on (#4VM91)
With the Linux 5.5 kernel now in development the Habana Labs AI startup is preparing for supporting future chips with their open-source Linux kernel driver...
Phoronix
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| Updated | 2025-12-17 21:15 |
on (#4VM55)
The UBports community developers maintaining Ubuntu Touch have landed the 64-bit ARM (ARM64/AArch64) version of libhybris into their "Edge" development branch. This in turn opens up Ubuntu Touch to more easier porting to newer Android devices...
on (#4VM1Q)
Linus Torvalds has officially released the Linux 5.4 "Kleptomaniac Octopus" kernel this evening as was expected. Linux 5.4 is the last major stable kernel release of the year and brings a lot of new hardware support particularly on the graphics processor front, Microsoft exFAT support is finally available, and a plethora of other new features and improvements to existing functionality...
on (#4VKWZ)
GNOME 3.35.2 is out as the latest development release on the route to GNOME 3.36 due out next March...
on (#4VKQW)
While NVIDIA graphics in IBM POWER systems have been known to make a powerful combination for supercomputer deployments, for those wanting a libre GPU compute experience can also use POWER with AMD Radeon's open-source driver with a pending patch to the kernel driver...
on (#4VKH8)
Following the initial tests earlier this month from the disclosures of the JCC Erratum (Jump Conditional Code) that required updated Intel CPU microcode to address and on the same day the TSX Async Abort (TAA) vulnerability that required kernel mitigations to address, which I have run benchmarks of those CPU performance impacts individually, readers have requested tests looking at the current overall impact to the mitigations to date.
on (#4VKCR)
As part of the KSelfTest updates sent in early for the Linux 5.5 merge window opening tonight/tomorrow, Google's KUnit is included in this pull request as the basic kernel unit testing framework...
on (#4VKCS)
For the imminent Linux 5.5 kernel cycle we have talked about exciting AMD Radeon and Intel graphics driver changes on deck from Navi OverDrive overclocking to more Intel Tiger Lake and Jasper Lake bits, AMDGPU HDCP support, and other features queued. But what about the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Linux driver?..
on (#4VKCT)
It was a busy week in the KDE space...
on (#4VK6B)
GNUstep, the longstanding GNU Project implementing Apple's Cocoa frameworks, might end up deprecating support for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to focus its compiler support on LLVM's Clang...
on (#4VK6C)
Catalin Marinas who oversees the 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture code within the mainline kernel has already submitted his pull request early for the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle beginning tonight or early on Monday...
on (#4VK3C)
In addition to Oracle having shipped a Solaris update this past week, prior to calling it a weekend their virtualization crew released VirtualBox 6.1 RC1...
on (#4VJX2)
With the Jump Conditional Code (JCC) Erratum that was made public earlier this month and ushered in new Intel microcode to mitigate this Skylake to Cascade Lake design defect, compiler/toolchain patches have been in the works to help offset the performance cost incurred from the updated microcode. Besides the GNU Assembler work we've talked about several times since JCC came to light, the LLVM folks have also been reviewing their comparable changes...
on (#4VJRK)
Over the years at Phoronix we have easily close to forty if not more Rosewill 2U and 4U sever cases... Rosewill's server cases have been among the best value enclosures when not needing any extra features like hot-swap bays, etc. For under $100 USD, their Rosewill 4U cases have been a favorite due to the cost yet good quality, fan filter, etc. A new revision out this summer is the Rosewill RSV-4310 that appears to have replaced the likes of the RSV-R4000. The RSV-4310 4U enclosure does bring some nice minor updates to the base enclosure we've come to know and appreciate though is more costly.
on (#4VJK0)
David Sterba sent in his pull request early of the Btrfs file-system changes that are ready for merging into the Linux 5.5 merge window next week...
on (#4VJEF)
We have done a lot of benchmarks on Intel/AMD x86_64 for Ubuntu 19.10 for seeing how its performance is looking, but what about IBM POWER9 with the likes of the libre Raptor Blackbird? Here are some Ubuntu 19.04 vs. 19.10 POWER benchmarks I recently carried out...
