Phoronix

AMD today announced "AMD-135M" as their first small language model they are publicly releasing. AMD-135M is open-source with the training code, dataset, and weights all being open-source to help in the development of other SLMs and LLMs...

With the Linux 6.12 merge window wrapping up this weekend and the bulk of the new feature merges now in the tree, I've begun running some Linux 6.12 benchmarks. Here is an initial look at Linux 6.10 vs. 6.11 vs. 6.12 Git on an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X desktop...

Similar to the ACPI CPUFreq and AMD/Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver and scaling governor benchmarks and power efficiency comparisons I routinely do on Phoronix, when recently having the Supermicro AmpereOne server in the lab with the 192-core A192-32X processor, I carried out some CPPC CPUFreq schedutil vs. performance governor benchmarks for curiosity and reference purposes while looking at the performance and power efficiency...

Intel software engineers have released version 0.7 of Open PGL, their open-source Path Guiding Library (PGL) that can be used by 3D renderers to enjoy state-of-the-art path guiding methods for better sampling quality and efficiency...

Apache CouchDB 3.4.1 was released today after the developers decided at the last minute before releasing CouchDB 3.4 to drop automatic upgrading of password hashes... Thus CouchDB 3.4.1 is out as the big "CouchDB 3.4" release. The CouchDB 3.4 series brings a number of performance improvements, QuickJS as an alternative to the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine, and other enhancements...

Patches for wiring up async device shutdown within the Linux kernel were queued via the driver core branch for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel. However, at the last minute these asynchronous device shutdown patches were reverted so that they can be reworked and hopefully land for the Linux v6.13 kernel in the new year...

Sound Open Firmware 2.11 is now available for this open-source audio DSP firmware infrastructure and SDK project backed by Intel, AMD, and other IHVs/ISVs. With SOF 2.11 comes support for new hardware from both AMD and Intel...

The upstream Linux 6.11 kernel introduced the ability to easily produce a Pacman kernel package for Arch Linux with the new "make pacman-pkg" target. With Linux 6.12 new additions to the Kbuild code make it easy to also produce a debug kernel build for Arch Linux systems...

As part of his new hope for helping to accelerate Wayland protocol development, Mike Blumenkrantz with Valve proposed an "experimental" protocol development area within Wayland-Protocols. He's also laid out a proposal for seeking to solidify the means by which suggested protocol changes can be rejected...

BusyBox 1.37 has been released as the first feature release in one and a half years for this "Swiss Army Knife of embedded Linux" systems. With BusyBox 1.37 comes some new options, many fixes, and other enhancements...

There's been much speculation since this morning over a reported "severe" unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) flaw affecting Linux systems that carries a CVSS 9.9.9 score... The embargo has now lifted with the details on this nasty issue...

Earlier this week in the launch-day Intel Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids review/benchmarks I unfortunately wasn't able to provide any CPU power consumption and performance-per-Watt benchmarks due a Linux kernel issue and the minimal time ahead of launch for testing. I've now repeated the Xeon 6980P benchmarking on the Linux 6.8 kernel of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with power monitoring working and have those power efficiency numbers to share today for how Granite Rapids compares to prior Emerald Rapids / Sapphire Rapids / Ice Lake and against the current AMD EPYC Bergamo/Genoa(X) competition.

PostgreSQL 17 is out today as the newest annual feature release to this widely-used SQL database server. Notable with PostgreSQL 17 is having an AVX-512 optimized bit_count function along with several other heavy hitting performance optimizations...

Following the release of the COSMIC Alpha desktop in early August, System76 is closing out September by issuing the second alpha release of their Rust-based open-source desktop environment...

The USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates were submitted today for the Linux 6.12 kernel merge window along with the other areas of the kernel overseen by Greg Kroah-Hartman. A new USB driver is the 9p network gadget driver that has been in development for quite a while and aims to help ease embedded Linux device development...

The RISC-V architecture updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.12 kernel cycle. More RISC-V CPU ISA extensions are being supported along with enabling some additional kernel features for this CPU architecture...

The VirtIO Vsock guest/host communication interface using virtual sockets will see better performance with the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel...

