Phoronix

The VK_NV_device_generated_commands_compute extension introduced in Vulkan 1.3.258 is now wired up for Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver and should further benefit VKD3D-Proton for Steam Play gaming...

QEMU 8.1 is now available as the latest feature update to this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

The AGX Gallium3D driver developed by the Asahi Linux crew for providing reverse-engineered OpenGL / GLES support on Apple Silicon M1/M2 hardware is now formally compliant with OpenGL ES 3.1...

Following the news last week of Firefox outperforming Chrome in SunSpider, a Phoronix reader pointed out Mercury that is an open-source web browser claiming to be the "fastest Firefox fork" and making use of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) and AES instructions along with compiler features like Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) and Profile-Guided Optimizations (PGO). The project advertises as being 8-20% faster than upstream Firefox. Curious I ran a couple benchmarks on my end of this Firefox fork.

Continuing to support x86 32-bit processors with the mainline Linux kernel continues to be a maintenance burden and uncovering ugly bits of code that are seldom touched. The latest work is on fixing up the 32-bit early microcode loading code so that it's more robust and actually correct...

While we are waiting on NVIDIA to roll out a beta of their next post-R535 Linux driver release stream, available today is the NVIDIA 535.104.05 Linux driver as their latest in this production driver branch...

Richard Hughes of Red Hat has just released Fwupd 1.9.4 as the newest version of thus open-source software that goes along with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for making it easy to deploy new firmware/BIOS updates for systems and countless peripherals under Linux...

GNOME's Sysprof is a wonderful system-wide profiling tool for helping developers analyze bottlenecks and debug other challenging issues. This system profiler has covered both kernel and user-space but to date has not provided any insight around the CPU scheduler behavior and thus developers have had to resort to other tooling there. But for the GNOME 45 release, Sysprof has integrated CPU scheduler details...

One nugget of information in the LibreOffice 7.6 release announcement for those who missed it and deserves calling out specifically... Succeeding LibreOffice 7.6 will not be v7.7 or v8.0 but rather v24.2...

Intel is well regarded for their vast open-source contributions from being a major contributor to the Linux kernel and other areas like Mesa, GCC/glibc, and other key open-source projects to various niche projects like ConnMan and other smaller software projects. Debuting a few months ago as one of the newest open-source Intel projects catching us by surprise was Intel One Mono as a font designed for developers. Today brings a new version of that font...

New (Windows) tools have been released that break the NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock, the "security" functionality in use since the GeForce GTX 900 days around signed firmware/BIOS handling. This authentication mechanism is what in turn has led to the GeForce GTX 700 series still being the best supported series by the open-source Nouveau driver while the GTX 900 series and later have been crippled to their low boot clock speeds due to PMU/re-clocking restrictions. While Nouveau developers have been working on the GPU System Processor (GSP) approach for RTX 20 "Turing" GPUs and newer to workaround this limitation as NVIDIA's blessed path forward, the NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock has now been broken by Windows modders...

Git 2.42 is out today as the newest feature update for this dominant open-source distributed revision control system...

In recent days a number of feature patches were queued in HID-next to provide new driver features and hardware support within the Human Interface Device subsystem...

The amdfwtool utility living within the Coreboot repository for dealing with AMD platform firmware files has now added support for EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors...

On Friday AMD sent out another pull request of AMDGPU/AMDKFD driver changes for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window. With the Linux 6.5 release due out likely in one week and the cut-off having passed for new "feature" code for DRM-Next, this latest AMDGPU pull request was centered around bug-fixes but also with a few minor additions...

For those that have been eyeing an AMD Ryzen 7 7040 "Phoenix" series laptop for Linux use, over the coming weeks ahead there will be benchmarks and a review on the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen4 with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U laptop. With this 8-core / 16-thread Zen 4 mobile processor clocking up to 5.1GHz, 64GB of LPDDR5x-6400 memory, 1TB NVMe SSD, and 2.8K OLED display it should be a real treat if the Linux support is all in good shape...

Melissa Wen with consulting firm Igalia continues working with AMD and Valve engineers on supporting AMD driver-specific color management properties for Linux to benefit the Steam Deck but ultimately to benefit all AMD Linux users as well...

LibreOffice 7.6 is now available as the latest major release to this leading open-source office suite that is widely used on the Linux desktop and elsewhere...

The new nvidia-drm-kmod is a FreeBSD port of Linux's nvidia-drm.ko open-source kernel module...

Following last Friday's release of Wine 8.14 following a summer holiday, Wine-Staging 8.14 is out today with its re-base for this testing/experimental flavor of Wine...

Mesa has landed GPUVis integration with a focus on CPU side tracing for help to uncover where games are blocking on the GPU. This GPU Trace Visualizer integration for Mesa was spearheaded by RADV developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen...

Budgie 10.8 is out today as the newest feature release for this Linux desktop environment...

The linux-firmware.git Git repository on the kernel.org Git repository has been the de facto location for collecting all of the microcode/firmware files needed by upstream Linux kernel drivers. The linux-firmware.git repository is the centralized repository for all firmware files, including the GPU/DRM graphics drivers. Now though a dedicated DRM firmware repository is being established as a staging area for new GPU firmware prior to being picked up by linux-firmware.git...

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 6.5-rc7 test kernel today, a few hours ahead of schedule...

A new release of Box64 is now available, the Linux x86_64 emulator for running programs and games on non-x86_64 architectures like ARM/AArch64 and RISC-V...

Intel ISPC 1.21 is now available as the newest feature update to this Implicit SPMD Program Compiler for a C language variant focused on single program, multiple data (SPMD) programming for exploiting the full potential of modern CPUs and GPUs...

Last week the FreeBSD 14 alpha phase kicked off and available today is the second weekly alpha release for this upcoming major BSD operating system update...

