Phoronix

While there have been efforts by AMD over the years to make it easier to port codebases targeting NVIDIA's CUDA API to run atop HIP/ROCm, it still requires work on the part of developers. The tooling has improved such as with HIPIFY to help in auto-generating but it isn't any simple, instant, and guaranteed solution -- especially if striving for optimal performance. Over the past two years AMD has quietly been funding an effort though to bring binary compatibility so that many NVIDIA CUDA applications could run atop the AMD ROCm stack at the library level -- a drop-in replacement without the need to adapt source code. In practice for many real-world workloads, it's a solution for end-users to run CUDA-enabled software without any developer intervention. Here is more information on this "skunkworks" project that is now available as open-source along with some of my own testing and performance benchmarks of this CUDA implementation built for Radeon GPUs.

At the end of last year OpenZFS 2.2.2 was released to fix a rare but nasty data corruption issue but it turns out there are other data corruption bug(s) still lurking in the OpenZFS file-system codebase...

Samsung engineers have been extending their "samsung" HID driver to support more of their wireless input devices by the mainline Linux kernel...

Code merged today to mainline LLVM is preparing for the notion of generic targets across the GFX9, GFX10, and GFX11 GPU families. With follow-on work these generic targets are aiming to allow compiling code once and then running across multiple GPUs in the given hardware family...

The 64-bit Arm (AArch64) little-endian kernel will be ready to support the Rust kernel code with the upcoming Linux 6.9 cycle...

GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor today issued their GNOME 46 Beta releases with some notable changes ahead of the API/ABI and feature freezes for the GNOME 46 desktop due for release in March...

As more exciting than the Super Bowl (at least for some of us) is the new Linux 6.8-rc4 kernel available for testing...

AMD has begun queuing AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver updates in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.9 merge window kicking off next month...

TrenchBoot has been in development for several years now by Oracle, 3mdeb, and other stakeholders for providing greater security and integrity to the Linux boot process via measured launch of the OS using a Dynamic Root of Trust Measurement (DRTM) backed by Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) and AMD Secure Startup. Much progress was made over 2023 while more work is ahead in 2024 for furthering the TrenchBoot efforts...

Debian 12.5 is out this weekend as the newest stable point release for this widely-used Linux distribution in order to ship the latest security fixes and various bug fixes...

Making for a very exciting Saturday morning, AMD just posted their initial enablement patch for plumbing Zen 5 processor support "znver5" into the GNU Compiler Collection! With GCC 14 due to be released as stable in March~April as usual for the annual compiler release, it's been frustrating to see no Zen 5 support even while Intel has already been working on Clear Water Forest and Panther Lake support with already having upstreamed Sierra Forest, Granite Rapids, and other new CPU targets months ago... Well, Granite Rapids was added to GCC in late 2022. But squeezing in as what should now be merged in time is the initial AMD Zen 5 support!..

After years of work by Qualcomm and Linaro engineers, the Qualcomm SoC support on the mainline Linux kernel has finally matured enough that new hardware support tends to come rather quickly and be well supported. With the forthcoming Linux 6.8 kernel the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 can boot on the mainline kernel, the Snapdragon-powered ThinkPad X13s has been popular with Linux developers thanks to the upstream support, and other Qualcomm-powered devices tending to play more nicely with upstream Linux these days rather than having to resort to vendor kernel builds...

Xfce developers have updated their Wayland roadmap this week to reflect their latest plans around the Xfce 4.20 release...

Today marks the UI, feature, and API/ABI freezes for the GNOME 46 desktop ahead of its stable release on 16 March. One feature coming down to the wire that looks like it may not make it -- unfortunately -- is the Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) integration...

There is just under three weeks to go until the much anticipated KDE Plasma 6 debut...

While we are still waiting to get our hands on AmpereOne hardware for Ampere Computing's in-house design Arm cores with up to 192 cores, Friday night Git activity to LLVM has revealed an "Ampere1B" core...

The macOS-inspired, FreeBSD-based helloSystem open-source operating system has published a new experimental build based on the fresh FreeBSD 14.0...

Wine 9.2 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this software for enjoying Windows applications and games on Linux and other platforms...

SPEC has effectively invalidated more than two thousand SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark submissions after it was discovered the Intel oneAPI DPC++ compiler was effectively "cheating" per their standards with a targeted optimization...

In an era of Internet streaming digital video recorders (DVR) / personal video recorder (PVR) software isn't nearly as popular as it was in the past, but the long-used open-source MythTV software is out with its first major update in one year...