Phoronix

System76 today is releasing an alpha build of Pop!_OS 24.04 that is built atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and making it very interesting is that it includes the alpha version of their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment. I've been playing around with this Pop!_OS 24.04 alpha in advance of today's embargo lift and it's been working out quite well...

Red Hat's performance team has been working on the Tuned profile delivery software as an alternative to power-profiles-daemon on Linux systems. Fedora will be switching over to Tuned to replace power-profiles-daemon and the newest Tuned 2.24 release is now available...

With upcoming Intel Arrow Lake H processors it's just not P cores and E cores but for the E cores will be a mix of both Skymont and Crestmont core types...

GNOME's libspelling library is seeing up to eight times faster spell checking performance thanks to threading and other optimizations...

For those making use of Microsoft's exFAT file-system on Linux systems, the user-space programs within exfatprogs have been updated that also include more robust "fsck.exfat" capabilities for checking and repairing exFAT file-systems...

Hyprland 0.42 has been released as the newest feature release to this dynamic tiling Wayland compositor that remains "100% independent" and "doesn't sacrifice on its looks." Hyprland had been doing some heavy lifting via the Wlroots library but now in version 0.42 that dependency is eliminated...

Valve has just released a SteamOS 3.6.9 beta as the newest update to their Arch Linux derived operating system powering the Steam Deck and other gaming devices...

Security researchers with the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have disclosed GhostWrite, a new CPU vulnerability affecting a common RISC-V processor...

Following the recent Mutter 47 beta release that also marks the feature freze point for GNOME 47, there still are some High Dynamic Range (HDR) display preparations being merged ahead of this next stable desktop release due out in September...

This could quite well be my simplest review in the past twenty years of Phoronix. The AMD Ryzen 9000 series starting with the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X launching tomorrow are some truly great desktop processors. The generational uplift is very compelling, even in single-threaded Linux workloads shooting ahead of Intel's 14th Gen Core competition, across nearly 400 benchmarks these new Zen 5 desktop CPUs impress, and these new Zen 5 desktop processors are priced competitively. I was already loving the Ryzen 7000 series performance on Linux with its AVX-512 implementation and performing so well across hundreds of different Linux workloads but now with the AMD Ryzen 9000 series, AMD is hitting it out of the ball park. That paired with the issues Intel is currently experiencing for the Intel Core 13th/14th Gen CPUs and the ~400 benchmark results makes this a home run for AMD on the desktop side with only some minor Linux caveats.

A set of nine patches were posted for review on Tuesday in aiming to get the Apple Touch Bar working well under Linux for the x86 T2-based Macs...

A seemingly late patch for the Intel Idle (intel_idle) Linux kernel driver enables support for upcoming Xeon 6 Granite Rapids processors...

Dragonfly 1.21 released today as the newest version of this modern, drop-in replacement to Redis and Memcached. This performance-optimized in-memory data store has added a few interesting features with the new release...

Mold 2.33 is out as the newest version of this high speed linker as an alternative to the likes of GNU Gold and LLVM LLD. With Mold 2.33 there are still new performance optimizations being worked out by lead developer Rui Ueyama...

OpenZFS 2.2.5 is now available as the newest stable update to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems...

Yesterday the Sway i3-inspired Wayland compositor saw tearing control support merged while today another prominent Wayland protocol has been merged: linux-drm-syncobj-v1 for explicit sync support...

As part of the Flash Memory Summit this week, the NVMe 2.1 specifications were published today including the NVMe 2.1 Base specification, Command Set specifications (NVM Command Set, ZNS Command Set, Key Value Command Set), Transport specifications (PCIe Transport, Fibre Channel Transport, RDMA Transport and TCP Transport) and the NVMe Management Interface specification...

Solidigm today is formally announcing the D7-PS1010 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs for the data center. The new D7-PS1010 solid-state drives offer phenomenal performance for PCIe Gen 5 servers as I've enjoyed in testing out a few of these D7-PS1010 SSDs the past several weeks and their leading performance that should be especially appealing for modern AI and HPC servers.

Back in February of this year you may recall the interesting news that was announced on Phoronix that AMD Quietly Funded A Drop-In CUDA Implementation Built On ROCm: It's Now Open-Source. That open-source ZLUDA code for AMD GPUs has been available since AMD quit funding the developer earlier this year. But now the code has been retracted. It's not from NVIDIA legal challenges but rather AMD reversing course on allowing it to be open-source...

Following last month's NVIDIA 560 Linux driver beta release where the open GPU kernel modules are used by default with Turing GPUs and newer, the NVIDIA 560.31.02 Linux driver has debuted today in stable form for the R560 series...