The DeviceTree additions to allow the Orange Pi 5 64-bit ARM single board computer (SBC) to work on the upstream Linux kernel are working their way closer to mainline...

Earlier this month the AMD Inception vulnerability was disclosed and quickly mitigated within the mainline Linux kernel and back-ported to the stable kernels. In the rush to get the code merged and the mitigation being under embargo until the disclosure date, some bugs and clean-ups with the mitigation code were discovered. That revised code was now submitted today for merging ahead of the Linux 6.5-rc7 kernel release this weekend...

Nate Graham is out with his weekly KDE development summary to highlight all of the interesting changes to this open-source desktop environment with Plasma 6 development continuing at full-speed ahead...

It's been nearly one month since Wine 8.13 was released while today marked the debut of the Wine 8.14 development milestone...

For those that happen to have a Google Stadia gaming controller from the days of Google's cloud gaming service, the Linux 6.6 kernel is adding a new driver to enable force feedback (rumble) support with these controllers...

Over the past month I've been delivering a number of Linux laptop tests with the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U for that Zen 4 "Phoenix" SoC within an Acer Swift Edge 16. One of the requests that has come up with my ongoing testing has been how well the default Microsoft Windows 11 installation compares to loading up Linux on this 8-core AMD Zen 4 laptop. Well, in this article is a look at the Linux performance compared to Windows 11, including when making use of the Linux 6.5 development kernel where AMD P-State is now the default and also for seeing what workloads are impacted by the recent AMD Inception vulnerability.

Linux 6.4 or newer paired with the latest cryptsetup development code has landed support for the OPAL specification for self-encrypting drives...

Given all the interest this week in Firefox outperforming Google Chrome in SunSpider, I decided to run some fresh Linux desktop web browser benchmarks on my end. For today's comparison is a look at the newly-released Chrome 116 up against Firefox 117b8 that will be released as stable in just over one week...

For those still managing to resist systemd, SysVinit 3.08 was released on Thursday as the newest update to this init system...

The GNOME 45 Beta is out today as the latest development milestone ahead of its stable debut in September...

The SUSE organization has changed hands many times over the years... From being its own independent company to the notable acquisition by Novell two decades ago. Over the past decade SUSE has changed hands between Attachmate, Micro Focus, EQT Partners, and then went public back in 2021 on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Now two years later it is being taken private...

A few minutes ago AMD sent out the very first open-source Linux kernel graphics driver patches for enabling the "GFX 11.5" graphics engine...

While over the past several years AMD landed numerous significant improvements to their RadeonSI driver for benefiting OpenGL workstation use-cases, that quest isn't yet over and more optimizations continue to be pursued. There are additional optimizations on the horizon for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for benefiting OpenGL on Linux workstations...

While back in November was when AWS originally announced new EC2 instances powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC "Genoa" processors, only this week did they bring their M7a general purpose instances to a general availability state where anyone can access them. Being very impressed with 4th Gen EPYC bare metal as well as with Azure's HPC cloud, I fired up some benchmarks of the new Genoa-powered EC2 M7a instance compared to the new M7i instances powered by Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" as well as showing how the competition is to Amazon's in-house Graviton ARM-based server processors.

Intel engineer Ilpo Jarvinen posted a set of Linux kernel driver patches to introduce a new "bwctrl" PCI Express Bandwidth Controller driver and associated PCIe cooling driver to allow for limiting the PCIe link speed in the event of any system thermal issues...

While Intel has maintained the QATzip open-source compression library for demonstrating data compression using QuickAssist Technology (QAT) with DEFLATE/LZ4/LZ4s, Intel has also been working on QAT'ed Zstd for achieving some sizable victories in performance and power efficiency...

It was less than one month ago that Intel announced AVX10 as the successor to AVX-512. In that time Intel engineers have begun posting AVX10.1 enablement patches for GCC as well as beginning AVX10 discussions for the LLVM compiler stack. Overnight already the initial AVX10.1 enablement code has been merged into the GNU Compiler Collection...

The reverse-engineered Etnaviv DRM driver for providing open-source graphics support for Vivante graphics IP has prepared a new set of improvements for the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel cycle...

The first beta release of the forthcoming OBS Studio 30 screencasting software is now available for testing...

While waiting for the belated Mesa 23.2 to eventually surface, the Mesa 23.1 branch remains the latest stable series for this collection of open-source OpenGL/Gallium3D and Vulkan graphics drivers...

SiFive's HiFive Unmatched development board was interesting when it began shipping in 2021 with 16GB of RAM and four U74-MC RISC-V cores along with one S7 core. But pricing was rather steep at $665 USD. Fast forward two years, the StarFive VisionFive 2 has begun to enjoy wide availability and for $100+ this RISC-V development board features a quad-core RISC-V processor via the StarFive JH7110 SoC with integrated GPU, up to 8GB of RAM, HDMI 2.0 output, dual Gigabit Ethernet, dual USB 3.0 ports, and more for around $100 USD. Here are some benchmarks of this most interesting RISC-V single board computer in the ~$100 space to be released yet.

While many Linux gamers are all-set these days by making use of Steam and leveraging Valve's Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux, for those running macOS or also wishing to enjoy more office/application-oriented Windows software on Linux support, CodeWeavers is out today with CrossOver 23 as the newest release of their commercial Wine-based software...

With the Intel Downfall vulnerability made public last week (also known as GDS - "Gather Data Sampling") there can be a sizable hit to AVX workloads making use of the GATHER instructions. For helping to lower the impact of Downfall/GDS on mitigated systems, Intel has made a change to the GNU Compiler Collection to disable GATHER generation in vectorization for Intel CPU families affected by this vulnerability...