Phoronix

Over the weekend I wrote about AMD beginning to post new graphics driver patches for a new GPU. As pointed out in that earlier article, it looks to be a new AMD Instinct MI300 / "Aldebaran" GPU model and today more patches were posted that further confirm this target...

A pending change to the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is leading to much lower system RAM use for some games that make use of many Vulkan Graphics Pipeline Libraries (GPL). The game causing this issue to be investigated was Valve's Dota 2 on RADV and is now seeing an 85% reduction in system RAM use by this open-source Radeon Linux driver...

Ubuntu Touch as the community maintained version of Ubuntu Linux for smartphones and tablets has for years been frustratingly limited to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS as its base operating system for when Canonical had abandoned their smartphone ambitions. Today though that has finally changed with Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal having been released that moves things forward to an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base...

Back in October Google announced their Compute Engine C3 instances in private preview that featured 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors as well as making use of Google's custom Intel Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU). Since then, back in January, was the big Sapphire Rapids launch with the likes of the Xeon Platinum 8490H being released. Last month meanwhile Google promoted the C3 VMs to public preview state. The Sapphire Rapids C3 VMs remain in "public preview" from Google Cloud during which time there are no charges involved for the CPU costs. For those wondering about the core-for-core performance of Sapphire Rapids in Google Cloud, here are my initial benchmarks of the C3 series.

Going back to late 2021 was the initial GCC compiler patch for "Ampere-1" for that next-gen AArch64 server processor while last year this successor to Ampere Altra (Max) was formally announced under the AmpereOne brand. That initial compiler support appeared in GCC 12 while ahead of the GCC 13 release in the coming weeks has been some last minute tuning for the AmpereOne cost table...

Thanks to forthcoming work out of Red Hat, the Linux 6.4 Device Mapper (DM) code is expected to see some optimization work that can significantly benefit concurrent I/O performance... In one case at least acquiring buffers now about 25 times faster...

While XWayland is in fairly good shape for enjoying both native and emulated games relying on X11 to run atop Wayland compositors for Linux gaming, occasionally different peculiar issues are uncovered. The most recent issue analyzed and addressed in XWayland Git is over the game Resident Evil 6 causing XWayland to hang and consume 100% of the CPU resources on launching that title...

In time for OBS Studio 29.1, the Veovera Software Organization non-profit has contributed support for AV1 and HEVC streaming via RTMP so that gamers and other creators can stream their content to the YouTube RTMP server using these newer video formats...

FreeBSD 13.2-RC4 was released this weekend while it's already been replaced by FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 to land one more fix prior to making the final release preparations on this next stable update to this BSD operating system...

Linus Torvalds just announced the release of Linux 6.3-rc4 as we reach around the half-way point of the Linux 6.3 kernel's development cycle...

It's been one month since the release of Mesa 23.0 while it's finally been succeeded by Mesa 23.0.1 as the first point release containing a wide variety of bug fixes throughout this ecosystem of open-source 3D graphics drivers...

OpenMandriva ROME 23.03 has been released as the "rolling release" flavor of this Linux distribution whose roots trace back to the beautiful days of Mandrake Linux...

With the Linux 6.2 release kernel developers addressed "a tasty target for attackers" after it was realized that the per-CPU entry data was not being randomized, even in the presence of Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR). The per-CPU entry area randomization has been present since Linux 6.3 but then was realized it's being activated even if KASLR was disabled, so now that is changing to avoid possible confusion...

Rob Clark on Saturday sent out a pull request adding the DMA-BUF/DMA-FENCE deadline awareness code to the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem with the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle...

Merged this weekend to the LLVM 17 development code-base is initial support for RISC-V's vector crypto extension ISA...

José Expósito announced the release this weekend of libinput 1.23, the input handling library used these days across the Linux desktop for both X.Org/X11 and Wayland based environments. With libinput 1.23 comes a few notable new features...

KDE developers remain quite busy working on Plasma 6.0 development along with preparing fixes for further Plasma 5.27 LTS point releases...

FreeBSD 13.2-RC4 is now available with a few more fixes for this BSD operating system update. A FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 release is also inbound as an extra release candidate with one more bug fix, after which the stable release should happen...

In addition to the mainline Linux kernel seeing recent support for the Arm-powered Lenovo ThinkPad X13s and Lenovo Yoga C630, among others, another Lenovo model working toward mainline kernel support is the Lenovo Flex 5G...

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution that they make public, CBL-Mariner, began with a very niche focus while over time has continued adding additional packages as it is worked into becoming a more robust Linux platform...