It's been nearly three months since the last DXVK release for this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 implementation built atop Vulkan for Steam Play (Proton) / Wine. That changed today with Philip Rebohle having just released DXVK 2.4.1...

Vulkan 1.3.296 is out as the first spec update in nearly one month. Given the time that has passed there are more bug fixes than usual but there is also a prominent new extension: VK_EXT_device_generated_commands...

Valve open-source graphics software engineer Mike Blumenkrantz is well known in the Linux community for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver code, various Mesa driver optimizations, and creative writing on his blog. He's also taken up a new task: further accelerating Wayland protocol development...

ChipStar 1.2 has been released as the open-source software enabling HIP/CUDA programs to be compiled and run atop SPIR-V whether it be OpenCL or Vulkan drivers...

While Intel has been making steady progress around enhancing the Linux kernel handling for CPUs with a mix of P and E cores for proper task placement and power optimizations, one area that still is less than desirable for these hybrid Intel Core processors is around virtualization. But Intel engineers are now actively working on improving the Linux virtualization infrastructure for being able to convey the P/E core differences among vCPUs so that the guest VMs can better behave in such environments...

Miguel Ojeda has submitted all of the Rust toolchain and infrastructure changes for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel...

Cloudflare's always-interesting technical blog laid out their details today concerning their next-gen "12th Generation" in-house servers that will be powering their vast web infrastructure. With these next-gen Cloudflare servers they are going with AMD EPYC 9684X Genoa-X processors...

Timothy Arceri with the Valve Linux graphics team has merged the code for Mesa GLSL to convert to NIR at compile-time and in turn dropping the old GLSL IR linker with this being a multi-year effort now wrapped up for Mesa 24.3...

The Network File System (NFS) changes have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.12 development cycle. Notable this time with NFS is adding LOCALIO protocol extension support that can lead to fairly "extreme" performance improvements in scenarios where the NFS client and server are on the same host...

Red Hat engineer Richard Hughes this morning released Fwupd 1.9.25 as the newest feature release to this open-source solution paired with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for making firmware updates on Linux a breeze for an increasing number of systems and peripherals. With Fwupd 1.9.25, the supported device list has grown a little bit longer...

The high performance open-source Mold linker has released version 2.34 with various improvements while also deciding to throw in the towel on DEC Alpha processor support...

Joshua Ashton of Valve's Linux graphics team has opened a Mesa merge request to support a proposed "frog-fifo-v1" protocol for Wayland to address the matter of "FIFO is fundamentally broken under Mesa's Wayland WSI right now."..

While there were many Windows reviews/benchmarks out Tuesday for Intel Core Ultra 200 Series "Lunar Lake" laptops on various websites, Linux tests are still awaiting due to having resorted to pre-ordering a Lunar Lake laptop myself for delivering Linux support/compatibility information and performance benchmarks. But hopefully by this time next week will be the initial data set...

While open-source enthusiasts like to criticize NVIDIA for not maintaining upstream, in-tree kernel graphics driver support (though things have been changing there), for other areas of their vast hardware portfolio they are much better upstream Linux kernel citizens and often at the forefront of new driver innovations. One of the leading examples of that is around the NVIDIA Mellanox networking driver support. With Linux 6.12 they've landed a new feature that has been described as "a sign of things to come, I think we will see more of this in the next 10 years."..

NVIDIA engineers have sent out an exciting set of Linux kernel patches for enabling NVIDIA vGPU software support for virtual GPU support among multiple virtual machines (VMs). In aiming for upstream-focused Linux support, this NVIDIA vGPU support is built around the adapted Nouveau driver with the code previously posted for splitting up the Nouveau/NVKM driver components...

With the Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" launch today the review embargo has now expired. I began with my Intel Granite Rapids Linux benchmarking a few days ago and have initial benchmarks to share for the flagship Xeon 6980P processors paired with MRDIMM 8800MT/s memory. This is just the beginning of a lot of Granite Rapids benchmarks to come on Phoronix. Compared to the existing AMD EPYC competition and prior generation Intel Xeon processors, the Xeon 6900P series performance surpassed my expectations and has debuted as an incredibly strong performer. In some areas of HPC and other workloads, Intel is able to regain leadership performance with Granite Rapids paired with MRDIMMs. In AI workloads where the software is optimized for AMX, the new Xeon 6900P CPUs can showcase staggering leads.

