Phoronix

With the Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids benchmarking at Phoronix the past few weeks it's been in a dual socket (2S / 2P) configuration. For those curious about the Intel Xeon 6980P 128-core server performance for a single socket (1S) configuration, here are those complementary results out today and for both DDR5-6400 and MRDIMM-8800 memory configurations. Thus a well-rounded look at the single Xeon 6980P performance compared to other single and dual socket Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server processors.

Intel's oneAPI Rendering Toolkit with the likes of OSPRay, Embree, OpenVKL, Open Image Denoise, and others has been open-source for years. But it's not been exactly an open-source development model with making it easy for independent contributors to propose code changes. But Intel has now decided to make these projects more like traditional open-source projects and welcoming community contributions -- including from different hardware vendors...

KDE Plasma 6.2 is now available as the latest refinement to the modern Plasma 6 desktop environment...

Merged as part of last week's Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver fixes for Linux 6.12-rc2 are a few performance tuning updates for Intel Xe2 graphics to benefit the recently released Core Ultra 200 Series "Lunar Lake" laptops...

While there is the open-source MoltenVK project that implements the Vulkan API atop Apple's Metal graphics drivers on iOS/macOS, the 3D graphics consulting firm LunarG is exploring the possibility of implementing Vulkan to Metal translation using Mesa...

Today marks the release of Qt 6.8 as not only a new feature release but also the latest long-term support (LTS) release for this open-source, cross-platform toolkit...

While the recently-departed GNOME Foundation Executive Director in the summer statement was described as "drafting a bold five-year strategic plan for the Foundation, securing two important fiscal sponsorship agreements with GIMP and Black Python Devs, writing our first funding proposal that will now enable the Foundation to apply for more grants, vastly improving our financial operations, and implementing a break-even budget to preserve our financial reserves." It turns out that wasn't enough. The GNOME Foundation today announced some new cost-cutting measures for the project overseeing the open-source GNOME desktop...

OpenBSD 7.6 is out this evening as another major step forward for this BSD operating system with enhanced hardware support, security improvements, updating various user-space software, and enabling other kernel enhancements...

FEX 2410 is out as the newest monthly update to this open-source emulator that allows running Linux x86/x86_64 binaries on Linux AArch64 (ARM 64-bit) systems, including for games and software like Steam. With FEX 2410 there are yet more fixes as well as some new JIT optimizations...

Following a last minute delay due to a performance regression, Python 3.13 stable is out today as the annual major feature release to this widely-used scripting language implementation...

Git 2.47 is out today as the newest feature release to this immensely popular distributed revision control system...

Gentoo Linux will be working on better support for ARM64/AArch64 and 32-bit ARM now that they have received an Ampere Altra Max server to help expedite their ARM build times for binary packages and installation stage builds...

While not expected to reach general availability (GA) state until October of 2025, available today in pre-alpha form is the openSUSE Leap 16.0 distribution...

RPM 4.20 is out today as the newest feature release to this package manager system that's been in development the past year and featuring a variety of improvements for the likes of RHEL and Fedora based distributions...

For those on Debian experimental or planning on upgrading to Ubuntu 24.10 that is releasing this week, the Ptyxis terminal emulator is now available in the package archive if wanting to try out this speedy terminal option...

Yesterday when announcing the Linux 6.12-rc2 kernel, Linus Torvalds asked that the kernel maintainers do a better job moving forward with their commit messages...

The NVGRACE-GPU VFIO driver was introduced for handling Virtual Function I/O support with the NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip so that the GPU device could be assigned to guests using KVM/QEMU and similar for virtualization. The NVGRACE-GPU driver is now being extended for supporting the forthcoming NVIDIA Grace Blackwell "GB" designs...

Following work last month for extending the Dell WMI sysman Linux driver to handle Alienware systems for managing the system BIOS within the confines of Linux, another separate improvement is on the way for enhancing Alienware hardware support under Linux. This newest effort is introducing the "dell-wmi-awcc" driver for handling functionality found under Windows with the Alienware Command Center...

