Phoronix

A six month old merge request to Mesa was finally merged today for enabling Radeon Memory Visualizer (RMV) support with the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver...

NetBSD continues using the FFS file-system by default while it's offered ZFS support that has been slowly improving -- in NetBSD-CURRENT is the ability to use ZFS as the root file-system if first booting to FFS, for example. There may be another modern file-system option soon with an effort underway to port DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 over to NetBSD...

The NVK open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs that has seen a lot of progress over the past year is now able to run some games like The Talos Principle, which was the launch title for Vulkan 1.0. While the NVK driver is correctly rendering, it's still slow until the kernel driver side is sorted out with re-clocking...

Google on Tuesday released their first post-holidays update to the cross-platform Chrome web browser...

While many haven't even moved yet to the very speedy Python 3.11 that was released back in October, for those wanting to do some bleeding-edge testing the fourth alpha of Python 3.12 is already out...

At today's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) more features were approved for the Fedora 38 release coming up in April...

Now that the 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" and Xeon CPU Max Series overview is out of the way, you are probably very eager to see some independent performance benchmarks of the much anticipated Sapphire Rapids CPUs that are going up against AMD 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors for 2023... For kicking off our Sapphire Rapids benchmarking, first up is a look at the Xeon Platinum 8490H performance under Linux as the flagship SKU.

Intel has announced the 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" CPUs today along with the Xeon CPU Max Series (Sapphire Rapids HBM) and Data Center GPU Max Series (Ponte Vecchio). Here is an overview of today's announcements prior to getting to some initial Sapphire Rapids Linux benchmarks on Phoronix.

Last year with the release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS there was a beta real-time kernel offering from Canonical...

With the next Linux kernel cycle we could see upstream disable their driver support for Microsoft's Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) protocol due to security concerns...

GCC compiler expert Jan Hubicka at SUSE began working on AMD Zen 4 compiler tuning patches that began landing in December for the GCC 13 compiler that will debut as stable in a few months. It looks like the work isn't over on Znver4 tuning with another patch being sent out today for fine-tuning the latest AMD CPU microarchitecture...

Established two years ago was the CentOS Hyperscale SIG for a group of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and other hyperscalers in making optional changes to CentOS Stream to better suit the Linux distribution to their internal needs...

Microsoft's Dozen "dzn", which was merged to Mesa last year as Vulkan implemented on Direct3D 12, is onto a 98.5% pass rate for its Vulkan 1.0 coverage...

For those making use of AMD's Optimizing C/C++/Fortran compilers, ZenNN library, profiling software, and various other CPU-based software resources for EPYC and Ryzen processors, AMD is in the process of rolling out a new area on the website for highlighting these Zen Software Studio assets...

Last week at the AMD CES 2023 keynote hosted by Lisa Su, new 65 Watt Ryzen 7000 series processors were announced. These more affordable Zen 4 processors are going retail this week and today marks the embargo lift. Up on the Linux testing block are the Ryzen 5 7600, Ryzen 7 7700, and Ryzen 9 7900 processors.

Back in July Intel engineers published the initial open-source driver code around the new Versatile Processing Unit "VPU" coming with Meteor Lake. This VPU block with 14th Gen Core CPUs is intended for AI inference acceleration for deep learning software...

In addition to Blender's back-ends for NVIDIA CUDA and OptiX, Intel oneAPI, and AMD HIP, Blender 3.5 is set to have a working Apple Metal back-end for that proprietary graphics/compute API with accelerated UI/viewport handling to complement the Metal Cycles support...

As part of a New Year's Eve patch deluge, XFS developer Darrick Wong sent out patches working on free space defragmenting support, among other work for further enhancing this mature open-source file-system...

For over two years Canonical has been working on dynamic triple buffering for the GNOME desktop with the Mutter compositor. This triple-buffering-when-needed can dramatically boost the desktop performance especially in cases like Intel integrated graphics and Raspberry Pi boards. The triple buffering work hasn't been upstreamed yet but the hope is that it may finally be ready for upstream inclusion with GNOME 44...

While the open RISC-V processor architecture has proven to be highly successful, one of the features that it hasn't yet supported with the Linux kernel to this point has been system hibernation / suspend-to-resume, but that support is now on the way...