Phoronix

There's a lovely new Linux kernel patch series out that's big in working on a major clean-up of the x86 APIC code (or "decrapification" as it's called in the patches) and also bringing up for discussion the idea of killing off x86 32-bit support. It's unlikely the x86 32-bit support will be removed right now, which is "just museum pieces", but as an alternative would be making it SMP-only to at least remove the uni-processor code paths...

While Intel Arc Graphics continue enjoying performance optimizations with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack, the major limitation facing Arc Graphics on Linux right now for gamers is the lack of sparse residency support that is needed for running many newer games on Linux with Intel graphics -- particularly newer Windows D3D12 titles running on Linux via Valve's Steam Play. It's been a long known limitation and will hopefully be addressed once the Intel Xe kernel driver is introduced, but at least as an interim solution there is now "fake" sparse support being implemented...

A set of 35 patches were posted on Sunday for introducing ARM64 Guarded Control Stack (GCS) support to the Linux kernel. This is akin to x86 Shadow Stack support for hardware-protected stacks of return addresses to help fend off ROP attacks...

CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230630 is now shipping as Microsoft's newest in-house Linux distribution release...

GNU Shepherd is the Guile-written service manager for handling daemons that is most notably used by the GNU Guix project as an alternative to the likes of SysV and systemd. With today's GNU Shepherd 0.10.2 some long-standing issues have finally been resolved...

Merged to Mesa 23.2-devel recently was an Intel Arc Graphics driver change to improve performance. This ended up being a rather significant improvement to performance and in today's article is a look at the performance impact of the recent Mesa work by Intel engineers to better the Arc Graphics family.

Merged for Linux 6.5 was initial MIDI 2.0 support for the necessary USB audio and raw MIDI drivers to support this major MIDI update. Being worked on now for merging into a future kernel release is the USB gadget driver support around MIDI 2.0...

With the Intel Xeon Max testing at Phoronix that's been ongoing so far for the past month on Phoronix has all been done within the Supermicro Hyper SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR rackmount server. This 2U dual socket platform for 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors has been working out well and provides a robust feature set while working out well for all of my Linux testing thus far.

The High Precision Event Timer (HPET) has long been a source of issues for Linux developers and it turns out systems relying on HPET rather than the CPU's TSC have in recent months suffered significant performance degradation with the Mesa OpenGL driver code...

New AMDGPU targets seeing the initial plumbing merged today for LLVM 17 are GFX1150 and GFX1151 as upcoming AMD APU products...

GNU Boot 20230717 has been released as the fork of Libreboot that in turn is a downstream of Coreboot focused on providing system firmware support only where they are fully free software. With GNU Boot the game is upped further by removing select motherboard ports and documentation where they do not comply with the GNU System Distribution Guidelines...

For two years now Arch Linux's official install media has been shipping with archinstall as a nice, text-based installer for more quickly setting up an Arch Linux environment. In preparation for release now is Archinstall 2.6 as the next feature release while available for testing today is the release candidate...

Meson 1.2 was released on Sunday as the newest feature release for this wildly popular, cross-platform build system that has become widely used by open-source projects as a superior alternative to GNU Automake and other solutions...

The newest weekly test version of the Linux 6.5 kernel is now available for evaluation and looking out for any bugs/regressions...

Linux Mint 21.2 has been released today as the newest update to this Ubuntu 22.04 LTS based Linux distribution known for its Cinnamon desktop environment and other Linux desktop focused refinements...

System76 has contributed Intel Core Raptor Lake HX support to Coreboot with some minor additions over the existing Raptor Lake "RPL" code as well as adding their new Adder WS 3 laptop to upstream Coreboot...

Back in April I pointed out some new AMD patches at the time for enabling a new "Dynamic Boost Control" feature that hasn't been widely talked about by AMD yet for allowing more frequency/power controls around Ryzen SoCs. But making this power/performance feature controversial is that it requires authentication with the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP) for activation with user-space blobs for tapping this greater control of the hardware. This AMD Dynamic Boost Control feature now looks like it is ready for merging into Linux 6.6...

Similar to the Dell WMI system management driver and Lenovo's Think-LMI driver, the HP-BIOSCFG driver now poised for introduction in Linux 6.6 allows for managing and configuring BIOS settings on capable HP laptops/desktops from under Linux itself...

Queued up ahead of the Linux 6.6 cycle later this summer is a new input driver for the Azoteq IQS7210A/7211A/E controllers...

For the past few months Intel has been working on a new cluster scheduling implementation for their hybrid CPUs. This rework was due to their earlier cluster scheduling code not working out so well for the likes of Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors while this new patch series can at least help some workloads in the ~1% range...