Phoronix

It finally happened! An updated Zstd kernel implementation based on Zstd v1.5 upstream has been merged for the in-development Linux 6.2 to provide better performance and reliability for Zstd compression/decompression use-cases from compressed firmware to transparent file-system compression...

The "char/misc" changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.2 as the random catch-all area of the kernel for drivers not fitting well in other subsystem areas. Notably with this update for Linux 6.2 is continued work on enabling the Intel-owned Habana Labs Gaudi2 AI accelerator...

With the great AMD 4th Gen EPYC Linux performance showing significant generational uplift and dominating against the current Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" competition, it's a combination of the twelve channels of DDR5 system memory support, up to 96 cores per socket, introduction of AVX-512, and other Zen 4 micro-architectural improvements. As follow-up testing articles to all of the Genoa data delivered thus far, over the weeks ahead I have additional benchmark results to share looking more closely at these different areas of improvement for AMD 4th Gen EPYC. In today's article is a look at the EPYC 9654 2P performance with AVX-512 on/off while also looking at the CPU power consumption impact and the affect on CPU clock frequencies and thermals.

In early 2021 the Vulkan Video extensions were published in beta/provisional form as a new industry-standard video encode/decode API with the context of Vulkan. As a nice Christmas gift this week from The Khronos Group, the extensions have been finalized as Vulkan Video 1.0 and are now deemed ready for production use...

In the event you missed out on participating in last month's Black Friday deal for joining Phoronix Premium to enjoy the site ad-free and multi-page articles on a single page while helping to support continued operations of Phoronix, the deal has returned for Christmas week and marking the end of the year...

The IBM Power/PowerPC architecture updates were sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.2 merge window and most significant with this update is the introduction of a new Power-specific qspinlock implementation designed to bolster large system scalability...

AMD kicked off Christmas week by posting an eighth version of their P-State EPP driver patches for implementing the AMD Energy Performance Preference handling within their recent processors/SoCs for software to hint a performance or energy efficiency hint. P-State EPP can address some of the shortcomings with AMD's original P-State driver implementation merged nearly a year ago and has been showing good results in numbers posted by AMD engineers...

A new set of patches posted for the Plan 9 (9p) resource sharing protocol code inside the Linux kernel can deliver roughly 10x better performance for file transfers...

For years XFS has been working toward online repair capabilities for the file-system and it looks like in 2023 that work may finally come to fruition...

Freed-ora had been a seldom talked about effort from the Free Software Foundation Latin America maintainers of GNU Linux-libre to ensure a fully free software kernel was installed on interested Fedora Linux systems and that no non-free packages were installed on the system. But now that effort has come to an end...

In early 2017 Microsoft open-sourced their DirectX shader compiler and shortly thereafter it's been possible to build it on Linux while finally as of this week Microsoft has begun providing official Linux binaries of their shader compiler...

Introduced nearly two years ago with Linux 5.12 was IDMAPPED mounts for many innovative use-cases from containers to systemd-homed. With the Linux 6.2 kernel, SquashFS is the latest file-system adding support for IDMAPPED mounts...

Introduced at the start of the year was an experimental open-source project implementing the VA-API interface over NVIDIA's NVDEC video decoding API. In turn this VA-API support for running atop NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver allows for GPU video acceleration within Firefox and other software only targeting the Video Acceleration API. Now in closing out the year is a new NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver release...

Merged back in Linux 5.13 last year was Landlock for allowing unprivileged application sandboxing. Landlock allows restricting ambient rights for a set of processes and is implemented as a stackable Linux security module (LSM) for establishing safe security sandboxes. With Linux 6.2 file truncation support is added for Landlock...

In addition to the HID driver updates for the Linux 6.2 kernel that were merged this week, the input subsystem updates also landed this week and were headlined by having several new touchscreen drivers...

The RISC-V processor architecture changes were merged this week for the Linux 6.2 cycle...

While Debian 12.0 "Bookworm" will hopefully be out around mid-2023, Debian 11.6 is out this weekend as the newest point release to the current Debian 11 "Bullseye" stable series...

After years of work the Apache project SpamAssassin has released its much-improved SpamAssassin 4.0 open-source software...

As of today the LLVM Git compiler finally has initial support for AMD Zen 4 CPUs with the -march=znver4 option now wired up for Ryzen 7000 series and EPYC 9004 series processors...

Linus Torvalds can be known for his hardware commentary at times like hoping AVX-512 "dies a painful death", Intel's "bad policies" around ECC memory, and giving NVIDIA the finger. The latest colorful commentary by the Linux creator is around Intel's new Linear Address Masking (LAM) feature that aimed to land in Linux 6.2 but is now delayed until the code can be reworked...