Phoronix

This week Intel released Embree 4.0 as the newest version of their open-source, high performance ray-tracing library. While the headline feature is now having support for GPU acceleration with SYCL to take advantage of Arc Graphics and other GPU hardware with SYCL support, for those that have long been using Embree on CPUs its performance has also improved. Here are some initial CPU-based benchmarks I did this week on Embree 4.0 with Intel's new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors.

Apple introduced the Touch Bar to their MacBook Pro laptops a half-decade ago as a dynamic touchscreen to replace the function keys on the keyboard. While some MacBook Pro models have already dropped the Touch Bar for not catching on, some community developers in the open-source Linux community continue work on enabling the functionality for the upstream Linux kernel...

After being in development for nearly one year , Zstd 1.5.4 has been released with many "significant performance improvements across multiple scenarios" for this increasingly-used data compression algorithm...

Red Hat engineers have been working on a new web-based user-interface for Fedora's installer for more than on year now and it's been worked into good shape while still not at feature parity to the Anaconda installer with its GTK interface. Martin Kolman presented at FOSDEM last weekend on Fedora's new installer UI to offer insight into their motives for making it web-based and what work remains...

The Gentoo project has provided a 2022 recap that highlights all of their interesting milestones achieved over the past year for this traditionally source-based Linux distribution that has long been popular with enthusiasts and power users...

The past few years there has been hipSYCL as an open-source project for not only taking SYCL codes to Radeon ROCm with HIP but also NVIDIA CUDA and other targets. The hipSYCL project has now decided to rename itself to Open SYCL to reflect its broader focus on supporting CPUs and GPUs from all major vendors and not being limited to just AMD's HIP interface...

Upstream kernel developers have begun hitting RAM capacity issues when carrying out large Linux kernel builds with the likes of "allyesconfig" for enabling all possible modules/options. While 32GB of system RAM has been common for developer desktops in recent years, large Linux kernel builds and taking advantage of multiple compile jobs have begun to cross that threshold and leading to out-of-memory behavior. Fortunately, a set of patches to the kernel's objtool is taming the memory use to reign in kernel builds for such scenarios...

AMD has made some late changes for Linux 6.2 around the Scatter/Gather (S/G) functionality for APUs that enables display scan-out from system memory...

For fans of the Doom (2016) video game looking to enjoy the title with the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation, a simple fix showed how addressing a simple oversight can boost the performance by a magnitude of 10x...

AMD and Atos announced today that they are building a new supercomputer in Bavaria for the Max Planck Society...

Earlier this week I posted benchmarks looking at how the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X performance has evolved in the three years to the day since that 64-core / 128-thread HEDT chip launched. While overall the Threadripper 3990X performance has evolved nicely under Linux since 2020, when it came to the video encoding tests in particular they performed worse overall. As I had raised in that earlier article and now elaborated with some follow-up tests, that regression is driven by the default "schedutil" frequency scaling governor used by default.

One of the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver milestones we have to look forward to this year is the introduction of the new "Xe" kernel graphics driver to effectively succeed the existing "i915" Direct Rendering Manager driver for recent generations of Intel graphics. More prep code was merged this week to Mesa's Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver in preparing to be able to make use of that new kernel mode driver once its upstreamed into the Linux kernel...

A new GTK blog post summarized a recent meet-up of GTK core developers for better sorting out active GTK4 work as well as some planning toward GTK5...

The BSD operating system projects tend to not receive as much support from hardware vendors as Linux and their driver support is made even more fragmented on the BSD side due to many subtle as well as not so subtle differences between the major BSDs. NetBSD developer Pierre Pronchery has proposed more "harmony" among BSD drivers with increased collaboration between the major BSD players on driver development...

FreeType 2.13 is out today as the newest version of this widely-used font rendering library. New to FreeType 2.13 is a new Qt-based demo program...

Over the past two years since an Aquacomputer HWMON driver was first introduced to the mainline Linux kernel, it's continued to be extended to support more products from this German PC cooling/peripheral retailer. With Linux 6.3 additional Aquacomputer components are now supported by this kernel driver...

The Etnaviv DRM driver started out in the Linux kernel providing reverse-engineered kernel graphics driver support for Vivante graphics IP developed by VeriSilicon and found within various SoCs. With the upcoming Linux 6.3 cycle the Etnaviv DRM driver is adding support for VeriSilicon's Neural Network Processor (NPU) IP...

While there's been a multi-year effort for Wayland high resolution scrolling, support by the desktop environments for this functionality, and all the other infrastructure work, high resolution scrolling is proving to still be a challenge for Linux in 2023. The latest is now the Linux kernel dropping Logitech high resolution scrolling for mice connected via USB until further improvements can be made...

A pending change to the GNOME Shell will make it easier to monitor running background applications that otherwise are not visually presented currently on the desktop...

Coming about over the past two years has been uutils as a re-implementation of GNU Coreutils written within the Rust programming language. This Rust-based version of cp, mv, and other core utilities is reaching closer to parity with the widely-used GNU upstream and becoming capable of taking on more real-world uses...