Phoronix

Arch Linux has five different officially supported kernel builds: stable, hardened, long-term. real-time, and Zen, but which of these is the fastest for desktop Arch Linux users? Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance out of these different kernel build options for Arch Linux and its derivatives.

Google engineer Ilya Tocar has introduced the notion of "light" AVX support within the LLVM compiler infrastructure for utilizing some benefits of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) but trying to avoid the power/frequency impact that AVX-512 use has on older generations of Intel processors...

Hitting the linux-firmware.git tree this morning were new AMDGPU firmware files for IP blocks found on upcoming hardware. It's likely these new firmware files are for the forthcoming Ryzen 7040 series mobile processors with RDNA3 graphics...

Among the numerous exciting aspects of Intel's next-generation Meteor Lake client processors is the introduction of the Versatile Processing Unit (VPU) inference accelerator for Computer Vision (CV) and Deep Learning (DL) workloads...

After Microsoft engineers got Vulkan 1.0 conformance tests to nearly 100% for their Dozen "Dzn" Mesa driver, they have now enabled Vulkan 1.1 support as their next step for this Vulkan-atop-Direct3D 12 open-source implementation...

LLVM 16 feature development is now officially over with the code having been branched, LLVM 17.0 development now happening with the mainline code, and LLVM 16.0 stable hoping to officially release in early March...

Red Hat continues investing in Stratis Storage as their modern Linux storage solution built atop XFS and LVM with intentions of providing ZFS and Btrfs like functionality but atop a mature and proven base. Released on Tuesday was Stratis 3.5 as the latest version of their Rust-written daemon...

Barring any release-blocking issues from coming up in the next week, Mesa 23.0 aims for its official release while 23.0-rc3 is now available for last minute testing...

Systemd developers today released their first release candidate of the upcoming systemd 253 feature release, which introduces a new "ukify" tool and has many other changes for this dominant Linux init system...

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Board of Directors has adopted updated by-laws that go into place next month with an aim of further protecting copyleft licensing...

Expected to be squared away in time for the Linux 6.3 kernel cycle, which is kicking off in February, is Automatic IBRS as a new feature of Zen 4 processors. The patches already have been queued up into TIP's x86/cpu branch so barring any issues will be all wired up for this next kernel version. Automatic IBRS can provide better performance than the Retpolines implementation used currently on Zen 4 and prior CPUs as part of the Spectre V2 mitigations. With the switch over to Automatic IBRS for Zen 4, it means better performance in some areas as shown by these benchmarks today with AMD 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors.

DXVK 2.1 has just been released as this Direct3D 9/10/11 to Vulkan API translation layer that is most notably used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for helping to run Windows games with great speed on Linux...

The openSUSE project in collaboration with Cisco is making it easier to deploy H.264 codec support on openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed...

Wine 8.0 is now officially out as the annual stable feature update for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

Sound Open Firmware 2.4.1 is out today as the first stable v2.4 release for this open-source audio / DSP firmware stack for not only modern Intel platforms but AMD, Mediatek, and other increasing industry use as well. With Sound Open Firmware 2.4 they have continued the transition in making use of Zephyr RTOS...

Going back to last August AMD Linux engineers began posting Linux kernel patches for new Quality of Service features coming with Zen 4. After a few rounds of review and updates to those patches, this work enabling the AMD SMBA and BMEC features for 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors appear positioned for introduction in the Linux 6.3 kernel cycle...

MoltenVK is out with a new release for implementing the Vulkan API atop Apple's Metal API for enjoying this industry-standard graphics/compute API on macOS and iOS...

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer has released new versions of the xf86-video-qxl and xf86-video-vmware DDX drivers for those making use of these X.Org drivers in virtualized environments...

GStreamer 1.22 is out today as the first major release of 2023 for this open-source multimedia framework. With GStreamer 1.22 comes some exciting feature additions...

For fans of the IceWM X11 window manager that has been around since the late 90's, IceWM 3.3.1 was released today as the first (minor) release of 2023...