Phoronix

Last November AMD introduced the first of the 4th Gen EPYC series with the EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors and that was then complemented earlier this year by the July launch of the Genoa-X processors for sporting AMD 3D V-Cache to help technical computing workloads and as well launching Bergamo for the Zen 4C based processor designs that allow up to 128 cores / 256 threads per socket. While AMD has a very robust portfolio for the high-end server space with 4th Gen EPYC, today AMD is introducing the EPYC 8004 "Siena" processors for "intelligent edge" servers. Siena is a step below Genoa but still very capable offering and coming in at a lower price point while being geared more for maximizing power efficiency and opening up EPYC to more deployments outside of the data center.

Stemming from Intel engineers finding significant overhead in some Linux scheduler functions when running PostgreSQL within a Docker instance, a new scheduler patch is on the way for Linux 6.7 that will help out at least Ice Lake and Sapphire Rapids with some migration-heavy workloads. With the change being in the common scheduler code, it's also likely to help out other hardware platforms too...

Since 2021 the Itanium IA-64 code was orphaned in the Linux kernel and over the course of this year there's been talk of retiring the Itanium code from the kernel, a.k.a. strip it out. It looks like 2023 will end with the Itanium IA-64 code indeed being removed from the Linux kernel...

Given the recent discussions stemming from Fedora 40 planning to ship KDE Plasma 6 and drop the KDE Plasma X11 session to focus solely on Wayland for the next-gen KDE desktop, prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has written a lengthy blog post to outline the current state and his thoughts on KDE Wayland support...

Intel's OpenVINO 2023.1 was just published to GitHub as the newest version of this open-source toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI workloads across their CPUs, GPUs, and now also having official support for the new VPU being found with Meteor Lake SoCs...

Linus Torvalds released Linux 6.6-rc2 today and it also happens to be 32 years to the day since he introduced the Linux 0.01 kernel version...

While there is (sadly) once again no Phoronix pilgrimage/meet-up at Oktoberfest this year, there is the annual Phoronix Premium sale special for those wishing to support the site at a discounted rate to enjoy ad-free viewing, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode, and other benefits...

For those curious about the power consumption of USB-C devices, there are some nifty devices out there that have a LED display and can report the voltage, Amps, Wattage, and USB power delivery protocol version of connected devices. It's a neat display but with a new POWER-Z driver coming to the Linux kernel it's possible to propagate that information from the system itself with this new driver...

Following SLOB's removal and SLAB being deprecated and set for removal, the Linux kernel is all-in on the SLUB allocator. A new patch series posted on Friday is aiming to help prevent the possibility of cross-cache attacks with the SLUB memory allocator in the kernel...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.16 is now Wine-Staging 8.16 for this experimental blend of Wine that offers up nearly 500 additional testing/in-development patches...

The threaded / atomic console support for the Linux kernel is the last main blocker before the real-time "RT" patches can finally be mainlined...

With the AMD performance uplift on the Linux 6.6 kernel due to the EEVDF scheduler code, the workqueue enhancements for chiplet-based processor designs, and other improvements, many Phoronix readers have speculated over AMD Linux gaming performance improvements with this in-development kernel...

Version 3.3.3 of the Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) is now available for this Java library that makes it easy to utilize native APIs from OpenGL and Vulkan to OpenCL compute and other OS APIs within Java's confines. LWJGL is used for Java games and can also be used with other Java software looking for rich API support particularly around GPU integration...

Just as anticipated, the Linux 6.5 kernel has landed in the Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic archive as the default kernel powering this next Ubuntu distribution release due out in October...

ROCm 5.7 was released on Friday with the introduction of a new "hipTensor" library, the ROCgdb debugger being extended with Fortran and OMPD support, and new optimizations to the rocRAND and MIVisionX libraries. AMD has also announced end-of-support for the AMD Instinct MI50 accelerator while not yet formally announcing any new RDNA3 GPU support...

KDE developers continue adding new functionality and performance optimizations for the Plasma 6.0 desktop that is aiming for its release in early February...

While the Ubuntu desktop has been using the GNOME Wayland session by default, Ubuntu's default Firefox browser build within its Snap confinements has continued relying upon XWayland. But the Firefox Snap beginning with Ubuntu 23.10 is now enabling the native Wayland support by default...

In time for the weekend gamers, SteamOS 3.5 has just rolled out into Valve's preview channel for the Steam Deck. Those switching over to the "Preview" mode from the System Update Channel setting can begin to enjoy this huge feature update for the Arch Linux based SteamOS...

Wine 8.16 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

Following discussions among compiler developers and other stakeholders, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is preparing to add a "-fhardened" compiler option that will enable various hardening features aimed at increasing the security/robustness of the generated binaries...