Phoronix

A few months ago I wrote about AMD Linux engineers working on ACPI PHAT support for the Linux kernel. This week new patches around Linux ACPI PHAT handling have been posted with further confirmation of this functionality coming to "future" AMD SoCs...

With Intel's very timely upstream Linux hardware support going back years, they typically start on the upstream hardware enablement well in advance of the product's planned public launch. On a number of occasions this has meant adding support to the Linux kernel for hardware that never ends up being released to consumers. There's been recent cases like the Thunder Bay support that was dropped from the kernel after it became clear that the SoC would never ship to now a more extreme case of a driver being in the mainline kernel for 15 years to support never-released hardware...

The Linux kernel's thermal driver has the obvious notion of hot and critically-hot trip points while to this point there hasn't been the opposite: cold trip points (events) but that's finally been proposed as we approach the end of 2023...

SVT-AV1 v1.8 was released this week as the newest version of this open-source AV1 video encoder originally started by Intel and continues to be developed by Intel engineers in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media. As with most releases, optimizing this CPU-based AV1 encoder's performance continues to be a key priority...

Canonical is experimenting with x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels! They have produced an experimental build of Ubuntu Server using x86_64_v3 for requiring basically Intel and AMD CPUs with AVX capabilities. But they aren't yet committing to it as a default or when such a change may materialize...

Since the release of the Threadripper 7000 series on 20 November I've carried out and published many benchmarks of these new HEDT/PRO CPUs including the flagship AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX featuring 96-cores / 192-threads. All of my Threadripper PRO 7995WX benchmarks have been carried out using an HP Z6 G5 A workstation and it's proven to be an outright beast for creators, software developers, and others needing immense multi-threaded capabilities at your finger tips. Here's more about my experience with this new high-end HP workstation.

Red Hat engineers have been developing Initoverlayfs as a scalable initial file-system. The code is currently in early form and the developers are still looking for feedback from the community as well as figuring out whether it properly belongs in kernel or user-space...

Following Canonical pulling on control of LXD and maintainership being limited to Canonical employees, LXD 5.20 was released today where they have also decided to change its license moving forward to AGPLv3 by default...

ONNX in collaboration with AMD have announced TurnkeyML as a new open-source machine learning toolchain focused on agile model development and deployment...

With Linux 6.7 there's now support for enabling/disabling 32-bit program support at boot-time. The "ia32_emulation=" argument can be used for enabling/disabling 32-bit user-space program support and the ability to support 32-bit system calls. Right now when forcing off the x86 32-bit support it can be confusing if the user is unaware as no warning is currently provided, but that is about to change...

The long-in-development work for a fully-functional multi-threaded FFmpeg command line has been merged! The FFmpeg CLI with multi-threaded transcoding pipelines is now merged to FFmpeg Git ahead of FFmpeg 7.0 releasing early next year. FFmpeg is widely-used throughout many industries for video transcoding and in today's many-core world this is a terrific improvement for this key open-source project...

Linux 6.6 brought an initial Intel Visual Sensing Controller "IVSC" driver. The Intel IVSC drivers have long been out-of-tree for use with Alder Lake laptops and newer. Linux 6.7 brought the La Jolla Cove Adadpter driver code as part of the IVSC controller. With Linux 6.8 there's yet more work landing on the IVSC front...

Cling 1.0 was released this week for this open-source interactive C++ interpreter that builds atop LLVM/Clang. Cling is implemented as an extension to LLVM/Clang to serve as an interpeter leveraging the read-eval-print loop (REPL) concept and relies on just-in-time (JIT) compilation...

The feature work continues pouring in for Mesa 24.0 with new OpenGL and Vulkan driver features continuing to be enabled...

Of the many new features in Linux 6.7, one of the items exciting Phoronix readers the most is the merging of the long-in-development Bcachefs file-system...

While it's been three years now since Ampere Altra Q80 was first introduced and two years since first testing the 128-core Ampere Altra Max, this ARM server platform has aged rather well with more robust hardware platforms coming to market with better firmware, the AArch64 Linux/open-source software ecosystem as a whole improving a lot during this time and more open-source projects receiving ARM optimizations, and other improvements made. While we're eagerly awaiting to see AmpereOne hardware, here is a look at how Ampere Altra Max M128-30 is standing up against current AMD EPYC Genoa(X) and Bergamo server CPUs along with Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids processors in raw performance and power efficiency.

A patch merged this weekend for Mesa 24.0-devel is helping the performance of the open-source NVK Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs but the performance remains well short still of the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack...

WayVNC v0.8 is working its way toward release as a VNC server for wlroots-based Wayland compositors like Sway. WayVNC continues to make it quite easy to have VNC support for Wayland desktops employing wlroots and this next release brings even more features...

Storage company Kioxia that was spun off from Toshiba several years ago has donated a software development kit (SDK) to the Linux Foundation for establishing the Software-Enabled Flash SDK. This is for opening new doors and innovative uses around flash memory...

Since earlier this year AMD has been working on Linux support for WBRF for mitigating WiFi radio frequency interference (RFI) with their latest Ryzen 7000 and forthcoming Ryzen 8000 series mobile processors. That work looks like it will be ready to land in Linux 6.8...