Phoronix

Earlier this year I wrote about Microsoft working on their first Vulkan extension and today it finally debuted within the Vulkan 1.3.264 spec update...

With the recently released Linux 6.5 kernel bringing AMD P-State EPP by default for modern Ryzen systems rather than the generic ACPI CPUFreq driver, running Linux 6.5 (or newer) in various workloads can lead to improved performance and/or power efficiency. Curious about the impact on the mobile side, I recently carried out some benchmarks of the ASUS ROG Ally gaming handheld with AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC from Linux 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, and 6.6 Git kernels.

In addition to the ASUS laptop improvements for Linux 6.6 with the ASUS-WMI driver, additional feature work is on the way for future kernel versions with one of those interesting additions being support for the ASUS Screenpad. Some higher-end ASUS laptops feature a secondary screen "screenpad" on the laptops and the pending ASUS-WMI driver patch will properly support it...

Since early this year AMD has been working on Linux enablement patches for Dynamic Boost Control (DBC). This is a new feature of some AMD SoCs that allow an "authenticated entity" to have greater control over certain SoC characteristics to improve the power/performance. AMD DBC was merged for Linux 6.6 just days ago while already new patches have been posted that extend the supported platforms for this Dynamic Boost Control functionality...

While we've been looking forward to Bcachefs landing and carrying out a fresh round of performance testing of Bcachefs against other file-system options, it's looking clear now that Bcachefs won't be landing for the Linux 6.6 merge window...

Merged on Thursday were a batch of KVM virtualization changes for the Linux 6.6 kernel...

OpenZFS 2.2 has been in the works to provide Linux container support, BLAKE3 checksumming, block cloning and other new features. It's looking like that release will be wrapped up soon while released on Thursday was v2.2-rc4 to help encourage last minute testing of this file-system driver for Linux and FreeBSD systems...

As a big win for Intel's QuickAssist Technology (QAT) accelerator found as an option with Sapphire Rapids processors and prior QAT hardware, there's been a QAT Zstd plug-in to provide big performance/efficiency benefits. Version 0.1 of that plug-in was released today...

Going along with KDE Plasma 6.0 releasing in early February will also be the Qt6-based KDE Gear applications and KDE Frameworks 6 happening in-sync...

In addition to the notable sound changes that merged last week for Linux 6.6 that included AMD VanGogh SOF support and enablement around a Valve "Galileo" device, sent in via the MFD pull request this week is work enabling the new Cirrus Logic CS42L43 audio codec...

Merged a few days ago for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window were the x86 platform driver updates, which bring a few interesting Intel/AMD laptop improvements as well as a new driver to support altering select HP BIOS settings from within the confines of Linux...

As covered in the launch-day Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT Linux review/testing, there is already upstream open-source driver support for these new RDNA3 graphics cards in recent versions of the Linux kernel and Mesa. It's a pleasant open-source out-of-the-box experience with the Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards with the possible exception of just needing to grab the recent AMDGPU firmware. But for those running older, enterprise Linux distribution releases, AMD has now released the Radeon Software for Linux 23.20 driver package to also enable the RX 7700/7800 XT support on those enterprise operating systems...

As an experimental feature for next month's Ubuntu 23.10 release, Canonical is introducing initial support for TPM-based full disk encryption to make use of your system's Trusted Platform Module (TPM). The downside though is this extra security relies on Snaps, including for the kernel and GRUB bootloader...

AMD today published version 1.2 of their Unified Inference Frontend (UIF) that is for supporting deep learning inference across AMD CPUs, GPUs, as well as Versal adaptive SoCs and FPGAs. AMD UIF aims to accelerate AI inference across all AMD compute platforms with machine learning frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow. With UIF 1.2 adds initial support for Radeon GPUs...

As part of a monthly status update concerning Plasma 6 development, KDE developer Nate Graham confirmed that the team is planning to release Plasma 6.0 in February of 2024...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has landed a set of 15 patches that can further help the Linux gaming performance for those using DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics...

The first alpha release of the OpenSSL 3.2 library is now available for testing. With OpenSSL 3.2 there are a number of new features, most notably the client-side work around QUIC support...

Going along with the MSM DRM driver support for the Qualcomm Adreno 700 series, the open-source TURNIP Vulkan driver this week merged its initial support for the Adreno 700 series...

In addition to the HID updates bringing rumble for Google's Stadia controller and other gaming peripheral improvements, the input subsystem updates were sent out this week for Linux 6.6 that bring more enhancements for Linux gamers. In particular, the common XPad driver saw some additions for this next kernel version...

A few days ago Bcachefs was proposed for inclusion to Linux 6.6 after it failed to be pulled for the prior Linux 6.5 kernel cycle. Since then we've been waiting to see what action Linus Torvalds would take with including Bcachefs... He's finally commented on it today but remains to be seen if it will land for this kernel release...

Igalia developers are working on extending the Broadcom V3D DRM kernel graphics driver, which is most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi devices, to support the notion of "CPU jobs" in kernel space to assist in their Vulkan support. These CPU jobs are for assisting the support where their Broadcom GPU driver isn't capable of some Vulkan commands and thus needs to be punted off and handled by the processor...

The Ceph changes were submitted today for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window and with it comes one big shiny feature addition: support for making use of the FSCRYPT file-system encryption framework...

The release candidates were tagged this morning of GNOME Shell and Mutter ahead of the "GNOME 45.rc" test release coming out within the next few days. With the release candidates are some last-minute changes worth mentioning...

