With new i915 driver code ready for the upcoming Linux 6.6, new threshold tuning around the RPS (cited as both Render P-States and Requested Power States) for some Intel graphics hardware and in some games can yield around a 10~15% boost to performance...
SK engineer Byungchul Park noticed costly migration overhead especially with TLB shoot-downs hurting performance while he was working with Compute Express Link (CXL) on Linux. That led to some optimization patches to reduce TLB flushes under some select cases that in turn led to a 50% reduction in full flushes and has the possibility of helping performance...
Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has published a lengthy blog post outlining the current state of the Plasma 6 desktop, what code porting work has wrapped up, and what major tasks remain before Plasma 6.0 can advance onto its beta and then release phase...
Preventing some modern Windows games from running on Intel Arc Graphics under Linux with Valve's Steam Play has been held up by lack of sparse support within Intel's ANV Vulkan driver. Those limitations will hopefully be overcome with the Intel Xe kernel mode driver when that is mainlined in hopefully the coming months, but for now it's a bit of a sore spot for Intel Linux gamers. A partial workaround though has now been merged for Mesa 23.3 with fake sparse support...
It's been ten years since Intel launched the Haswell processors that were great for the time followed by Broadwell. On the laptop side for Haswell and Broadwell the Panel Self Refresh (PSR) power-savings support has been rather notorious at least on the Linux side. Finally for the Linux 6.6 kernel due out in late 2023, the developers are re-enabling PSR support for these aging laptops...
An updated patch-set was sent out on Wednesday to address fixing wake-up problems for some AMD client platforms when going through a suspend/resume cycle...
Another weekly batch of drm-misc-next changes were sent out today to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the Linux 6.6 merge window opening in a few weeks...
The just-announced AMD Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 are working quite well under a fully open-source and upstream graphics driver stack. AMD is making available a new Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver release for those on enterprise Linux distributions, but those living more on the leading-edge and preferring the open-source upstream Linux/Mesa driver experience, I've been testing these new RDNA3 professional offerings and the support is already in place and working out rather well. In this article are some initial tests of the Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 as well as showing how the performance of the new packaged driver compares to that of using all open-source and upstream GPU driver components.
Earlier this year AMD introduced the RDNA3-based Radeon PRO W7800/W7900 series while today the company is introduced the Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 series at the lower-end of the professional graphics spectrum...
Intel open-source driver engineers have begun starting work on preparing the Linux graphics driver stack to ultimately handle Lunar Lake integrated graphics that is the generation following Arrow Lake...
Microsoft has released an updated version of its CBL-Mariner 2.0 in-house Linux distribution that includes various security patches, new packages being added to the OS, and a variety of other updates...
LibreOffice 7.6 as the next major update to this open-source office suite is due out in mud-August while today's RC2 release serves as a last chance for testing out this updated free software alternative to Microsoft Office...
Clement Lefebvre shared today as part of the monthly status update for the Linux Mint project that they'll be releasing an "EDGE" ISO to help in running this desktop Linux distribution on newer hardware...
For several years now The Khronos Group has been developing the ANARI standard as an analytics rendering API and focusing on scalable 3D data virtualization. Today the ANARI 1.0 release finally took place for this cross-platform 3D rendering engine API...
Asahi Linux is great for those wanting to run the best Linux experience on Apple Silicon hardware while using this Arch Linux based distribution. But for those preferring Fedora Linux over Arch, a Fedora Asahi Remix is coming and was announced today at the Flock To Fedora conference...
While Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) on Intel/AMD x86_64 processors is limited to providing one additional thread per core, SMT on IBM POWER hardware can provide 4-way and even 8-way SMT for some processor models. With Linux 6.6 the /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control interface is being extended to allow greater control over managing partial SMT states in cases of the CPUs supporting more than 2-way SMT at Linux run-time...
After six years as serving as the XFS file-system maintainer, Darrick Wong announced he'll be stepping down from this role and that really multiple developers need to step up to maintain XFS and help with testing and other responsibilities...
Intel has published their latest quarterly update to the Intel Media Driver open-source VA-API implementation as well as to their oneVPL video processing layer library...
Canonical has aimed to ship Linux kernel stable release updates (SRU) for Ubuntu releases on a three week cycle. That has worked out well overall but has led to delays at times in getting down CVE security fixes and other urgent customer requests. Moving forward Canonical is aiming for a new "4/2" week cycle for kernel SRUs...
Linux's cpupower utility lives within the Linux kernel source tree for reading and tuning various CPU power settings rather than poking at sysfs files directly or other means of adjusting your processor power-related tunables. With the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel cycle the cpupower utility is adding support for adjusting new AMD P-State driver features...
