Phoronix

DXVK 2.5.2 is out today as the newest point release to this open-source software implementing the Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 APIs atop Vulkan for powering Windows games on Valve's Steam Play (Proton) as well as being used by other software and some games directly...

A Phoronix Premium subscriber a while back requested some fresh benchmarks of how the Liquorix downstream of the Linux kernel is comparing against the latest upstream kernel... Here are some benchmarks looking at the Liquorix flavor of the Linux kernel compared to upstream Linux 6.12...

The latest round of drm-misc-next material was sent out yesterday to DRM-Next in advance of the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window...

Joshua Hahn has posted the latest "request for comments" draft working on weightedd interleave auto-tuning for the linux kernel in order to better enhance the performance characteristics of primarily Linux servers with multiple memory nodes...

In early 2023 DreamWorks open-sourced their MoonRay renderer as OpenMoonRay. Since then they have continued advancing this award-winning production MCRT renderer. Before closing out 2024 they have now released OpenMoonRay 1.7...

Intel and Canonical have been collaborating to provide an early "Graphics Preview" stack for Ubuntu 24.10 to provide better support for the new Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Lunar Lake" and Intel Arc B-Series "Battlemage" graphics...

Of the many new features in Linux 6.13 for that kernel debuting by late January, AMD customers once again have a lot to look forward to from new Zen 5 features being enabled to additional performance optimizations. Here is a look at some of the most exciting new AMD features and improvements with this first major Linux kernel release coming for 2025...

One of the areas for benchmarking exploration that I had been meaning to dive into since the launch of the Intel Arrow Lake processors back in October was checking out the Microsoft Windows 11 vs. Linux performance for the new Core Ultra 9 285K flagship processor. Particularly with the mix of P and E cores I was curious for a fresh look at the Windows vs. Linux performance capabilities. With recently carrying out a Windows 11 install on Arrow Lake for running the Intel Arc B580 Battlemage Windows vs. Linux benchmarks, following that I carried out some fresh CPU benchmarks for seeing how Arrow Lake processor performance is looking on these competing operating systems.

The Fish Shell as the interactive, user-friendly command line shell debuted its 4.0 beta release ahead of the holidays. Notably in this release is porting the C++ code over to the Rust programming language...

Intel's OpenVINO open-source AI toolkit is out with a new feature release today for closing out the year. The OpenVINO 2024.6 release brings initial support for the Arc B-Series "Battlemage" graphics cards as well as further optimizing the Intel NPU support...

Along with the recent release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 beta, the AlmaLinux crew released their AlmaLinux 10 beta as the latest wares for this popular community/free alternative to upstream RHEL. I've been running some early benchmarks and testing on this AlmaLinux 10.0 Beta "Purple Lion" release and it's running well with performance right inline with upstream RHEL 10 Beta.

Back in August AMD posted Linux patches for L3 Smart Data Cache Injection Allocation Enforcement (SDCIAE). That L3 Smart Data Cache Injection (SDCI) work was since announced as part of the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. A second iteration of those SDCIAE were posted this week in working to get this functionality enabled for the mainline Linux kernel...

The Linux kernel already supports the Realtek RTL8125D 2.5G Ethernet controller but additional handling is required to enable the revision B variant of this chipset, which will be coming in the next kernel cycle...

Cloud Hypervisor 43 is out as the newest version of this Intel-backed, Rust-based open-source VMM project that now routinely sees contributions from Microsoft, Arm, Rivos, Tencent, and other organizations...

Building off the release of NetBSD 10.0 that arrived for Easter this year and incorporated a half-decade of work, NetBSD 10.1 is out right before Christmas as the first update to this BSD operating system series...

AMD today sent out a first batch of "new stuff" feature patches to DRM-Next of new code for their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD compute driver of material for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle...

While there are a growing number of startups offering AI accelerators, many of them are more or less vaporware and the other big challenge even among those actually shipping products is their software stacks are very premature or an outright heaping mess. Surprisingly there's a company known as MemryX that was started out of the University of Michigan AI research that is both shipping actual hardware -- and at a decent price point -- and where the software stack is a pleasant experience that works on both Windows and Linux. Here are my initial experiences in testing out the MemryX M.2 module that features four of their in-house MX3 AI accelerator chips.

On Tuesday the UEFI Forum released the UEFI 2.11 specification alongside the Platform Initialization (PI) 1.9 specification...

Back for the Linux 6.12 kernel EROFS introduced support for file-backed mounts to help with container and sandboxing use-cases. As part of the EROFS "fixes" merged yesterday to the Linux 6.13 kernel, file-backed mounts are now using buffered I/O by default to speed-up container start times...

The latest house cleaning of the Linux kernel is looking to drop support for IBM Cell Blade servers for those platforms from the better part of two decades ago with Cell BE processors that also had worked their way into some supercomputers at the time...