's now a three year old device with far more interesting ARM laptops on the market and more powerful options coming to the market this year...
The open-source EROFS read-only file-system that is popular with mobile/embedded devices and containerized applications has been making good progress on performance, showing itself to be rather robust, and has an ambitious roadmap of new feature plans for this RO file-system...
Phoronix