Phoronix

System76 has contributed Intel Core Raptor Lake HX support to Coreboot with some minor additions over the existing Raptor Lake "RPL" code as well as adding their new Adder WS 3 laptop to upstream Coreboot...

Back in April I pointed out some new AMD patches at the time for enabling a new "Dynamic Boost Control" feature that hasn't been widely talked about by AMD yet for allowing more frequency/power controls around Ryzen SoCs. But making this power/performance feature controversial is that it requires authentication with the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP) for activation with user-space blobs for tapping this greater control of the hardware. This AMD Dynamic Boost Control feature now looks like it is ready for merging into Linux 6.6...

Similar to the Dell WMI system management driver and Lenovo's Think-LMI driver, the HP-BIOSCFG driver now poised for introduction in Linux 6.6 allows for managing and configuring BIOS settings on capable HP laptops/desktops from under Linux itself...

Queued up ahead of the Linux 6.6 cycle later this summer is a new input driver for the Azoteq IQS7210A/7211A/E controllers...

For the past few months Intel has been working on a new cluster scheduling implementation for their hybrid CPUs. This rework was due to their earlier cluster scheduling code not working out so well for the likes of Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors while this new patch series can at least help some workloads in the ~1% range...

Btrfs has long provided a built-in integrity checker tool into the file-system driver. However, slated for Linux 6.6 is deprecating of this integrity checker...

Ahead of the Linux 6.5-rc2 release tomorrow there was a set of x86/x86_64 kernel changes merged overnight to deal with some weaknesses in the kernel's Control Flow Integrity (kCFI) / FineIBT (Indirect Branch Tracking) code...

With all the news in recent weeks following Red Hat's decision to limit access to RHEL sources that in turn lead to changes for AlmaLinux, finding new ways to obtain sources at Rocky Linux, interesting statements from Oracle, and even SUSE forking RHEL. The public RHEL sources now will basically be the upstream CentOS Stream code for which future Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions are ultimately based. The CentOS Project issued a new statement on Friday...

Earlier this month brought the release of systemd 254-rc1 with a new soft-reboot mechanism, officially deprecating System V scripts, a new systemd-battery-check process that runs at boot to check any system battery level status, and various other changes. On Friday systemd 254-rc2 was released with a few more changes...

The uutils project continues advancing as a modern, drop-in replacement to the GNU Coreutils utilities that is written in the Rust programming language...

Imagination Technologies today published their fourth iteration of their in-development PowerVR DRM kernel graphics driver targeting their Rogue architecture and future graphics IP. This open-source kernel driver ultimately will go along with their PowerVR Vulkan driver they continue developing within the Mesa code-base...

While IO_uring has been one of the most interesting kernel innovations of recent years and can allow for great speed-ups to async I/O, there have been some security concerns and with the Linux 6.6 kernel it will be easier for Linux administrators to disable it system-wide if so desired...

AMD Linux engineers are working on extending the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem used by their GPUs/accelerators to allow up to 128 DRM devices per system...

System76 developers working on their Rust-written COSMIC desktop have recently been improving a number of areas of this open-source desktop...

The GTK toolkit and GLib support for Apple's macOS may be taking a back-seat to other platforms moving forward and would fall into a "best effort" category...

Yesterday Intel engineers sent out early compiler patches for Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake with adding the new instructions of AVX-VNNI-INT16, SM3, SHA512, and SM4. Today that new instruction support was complemented by a new patch out of Intel for actually adding the new Lunar Lake, Arrow Lake, and Arrow Lake S targets to GCC...

Consulting firm 9elements sent out a set of patches this week to the peci-cputemp and dimmtemp drivers for supporting Intel Sapphire Rapids platforms, including for the up to eight socket configuration capable this generation...

Mesa's Rusticl OpenGL implementation written in Rust it turns out can already run the Tinygrad open-source software with its OpenCL back-end for running the LLaMA model...