The "v1" patches were posted today for a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver to be used for display purposes with the StarFive JH7110, a low-cost RISC-V SoC found in the VisionFive boards, PINE64 Star64, and other low-cost RISC-V single board computers...
Since last year Intel Linux engineers have been busy working on FRED support for the Flexible Return and Event Delivery specification that will be found with future-generation processors. FRED overhauls how CPU transitions are handled between privilege levels and a design goal of lowering transition latencies and allow for more robust software use-cases...
Over the past month on Phoronix were 223 original news articles along with 17 multi-page featured articles / Linux hardware reviews, all written by your's truly. When it came to the hardware testing in July, AMD processor tests easily dominated from the Ryzen Z1 Extreme within the new ASUS ROG Ally over to the AMD EPYC Genoa-X and Bergamo server processors to close out the month...
Back in March Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal finally released for this community-developed smartphone/tablet OS that finally migrated from an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS base to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. This past weekend Ubuntu Touch OTA-2 Focal was released as the first update this lineage of being based off the newer Ubuntu Long-Term Support state...
Intel today released Embree 4.2 as the newest feature update to this open-source and high performance ray-tracing library. While Embree has long offered fast CPU-based ray-tracing support, Embree 4.0 introduced GPU acceleration via SYCL. With the Embree 4.2 release, the GPU SYCL support is no longer being treated as beta...
Following the release this weekend of GNU Binutils 2.41, another important GNU software project just issued their latest update: the GNU C Library 2.38...
With the upcoming Intel Meteor Lake processors is the introduction of the Versatile Processing Unit "VPU" IP block for computer vision and deep learning use-cases to provide better performance. Earlier this year with Linux 6.3 the iVPU driver was merged. Meteor Lake processors haven't even officially launched yet while already Intel's open-source engineers have begun enabling the next-gen VPU to be found with Lunar Lake processors...
One of the latest feature additions for next quarter's Mesa 23.3 release of these open-source user-space graphics driver components is adding support for the EGL explicit device extension...
Qualcomm engineers have begun rolling out a new open-source V4L2/media driver for a new Qualcomm "Iris" video accelerator hardware for video encode and decode on Qualcomm SoCs...
Alpine Linux remains one of the most popular lightweight Linux distributions built atop musl libc and Busybox. Alpine Linux has found significant use within containers and the embedded space while now sadly the most prolific maintainer of packages for the Linux distribution has decided to step down from her roles...
Linux creator Linus Torvalds is growing frustrated with AMD fTPM hardware random number generator bugs on recent Ryzen systems plaguing the kernel and has expressed a desire in disabling its use...
RISC-V is now an official Debian architecture for the Debian 13 "Trixie" release to happen in about two years time. Over the weekend a brief status update was issued surrounding this newest CPU architecture to be supported by the Debian GNU/Linux team. Arguably most interesting is how they are currently building out the Debian RISC-V packages...
Just in time for the next monthly ISOs of Arch Linux, Archinstall 2.6 has been released as the latest feature update for this easy-to-use, text-based Arch Linux distribution installer...
GNU Binutils 2.41 is out today as the latest major update to this important collection of binary utilities present on most Linux systems and other platforms...
As one of the last blockers for getting real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support mainlined in the Linux kernel, this week saw a revised patch series around non-blocking consoles...
Linux 6.5 upgraded its Rust toolchain against Rust 1.68.2. This was the first upgrade of the Rust toolchain from the original v1.62 requirements when the first Rust kernel code was mainlined. A second upgrade is now planned to take it to Rust 1.71...
Last weekend I wrote about Zen 4's Automatic IBRS security feature needing STIBP enabled for protecting user-space processes. Single-Threaded Indirect Branch Predictors though haven't been enabled up to now with the Auto IBRS functionality on Linux. But the x86/urgent pull request sent out today ahead of the Linux 6.5-rc4 tagging makes that change...
A new per-application workaround/optimization to the open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has sharply reduced the time required for compiling Cyberpunk 2077 game shaders for this popular title running on Linux by way of Valve's Steam Play...
For those fond of the COBOL programming language and continuing to make use of it in new development efforts, GnuCOBOL 3.2 was released on Friday as the latest feature update for this 21+ year old free software effort around being an open-source COBOL implementation...
Going back to May I wrote about AMD's "k10temp" Linux temperature driver being updated to handle negative temperature readings and now finally merged on Friday as a fix ahead of Linux 6.5-rc4 is a change to that open-source driver for properly displaying negative temperatures...
With most developers having recovered from the recent Akademy KDE developer conference, Plasma 6 is back to seeing a lot of new development activity for what will be the next major open-source desktop release likely debuting in early 2024...
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