Phoronix

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list last week and now queued already via tip/tip.git's "x86/cpu" Git branch is support for a new AMD CPU feature we haven't heard about until now... ERAPS, the Enhanced Return Address Prediction Security...

To clear up the ever-growing stack of laptops, I recently bought a TOUPUWAN 30-Slot Laptop/Tablet Storage Cart. This laptop/tablet storage cart can accommodate 32 devices in total while slots for up to 30 laptops/tablets 16.3-inches in size. It does have built-in power strips as well to easily facilitate charging of the devices while securely stored away but for my purposes I was just looking for something to better organize the mess of laptops I only occasionally pull out when running new Linux laptop benchmarks.

Arch-based Manjaro Linux is working on Manjaro Data Donor "MDD" as a new data collection tool of its users. This is intended to succeed their former ping-based solution for user counting plus incorporate hardware/software data collection on users. Once deployed, this will be opt-out handling for the data collection...

Fujitsu has upstreamed support for their next-gen "Monaka" Armv9 processor into the GNU Compiler Collection codebase in time for the GCC 15 release coming out early next year...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is adding a device aliasing file feature that could appear in the upcoming Linux v6.13 merge window...

Select newer Dell/Alienware laptops with a "WMAX" thermal interface will see ACPI Platform Profile support now exposed with the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle...

AMD Linux engineer Borislav Petkov kicked off the new week by volleying a patch for adjusting the Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO, a.k.a. "Inception") vulnerability mitigation handling for capabilities to be found with affected processors running on newer CPU microcode...

CachyOS continues to be a fascinating Arch Linux based distribution that pushes the boundaries of out-of-the-box performance with a variety of patches, optimization techniques, specialized package builds, and more. One of the latest areas they are exploring is making use of AutoFDO for their kernel builds...

Nine years after the Raspberry Pi Touch Display was announced as a 800 x 480 pixel LCD panel catering to the Raspberry Pi, today the Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 was announced...

Linus Torvalds has just issued the Linux 6.12-rc6 kernel release as we close in on the stable Linux 6.12 kernel release later in November...

The Redox OS open-source Rust-based operating system project is out with their newest monthly development update...

The latest patches from AMD Linux engineers for working on x86 heterogeneous design identification were queued last week for introduction in the Linux 6.13 kernel...

The Linux Mint crew is out with their newest monthly status update that outlines the activities of this desktop Linux distribution over the course of October...

With this week's release of SVT-AV1 2.3 for open-source AV1 encoding citing significant performance improvements for running on ARM, I was eager to see how well this AV1 encoder would be performing on the new System76 Thelio Astra ARM developer desktop powered by Ampere Altra. Here are some benchmarks showing those big speed-ups for ARM-based AV1 encoding...

Alyssa Rosenzweig has pushed the latest Apple Silicon OpenGL "AGX Gallium3D" and Vulkan "Honeykrisp" code from the Asahi Linux development repository into the Mesa Git codebase ahead of this quarter's Mesa 24.3 release...

While the mainline Linux kernel has begun seeing initial support for various Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops, various feature limitations are outstanding before these Qualcomm-powered laptops really become usable for daily use. For instance, just a few days ago the audio firmware was finally upstreamed to make setting up X1 Elite laptops easier. Another important feature as an example is CPUFreq driver support for CPU frequency scaling to ensure optimal performance and power efficiency...

FreeBSD 14.2 Beta 1 is out today as the first tagged test snapshot in working toward this newest FreeBSD 14 point release...

Cloudflare's Pingora Rust framework that was written as a replacement to Nginx and made publicly open-source earlier this year with a focus on building fast and reliable networked systems is out with its newest feature release...

Sculpt OS for what has been working to become a general purpose operating system built off the original Genode is out with a new feature release...

Intel has integrated VVC VA-API hardware accelerated decoding support into the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary of interesting KDE changes in closing out October...

Vulkan 1.3.301 was published on Friday with the lone new extension this release being a rare contribution from Huawei adding HDR Vivid support with VK_HUAWEI_hdr_vivid...

Right on schedule for releasing the Xfce 4.20 desktop in December, the "Pre1" pre-release was posted on Friday for testing...

Earlier this year and through July Steam on Linux was enjoying above a 2% marketshare thanks to the success of the Arch Linux powered SteamOS and Steam Deck offerings. But then for August and September Steam on Linux use was below 2%. After a 0.13% rise in October, Steam on Linux is back to sitting at a 2.00% marketshare...

Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard has laid out plans for releasing Wine 10.0 around mid-January as the annual stable release for this open-source software to run Windows applications and games on Linux and other platforms...

One of the very convenient features for Ubuntu Linux users who want to run the very newest upstream kernel releases or simply test a new kernel build for verifying bug fixes or functionality has been the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA. It's been around for years, backed by Canonical, and very convenient for fetching pre-built AArch64 / ARM / POWER / RISC-V / x86_64 kernel binaries as Debian packages... With options of stable/test kernel versions as well as daily packages. Sadly, it's been broken once again and has been in that manner since mid-September...

With the upcoming Mesa 24.3 release there is a huge improvement coming for those using the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver with games leveraging AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2...

The Google Chrome/Chromium web browser code has merged support for linux_drm_syncobj_v1 as the modern Wayland protocol for explicit buffer synchronization...

Intel software engineers have been very busy recently with upstreaming various elements of support into the Linux kernel, open-source compilers and more for the next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors. Following the recent GCC prep patches for Diamond Rapids to work on the ISA additions around AMX-AVX512, AMX-FP8, AMX-FP32, and others, a new patch was posted today for actually exposing the "-march=diamondrapids" compiler target and in turn confirming all of the new ISA capabilities...

