Phoronix

Earlier this month one of the interesting milestones for Mesa's Rust-based OpenCL "Rusticl" implementation was getting Rusticl running on Zink so that this OpenCL implementation was running atop this Gallium3D driver in turn running atop a bare metal Vulkan driver. As of yesterday some of that necessary code was merged to Mesa 22.3...

While the Intel Core i9 13900K is running fast and well on Linux, a few Raptor Lake IDs have come to light that have been missing from various drivers and only now being addressed...

Just last week I wrote about Glibc preparing more optimizations for AVX-512 CPUs with implementing more C library functions in EVEX512 enhanced vector extension versions. This week there is more EVEX512 function work...

Btrfs' async discard functionality will likely be turned on by default with the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel cycle when running on an SSD...

With Ubuntu 22.10 "Kinetic Kudu" having shipped last week, Canonical engineers are moving ahead and beginning to get things going for the Ubuntu 23.04 development cycle now under the "Lunar Lobster" codename...

Fedora Linux 37 has been running behind schedule and today it was decided to push it back now to mid-November over a "critical" openSSL vulnerability yet to be made public...

Valve's new Steam client beta published today has rolled out an updated Big Picture mode for enjoying the Steam client on TVs and other large format displays while this Big Picture mode was designed and optimized for the Steam Deck...

Merged this morning into Mesa 22.3 for the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver is "protected content" support in conjunction with the EGL_EXT_protected_content extension...

VKD3D-Proton 2.7 has finally been released as the first tagged release of this Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan API implementation used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying an increasing number of D3D12 Windows games on Linux...

As a warning and call for testing, old and "weird" laptops may broken backlight controls when moving to the Linux 6.1 kernel currently under development. Thus if invested in using an old laptop with a modern kernel version, it may be useful trying out a Linux 6.1 release candidate to help spot any regressions early...

While the Intel Alder Lake and now Raptor Lake hybrid processor support on Linux is in good shape after various improvements to the kernel for dealing with the mix of P and E cores, there are occasional caveats. Posted this week were a set of Intel P-State driver fixes around hardware P-states (HWP) calibration to ensure it's working on all Intel hybrid platforms...

At the start of the year SUSE's YaST team announced D-Installer as their new web-based distribution installer. Now as we approach the end of the year, D-Installer is ready for more widespread user testing and they are looking for help from the community in testing. Additionally, they are looking for help coming up with a new name for the "D-Installer"...

Earlier this month I wrote about AMD "Morgana" and "Glinda" SoCs appearing in Coreboot for this open-source system firmware implementation. These are codenames we haven't seen talked about previously by AMD and this week more of the AMD Glinda SoC code has been published and merged into Coreboot...

The Linux kernel's networking subsystem is beginning to make preparations for 800 Gbps Ethernet networking...

Ampere Computing is mainlining a Linux kernel driver for accessing the sensors of their SMpro co-processor found with their current line of Ampere Altra server processors...

Work carried out by Google engineers and others around the Linux kernel's read-copy update (RCU) synchronization mechanism to make it "lazier" is helping with 5~10% power-savings for idle or lightly-loaded systems. This "Lazy RCU" work is likely to be merged for the Linux 6.2 kernel merge window in December...

Last week Intel began shipping their 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" processors. As noted in that launch-day article last week, unfortunately I wasn't able to deliver my usual Linux performance review in time due to hitting some DDR5 issues with my test platform, but those have now been resolved with a new Z790 motherboard. So as the first of my Raptor Lake Linux benchmarks, here is a look at how the top-end Core i9 13900K performs against the AMD Ryzen 7000 series on Ubuntu Linux along with the older Intel/AMD processors.

In recent months there has been a lot of RADV ray-tracing optimizations and improvements for maturing the ray-tracing support by this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa. The RADV ray-tracing performance is about to take another step forward with a pending merge request providing a PLOC BVH builder that can improve the Quake II RTX performance by around 33%...

With the recent Linux 6.1 merge window there sadly weren't any Nouveau Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver improvements for getting the RTX 30 "Ampere" OpenGL support working yet with the mainline kernel even with RTX 40 series having launched. Needless to say, there also wasn't any progress on the re-clocking front for getting the GTX 900 series and later running in a performant manner on this open-source driver. But the Nouveau developers at Red Hat haven't simply been idling but rather have been working on the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) support for improving the RTX 20 "Turing" support and newer...

An updated version of the Rust "gccrs" front-end for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) was sent out today for review. The GCC Rust "v3" patches address developer comments raised during earlier review as they try to get this new Rust programming language support merged in time for GCC 13...