With Red Hat now restricting access to the RHEL source repositories, AlmaLinux and other downstreams that have long provided "community" rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with 1:1 compatibility to upstream RHEL have been left sorting out what to do...

Similar to what I have shown with the Ryzen 9 7950X AVX-512 desktop performance and AMD EPYC 9004 series AVX-512 server performance, the new Ryzen 7040 series mobile processors are exhibiting great AVX-512 performance for laptops. In today's article is a look at the performance impact when toggling AVX-512 capabilities for a Ryzen 7 7840U "Phoenix" SoC compared to toggling AVX-512 with prior Intel Tiger Lake and Ice Lake laptops that offer AVX-512.

Intel's Linux software engineers understand the annual GCC compiler release cadence well and acknowledge the importance of having tuned compiler support available at launch. Intel for years has tended to get their new CPU support and new ISA features upstreamed into GCC as well as LLVM/Clang well ahead of product launch so that by the time their new consumer and server CPUs are shipping, there tends to be support within compilers just not at their stable versions but already found in the likes of Ubuntu. With that said, today Intel engineers posted initial compiler patches for Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processors...

While less than one week has passed since the Linux 6.5 merge window ended and 6.5-rc1 being issued, there is already the first set of drm-misc-next changes submitted to DRM-Next of early open-source graphics/display driver changes geared for Linux 6.6 later this year...

Mesa 23.2 feature development is now over with the code having been branched and the first release candidate tagged for what will be this quarter's stable release series...

Intel this morning released their open-source Compute Runtime 23.22.26516.18 as their newest monthly update to this open-source compute stack used on Linux for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero usage...

Last week we began seeing AMD engineers post Linux patches for "Family 26" (1Ah) CPU enablement that is more than likely for Zen 5 processors. This week the AMD "1Ah" work has carried forward with new patches having been merged into the Linux 6.5 kernel...

Now that the Linux 6.5 merge window ended this past weekend, here is the usual Phoronix overview that lists all the prominent new features and changes coming for this next version.

Last month AMD Linux kernel driver patches revealed a new feature called FreeSync Panel Replay that is basically an improvement over Panel Self Refresh (PSR) for laptop displays. That code didn't make it for the recently-closed v6.5 merge window but this week AMD engineers did post a second iteration of the patches...

AMD has made available the FidelityFX SDK solution available via GPUOpen as their easy-to-integrate offering for FidelityFX technologies...

While the Linux 6.5 kernel merge window just ended days ago and there still is two months to go until that stable release, already the lead developer of the Bcachefs file-system is working to get the code merged for Linux 6.6...

As a follow-up to the news last week when I pointed out that Intel has begun working on Granite Rapids D compiler support for the GNU Compiler Collection, that code has now been merged for next year's GCC 14 release...

Libva 2.19 has been released as the newest feature update for this centralized library used by the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) on Linux and other platforms...

Ahead of the planned LibreOffice 7.6 open-source office suite in one month, LibreOffice 7.6 RC1 is available today for testing...

For months Linux hardware vendor System76 has been teasing their in-house designed and manufactured "Virgo" laptop to be built at their facility in Denver. They are hoping to develop the quietest yet most performant Linux laptop. Today they published the initial open-source design files for their custom motherboard PCB in this laptop...

As a devoted Thunderbird mail client user for the past nearly twenty years since its first release, I'm elated today by the release of Thunderbird 115...

With the ASUS ROG Ally being the first device powered by AMD's new Z1 Extreme SoC with Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA3 graphics, it's been very interesting to see its performance advantages over the Steam Deck. But beyond its potential for use in gaming handhelds, it's quite fascinating to see how powerful the Z1 Extreme actually is when removing power restrictions on this SoC. In this article is a wide range of CPU benchmarks putting the Z1 Extreme up against the new Ryzen 7 7840U laptop SoC as well as prior generation Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U for reference. When adjusting the ACPI Platform Profile configuration, the Ryzen Z1 Extreme proves to be very robust from a low-power SoC delivering good battery performance up through pulling 50+ Watts while outperforming the 7840U.

