Phoronix

OpenELA has been announced as the Open Enterprise Linux Association that brings together CIQ (Rocky Linux), Oracle, and SUSE for collaborating around RHEL-compatible Linux distributions...

After resorting to buying a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card to be able to share Linux performance metrics for that more affordable Ada GPU, last month I posted the Radeon RX 7600 vs. GeForce RTX 4060 benchmarks as well as looking at the GeForce GTX 1060 through RTX 4060 GPU compute and renderer performance across several generations of NVIDIA GPUs. For those considering the RTX 4060 for a Linux gaming system or an upgrade to other recently released AMD or NVIDIA GPUs, here is a fresh round of Linux gaming performance metrics on the newest drivers.

AMD Linux engineers continue work on enabling the Family 1Ah CPU models for the Linux kernel as what would appear to almost surely be the next-gen Zen 5 processors...

A decade ago the Radeon R600g SB shader back-end proved useful for boosting gaming performance on pre-GCN graphics cards of the time and proved useful. But in more recent years in the R600g switch to NIR, the SB path hasn't received much attention and its benefits have diminished. The R600g SB code has now been dropped...

The Nouveau DRM kernel driver changes for new user-space APIs to be used by the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver have now been submitted for pulling to DRM-Next from the current drm-misc-next queue. These Nouveau kernel driver additions for NVK in turn will then premiere with the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle...

Merged for Mesa 23.3 is support for the VirGL code to handle accelerated AV1 video decoding within guest virtual machines...

GRUB2 and Linux bootloaders in general don't get too much attention these days as for the most part they "just work" well and most Linux distributions prefer to keep their GRUB menu hidden if at all possible. But at the same time it's an often overlooked area and not an area where there is an eager and glamorous open-source community behind it. However, it looks like Red Hat at least may have some new ideas brewing and they are hiring now to improve the Linux bootloader experience...

The consulting firm KDAB that is known for their work on the Qt toolkit has released KDGpu as a new library that is a thin wrapper around the Vulkan API and aims to allow for more productive GPU programming...

In addition to Intel posting initial AVX10.1 patches for the GCC compiler, Intel has also begun sorting out their AVX10 plans for the LLVM/Clang compiler stack...

After a rather busy Patch Tuesday with the AMD Inception vulnerability and Intel Downfall going public, the Linux kernel saw a new bug fix merged today for a different issue... It turns out original AMD Zen 1 processors could end up leaking data in certain conditions after a divide by zero occurs...

With yesterday's disclosure of the Intel Downfall speculative execution vulnerability and the updated CPU microcode and Linux kernel patches I have been very busy testing the performance impact of this mitigation. Here are some initial numbers and workloads I have found to be impacted as a result of this security mitigation for Skylake to Icelake/Tigerlake client and server processors.

Following yesterday's disclosure of the AMD "Inception" security vulnerability and the Linux kernel patches merged for reporting the mitigation status as well as the kernel-based handling for earlier generation Zen CPUs, the Family 19h microcode mitigations have now been picked up by the linux-firmware.git repository...

A new set of patches have been posted for the Linux kernel that implement AMD P-State Preferred Core handling for the amd-pstate driver...

As a lot of active development continues around the KDE Plasma 6 desktop and the developers eyeing a beta in a few months, it appears work on this Qt6-ported desktop environment is coming together quite nicely...

The long-in-development Bcachefs file-system driver was submitted for Linux 6.5 but never merged this cycle due to various technical issues and developer in-fighting. Linus Torvalds himself has now gotten around to reviewing the proposed code and chiming in on the situation...

The intel-speed-select tool that lives within the Linux kernel source tree has seen a set of patches prepared for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window. Arguably most interesting with this updated Intel Speed Select tool is now the ability to work with more than eight CPU sockets per platform -- the new limit is 32...

As soon as the AMD Inception CPU vulnerability was made public yesterday, the Linux kernel mitigation patches were merged and within hours appeared in six new stable point releases for the kernel along with the Intel Downfall mitigation patches. Today though these patches are seeing a rework to clean-up this mitigation...

As a result of the AMD INCEPTION and Intel DOWNFALL speculative execution vulnerabilities published this Patch Tuesday, Linux 6.5 Git quickly picked up the patches on embargo expiration and now there are six new stable point releases for back-porting these CPU security vulnerabilites to the supported stable kernel series...

NVIDIA today rolled out a new stable point release in their R535 series for Linux users to provide a handful of bug fixes...

In addition to the Linux kernel patches for GDS/Downfall for reporting the mitigated state and handling around Intel's latest speculative execution vulnerability, the updated CPU microcode has now been published on GitHub. In addition to having the Downfall mitigations for Skylake through Icelake/Tigerlake, there are also other security updates and functional issues resolved by this Intel 20230808 CPU microcode release...