Phoronix

Ahead of tomorrow's launch of the AMD Ryzen 7800X3D / 7900X3D / 7950X3D processors, today marks the embargo expiry on the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X3D 3D V-Cache processor. Today I can share with you the initial performance around the performance of this $699 USD processor that features a 144MB cache.

The Vulkan 1.3.242 spec is now available with a handful of clarifications and fixes to the existing text as well as introducing the new VK_NV_low_latency extension...

The Linux kernel since last year has mistakenly left systems relying on the original Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) for Spectre V2 mitigation without Single Threaded Indirect Branch Predictor (STIBP) coverage for cross-HyperThread dealing with this Spectre vulnerability. There is a patch underway that is resolving this issue for Intel Skylake era systems...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is seeing work towards being able to support Direct3D 12 Feature Level 12.2 with VKD3D-Proton to further enhance the Steam Play gaming experience on Linux...

A change made to the Linux kernel back in 2016 is causing issues with NVMe PCIe support on some ARM64 devices like the Microsoft Surface Pro X and Lenovo ThinkPad X13s. A new kernel quirk is on the way for aiming to address that and yield working NVMe storage...

Merged this past week into Mesa 23.1 is initial support for Loongson's LoongArch CPU architecture...

While two years ago in Linux 5.16 multi-actuator hard drive support was merged, with the in-development Linux 6.3 kernel the BFQ I/O scheduler is now seeing some tuning for multi-actuator drives...

The hardware monitoring support among consumer desktop motherboards continues to improve with Linux 6.3 adding sensor support for many ASUS B650/B660/X670 AMD Ryzen motherboards...

While Cloudflare is in the process of replacing Nginx with their in-house, Rust-written alternative, the Cloudflare infrastructure is vast and has many different services at play. For one of the areas they are still currently relying on Nginx, this week they published a blog post outlining how they rewrote an Nginx module in the C programming language to instead make use of Rust...

Cloud Hypervisor as a reminder is what started out as an open-source Intel project to develop a modern hypervisor focused on cloud workloads and with security being among the leading concerns. Cloud Hypervisor more recently is developed as a Linux Foundation project but with Intel's software engineers being among the leading contributors to the project along with the likes of Arm, Tencent, Bytedance, and Microsoft...

The cryptography subsystem updates for the Linux 6.3 merge window landed earlier this week with a few notable additions this cycle...

FreeBSD 13.2 Beta 3 is now available in providing the latest test release for this forthcoming update to the FreeBSD 13 stable series...

The RISC-V architecture updates were merged this Saturday for the Linux 6.3 merge window...

Sent out for review on Friday evening were 76 patches implementing SSDFS, the newest open-source Linux file-system and catering to flash-friendly drives and particularly those with NVMe Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) support...

For modern Intel platforms supporting Coreboot whether it be for Chromebooks or on server platforms, they are still beholden to the Intel Firmware Support Package (FSP) binary blobs. But Google and Intel engineers have been working to enable more flexibility around the FSP binaries by being able to optionally reduce the amount of proprietary firmware executed on the CPU, optionally weeding out some of the optional FSP components, and optimizing the status quo to achieve greater boot speeds...

For those with an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT or RX 7900 XTX graphics card, the latest Mesa 23.1-devel code as of Friday has seen a number of fixes land for benefiting the GFX11/RDNA3 graphics processors...

While last week brought the Plasma 5.27 release as the last feature update to the Plasma 5 series, KDE developers haven't letup in their development efforts with this week continuing to be quite busy for the developers from bug fixing to new features...

Along with all of the Arm SoC and board updates that were merged to the mainline Linux 6.3 kernel earlier in the week, the ARM64 (AArch64) architecture changes have also landed for this next Linux kernel version...

The MFD subsystem changes were merged this week for the Linux 6.3 kernel that include a new driver for the Intel Platform Management Component Interface (PMCI) for use by the BMC controllers on the Intel Max 10 series FPGAs...

As written about last year, the Laminar Research developers responsible for the incredible X-Plane flight simulator software have been working to make use of Mesa's Zink for leveraging OpenGL atop Vulkan to thereby avoid vednor OpenGL drivers that can vary in quality across platforms. With X-Plane 12.04b3, that goal is finally realized...