While GIMP 3.0 stable likely not set to debut in 2023 but rather at least release candidates are expected, Canonical is looking at shipping a GIMP 3.0 snapshot in Ubuntu 23.10 in hopes of GIMP 3.0 stable by the time of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or at least a near final v3.0 state...

This shouldn't be particularly surprising for those closely tracking release cycles and the Linux kernel release cadence, but now it's official: Ubuntu 23.10 is aiming to ship with the Linux 6.5 kernel...

Google engineers have published early code around "Device Memory TCP" (a.k.a. Devmem TCP) as a proposal for transferring data to/from device memory efficiently by avoiding the need to copy the data to a host memory buffer...

GRUB 2.12 had been talked about for a mid-2022 release while one year later we are finally greeted by the first release candidate for this next major open-source bootloader release...

Yesterday Oracle published an interesting announcement and doubled down on their intentions of keeping Oracle Linux compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux following Red Hat's controversial announcement last month. Today is another very interesting response to Red Hat's recent shift, this time from the SUSE Linux folks...

Richard Hughes of Red Hat and the lead developer behind the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) has released Fwupd 1.9.3 as the newest feature update to this open-source solution for carrying out system and peripheral firmware updates on Linux...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" supports native hardware ray-tracing with RDNA2 and RDNA3 graphics cards where it's matured quite nicely over the past number of months. With the upcoming Mesa 23.2, RADV RT support is enabled by default for all supported GPUs. RADV also has emulated ray-tracing support for older generations of AMD GPUs and as of today it's finally hit a 100% pass rate...

Earlier this month I provided some initial GeForce RTX 4060 vs. Radeon RX 7600 Linux gaming benchmarks for this new sub-$300 graphics card. For those considering this latest Ada Lovelace graphics card for 3D rendering or compute purposes, here are some benchmarks of the GeForce RTX 4060 on that front by looking at the generational performance of the x060 series graphics cards from the RTX 4060 back to the GTX 1060.

Following the stunning decision last month by IBM that they would begin limiting access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources, AlmaLinux quickly came out working on a path forward and Rocky Linux also shared some ideas how they may continue providing a RHEL-compatible Linux distribution. We've been waiting for Oracle to comment on their plans for the RHEL-compatible Oracle Linux distribution and today they finally issued a statement...

The AMD Compressonator open-source tool suite that is under the GPUOpen umbrella has now added AVX-512 support alongside other enhancements in its v4.4 update...

Among the many interesting changes that landed the past two weeks for the Linux 6.5 merge window, the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates as a whole standout for bringing numerous desktop motherboards and other devices to now enjoy working sensor monitoring support under Linux...

Besides Bcachefs missing out on Linux 6.5, another patch series that didn't get buttoned up in time for the v6.5 merge window was AMD's work on radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation between WiFi 6/6e/7 hardware and AMD's newest SoCs with RDNA3 graphics...

About a year ago Ubuntu changed its default compression level for its initramfs handling down to Zstd level one to deal with slow initramfs creation times on low-end systems / development boards. But since then that has resulted in larger initramfs sizes and yielding other bugs like more quickly filling up the /boot partition on Ubuntu systems. Thus the developers have gone back to the drawing board and are trying to figure out a path forward for better initramfs handling that works well for low-end single board computers while also maximizing space savings and working out well for all Ubuntu use-cases...

While Google shutdown their Stadia game streaming service, with updated firmware there is Bluetooth (BLE) support for the controller as well as USB wired connectivity for those wishing to continue using this gaming controller. Google engineers have also been working on a new Linux driver for enabling force feedback "rumble" support with this controller...

While Intel's Linux engineers were very timely in enabling much of the Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" support for the upstream Linux kernel well ahead of the processor launch at the beginning of the year, one patch series that has continued on post-launch has been working to get the new C0.x idle states supported...