Phoronix

GCC 14.2 hit the Internet today as the first stable point release update to the GCC 14 series following the inaugural GCC 14.1 stable release from early May...

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has recently begun pushing changes to the Mesa 3D graphics code-base as part of "The Juiciest Refactor Ever". After merging the first of the patches last week, this week has brought more code for this juicy refactoring...

For those intrigued by Ikey Doherty's work in recent times on Serpent OS as a new from-scratch Linux distribution that makes use of lots of tooling, Ikey is kicking off August by releasing the first pre-alpha image of this Linux OS...

Now that I am through with my testing of the initial Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Ryzen AI 9 365 Linux performance benchmarking and support exploration, I've begun diving in to other areas of the Linux support/performance for these Zen 5 "Strix Point" SoCs. The area for a quick look today is with the yet-to-be-merged AMD Heterogeneous Core Topology patches...

ARM Linux maintainer Arnd Bergmann laid out a proposal with deprecation timeline today for beginning to work toward removing many older ARM boards and obsolete features...

Mesa 24.2 is barreling towards its stable release in August while out today is the third weekly release candidate for this set of open-source OpenGL, Vulkan, and video acceleration drivers...

Ampere Computing hosted an AmpereOne architecture briefing this week where more details were shared on their long talked about AArch64 server processors. This announcement finally included a SKU table with suggested pricing as well as talking up a next-gen "AmpereOne Aurora" offering for a processor with up to 512 cores and some newly-disclosed Ampere AI acceleration IP.

The Xen Project has announced version Xen 4.19 of this open-source hypervisor that is rolling out security improvements, performance and scalability enhancements, and other refinements to this cross-architecture option for open-source virtualization...

The Servo project is out with their latest monthly status report to highlight advancements made on this open-source, Rust-written web layout engine...

One of the many exciting features merged for Linux 6.11 is getrandom() in the vDSO for very fast yet secure random number generation. Now that the kernel bits have landed, it's on to making use of it in the GNU C Library and other libc implementations...

There's been no shortage of cheap, ARM-based handheld game consoles coming to market. Given Linux on Arm tending to work better than Windows and in keeping vendor costs to a minimum, they've tended to be running Linux or Android with various open-source games/emulators. Many of the vendors have kept their Linux support downstream while with time more of these gaming handheld consoles are seeing mainline Linux support. Yet another one being worked on for mainline Linux kernel support is the GameForce Ace...

Merged on Sunday prior to tagging the first release candidate of Linux 6.11 were some last minute updates to Turbostat, the tool that lives within the kernel source tree and used for reporting CPU frequency and idle statistics along with other useful metrics. With Linux 6.11, Turbostat is gaining some new abilities...

For those enjoying the classic game Snake (Blockade) or rather wanting to learn about the SDL3 API to develop your own software using this cross-platform software/hardware abstraction library, a game of Snake has been added to the SDL3 repository to serve as a more full-featured example...

While the Linux 6.11 merge window ended just days ago, Intel engineers are already beginning to submit kernel graphics driver changes to the DRM-Next branch of material they want to get in for the Linux 6.12 cycle that will end out 2024. Notable is they are trying to wrap up the Xe2 graphics support for Lunar Lake and Battlemage discrete graphics so that the support can be exposed by default...

Last year the oneAPI Construction Kit was introduced by Intel-owned Codeplay Software for bringing SYCL to new hardware even for hardware outside of Intel's offerings. One of the early targets of this oneAPI Construction Kit support was for RISC-V processors and now with today's release of oneAPI Construction Kit 4.0 there is finally RISC-V host CPU support...

With the AMD Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" laptops now shipping this week, Intel has announced that their Intel Core Ultra "Lunar Lake" processors as the successor to Meteor Lake will be formally launching on 3 September...

After seeing how the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 Zen 5 Strix Point performance is under Linux against a range of other Intel/AMD laptops, the next obvious question is... how does this compare to Windows? In this article is an initial look at the Windows 11 versus Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Linux performance for the same AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 SoC within an ASUS Zenbook S16 and running the same benchmarks in looking at the out-of-the-box performance difference.

Since last year there's been support available in the MSM DRM kernel driver for Qualcomm's Adreno 700 series graphics processors. There's also been some Adreno 700 series support in TURNIP as the Mesa Vulkan driver for these newer Adreno GPUs. Now finally the Freedreno Gallium3D driver has merged initial Adreno 700 series support for the Mesa 24.3 release...

Google engineer Rong Xu has proposed adding AutoFDO and Propeller support to the mainline Linux kernel for its Clang-based build as it can help the system performance improve in the up to 5~10% range...

AdaptiveCpp as the open-source compiler formerly known as hypSYCL and Open SYCL is out with a new feature release for this C++ heterogeneous compiler supporting all major CPUs and GPUs...