on (#4VJEG)
A few weeks back I wrote about NVIDIA's Nitin Gupta working on proactive memory compaction for the Linux kernel to more proactively compact memory rather than doing so on-demand when it can lead to high latencies for applications needing lots of huge-pages...
on (#4VJB8)
While it's taking painfully long to get X.Org Server 1.21 organized for release, at least in the interim there continues to be new xorg-server 1.20 point releases that back-port many of the prominent fixes...
on (#4VJ8H)
While the Linux 5.5 cycle begins next week, looking ahead to early next year when the Linux 5.6 cycle will begin, there is expected to be another power management improvement coming for AMD Radeon graphics cards...
on (#4VJ5F)
A few days ago 7 Days to Die saw a performance boost on Mesa Git from its "glthread" threading implementation while now a number of game emulators have seen similar whitelisting...
on (#4VJ5G)
Ending out the week is an exciting development in the Intel open-source graphics driver space... Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support! This is another step towards their upcoming discrete Xe GPUs and ultimately their exciting oneAPI conquest...
on (#4VHM0)
The inaugural release of Glimpse is now available, the fork born out of calls for renaming The GIMP project to something not considered offensive...
on (#4VHM1)
It's been almost two months since last looking at the RADV ACO performance for this shader compiler back-end alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM code. ACO is making its debut in the upcoming Mesa 19.3 release while since the last round of testing have been more optimizations and fixes as well as getting the Navi/GFX10 support in place. In this article are some fresh benchmarks of the Vulkan RADV ACO support for not only Polaris and Vega but also the Radeon RX 5700 Navi graphics cards.
on (#4VH9S)
The Linux 5.4 kernel is to be released on Sunday and that will in turn kick-off the Linux 5.5 merge window. Here is a look at some of the changes on the table for what will in turn be the first major stable kernel release of 2020...
on (#4VH9T)
It looks like a big new systemd release will be out in time for Christmas...
on (#4VGZR)
Building off the NVIDIA 440 stable Linux driver release from earlier this month, the NVIDIA 440.36 Linux driver is out today as a small update...
on (#4VGZS)
With the big PHP 7.4.0 release due out next week, yesterday we published our PHP 7.4.0 benchmarks using the near-final build for this annual update to PHP. Those benchmarks compared previous releases as far back as PHP 5.6. But out of curiosity after that article I went to do some benchmarks going back to PHP 5.3 through PHP 7.4 and PHP 8.0-dev...
on (#4VGRB)
Arm engineers have been working to speed-up the open-source Chromium web browser on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and ultimately to flow back into Google's Chrome releases. Their focus has been around Windows-on-Arm with the growing number of Windows Arm laptops coming to market, but the Chromium optimizations also benefit the browser on Linux too...
on (#4VGRC)
Released at the end of October to little fanfare was webOS Open Source Edition 2.0, the open-source Linux OS currently in development by LG for use on their Smart TVs and other digital products. With webOS Open Source Edition 2.0, they began setting their sights on automobiles and other potential use-cases. That was then extended by this week's release of webOS OSE 2.1...
on (#4VGKC)
Universal Bandwidth Compression is now enabled for the open-source "TURNIP" Mesa Vulkan driver...
on (#4VGED)
Mesa 19.2.5 was just released earlier this week but now v19.2.6 has already been released due to the previous point release breaking IBM POWER builds...
on (#4VGEE)
Coming up this weekend with the Linux 5.4 kernel is emulation/spoofing of the SGDT/SIDT/SMSW instructions around UMIP for allowing newer 64-bit Windows games to run on Wine and Steam Play (Proton). With newer CPUs like the AMD Ryzen 3000 series that support UMIP, these instructions are not allowed to run in user-space with Wine due to UMIP. So while the first stable kernel release is about to land with this support, some Wine-based emulation not contingent on the kernel patches is also in the works...
on (#4VG5X)
Linux for years has supported monitoring NVMe drive temperatures when installing the nvme user-space utility and run as root, etc. But now finally with Linux 5.5 the kernel is supporting NVMe drive temperature reporting through the hardware monitoring "HWMON" infrastructure alongside other hardware sensors...
on (#4VFXN)
For those wondering if it's worthwhile for performance recompiling your key Linux binaries with the microarchitecture instruction set extensions and tuning for Ice Lake, here are some GCC compiler benchmarks looking at that impact for the Core i7 1065G7 on the Dell XPS 7390.
