Phoronix

From SC23 going on in Denver, the PCI-SIG team sent out a news release that they have announced the naming for their next-generation PCI Express cabling... CopprLink...

On 14 December is the previously-announced launch of 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" and Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors via a webcast from NASDAQ that Intel is promoting as the "AI Everywhere" event. AMD meanwhile recently announced an "Advancing AI" event for the week prior. While details on the AMD Advancing AI event are light, it's all the more interesting now with AMD teasing open standards and open-source around the event...

Intel has released new CPU microcode this morning for mitigating a new CPU security vulnerability (INTEL-SA-00950). This new microcode drop also fixes various functional issues on recent generations of Intel processors...

Just two weeks since Fwupd 1.9.7 was released, Fwupd 1.9.8 is now available for this open-source solution that facilities firmware updating on Linux systems for system firmware as well as various devices/peripherals...

The Canonical-developed Netplan has served for Linux network configuration on Ubuntu Server and Cloud versions for years. With the recent Ubuntu 23.10 release, Netplan is now being used by default on the desktop. Canonical is committing to fully leveraging Netplan for network configuration with the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release and in turn also marking the Netplan 1.0 release...

It was just last week that Microsoft got OpenGL 4.3 implemented over Direct3D 12 for use in cases where Windows lacks a native OpenGL driver or for use under Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSLg). After implementing a few more GL extensions atop D3D12, Microsoft has now got OpenGL 4.4 in Mesa running on Direct3D...

Merged overnight to Mesa 24.0 is the Rust-written NAK compiler back-end for the Nouveau Gallium3D driver and NVK Vulkan driver...

After a one week delay, Blender 4.0 is now available as the latest major update to this leading open-source and cross platform 3D modeling software...

With newly-merged optimizations to Mesa 24.0-devel, the Intel shader compiler back-end is seeing its scheduling code execute around 30% faster. This big speed-up comes due to overhauling how they store pass information and reusing that for multiple pre-RA scheduling modes...

AMD is announcing this morning in Bavaria (SPS 23 in Nürnberg) the Ryzen Embedded 7000 series processors, the latest addition to the Zen 4 family. The Ryzen Embedded 7000 Series are socketed CPUs intended for various embedded and edge applications in the 60~105 Watt space.

Since the Linux 6.5 kernel this summer the SLAB allocator has been officially deprecated. This followed the demise of SLOB and trying to get all Linux users over to the SLUB allocator. Patches have now been posted for stripping out the SLAB allocator for good from the mainline kernel...

Guardrails have been in place where the Firefox browser has enabled Wayland by default (when running on recent GTK versions) but as of today that code has been removed... Firefox will try to move forward with stable releases where Wayland will ship by default!..

The Aurora supercomputer originally was supposed to be completed by Intel and Cray/HPE for the Argonne National Laboratory back in 2018. Now at the end of 2023, it's made its first debut on the TOP500 list... But only as a partial deployment and is coming in at spot number two...

One of the great niche features of Ubuntu Linux has been the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA that's been maintained by Canonical for providing daily kernel builds of the Linux Git kernel state as well as of all point releases and release candidates. Sadly it's now been broken for one month for this very convenient feature...

Kicking off an exciting Supercomputing SC23 week, The Linux Foundation announced this morning that they are forming the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF) to help advance an open-source core software stack for high performance computing (HPC). Already a number of national labs, Intel, NVIDIA, and other stakeholders are involved...

AMD today is announcing what they call "the most powerful PRO GPU under $1,000" with the Radeon PRO W7700 that has a suggested price of $999. Like the rest of the Radeon PRO W7000 series, the W7700 enjoys fully upstream and working open-source Linux graphics driver support for launch day. I received an AMD Radeon PRO W7700 and have been putting it through its paces successfully under Linux.

With the SC23 Super Computing conference kicking off today in Denver, Intel has just lifted the embargo on a number of disclosures.

Valve's Steam Deck is a heavy user of relying on pre-compiled shaders to yield quicker start times and a more efficient handheld gaming experience. But in cases where bugs happen and a shader compiler fix needs to be back-ported, there isn't a straight-forward means of properly handling that for the Steam Deck. But with new knobs being added to the Mesa RADV driver code, there will be some options for better dealing with this moving forward...

Following the recent talk of XWayland's rootful mode becoming more useful, Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan has continued enhancing the XWayland rootful support. Last week he opened up the merge request for adding HiDPI support to this mode...

Ahead of Supercomputing SC23 week, a new version of OpenBLAS has been published for this leading open-source Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) library. OpenBLAS 0.3.25 brings new improvements for Intel and AMD x86_64 CPUs as well as a number of general improvements, and continued tuning for other architectures like ARM64, POWER, and LoongArch...