Phoronix

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 Järvinen 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...

Distrobox as the open-source project allowing easy access to running other distributions/apps via Podman and Docker has merged support for ChromeOS...

In addition to Debian promoting RISC-V to an official CPU architecture for the newly in development Debian 13 cycle, another CPU architecture/port change is adding LoongArch "Loong64" as a new Debian Port...