Phoronix

Since the introduction of the AMD P-State driver to the mainline kernel, enthusiasts and gamers have been experimenting with the amd_pstate driver and some distributions like Ubuntu have went with using this driver in place of ACPI CPUFreq by default for Zen 2 and newer processors. Patches posted this week by AMD make it easier to switch between the AMD P-State driver and ACPI CPUFreq...

In addition to Linux 6.2 promoting [DG2] Arc Graphics to stable, this next kernel version will no longer deem the Intel In-Field Scan (IFS) driver as "broken" now that it's API/ABI is in good shape...

Thanks to this year's Linux Plumbers Conference it looks like the compute accelerator subsystem/framework is finally coming together. The fourth and potentially final iteration of the accelerator framework patches have been sent out with hopes of them being mainlined for the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel...

Libinput 1.22 was released this weekend by José Expósito as the newest version of this widely-used input handling library that is now common to the Linux desktop by both X.Org and Wayland based environments...

GIMP 2.99.14 is out this weekend as the latest development release on the way toward the elusive GIMP 3.0...

A final batch of drm-intel-next feature patches were submitted on Friday to complement the drm-intel-gt-next patches. Most exciting with this last minute PR for Linux 6.2 is the DG2/Alchemist discrete GPU support no longer being treated as experimental...

In early 2020 the software engineers at Micron announced an open-source storage engine designed for SSDs and persistent memory. The storage engine prided itself on being a speedy key-value store database and there was also a MongoDB-based implementation. Last year HSE 2.0 debuted and the updated storage engine no longer relied on modifications to the Linux kernel and now strictly a user-space based solution. This week the Micron engineers are celebrating HSE 3.0 as their latest work on this open-source storage engine...

Being queued up via the x86 platform driver's "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.2 cycle is the dell-wmi-ddv driver, which is for exposing the WMI interface of the Dell Data Vault (DDV)...

Back during the summer was news that Ikey Doherty was going to work full-time on Serpent OS, a new Linux distribution he started. Ikey Doherty as a reminder previously created the Solus Linux distribution, worked for Intel on Clear Linux, and has other software accomplishments to his name. It's been a quiet few months for Serpent OS but it turns out they've been busy establishing their build infrastructure and tooling...

As KDE developers approach the holidays they have more bug fixes and features in store for their users of this open-source desktop environment...

Last week when launching the AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors, AMD released AOCC 4.0 as the newest version of their optimizing C/C++ compiler that now supports their Zen 4 micro-architecture. Last week I ran some initial AOCC 4.0 benchmarks and this LLVM/Clang downstream was looking rather favorable in relation to upstream LLVM/Clang, while since then I've been able to conduct more thorough benchmarks across a wide variety of C/C++ open-source workloads. Here is that more extensive round of AOCC 4.0 benchmarking against the open-source LLVM/Clang and AOCC compilers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced this week that their Krakatoa product-grade, volumetric renderer has been made open-source. AWS also open-sourced their XMesh software to optimize animated 3D geometry asset files...

Mesa VirGL with the virglrenderer library has allowed for virtual 3D GPU support within QEMU virtual machines. This Gallium3D-leveraging code has allowed for OpenGL and other functionality to work within VMs while leveraging the host's GPU. The latest notable addition is adding VirGL video encoding support with H.264 and H.265 initially being supported for accelerated support in VMs...

This summer AMD announced the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer "RRA" as part of their developer software suite for helping to profile ray-tracing performance/issues on Windows and Linux with both Direct3D 12 and the Vulkan API. Initially the RRA 1.0 release was binary-only but now AMD has made good on their "GPUOpen" approach and made it open-source...

Cloud Hypervisor as the open-source, Rust-written and modern hypervisor project that was started by Intel and now also backed by AMD, Arm, Microsoft, and other vendors is out with a big release...

For going along with the i915 DRM kernel driver support to premiere in Linux 6.2, the Mesa 23.0 development code for Intel's Vulkan driver is exposing performance metrics / hardware counters for DG2 "Alchemist" Arc Graphics hardware...

With Linux 6.1-rc6 due out this weekend we are reaching the point at which the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem maintainers will be cutting off new feature code from being queued into DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.2 cycle. Intel engineers today sent out a final batch of drm-intel-gt-next changes to make it for this next kernel version...

AMD has been putting out a number of ROCm compute stack point releases recently with ROCm 5.3.3 having been the latest to premiere on Thursday...

Barring any unforeseen issues from coming about, Mesa 22.3 will hopefully be released next week...

For those wondering about the out-of-the-box performance of different modern Linux distributions when running the new Intel Raptor Lake processors, here are six different distributions running on the current flagship Core i9 13900K processor. Tested this round was CentOS Stream 9, Clear Linux, Debian Bookworm (Testing), EndeavourOS, Fedora Workstation 37, and Ubuntu 22.10.