Phoronix

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...

Support for making use of Vulkan with VirtIO-GPU while using QEMU could very soon be upstream...

Wasmer 5.0 is now available as the latest major update to this WebAssembly (WASM) runtime focused on being able to allow developers to write "universal apps" that will run anywhere thanks to the power and versatility of WebAssembly...

Shotcut 24.10 is now available as the latest feature release to this open-source, cross-platform video editor built atop the MLT framework, Qt6, FFmpeg, SDL, and other software components...

Intel off their typical second Tuesday of the month patch regiment today posted new CPU microcode just for 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" and 14th Gen "Raptor Lake Refresh" processors for Linux systems. Notable with the updated Raptor Lake CPU microcode is the internal voltage handling fix for that well known problem plaguing many Raptor Lake owners plus two other fixes...

Following the rather bizarre blog post two weeks ago of laptop vendor MALIBAL suggesting not supporting Coreboot due to their frustrating experiences dealing with Coreboot consulting firms, the Coreboot project itself has now issued a response...

For years there have been statements about how over half of the VMs running within the Microsoft Azure public cloud are Linux-based... In a new blog post today is the first time I am seeing Microsoft cite now "over 60%" Linux marketshare on Microsoft's cloud...

CVE-2024-9632 was made public today as the latest security vulnerability affecting the X.Org Server. The CVE-2024-9632 security issue has been present in the codebase now for 18 years and can lead to local privilege escalation...

Earlier this year Micron announced the Crucial Pro DDR5-6000 memory for AMD and Intel desktops and catering to gamers. With the newest AMD Ryzen 9000 series (Zen 5) and Intel Core Ultra Series 2 (Arrow Lake) processors out there and enjoying even faster memory, today Micron announced the Crucial Pro DDR5-6400 memory kits for greater performance. In advance of today's launch I have been testing the Crucial Pro DDR5-6400 32GB Kit (16GBx2) UDIMM Kit (CP2K16G64C38U5B) and have some initial benchmarks to share from the new Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Arrow Lake desktop.

Fedora 41 is ready for release today as a wonderful update to this leading edge Linux distribution...

It looks like the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle will be adding RISC-V support for user-space pointer masking and tagged address ABI...

A set of patches are currently under review on the Linux kernel mailing list for helping to further lower idle power use for Xeon 6 Sierra Forest processors...

Thanks to Valve's Linux graphics team, VK_EXT_device_generated_commands is now supported by the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver with the upcoming Mesa 24.3 release...

Google's open-source and cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit has been forked by community developers as Flock...

David Rosca working for AMD has continued to improve their open-source video acceleration support within Mesa. Merged today for Mesa 24.3 is the code within the Gallium3D video acceleration front-end and the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for handling AV1 still picture encode...

KDE developer Vlad Zahorodnii is out with an insightful blog post today on how XWayland window resizing has been enhanced for Plasma 6.3 so that resizing X11 clients will now appear much more polished than the status quo...

Following last week's launch testing of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and Core Ultra 5 245K Arrow Lake desktop processors, the next area I've been exploring deeper has been the DDR5 memory performance including with CUDIMMs. Here's a closer look at the Core Ultra 9 285K performance under Linux while testing several different sets of memory and running Ubuntu 24.10.

Going back to earlier in the year AMD Linux engineers have been prepping the kernel for PCI Express TLP Processing Hints (TPH) support that allows for hints that can be injected to improve latency and lowering traffic congestion when there are several possible cache locations on the server with the TPH noting the optimal location of a Transaction Layer Packet (TLP). This PCIe TPH support is set to be merged upstream with the forthcoming Linux 6.13 cycle...

Mozilla Firefox 132.0 release builds are now available for Linux, macOS, and Windows for this newest monthly feature release to this open-source web browser...

The Trinity Desktop Environment as a still-maintained fork of the KDE 3.5 desktop software is out with a new point release...

While the sched_ext extensible scheduler code was merged for Linux 6.12, work on sched_ext itself it is not over. New patches this weekend continue working on NUMA awareness for it with its default idle selection policy while similar work on CPU last level cache (LLC) awareness are slated for the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle...

Another feature to look forward to with this quarter's Mesa 24.3 release is the open-source Freedreno Gallium3D driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware now supporting Rusticl-based OpenCL compute...

Over the past year we have seen Raspberry Pi working a lot on Wayland support for the Raspberry Pi OS desktop and using it on their latest Raspberry Pi models. With today's new Raspberry Pi OS update, Wayland is being used by default across all Raspberry Pi devices...

While the Linux 6.12 kernel enables Intel Xe2 Battlemage discrete GPU support out-of-the-box as a sign of its maturing state, there are a number of patches for the open-source Battlemage driver support that are ongoing. One of the areas seeing some patches recently are around enhancing the display features with Battlemage's upgraded capabilities. Plus there's ongoing work around next-gen Xe3 graphics too...

It turns out the latest AMD Ryzen desktop processors offer support for AMD Smart Trace Buffer (STB) that previously was only limited to mobile platforms...

Intel has issued their newest quarterly feature release of their FFmpeg Cartwheel, which is their developer staging area of new video acceleration related patches for Intel graphics hardware that they are working to upstream within the widely-used, open-source FFmpeg library...

Sway 1.10 released on Sunday as the newest version of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor for the Linux desktop...

Following a busy week of kernel drama stemming from the Russian sanctions impacting Linux maintainers, Linus Torvalds is out with the Linux 6.12-rc5 weekly test candidate...

Sent out in original patch form this past week and already iterated to a second version this Sunday, a new proposal is underway to introduce "hung_task_detect_count" as a convenient means of tracking the number of times hung tasks are detected since boot...

Intel merged Linear Address Masking into the Linux kernel last year as a means of allowing user-space to store metadata within some bits of pointers without masking it out before use. LAM can be useful for virtual machines, sanitizers / profiling / memory tagging, and other uses. While the brand new Intel Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs support LAM, the Linux kernel is now disabling LAM out of security concerns...

For the past year Intel software engineers have been developing a PCIe cooling driver to reduce the PCIe link speed to cope with thermal issues. In the future with PCI Express 6.0 this driver may be further adapted to also reduce the PCIe link width when encountering thermal problems. This cooling driver is now ready for merging with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel...

The Linux NETFS code as a network file-system helper library is seeing patches to help enhance the read performance for solutions like CIFS as well as adding single blob object support...

In addition to Eric Biggers of Google being busy working on various crypto and hashing performance optimizations, the longtime Linux developer has also been working on "dm-inlinecrypt" for better leveraging inline block device encryption...

Vulkan 1.3.300 debuted on Friday with a handful of fixes and one new extension...

With Linux 6.13 there is going to be the initial kernel graphics driver support for Xe3 in integrated form to be found with next-gen Panther Lake processors. Merged today for Mesa 24.3 this quarter is the initial OpenGL and Vulkan driver enablement for Xe3 graphics...

Submitted today were a set of x86 platform driver fixes for merging ahead of the Linux 6.12-rc5 release due out on Sunday. For the most part mostly mundane fixes. But notable is an ASUS WMI fix to address the Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" performance issue I've pointed out now in several articles...