Building off the launch earlier this year of the first Xeon 6 processors with the Xeon 6700E "Sierra Forest" processors, today Intel is lifting the wraps on the much anticipated Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" processors. Where as Sierra Forest is optimized for power efficiency and core density, the Intel Xeon 6 P-core processors are optimized for per-core performance and have shown some very strong generational uplift -- and against the AMD competition -- as we'll show today in the first Xeon 6980P Linux benchmarks.

Intel used their Enterprise Tech Tour last week in Oregon to not only provide insight into the new Xeon 6900 "Granite Rapids" server processors (and Xeon 6980P benchmarks) but also to shed more light on their Gaudi 3 AI inference accelerator. The question I was most curious about with Gaudi 3: where's the Linux driver support?..

Merged as part of the memory management "MM" changes for the Linux 6.12 kernel is a kernel stack usage histogram to help developers in better optimizing the kernel stack sizes and minimizing memory waste...

Going along with other early Linux kernel driver additions for enabling Panther Lake, the intel-lpss driver in Linux 6.12 has made its device ID additions for supporting Panther Lake H and Panther Lake P processors...

The Intel LPMD open-source project is a user-space daemon for optimizing active idle power handling on Linux and can be useful particularly for modern Intel Core hybrid processors. LPMD is short for the "Low Power Mode Daemon" while with today's v0.0.7 release it's now re-identified itself as the "Energy Optimizer" instead...

Landlock as the Linux security module for unprivileged access control handling is adding new controls around Unix socket handling with the Linux 6.12 kernel...

The Dell-WMI-Sysman driver on Linux allows for managing BIOS settings from within Linux using sysfs. This dell-wmi-sysman kernel driver supports most Dell platforms from 2018 and newer for convenient BIOS management...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.12 merge window...

Months ago Intel Linux engineers began adapting the Linux kernel to end the assumptions made around "Family 6" for Intel CPUs that had been used since the 90's with the Pentium Pro as the CPU family ID. With Linux 6.12 they finished the Intel CPU family/model ID restructuring and now we have the first patch confirming a post-Family 6 Intel CPU: Diamond Rapids is Family 19...

AMD's GPUOpen team has released HIP RT 2.4 as the newest version of this open-source ray-tracing library built atop their HIP interface...

Linux 6.11 introduced the getrandom() in the vDSO support for faster yet secure user-space random number generation needs. Initially that was focused on Linux x86_64 while for Linux 6.12 is ported to five more architectures...

The media subsystem updates were submitted today for the Linux 6.12 kernel merge window. Notable this cycle is a new HDMI CEC driver for a 4K HDMI splitter/amplifier for those looking for a device that can be controlled from within Linux using the HDMI Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) specification...

Back in June it was teased that Framework Computer in collaboration with DeepComputing would be releasing a RISC-V motherboard for the Framework Laptop 13. That RISC-V laptop motherboard has yet to be officially released but Linux kernel patches were posted today for enabling the DeviceTree support so Linux can boot on this upcoming board...

The Servo open-source browser layout engine has supported making use of the Firefox Devtools code for the provided web developer tools such as the HTML web page inspector and browser console. But that support had fallen into disrepair. Fortunately, thanks to a useful Outreachy project, the code has been updated and now working nicely with the newer Devtools code...

Following Vulkan Video H.264/H.265 video encoder support being merged into the FFmpeg library, the latest improvement for this open-source multimedia API when leveraging Vulkan is implicit DRM synchronization...

While there sadly the previously-annual Phoronix meet-up at Oktoberfest in Munich remains defunct, in honor of Oktoberfest 2024 kicking off this weekend in Munich, it's time for the annual Phoronix Premium special. With the Oktoberfest sale you can go ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode support, and other benefits while supporting the site and enjoying a discounted rate...

In between Linus Torvalds' busy week being in Vienna for the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit and related Linux Foundation events as well as managing the Linux 6.12 merge window with landing new features like sched_ext and real-time PREEMPT_RT, he also managed to finish up some of his own code for this next kernel version. Being merged today is his own code working on a new user access fast validation path using address masking...