Phoronix

Xcompmgr 1.1.10 was released yesterday as the newest update to this basic X11 compositor providing "eye candy" effects for classic X.Org usage...

The "intel_idle" driver provides CPU idle time management for Intel processors on Linux for helping to put the processor into low-power states in conjunction with the MWAIT instruction. With the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel, the Granite Rapids D support for the Intel Idle driver is set to be merged...

It's the second Tuesday of the month and this Patch Tuesday brings new CPU microcode for mitigating the latest Intel processor security vulnerabilities and updates to some previously disclosed issues...

One of the many changes to look forward to with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle is the AMD P-State driver to be used by default with the new EPYC 9005 series processors. While AMD Ryzen CPUs for a while now have been defaulting to the modern AMD P-State driver that makes use of ACPI CPPC platform support for allowing better power efficiency, AMD EPYC CPUs have kept to using the generic ACPI CPUFreq frequency scaling driver. But now AMD engineers have deemed amd_pstate ready for use with EPYC 9005 "Turin" CPUs and will be the default choice moving forward. Here is more information and power/performance benchmarks for this shift while testing using the EPYC 9755 processors.

Merged today to GNOME's Mutter compositor is improved logic for selecting the graphics processor to treat as the primary one within multi-GPU laptops...

Red Hat announced today they have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Neural Magic, an AI software company behind the likes of DeepSparse and nm-vllm...

As part of the transition to eventually drop the long dormant Clover OpenCL state tracker from Mesa's Gallium3D codebase in favor of the modern OpenCL Rusticl Rust-written driver, Mesa 25.0 has ended Clover support for NIR-based drivers...

Yesterday brought the eighth and ninth iteration of the AMD XDNA Linux kernel driver posted for review for enabling the Ryzen AI branded NPUs found in their recent SoCs...

Red Hat in cooperation with Intel, Bloomberg and IBM has been developing the Climatik open-source project as a means of power capping AI use within the data center for better energy efficiency and sustainability...

Merged today for the upcoming GCC 15 stable release is a new "X86_TUNE_AVX512_TWO_EPILOGUES" tuning optimization that is enabled by default for AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors...

DXVK 2.5 was just released as the newest version of this open-source project implementing Direct3D APIs atop the Vulkan API for better handling of Windows games on Linux systems as used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) software...

Memtest86+ 7.0 debuted back in January while now as we approach the end of 2024, Memtest86+ 7.20 is now available as the latest significant update to this open-source memory tester commonly used on Intel and AMD systems...

The latest terminology within the Fedora camp causing concern is "karma" that's long been used for conveying feedback around package updates with their Bodhi software used for gating Fedora Linux package updates...

Microsoft last month announced the open-source Rust-written OpenHCL for running confidential Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP virtual machines. Today Microsoft is announcing another interesting open-source, Rust-based project in the virtualization space: Hyperlight. Microsoft's Hyperlight project is an embed-friendly, lightweight VMM for use within Linux and Windows applications...

While not as exciting as if it were Apple M3/M4 device support hitting the upstream mainline Linux kernel, but for those with some older Apple (pre-M1) devices around, support for a number of older SoCs and boards is set to arrive with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel...

As another effort for boosting the energy efficiency and behavior of Intel Core platforms with a mix of energy efficient "E" and performance "P" cores, a set of patches were posted Friday night for adapting Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) to the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver with a focus on providing better energy efficient performance initially for Lunar Lake SoCs...

Set to be merged during the upcoming Linux 6.13 merge window is support with the Rust programming language infrastructure for allowing in-place kernel modules...

The Intel Diamond Rapids target has been merged in time for the upcoming GCC 15 compiler release to allow for "-march=diamondrapids" targeting for leveraging the array of new CPU ISA additions found with these next-gen Xeon processors...

The Rust-written Servo browser web layout engine project is out with its October 2024 status update that provides insight to their development activities the past several weeks...

PHPStan 2.0 is out today as what is the best open-source static analyzer for the PHP programming language...

Linus Torvalds just christened the Linux 6.12-rc7 kernel today for what will hopefully be the last release candidate before declaring Linux 6.12 stable next week Sunday...

The Arch Linux based CachyOS Linux distribution has issued its November 2024 media refresh. Notable this time are pulling a few performance-related patches into its kernel build...

A set of Linux kernel patches posted on Friday by Meta/Facebook provide for sizable performance optimizations for applications leveraging /proc/kcore such as for debuggers...

Debcow is an experimental implementation of deploying Debian packages on copy-on-write file-systems like Btrfs and Bcachefs. Debcow adapts DPKG to use reflinks for installing packages. With reflinking to the file contents from the Debian package archives rather than copying of files, it can lead to a dramatic speed-up of installing Debian packages: as much as 6x faster on CoW file-systems...