October is now in the books after writing 247 original news articles and another 24 Linux hardware reviews / featured multi-page benchmark articles. From the launches of Intel Arrow Lake and AMD EPYC 9005 to other interesting new hardware, the Russian Linux kernel drama, Linux 6.12 developments and early Linux 6.13 patches queuing in "-next" branches, October was an interesting month both for hardware and open-source software...

Ubuntu developer Simon Quigley laid out the plans for hoping Ubuntu packages will move from Qt 5 to Qt 6 so that by the time of the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle in early 2026 that the older version of this graphical toolkit can be removed...

Miriway 24.10 was released on Halloween as the newest version of this Mir-based Wayland compositor. Miriway is developed by Canonical/Ubuntu developers as a compositor for other desktops like Xfce, MATE, LXQt and others as a way to ease their migration path to Wayland...

As part of the latest Bcachefs fixes pull request, lead developer Kent Overstreet has provided an update on the bug situation for this advanced copy-on-write open-source file-system...

The Academy Software Foundation that is made up of many different vendors released OpenVDB 12.0 as the newest major release to this sparse volume data structure library and tooling that is an Academy Award winning library started by DreamWorks Animation...

This isn't an off-schedule April Fools' Joke or anything like that but an exciting sign of the times: VMware Workstation will be shifting off its proprietary base and onto leveraging the upstream Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) for virtualization needs moving forward...

As a nice Halloween treat for Linux desktop users, System76 has published their third alpha version of the Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment...

With the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" series launch earlier this month there was launch-day benchmark review results for the EPYC 9575F, EPYC 9755, and EPYC 9965 processors in looking at that frequency optimized SKU, the new flagship 128-core Turin "classic" core model, and the new flagship 192-core Turin "dense" core SKU, respectively. That's interesting for looking at the new 5th Gen AMD EPYC top-end wares but in comparing to 4th Gen EPYC also means higher core counts at the top-end. In being curious about the core-for-core advantages of 5th Gen EPYC, I managed to get my hands on the AMD EPYC 9655 processors for seeing how that model compares to the prior AMD EPYC 9654 "Genoa" flagship model. Here's a look today at how the AMD EPYC 9655 1P/2P 96-core processor compares to the prior EPYC 9654 flagship.

AMD has been teasing the Ryzen 9000X3D Zen 5 CPUs with 3D V-Cache and today they formally announced the specs of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor that will begin shipping 7 November...

Following the announcement yesterday that Ubuntu 25.04 will default to the -O3 optimization level with GCC for its Debian package builds, Fedora stakeholders have begun debating the merits of switching to the -O3 optimization level or not instead of the existing -O2 optimization level default...

Linus Torvalds merged a patch on Wednesday that he authored that with reworking a few lines of code is able to score a 2.6% improvement within Intel's well-exercise "will it scale" per-thread-ops benchmark test case...

Intel compiler engineer Feng Zou has upstreamed AMX-FP8 support into the LLVM compiler stack. This FP8 extension to the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) is coming with next-gen Diamond Rapids processors alongside other new ISA extensions...

SUSE's Agama OS installer 10 was recently released as the newest feature iteration for this next-gen OS installer for SUSE/openSUSE...

SVT-AV1 2.3 is now available as the newest feature release to this leading open-source AV1 encoder. With SVT-AV1 2.3 there are yet more performance improvements...

One month has passed since the AMDVLK 2024.Q3.3 driver release while today has brought the AMDVLK 2024.Q4.1 release with a few new Vulkan API extensions...

A new patch posted today for the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver is introducing a "cleaner shader" explicitly for GFX11.0.3 GPUs like the Radeon 780M integrated graphics to help ensure that there is sufficient data isolation between different workloads running on the GPUs. The motivation isn't clear if there is some GFX11.0.3 security vulnerability, some AMD Linux customer particularly concerned about security on said GPUs, or some other motivation for focusing this latest cleaner shader work on GFX11.0.3 hardware...

Canonical has announced the formal state of the Ubuntu 25.04 "Plucky Puffin" development. Among other early changes are now defaulting to -O3 compiler optimizations rather than the default -O2 optimization level when building Debian packages...

Earlier this year Google announced Axion as their first Arm-based CPU for the Google Cloud. Today already they are taking Axion to general availability with the new C4A instances. These new C4A instances are advertised as offering up to 50% better performance and up to 60% better energy efficiency than their current generation x86 instance types. In this article are some of the first public independent performance benchmarks of the Google Axion CPU along with comparing to existing GCE Arm and x86_64 instance types.

Enterprise security firm Edera today is announcing OpenPaX that they promoted in their advance press notice as a "new open-source alternative to GrSecurity." GrSecurity being the firm focused on providing out-of-tree Linux kernel patches focused in the name of security enhancements. With OpenPaX they are open-source and publicly available kernel patch for mitigating common memory safety errors and other system hardening...

DRM_Panic is the functionality first added in Linux 6.10 for "Blue Screen of Death" type functionality when a kernel panic occurs or similar for displaying a nice graphical error message. Since the initial introduction it's been extended to handle QR code error messages, monochrome logos, and other customization options. The AMDGPU driver has new patches available for expanding the DRM_Panic support to all DCE/DCN-based graphics cards...

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver used by all modern AMD Radeon graphics hardware has landed support in Mesa 24.3 for async VCE/UVD video operations to enhance the performance with the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library...