Phoronix

Hot off the release of Blender 3.4, Blender developers have begun discussing the possibility of raising their CPU requirements moving forward for making use of this open-source 3D modeling software...

Ahead of the holidays there is a new Vulkan API spec update from The Khronos Group...

At the start of November AMD announced the Radeon RX 7900 series while these high-end RDNA3 graphics cards will go on sale next week. Both the Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX are at Phoronix for Linux testing with AMD's fully open-source graphics driver stack while today the embargo expires on showing off the hardware.

PHP 8.2 is out today as the annual major feature release to this widely-used scripting language primarily for web purposes...

With the Linux 6.1 kernel set to be released this weekend, here is a look back at the prominent changes to find with this kernel. Linux 6.1 besides being the last kernel version of the year is all the more important in that it's expected to be the new Long Term Support (LTS) kernel...

Thanks to the work led by Valve engineers on the open-source Linux graphics stack, Mesa 23.0 continues picking up new features for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver...

While Intel's GPU compute stack for Linux is fully open-source, one area where it still has room for improvement is getting it packaged up on more Linux distributions. The reference binaries published by Intel for their Compute-Runtime and Level Zero components are just Debian/Ubuntu packages but with time -- and as Arc Graphics and other hardware becomes available -- we are seeing more distributions taking a stab at offering up their own package builds...

For those running an AMD Ryzen 5000 series "Cezanne" powered laptop, squeezing into the kernel this week ahead of the Linux 6.1 debut on Sunday is a suspend/resume fix affecting various models...

Fwupd 1.8.8 is available today as the newest update to this excellent solution for allowing system and device/peripheral firmware updates to happen under Linux and other platforms when paired with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS)...

With the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver that has come together over the past year and improved upon there has been the Energy Performance Preference "EPP" mode being worked on recently to further improve the performance/power characteristics of Ryzen and EPYC processors on Linux. A new patch series today implements a third mode for the AMD P-State driver...

A recurring question that has come up by readers since the recent launch of the Intel 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" processors has been whether it's still worthwhile running with the "mitigations=off" Linux kernel option to disable software-controlled CPU security mitigations to increase performance. For production systems that is never recommended due to the security risk, but for those wondering, here is a brief look at the mitigation situation on Raptor Lake with the flagship Core i9 13900K.

Blender 3.4 is now available as the latest feature release for this increasingly popular, industry-supported open-source cross-platform 3D modeling software...

Following the initial AMD Zen 4 "znver4" target for GCC 13 that was published and merged in October (and now a SUSE engineer working on providing actually tuned support and accurate cost tables), an initial AMD Zen 4 patch for the LLVM/Clang compiler was published a few days ago...

With the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel cycle the Apple Silicon CPU frequency scaling driver is set to be mainlined for further improving the Apple M1/M2 SoC support on the mainline kernel...

The first beta of OpenVPN 2.6 is now available and it's a big one for those using this cross-platform, virtual private network (VPN) system...

The Asahi Linux distribution is now shipping an early, alpha quality graphics driver stack for the Apple M1/M2 SoCs. This work-in-progress driver consists of their experimental Rust-written DRM kernel driver and then the AGX Gallium3D code in Mesa that is currently targeting OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support...

In addition to today seeing the GCC Rust front-end being declared ready for merging with its latest patch series sent out today, the Modula-2 front-end sent out its third revision which is also expected to now be merged as another new programming language front-end for GCC 13...

Among the many exciting new features in Linux 6.1 is the merging of the Multi-Gen LRU "MGLRU" code as what has shaped up to be one of the best kernel innovations for 2022 for overhauling the Linux kernel's page reclamation code. The performance results already are very promising and MGLRU is being used successfully at Google and other large deployments. The work isn't over though on further advancing the kernel in this area...

Among the early pull requests sent out already ahead of the Linux 6.2 merge window opening next week is a change to enable "-funsigned-char" by default for Linux kernel builds. In preparation for this compiler flag change several fixes have already landed along with a lot of early testing, so any fallout is hoped to be minimal...

Back in October AMD sent out their initial Zen 4 "znver4" enablement for the GCC compiler. That initial Zen 4 support was since merged for GCC 13 but that initial enablement carried over the cost tables from Zen 3 and didn't do much in the way of tuning but rather just flipping on the new instructions supported by the Ryzen 7000 series and EPYC 9004 series processors. Today there is finally some juicy tuning patches being sent out for GCC...