Phoronix

While we are used to seeing Intel engineers dominating the speaker lists at various Linux events around the world, it's been a number of years since AMD engineers held multiple presentations like they did this week for the Linux Plumbers Conference and now the Open-Source Summit EU taking place in Dublin, Ireland...

There has been a number of different efforts in recent time to further enhance the Linux kernel's scheduler to better adapt to modern hardware architectures whether it be for Intel hybrid CPU designs, adapting to new CPU cache configurations, or just better scaling with today's ever-increasing core counts. Another scheduler effort detailed this week is "Nest" that aims to keep tasks on "warm cores" with hopes of lower latency due to being already at higher clock/performance states and ideally operating at an optimal turbo/boost frequency. The Nest developers find that their scheduler "improves performance 10%-2x and can reduce energy usage" with modern hardware...

Ever since OpenPrinting took over CUPS upstream from Apple, this widely-used, open-source print server has been back to having a vibrant future. CUPS development ceased at Apple and there wasn't much going on until last year when CUPS founder Michael Sweet and OpenPrinting provided new life to the project...

For a number of years Arm CPUs on the mainline Linux kernel have supported Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) as a means of providing the kernel's scheduler with the information to influence its scheduling decisions based on the estimated energy consumed by the CPU cores. EAS employs an energy model for helping to place tasks between the big.LITTLE cores for optimal energy efficiency and a minimal impact on throughput. Intel has been working to eventually support Energy Aware Scheduling on their x86 hybrid CPUs too...

Released last month was Cemu 2.0 as open-source software and with Linux support for this Nintendo Wii U emulator that for years has been in development but up to that point closed-source and Windows-only. Cemu 2.0 continues advancing with another bug-fixing update out today...

Endeavour OS 22.9 "Artemis Nova" is out today as the newest version of this enthusiast-oriented Linux distribution built around Arch Linux...

Ahead of Intel Raptor Lake and AMD Zen 4, it's a lot of fresh CPU re-testing at Phoronix under Linux with the bleeding-edge software stack of the latest Linux kernel as well as many new/updated benchmarks, the latest motherboard BIOSes, and more. As over the past year there has been a lot of work by Intel open-source engineers around better tuning the Linux kernel for their hybrid architecture, here are some fresh side-by-side benchmarks of the Intel Core i9 12900K against the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X.

Mike Blumenkrantz has been working under contract for Valve on the open-source Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation for Mesa but that work has carried over into the Mesa Vulkan drivers too where there is common overlap. His recent work has been focused on lowering the CPU overhead of some operations with the RADV Vulkan driver...

Red Hat engineer and systemd developer Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek presented on Monday at the Linux Plumbers Conference on a new design for inital RAM disks (initrd) making use of the new systemd mkosi-initrd project...

Meta/Facebook has turned to kernel live-patching (KLP) with Red Hat's Kpatch the the Linux kernel livepatch infrastructure to handle live updates to "several million servers". Meta engineers shared during this week's Linux Plumbers Conference around the successes they've had with it as well as troubles encountered along the way...

As a follow-up to the recent article about Mesa preparing a software fallback for S3TC, that code was merged for next quarter's Mesa 22.3...

A change queued in HID-next ahead of the Linux 6.1 cycle aims to enable HID++ protocol usage for all Logitech Bluetooth devices...

Hopefully being mainlined next cycle with Linux 6.1 is the Multi-Gen LRU, or better known as MGLRU, as a superior alternative to the kernel's existing page reclamation code. Assuming it lands for Linux 6.1 as the last complete kernel cycle of 2022, this would make it one of the most exciting innovations to make it into the kernel this year...

AMD Linux graphics driver engineer Pierre-Eric Pelloux-Prayer has made an improvement to Mesa's common code that should yield much faster start-up times for Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive...

Longtime open-source Linux graphics driver developer and DRM subsystem maintainer, David Airlie of Red Hat, took the stage at Linux Plumbers Conference today to talk about Nouveau and the state of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver...

Samba as the open-source re-implementation of the SMB networking protocol for better file and print server interoperability with Microsoft Windows platforms is out with a new release. In the nearly six months since Samba 4.16 was introduced, Samba 4.17 has built up performance improvements/fixes and other enhancements for this widely-used open-source project...

Godot 4.0 Alpha 17 is out today as the newest development release for this open-source game engine. Also announced today that the new start-up W4 Games that was started by Godot Engine developers has managed to raise $8.5M USD to support this open-source game engine ecosystem...

Fedora 37 beta has been successfully released on-time as a development test release ahead of next month's planned stable release...

AMD landed several new GPU firmware binaries into the linux-firmware.git repository this morning for unreleased hardware...

Development on Zink as the OpenGL implementation atop the Vulkan API within Mesa remains very vibrant with a lot of optimizations and other improvements ongoing...