Phoronix

Intel today introduced Embree 4.0 as a major update to this high performance ray-tracing library...

With the upcoming Linux 6.3 cycle there is finally support for the Steam Deck being added to the Steam HID driver...

Linux 6.1 was widely anticipated to be a Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel with normally the last major release series for the calendar year normally promoted to LTS status. Greg Kroah-Hartman as the Linux stable maintainer went ahead today and formally recognized Linux 6.1 as the 2022 LTS kernel...

AMD ROCm 5.4 was released back in November while since then it has continue to be refined with new point releases to address various issues with this open-source Linux GPU compute stack...

Today marks three years since AMD introduced the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, the first HEDT chip sporting 64 cores / 128 threads. While based on Zen 2, the shear multi-threaded compute power of the Threadripper 3990X still bodes well today. Besides 64 cores / 128 threads still being a lot, Linux software improvements over the past three years have helped maintain the competitiveness of the Threadripper 3990X. In today's benchmarks are results from the System76 Thelio Major as tested back in 2020 based on Pop!_OS / Ubuntu 22.04 LTS compared to the very latest state today when running an Ubuntu 23.04 snapshot on the same system and using a Linux 6.2 Git kernel.

For those wanting to run Linux bare metal on modern Apple Silicon M1/M2 systems, the easiest way to do so is by using the Asahi Linux distribution with its downstream kernel carrying the latest Apple driver enablement patches for the ARM hardware, the specialized installer for safely setting up the Linux distribution on the Apple, and modern package base provided by Arch Linux. For fans of Fedora Workstation, the Fedora Asahi remix has been working to provide a great Fedora Workstation experience for modern Macs...

GNU Compiler Collection compiler expert Jan Hubicka at SUSE continues working on last-minute tweaks to the GCC 13 for benefiting AMD's latest Zen 4 processors...

The work led by Red Hat's David Airlie on supporting Vulkan Video with the Mesa RADV driver has seen the work mainlined today for Mesa 23.1!..

In addition to the in-development Fedora / Red Hat Anaconda web UI based installer that has been in the works, Fedora IoT is rolling out a new installer of its own to ease deployments around edge computing and Internet of Things devices...

Among the many interesting talks this past weekend at the 2023 edition of FOSDEM was Intel engineer Jiewen Yao presenting TD-Shim as the company's work on a lightweight virtual firmware for containers that complies with their approach to confidential computing...

The X.Org Server keeps on giving when it comes to security vulnerabilities with its massive, aging, and ill-maintained code-base. Disclosed on Monday night was CVE-2023-0494 as the latest security advisory and another discovery by the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative...

Qualcomm's Cloud AI 100 inference accelerator that features up to sixteen cores and focused on AI needs at the edge of data centers continues on a trek toward having mainline Linux kernel support...

While initial Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) support for the Linux kernel only was mainlined last year to the kernel tree, Arm already has SME 2 and SME 2.1 support on the way to mainline...

Noctua at the end of January announced the NH-L9a-AM5 and the all-black NH-L9a-AM5 chromax.black heatsinks as their new ultra low-profile active CPU coolers for the AMD AM5 socket that support AMD's recently announced Ryzen 7000 series 65 Watt CPUs. The height with fan at only 37 mm makes the new NH-L9a-AM5 heatsinks work out very well for small form factor (SFF) builds and for our case at Phoronix an instant hit for running the new AMD Ryzen processors within 2U rackmount enclosures.

Well known multimedia developer and VideoLAN president Jean-Baptiste Kempf presented at FOSDEM 2023 this weekend on the upcoming FFmpeg 6.0 release as well as dav1d v1.1...

Michał Żygowski of firmware consulting firm 3mdeb presented at FOSDEM 2023 this weekend in Brussels. The focus of Żygowski's presentation for the Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting was on the current client and server hardware state for AMD platforms with Coreboot / open-source firmware...

After the prior kernel patches had stalled in their review process, last week work was revived on x86_64 parallel CPU bring-up for the Linux kernel to help in booting the kernel faster on larger core count desktops and servers. The results have been promising and over the past few days more test results have flowed in along with other positive commentary that will hopefully this time lead to the work ultimately getting upstreamed...

In development now for nearly two years is Chimera Linux as a "non-GNU" Linux distribution built with the LLVM Clang compiler, leveraging musl libc, and commonly relying on BSD user-space software components. After a lot of work on bringing up Chimera Linux as well as getting a Wayland-based deskttop going, the project is aiming for its alpha release within the next month...

The Linux 6.3 kernel's IT87 driver is preparing support for the IT87952E super I/O controller that is used by some newer desktop motherboards and will now be able to enjoy hardware monitoring "HWMON" support...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee recently signed off on the proposed "Unfiltered Flathub" feature that makes it easier to enjoy the full collection of software offered by Flatpak's Flathub service...