on (#4VFKH)
Blender 2.81 is now available as the latest minor yet significant update to this open-source 3D modeling software following the major Blender 2.80 release earlier this year...
on (#4VFKJ)
While releasing the game on time might be more of a challenge, Valve did deliver in announcing Half-Life: Alyx as scheduled as their new flagship virtual-reality game...
on (#4VF8Q)
The Khronos Group has officially confirmed Intel's new "Iris" Gallium3D driver as being a conformant OpenGL 4.6 implementation...
on (#4VF8R)
PHP 7.4 is due to be released next week as the annual major iteration to PHP7. Like we have seen through the PHP7 releases, while new features continue to be tacked on for this popular web-based programming language the performance has continued evolving. Here are the latest benchmarks of PHP 5.6 through PHP 7.4 while also looking at the PHP 8.0-dev performance that is in development on Git master.
on (#4VF8S)
Thanks to work done by 9elements Cyber Security for an unnamed client, there is now working open-source Intel TXT support for Coreboot with the patches under review for upstream inclusion...
on (#4VF0P)
While the official NVIDIA Linux driver has worked well with DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (DP MST) setups for years now for driving large displays, audio hasn't worked under Linux for NVIDIA's driver in this combination. But with the upcoming Linux 5.5 cycle that will be addressed...
on (#4VEVD)
The long-awaited WireGuard secure VPN tunnel functionality looks like it will land with the Linux 5.6 kernel cycle happening in early 2020. Linux 5.5 is kicking off next week but the necessary crypto subsystem changes have yet to take place as well as a final sign-off on the new WireGuard code...
on (#4VEPV)
With the initial Navi 14 support to be found in the Linux 5.4 kernel releasing this weekend the GPU ASIC (along with Navi 12) have been marked as experimental and thus not enabled by default unless passing a special module parameter to the kernel. But now at the last minute this support has been deemed non-experimental for Navi 14...
on (#4VEPW)
Wednesday marked the v1.0.2878 update to Intel's "IGC" Graphics Compiler that is used by their graphics hardware compute stack...
on (#4VEJN)
Mesa 19.3 had been expected for release next week per their original release calendar, but as we are used to seeing for these quarterly feature releases, at least one if not more weekly release candidates tend to be needed for ironing out bugs. As such, Mesa 19.3.0 is now solidly looking like at least an early December release while Mesa 19.3-RC4 shipped on Wednesday...
on (#4VECQ)
The "Data Streaming Accelerator" (DSA) is a new block on future Intel CPUs that hasn't been talked about much publicly... Until now. Intel's open-source crew has begun detailing DSA for future Intel CPUs that will offer high-performance data movement and transformation operations. The Linux driver enablement has begun...
on (#4VDVK)
Mesa 19.2.5 is out today as the latest bi-weekly stable update to the current Mesa 19.2 series...
on (#4VDH7)
With Linux 5.4 due to be released this coming Sunday, 24 November, one of the big "winners" of this next kernel are AMD Radeon customers. Linux 5.4 brings support for new GPUs as well as better performance for existing graphics cards. Here are some fresh benchmarks of the performance wins as a result of the LRU bulk moves functionality.
on (#4VDH8)
Last week ago we provided a number of benchmarks looking at the performance impact from Intel's Jump Conditional Code (JCC) Erratum that required a CPU microcode update to mitigate but that comes with a performance hit. At least Intel has pending GNU Assembler patches to help offset that performance hit. In time for last week's articles I didn't have a chance to perform Skylake Xeon Scalable (1st Gen) benchmarks but now here are some metrics alongside Cascade Lake...
on (#4VD71)
NVIDIA has released CUDA 10.2 for SuperComputing 19 week. CUDA 10.2 comes with some interesting changes, including to be the last release that will support Apple's macOS and the introduction of a standard C++ library for GPUs...
on (#4VD72)
Intel's SVT-AV1 video encoder for AV1 is currently the fastest AV1 CPU-based encoder we have seen but it's looking like in due time Rav1e could be closing in on it if they continue with their current trajectory...