Phoronix

Intel's oneDNN Deep Neural Network Library used for building deep learning applications is preparing another release that continues going heavy on performance optimizations and preparing for future Intel hardware generations...

In development the past several months has been patches to allow changing the compression algorithm used by the hibernation images of the Linux kernel while preserving the system memory contents. With using LZ4 yields faster system restore times from hibernation than the current de facto compression algorithm used of LZO. This work is now queued for introduction in Linux 6.9...

While Intel is the company behind XeSS - Xe Super Sampling, under Linux it's an ongoing story of having to hide the fact that Intel graphics are in use when trying to enjoy Windows games running on Steam Play that are XeSS-enabled. The latest example is the HITMAN 3 game that can work on modern Arc Graphics as long as you conceal the fact under Linux that Intel graphics are being used...

Adding to the list of features slated for the upcoming Linux 6.9 cycle is allowing RISC-V kernel builds to be compiled with Clang Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) enabled...

Kicking off what may end up being a fairly busy Patch Tuesday are two WiFi authentication vulnerabilities being made public that affect Intel's IWD daemon as well as the WPA_Supplicant software -- between the two they are the most common solutions for wireless daemons on Linux systems...

A new blog post was posted by the Redox OS team that is working on their Rust-written micro-kernel designed open-source operating system. Their latest post lays out their porting strategy for getting more Linux and BSD user-space software running on this Rust-based OS...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) on Monday approved some last-minute features ahead of the Fedora Linux 40 release quickly coming up in February...

Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver for providing open-source OpenGL support on Linux systems has implemented indirect draw generation. For software relying heavily on indirect draws will see a "massive boost" in performance...

The FEX emulator 2402 release is now available for this open-source project allowing x86_64 binaries to run on AArch64 (ARM64) platforms, including games and the likes of Valve's Steam Play software...

As noted in prior Phoronix articles for months, FreeBSD 14 is likely to be the last for supporting prominent 32-bit systems. On the FreeBSD mailing list more details on the FreeBSD 32-bit deprecation process was posted this week...

It's been nearly one year to the day since outlining intel's AVX-512 powered sorting library to offer blazing fast sort speeds. Over the past year has brought the 1.0 release, new algorithms in v2.0, AVX2 support and more AVX-512 optimizations in v4.0, and now today Intel is out with x86-simd-sort 5.0 with yet more performance improvements...

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...