Phoronix

Google engineers this month have begun posting new patches for the Linux memory management subsystem and related components for a feature dubbed Working Set Reporting...

With Linux going to disable PCID support on Intel Alder Lake and Raptor Lake while waiting for mitigated microcode due to a CPU bug, I was curious if this disabling of Process Context Identiifiers would have any overall performance implications. So I ran some benchmarks this weekend...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has implemented smooth lines support for in turn to be leveraged by the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver...

The 61st edition of the TOP500 supercomputer list has been published this morning. The Frontier supercomputer continues to hold the top spot and the only true Exascale system...

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.4-rc3 kernel following a rather uneventful week...

A patch is pending via x86/urgent to workaround an issue with Intel Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors that is leaving the kernel developers for the time being to disable Process Context Identifiers (PCID) with these Intel mobile/desktop processors...

Arch Linux on Friday began its Git repository migration and as part of that discontinuing SVN access and some changes to how their package repositories are setup. Arch Linux's Git migration has now been successfully completed...

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed a new set of patches for Mesa 23.2 that are further optimizing the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" for lower overhead in some code paths...

Being merged into LLVM's libc library recently are an optimized memory copy function "memcpy" implementation for the RISC-V architecture...

There is pending patches for adding support for the LEAKSHIELD device to the Aquacomputer Linux device driver. German PC component manufacturer Aquacomputer has been enjoying support for their various products on Linux and the latest seeing support in this open-source driver is the Aquacomputer Leakshield for reporting any water cooling leaks and other performance metrics around your cooling setup...

As covered a few days ago on Phoronix, there's been early progress on HDR display support for the KDE desktop among other highlights this week...

Intel quietly released a new whitepaper and specification for their proposal on "X86-S" as a 64-bit only x86 architecture. If their plans workout, in the years ahead we could see a revised 64-bit only x86 architecture...

While the Vulkan high performance graphics and compute API is backed by many vendors, Microsoft and Apple are two notable organizations that haven't backed this Khronos Group standard. For Microsoft's part, they obviously prefer their in-house Direct3D. However, Microsoft is making preparations for submitting their first Vulkan extension...

AMD engineers have been working out many quirks and oddities in system suspend/resume handling to make it more reliable on their hardware particularly around Ryzen laptops. In addition to suspend/resume reliability improvements and suspend-to-idle (s2idle) enhancements, one of their engineers also discovered an easy one-liner as a small step to speeding up system resume time...

Ivan Orlov this past week posted the patches for VALSA, the Virtual ALSA sound driver that aims to help Linux kernel developers in testing and fuzzing of the sound subsystem...

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's Linux team has just released VKD3D-Proton 2.9 as the latest major update to this Direct3D 12 on Vulkan API implementation that is used by Steam Play (Proton) for running modern Windows games on Linux...

CodeWeavers, the company known for its CrossOver software for running Windows games/apps on Linux / macOS / Chrome OS and in turn being the main corporate backer to the Wine project, is now transitioned to being an employee ownership trust. This comes with Jeremy White deciding to leave the company after 27 years...

Due to the constantly evolving state of the open-source Linux graphics drivers in particular, here is a fresh look at an assortment of AMD Radeon GPUs making use of the Mesa 23.2 development code for the newest RadeonSI and RADV drivers paired with the recently released Linux 6.3 kernel. These open-source Radeon Linux gaming benchmark results are going up against various NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30/40 series graphics cards using the NVIDIA 530.41.09 release as its latest Linux driver.

There's a new open-source Vulkan driver in development by an independent developer that is working on providing support for aging Radeon HD 6000 series "Northern Islands" graphics processors...

There's been a Fedora 39 proposal under evaluation for boosting the kernel's vm.max_map_count to help with some Windows games on Steam Play. Though concerns were raised that bumping this kernel tunable too high may not be wise. As such, further testing is to happen for tuning Fedora's stock vm.max_map_count value...