Last month AMD announced the Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT graphics cards while today these graphics cards go on sale for $449 and $499 USD, respectively. Today also marks the review embargo lift so I'm now able to talk about the Linux support and performance for these new RDNA3 graphics cards that are designed for 1440p gaming,

On the AMD CPU side of the house, one of the patch series we are looking forward to seeing upstreamed in the Linux kernel is the AMD Preferred Core functionality that was initially sent out this summer. This AMD Preferred Core handling is built onto the AMD P-State driver and has been undergoing a few rounds of iteration with the latest "v5" patches having been posted this week...

The Linux 6.6 FUSE driver code for enabling file-systems in user-space is adding support for STATX to the protocol as part of focusing on enabling file birth time "btime" support...

The USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates were merged this past weekend for the ongoing Linux 6.6 kernel merge window...

Greg Kroah-Hartman last Friday sent out the "char/misc" changes for the Linux 6.6 kernel merge window that include the catch-all of different driver changes. This cycle the char/misc updates aren't particularly exciting but the Intel PECI updates do stand-out...

After a hiatus due to the pandemic, systemd's All Systems Go conference is returning next week to Berlin...

While this summer has been a busy season of benchmarking with the new AMD EPYC Bergamo processors providing up to 128-cores / 256-threads per socket and the new EPYC Genoa-X parts providing up to 1.1GB of L3 cache with 3D V-Cache to provide for excellent HPC performance, not everyone needs such levels of performance nor having the budget for such platforms. It's always fun talking about the high-end server platforms, but at the opposite end AMD and their platform partners have been rolling out an equally interesting assortment of AMD Ryzen 7000 series based server products. With the Ryzen 9 7950X/7950X3D providing up to 16-cores / 32-threads, a growing number of Ryzen server motherboards supporting DDR5 ECC UDIMM, and a number of innovative Ryzen server platforms coming to market, it's an interesting time to be after a budget-friendly server platform or other robust rackmount systems where looking for power efficient 16 cores or less configurations.

Ahead of Intel expecting to formally reveal more Meteor Lake processor details in the coming weeks, Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers are ready to declare the new integrated graphics stable with the upstream Linux kernel -- dropping the existing flag that treated them as experimental and not enabled by default unless passing a special kernel module parameter...

Masahiro Yamada submitted today all of the Kconfig feature updates targeting the Linux 6.6 merge window. Most notable with the Kconfig work is the "make xconfig" GUI seeing a port for Qt6 toolkit compatibility...

Mesa 23.2 was supposed to have been released by now following a series of weekly release candidates that started in mid-July when feature work ended. After a five week hiatus, Mesa 23.2-rc3 is now available for testing...

AMD by way of their Xilinx acquisition has been running the Open Hardware Competition since 2015 for helping to drive new innovations around FPGAs and the ACAP compute platform. The winners of the AMD Open Hardware Competition 2023 were recently announced...

PoCL began as an open-source project providing a CPU-based OpenCL implementation and over the years has added support for various LLVM back-ends such as for targeting AMD HSA, Intel Level Zero, and NVIDIA CUDA/PTX with its OpenCL implementation. The latest back-end merged ahead of Portable Computing Language 5.0 is a remote back-end that allows for OpenCL codes to be transparently utilized on networked systems for distributed computing...

Following Intel's acquisition of Tower Semiconductor falling through due to failing to obtain all the necessary regulatory approvals, Intel and Tower today announced a foundry agreement...

The sound subsystem and audio driver updates were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window. Interesting about the sound work this cycle is a fair amount of work around AMD Van Gogh platforms, which so far is just the APU that's known to power Valve's Steam Deck...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.15 is a new version of Hangover, the Wine-based software that aims to ease the deployment of Wine with x86/x86_64 Windows software support atop AArch64 processors and other CPU architectures...

One of the patches to be picked up by the Linux 6.6 kernel this week brings back REP MOSQ for user-access on CPUs without Enhanced REP MOVSB (ERMS) support. In turn this can equate to some performance benefits on AMD CPUs lacking ERMS...

Manjaro 23.0 "Uranos" has been released as the latest version of this desktop-focused Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux...

The decision last month for the Linux kernel to disable random number generation (RNG) for all AMD fTPMs ended up having some unintended consequences on Intel systems that ended up breaking S3 suspend behavior...

Microsoft continues improving the Hyper-V support within the Linux kernel for benefiting Linux guest VMs running within this hypervisor on Windows. With Linux 6.6 the Hyper-V code adds support for SEV-SNP secure guests on the AMD EPYC side while over on the Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids side is initial support for Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) protected guests...

It's been nearly four months since the release of DXVK 2.2 for this Direct3D 9/10/11 API implementation built atop the Vulkan API that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying Windows games on Linux. Out today is DXVK 2.3 as the latest major step forward for the project...

The ACPI and power management updates were merged last week for the Linux 6.6 kernel...

Released at the end of August was GNU Coreutils 9.4 while out this weekend is uutils 0.0.21 as the open-source, Rust-written re-implementation of the Coreutils utilities...

A set of printk clean-ups were sent in today for the Linux 6.6 merge window. These clean-ups are important as they are a stepping stone towards the threaded / atomic console printing and in turn that is the last major blocker before the real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support can finally be upstreamed in the kernel...

Fwupd 1.9.5 is out today as the newest version of this open-source software for enabling system and peripheral firmware updating under Linux that ties into the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS). With the Fwupd 1.9.5 some additional devices are now supported plus there are some other core improvements...

Armbian 23.08 is out as the latest quarterly update to this Debian-based Linux distribution optimized for use on Arm single board computers and other devices...

As part of the "smp/core" changes that were merged last week for the Linux 6.6 kernel, partial SMT enablement landed for processors that support more than two threads per physical core to allow greater run-time control over just how many threads to enable...

OpenBLAS 0.3.24 is now available for this latest open-source BLAS and LAPACK implementation known for its advanced CPU optimizations and extensive tuning for providing for very speedy linear algebra kernels...