Building off last Sunday's inaugural release candidate of Linux 6.12, Linus Torvalds tagged the Linux 6.12-rc2 kernel a few minutes ago...

In addition to Intel's Linux engineers being busy preparing hardware enablement support for next-gen Panther Lake client processors, they are also busy beginning to plumb Linux driver support for next-generation Xeon "Diamond Rapids" support as the successor to Xeon 6 Granite Rapids. With Linux 6.12 some new bits are now set to land for Diamond Rapids...

Prominent Wayland developer Simon Ser has released Cage v0.2, a Wayland kiosk compositor that runs single, maximized applications...

Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst continues enhancing Mesa's Rusticl driver that allows for a Rust-based OpenCL driver implementation for use by Gallium3D drivers. The newest addition is a build-time option for controlling devices to be enabled by default...

Wasmer 4.4 is out as the newest version to this prominent WebAssembly (WASM) runtime that supports WASIX / WASI / EmScripten to "run software anywhere" by effectively serving as lightweight containers and being able to scale from the edge to the cloud...

HoneyKrisp as the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver for Apple Silicon graphics and developed as part of the Asahi Linux project has landed a number of enhancements into the mainline Mesa code...

OpenRazer 3.9 is out today as the newest version of this community project providing open-source driver support for Razer peripherals on Linux. This out-of-tree set of Linux kernel drivers allows for various Razer devices to be configured and fully leveraged under Linux...

Linus Torvalds merged the newest round of fixes to the experimental Bcachefs file-system, but it's left Linux creator Linus Torvalds frustrated and he's presented two choices for the file-system moving forward due to the continued LKML drama...

The long-in-development GIMP 3.0 open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop hopes to ship its release candidate in the near future...

It's been a long journey to see good web camera support for Intel Alder Lake and newer designs making use of the IPU6 imaging IP. But with Fedora 41 due for release in the coming weeks, there will finally be good out-of-the-box, open-source support for the IPU6-based web cameras in modern Intel Core laptops across Tigerlake / Alder Lake / Raptor Lake laptops...

We are not done yet seeing new Arm cores still impacted by the Speculative Store Bypass handling errata. Merged to Linux 6.12 on Friday was adding the speculative SSBS workaround for the Cortex-A715, Neoverse-N3, and Microsoft Azure Cobalt 100 cores...

OpenZFS 2.3-rc1 is now available for testing as the next major feature release to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems...

Sam Lantinga released SDL 3.1.3 on Friday as their "stable ABI preview" version ahead of the SDL 3.2.0 stable release. The developer at Valve notes that SDL3 has already been "battle tested by millions of people in DOTA, CS2 and Steam" and they are now gearing up for the SDL 3.2 stable release to get SDL3 out to the masses...

KDE developers have been putting the finishing touches on the Plasma 6.2 desktop as it prepares to release next week. Plasma 6.2 will be out on Tuesday barring any last minute issues...

We are quickly working our way to the end of the calendar year where Wine 9.xx bi-weekly development releases will focus on a shift to stability for releasing Wine 10.0 in early 2025. But we're not there yet and Wine 9.19 is out today to deliver the newest batch of features and fixes for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and apps on Linux...

The Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 accelerator caters to a variety of edge-to-cloud industries. While the Qualcomm Cloud AI hardware isn't talked about as much as the AI accelerators from other vendors, there is the QAIC driver within the mainline Linux kernel for supporting the Cloud AI 100 along with associated open-source compiler and user-space stack. It turns out the Qualcomm Cloud AI family is growing with a Cloud AI 80 "AIC080" accelerator coming to market at a lower-cost...

Intel's Linux engineers continue working on preparing for next-generation hardware support within the kernel well ahead of launch. The latest on the recent enablement around next-gen Panther Lake processors is enabling a new "5th Gen" neural processing unit (NPU) to be found with Panther Lake P...

