Phoronix

VKD3D-Proton 2.12 is out today as the newest version of this software used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for implementing Direct3D 12 over the Vulkan API. With VKD3D-proton 2.12 is initial support for NVIDIA Reflex technology along with various other features...

Earlier this week on Patch Tuesday was the disclosure by Intel of the Register File Data Sampling (RFDS) vulnerability and mitigation via updated CPU microcode and a kernel patch. RFDS is around malicious user-space software potentially being able to infer stale register values from kernel space. Register File Data Sampling affects recent Intel Atom / E-core bearing processors including the latest Raptor Lake Refresh processors. In this article are some initial benchmarks of the RFDS performance impact under Linux when using the Core i9 14900K processor.

Ahead of next month's Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release, Canonical has released LXD 5.21 as the newest feature update to this container and VM manager. LXD 5.21 now ships with a production-grade graphical user interface by default, brings AMD SEV support for memory encryption of VMs on EPYC CPUs, object storage support, and other features...

All of the ARM64 (AArch64) feature updates have been merged for the Linux 6.9 kernel. Besides the new SoC and platform hardware support, there are a few ARM64 architecture updates worth pointing out...

Intel has published SVT-AV1 2.0 as the newest major feature release to this leading open-source CPU-based AV1 video encoder. Along with various API changes, SVT-AV1 2.0 has yet more encode performance optimizations...

While Mobileye has already announced EyeQ6 and EyeQ7, being upstreamed in the Linux 6.9 kernel is finally support for the EyeQ5 SoC used for advanced driver-assistance systems in various automobiles. The EyeQ5 is a MIPS-based platform now capable of running an upstream kernel...

The Virtual Function I/O (VFIO) updates for the Linux 6.9 merge window bring a mostly mundane assortment of driver patches and other routine changes. But there is a new driver for NVIDIA's Grace-Hopper superchip...

A few days ago I had the chance to indulge on an incredible compute nirvana: eight AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators at my disposal for some albeit brief testing. Not only was it fantastic from the shear compute performance, but for Phoronix fans, all the more exciting knowing it's atop a fully open-source software stack from the kernel driver up through the various user-space libraries (well, sans the GPU microcode). This first encounter with the AMD MI300 series was eye-opening in seeing how far the ROCm software stack has come and the increased challenges for NVIDIA going forward with the rising competitiveness of AMD's hardware and software efforts.

AMD's HIP Ray-Tracing library "HIP RT" has been one of the few projects under the GPUOpen umbrella that starts off as closed-source software but then is eventually open-sourced... That happened now with the HIP ray-tracing code becoming publicly available...

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai with SUSE has submitted all of the core sound updates and driver changes for the ongoing Linux 6.9 kernel merge window...

Intel today is introducing the Core i9 14900KS as their newest "world's fastest desktop processor" with up to 6.2GHz clock frequencies...

Some Phoronix readers have been interested in Slint as a Rust-focused graphical toolkit that offers a royalty-free license and in addition to desktop ambitions has also been porting to Android. Slint 1.5 was released today and in addition to the Rust programming language support has begun offering a Python API...

The openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling release Linux distribution has begun rolling out the KDE Plasma 6.0.1, Gear 24.02 apps, and Frameworks 6.0 packages. Plasma 5 is being replaced within the Tumbleweed repository but openSUSE Tumbleweed isn't yet transitioning to the Wayland session by default...

The Krita open-source graphics editor and digital art program is looking at possibly adding some AI features to its arsenal as well as possible GPU acceleration and other new features in 2024...

The current Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series products that were announced in 2022 built off Arctic Sound M are the Data Center GPU Flex 140 and Data Center GPU Flex 170 while now a new "170G" variant was added for Intel's open-source Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan drivers...

Eric Engestrom has released Mesa 24.0.3 as the newest bi-weekly bug-fix release to the current Mesa 24.0 stable series graphics drivers...

Since the Bcachefs file-system was upstreamed in the Linux 6.7 kernel it's been humming along fairy well. But today the Bcachefs feature updates were sent in for the Linux 6.9 merge window and Linus Torvalds isn't happy about some of the proposed code...

The EFI updates were merged today for the ongoing Linux 6.9 merge window. This cycle the EFI kernel code is seeing enhancements for confidential computing as well as for satisfy Microsoft's requirements for getting them to sign the x86 shim loader again for UEFI Secure Boot handling...

As a follow-up to the article earlier this month around DeviceMapper's Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) preparing to be upstreamed, it was successfully merged today by Linus Torvalds as the newest shiny feature of Linux 6.9...

All of the ARM SoC updates and new machine/platform additions were submitted and merged on Tuesday for the ongoing Linux 6.9 kernel merge window...