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Merged just over a year ago into the Linux kernel was DAMON as an Amazon-developed solution for monitoring data accesses. In the year since being merged, DAMON has continued to see more functionality added and new users and developers becoming involved with this data access monitoring...

With the end of the year upon us it's a great time to see how the Windows vs. Linux gaming performance is looking as we enter 2023. In particular, it's interesting on the AMD Radeon side with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack having made great gains this year thanks to the continued investment by AMD and heavy contributions by Valve to the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver that is used by the Steam Deck and commonly in general by Linux gamers. Here is a look at the Windows vs. Linux GPU performance both for the mature RDNA2 support as well as the recently-released RDNA3 graphics.

Valve developers investing heavily into the open-source 3D graphics driver stack, AMD continuing their big contributions to Mesa, the Apple AGX Gallium3D driver taking shape, Microsoft continuing to leverage Mesa for various purposes on Windows, Zink maturing for OpenGL atop Vulkan, and other efforts all culminated with the most ever code growth to Mesa in a single year as well as nearly the most ever commits to this 3D graphics driver project...

Earlier this month prolific open-source GPU driver developer David Airlie at Red Hat picked up work again on Vulkan Video support for the RADV driver. Initially that RADV Vulkan Video work was focused on H.264 and H.265 video decoding while since then he has shifted focus to initial video encode support with H.264...

More than a few Phoronix readers have written in that have been early adopters to the Linux 6.1 kernel released as stable earlier this month and now finding their HDMI audio outputs no longer working. Fortunately, the issue has been sorted out by upstream developers and a fix is on the way...

OpenCV 4.7 was released today as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source computer vision library...

When the Retbleed security vulnerability was introduced earlier this year mitigating it for Intel Skylake and Skylake-derived CPU cores required imposing Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) that further tanked the out-of-the-box performance for these aging Intel CPUs. But being introduced now with Linux 6.2 is a new mitigation technique named Call Depth Tracking that is helping recover some of that lost performance and in turn extending the usefulness of the Skylake-derived processors still in service.

With the end of the year upon us, it's interesting and fun running GitStats on various prominent open-source projects and looking at some of the key growth metrics over the past year. Here is a look at how systemd's Git activity has paced in 2022 compared to years prior...

LLVM's GPU/device offloading support continues to advance and this open-source compiler stack has now added basic JIT (Just In Time) compilation support to its OpenMP offloading capabilities...

Following yesterday's article looking at the performance of Intel's Clear Linux running on AMD EPYC 4th Gen "Genoa" with great performance results even though Clear's kernel was limited to 320 of the 384 available logical CPU cores for the EPYC 9654 2P setup, the kernel has now been adjusted to handle up to 512 CPUs...

Updated patches were sent out today that aim to reduce the maximum memory usage while compiling the Linux kernel. In turn for memory constrained systems that attempt to compile the kernel this should lead to less swapping and faster build times...

Now that the merge window for Linux 6.2 is over, here is a look at all the prominent features on deck for the Linux 6.2 kernel that will be released as stable in about eight weeks.

The Restartable Sequences "RSEQ" system call merged a few years ago into the Linux kernel and is now used by the GNU C Library and friends for faster user-space operations on per-CPU data. Now coming next year with Linux 6.3 is set to be some notable additions to the RSEQ support...

Intel engineer Huang Ying sent out a set of patches today to implement batch TLB flushing for page migration within the migrate_pages() function and is showing very promising results...

For a long while there has been requests for having a dark mode version of Phoronix.com available for reading content that matches your system's dark theme. The lightened work around Christmas and the holidays finally allowed for me to tackle that sought after feature with CSS dark mode integration...

Intel engineers had submitted support for Linear Address Masking (LAM) with the recently-closed Linux 6.2 merge window but it was rejected by Linus Torvalds. In working toward re-submitted it for the v6.3 cycle or later, an updated Linux LAM patch series was posted today...

Ahead of the early February planned debut of the LibreOffice 7.5 open-source office suite, the release candidate was made available today for testing...

Similar to the great results of Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux on the Ryzen 9 7950X, making use of Clear Linux on the new 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors also helps in maximizing performance for these AVX-512 server processors. Here are some initial benchmarks.

With the in-development Linux 6.2 kernel there is the new compute accelerator "accel" subsystem/framework as part of the Direct Rendering Manager area. The creation of that new subsystem was pulled together by Intel (Habana Labs) and now their AI accelerator driver is preparing to move from the "char/misc" catch-all to this new subsystem...

As a long awaited gift for those using UBports' Ubuntu Touch, for Christmas the open-source, community-driven crew published a beta/RC build of Ubuntu Touch re-based atop Ubuntu 20.04 LTS...