Phoronix

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...

While there is no shortage of consumer network attached storage (NAS) devices these days, those able to run a mainline Linux kernel, open bootloader, and other open/mainline software components is a bit more challenging. Thanks to the work of open-source developer Heiko Stuebner, the QNAP TS-433 is looking to be an interesting candidate for those wanting a nice 4-bay NAS while being able to load it with a mainline Linux kernel build and other upstream open-source software...

A number of GPU hang fixes have been merged for AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver within Mesa. These fixes should help further enhance the current RDNA3 GPU driver support and also has fixes for stabilizing the upcoming RDNA4 GPU support...

For those making use of JSON data with the PostgreSQL database server, now merged code to make use of SIMD for JSON escaping has shown up to a 4x improvement for query performance when dealing with lots of JavaScript Object Notation data...

AMD engineers posted a set of patches today for enabling VCN IP DUMP support with their open-source AMDGPU kernel driver. This allows for dumping the IP state of all Video Core Next (VCN) hardware from VCN 1.0 through VCN 5.0...

Ilpo Järvinen of Intel sent in a new round of x86 platform driver fixes today for the ongoing Linux 6.11 kernel cycle. This pull request has a few items worth mentioning as part of this fixes queue...

The Broadcom V3DV driver living within the Mesa code-base that provides Vulkan API support most notably for Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers now advertises Vulkan 1.3!..

At the start of the year AMD posted an open-source XDNA Linux driver to GitHub for supporting the Ryzen API NPU IP found within their newest Ryzen mobile SoCs. It wasn't until last month though in mid-July that AMD began the process of submitting the driver for review so that it can work its way toward the mainline Linux kernel within the "accel" accelerator subsystem. Today brings a second revision to that driver...

Canonical engineers on Friday announced they are evaluating "-O3" compiler optimized package builds for Ubuntu Linux. As part of this evaluation of using GCC's -O3 compiler optimization level rather than -O2 when compiling Ubuntu packages, experimental Ubuntu desktop and server ISOs are available for testing with this change. Excitingly I ran some initial benchmarks over the weekend in looking at the performance difference.

A one year old merge request to support Wayland's Tearing Control protocol (tearing-control-v1) has finally been merged into the Sway compositor codebase...