Earlier this week I delivered initial Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics benchmarks on Linux while today the focus is on Lunar Lake's CPU performance. The Xe2 graphics performance under Linux was disappointingly slow with it performing even worse than Meteor Lake while RDNA3.5 graphics led. Intel has been investigating the Xe2 Linux graphics performance but I haven't heard any updates yet. Today the attention is on the Lunar Lake CPU side under Linux and it too isn't looking too good. The performance of this 8-core Core Ultra 7 256V SoC is poor in real-world multi-threaded scenarios and the performance-per-Watt is only compelling in a subset of workloads. The AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 and AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Zen 5 SoCs tended to deliver the superior performance and power efficiency under Linux.

The open-source ZLUDA project began life as a drop-in CUDA replacement that ran atop Intel GPUs using the Level Zero API. Then AMD quietly began funding it for several years as a viable CUDA implementation running atop AMD GPUs until discontinued funding earlier this year. ZLUDA for AMD GPUs was then made open-source but then in August the ZLUDA code was removed at AMD's request. Today it's taking on its third incarnation...

Richard Hughes of Red Hat just announced Fwupd 2.0 as a major release to this open-source firmware updating utility for Linux systems. Fwupd 2.0 clears out a lot of long deprecated and legacy bits while adding new features and shipping many fixes...

Blender 4.3 is available today in beta form to encourage public testing of this next feature release to this leading open-source 3D modeling software...

Red Hat engineer Jocelyn Falempe has been working to sort out DRM Panic support for the AMDGPU driver. The DRM Panic infrastructure is useful since it's what allows presenting a panic screen, a.k.a. a "Blue Screen of Death" type experience when running into major kernel problems. With Linux 6.12 there's now the ability to show QR codes for error messages with DRM Panic...

The Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver has experimental code now available for testing that also implements the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) atop the Vulkan Video APIs. This is an interesting effort that now allows VA-API applications to rely on drivers with Vulkan Video support underneath...

Zrythm is an interesting open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software package. It's been making use of the GTK toolkit but now the developers have decided to switch to Qt6 instead...

The Rust-written Servo web layout engine project that was born at Mozilla and now continued by Linux Foundation Europe with other stakeholders like Igalia has been making steady progress in recent months. The project's September 2024 status report is now available that outlines recent improvements to this open-source browser layout engine...

A new set of patches from AMD Linux engineers today aim to boost the performance for heterogeneous CPU designs such as the recent Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" SoCs that have multiple core types...

Last week when kicking off the Intel Granite Rapids benchmarking with the Xeon 6980P processors there was particularly strong performance within HPC and other scientific computing workloads. Besides going now up to 128 cores / 256 threads per socket, another reason for the especially strong generational uplift and against the current AMD EPYC competition is Xeon 6 Granite Rapids introducing Multiplexed Rank memory support. One of the areas I've been eager to explore is quantifying the DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM 8800MT/s performance difference and this article is dedicated to looking at that memory performance impact for the Xeon 6900P series.

Last week with the launch of the Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" processors, Intel didn't disclose their list prices... Today they added the Granite Rapids list prices to their ARK database. With Granite Rapids making Intel much more competitive to the AMD EPYC competition and over prior generation Xeon CPUs, these new processors are commanding a higher price tag with the Xeon 6980P topping out at $17,800 USD...

Mesa 24.2.4 is out today as the newest stable point release to this collection of predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers...

Now that sched_ext was upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel as part of the many great features in Linux 6.12, Fedora's kernel builds are prepared to enable this innovative scheduler feature that allows for new scheduling policies to be loaded via (e)BPF programs...

Google engineers have been working on support for the Linux kernel to leverage AutoFDO feedback directed optimizations and Propeller optimizations when compiling the Linux kernel with LLVM/Clang. In turn this can help Linux systems see 2~10% better performance thanks to the more optimized kernel...

After years of AmpereComputing talking about AmpereOne AArch64 server processors, it looks like we are finally on the cusp of seeing broader availability of the processors and servers/motherboards for this ARM server platform up to 192 cores. At the end of August I finally received a temporary review system with the AmpereOne A192-32X flagship SKU. That server was the Supermicro ARS-211M-NR and is supposed to be seeing availability real soon. Now the latest on the AmpereOne front is Giga Computing (Gigabyte) announcing general availability of their servers...