A patch is pending for enabling support for the USB-C model of Apple's latest Magic Trackpad input device under Linux...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 9.21, Wine-Staging 9.21 is available as this experimental blend of Wine that carries extra patches for testing/evaluation to enhance the ability for Windows games and apps to run on Linux...

If this weekend's release of Hyprland 0.45 doesn't suit your fancy, Niri is also out this weekend with a new feature release. Niri is the scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor for an interesting Linux desktop experience...

Debian 12.8 is out today as the latest media refresh for the "Bookworm" release with numerous security fixes along with other general bug fixes included as part of the assortment of package updates...

Hyprland 0.45 released today as the newest version of this Wayland compositor focused on being an independent, very customizable, and dynamic tiling compositor...

Longtime NVIDIA Linux engineer Aaron Plattner shared a status update on Friday around the current feature parity difference between the NVIDIA driver stack on X11 and under (X)Wayland...

Friday saw a final round of "drm-misc-next" feature updates ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel merge window. The DRM Panic code continues to be enhanced for improving this "Blue Screen of Death" like experience on the Linux desktop...

A set of Friday night patches provide for some exciting context switching optimizations to the Linux kernel...

Microsoft overnight released the newest version of their Azure Linux 3.0 in-house Linux distribution that is used by a variety of internal services at the company as well as external customers...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly development recap of all the interesting Plasma desktop changes to have landed over the past week...

The belated first release candidate of Mesa 24.3 is now available for testing of the upgraded OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers commonly used on Linux systems and elsewhere...

Following a one week delay, Wine 9.21 has been released as the latest development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems. We are also closing in on the approaching Wine 10.0 stable release...

OpenZFS 2.3 continues working its way toward release as a big step forward for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems...

A patch is working its way to the mainline Linux kernel for addressing an annoyance affecting new Intel Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" laptops...

Last week Google announced the general availability of their C4A instances powered by their in-house Axion processors. I delivered launch-day benchmarks looking at the Google Axion CPU performance with the C4A instances compared to other Google Cloud instance types powered by Ampere Altra and Intel Xeon. In this article is a look at how the Google Axion processor performance compares to the competing Amazon/AWS Graviton4 processor.

Earlier this year was a Fedora change proposal seeking to make KDE Plasma the default over GNOME for Fedora 42. A compromise of sorts has now been settled on with the Fedora Desktop Spin being promoted to an "Edition" status that will put it on the same level as the GNOME-based Fedora Workstation Edition...

Intel's Linux kernel test robot has reported a 3888.9% performance improvement in the mainline Linux kernel as of this past week...

Mesa 24.3 feature development is now over and Mesa 25.0 has entered development with Mesa Git...

As the latest on the compiler enablement front for Intel's next-gen Xeon "Diamond Rapids processors, LLVM Git has merged support for the AMX-AVX512 instructions for next spring's Clang 20 compiler release...

A patch posted on Thursday by one of Intel's long-time Linux kernel engineers would begin treating outdated Intel CPU microcode as a security vulnerability that would be reported to user-space via the existing sysfs vulnerabilities reporting...

With the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" testing over the past month since launch I have looked at how well the new EPYC Turin CPUs compete against Intel Xeon, how Turin Dense dominates in performance and power efficiency to AmpereOne at 192 cores, and the generational uplift from EPYC Genoa to Turin at the same core counts, among other Turin performance benchmark tests. Up for comparison today is a look at how the NVIDIA Grace CPU performance within the GH200 Superchip compares to the AMD EPYC Turin processors.

Sent out yesterday was an AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver pull request with the last few feature additions and patches slated for the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel merge window. Alongside other AMD kernel graphics driver updates, the new driver code with Radeon RX 7000 series RDNA3 graphics cards will finally allow controlling the zero RPM fan feature under Linux...

The FreeBSD project issued today their Q3'2024 progress report to outline enhancements made to this open-source BSD operating system over the prior quarter...

While old Radeon GFX6/GFX7 era graphics processors are no longer actively supported by AMD on Windows and haven't been for quite a while, under Linux with the upstream open-source driver stack they remain supported and still enjoying improvements in large part from common code. The most recent fascinating aspect is the old AMD GFX6/GFX7 era GPUs seeing official Vulkan 1.3 support that has been deemed conformant by Khronos...

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS has remained very active implementing more features and fixes as we approach the end of 2024...

Yet another feature merging into Mesa 24.3 with the code branching (feature freeze) yet to take place is Vulkan FIFO presentation mode support under Wayland...