Phoronix

Ahead of the KDE Plasma 5.25 desktop release next week, KDE developers have been busy this past week with last minute fixes ahead of that half-year update as well as beginning early work for Plasma 5.26...

PoCL 3.0 has been formally released today for this portable OpenCL implementation that supports execution on CPUs or other back-ends by way of LLVM such as for targeting AMD HSA, NVIDIA GPUs, and other accelerators. With PoCL 3.0 comes initial OpenCL 3.0 support while the actual conformance results are still pending...

This week's release of Blender 3.2 brings AMD GPU rendering support on Linux via AMD's HIP interface in conjunction with their ROCm compute stack. Eager to see the AMD GPU support on Linux finally arrive, I quickly began trying out this new Blender open-source 3D modeling software release while seeing how the AMD RDNA2 HIP performance compares to that of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 GPUs that have long enjoyed top-notch support under Blender.

MIT CSAIL today is lifting the embargo on a new hardware vulnerability affecting the Apple M1 SoCs (no word yet on exposure with the recently announced Apple M2) and dubbed the "PACMAN" attack...

In recent weeks Ubuntu developers have been working on bringing up and improving support for the Starfive VisionFive, which is one of the most promising "low-cost" RISC-V single board computers to date. Hopefully for Ubuntu 22.10 we'll be seeing good support for this sub-$180 RISC-V computer...

With the Linux 5.19 merge window past, the initial batch of drm-misc-next feature changes targeting the Linux 5.20 kernel have been mailed in to DRM-Next for queuing until that next kernel merge window kicks off later in the summer...

It was just back in April that Sound Open Firmware 2.1 released as the newest version of the open-source audio DSP firmware stack started by Intel and also even being used by other select hardware vendors as well. Sound Open Firmware 2.2 is on the way as the newest feature release for Intel's "SOF" project...

This week Phoronix.com turned 18 years old! In marking that milestone, a Phoronix Premium special was offered for enjoying the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits while supporting the site for hoping to help provide a successful 19th year of Phoronix Linux hardware testing and news operations. If you want to participate, that special ends this weekend...

Adding to the list of many exciting features in Linux 5.19 is a new DMA-BUF fence import/export API for improving the usage of explicit synchronization on the Linux desktop to help with Vulkan and allowing more of the Linux desktop to move in the future to a more explicit synchronization model...

AMD today hosted their 2022 Financial Analyst Day where they made some new disclosures and firmed up past product road-map plans...

One of the many changes with the recent Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release was enabling systemd-oomd by default as the out-of-memory daemon that can kill processes when under memory pressure. Unfortunately, for some users this has led to a poor desktop experience with finding their applications being unexpectedly killed. Ubuntu developers are now discussing how to improve this OOMD handling...

PipeWire 0.3.52 was released today as the newest version of this open-source server for handling audio/video streams on the Linux desktop and increasingly being used now as a replacement for PulseAudio...

There was much interest in the recent Python 3.11 beta benchmarks showing much performance uplift from this in-development version of Python compared to prior 3.x releases. While Python 3.11 performance is looking great and huge advantages compared to prior versions, there are also alternative Python implementations like PyPy and Pyston. Stemming from Phoronix reader requests, here are benchmarks showing how Python 3.11 beta performance compares to those alternative Python implementations.

Vulkan 1.3.217 is out this morning as the newest version of the Khronos' high performance graphics/compute API specification. With Vulkan 1.3.217 comes two new extensions...

Earlier this year was an AMD Linux patch to prefer using MWAIT rather than HALT for cases where the CPU idle driver isn't being used. Using MWAIT can lead to significant improvements for the exit latency and now for the Linux 5.20 cycle later this year that change is expected to land...

Intel's open-source Linux driver engineers are busy not only preparing support for next-generation 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" processors but also the follow-on 14th Gen "Meteor Lake" on Linux...

The newest contribution to the open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver in Mesa by Valve's Linux graphics driver developers is for supporting VK_EXT_primitives_generated_query...

The Haiku open-source operating system project building off the success of BeOS continues steadily improving its hardware support and making other improvements...

As added reason for Radeon Linux users to celebrate today beyond Blender 3.2 releasing with AMD HIP Linux render support is that Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" continues maturing with its ray-tracing support...

Blender 3.2 is releasing this morning as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling and animation software package. Blender 3.2 finally adds AMD GPU-accelerated rendering support on Linux and many other refinements...