Phoronix

Last summer Intel published guidance around the Data Operand Independent Timing (DOIT) instruction mode that can be enabled with recent generations of Intel processors to ensure constant time execution for a subset of the Intel instruction set, which can be particularly important for cryptographic algorithms. Linux kernel developer discussions fizzled out last year over handling this DOIT functionality for what is described as a CPU vulnerability with recent Intel CPUs. However, now a Linux kernel patch from a Google developer would enable this change unconditionally for newer Intel CPUs but raises performance concerns.

TornadoVM is an open-source plugin for OpenJDK and GraalVM that allows for running Java programs on heterogeneous hardware like GPUs and FPGAs. With today's TornadoVM 0.15, it's the first release now supporting discrete Intel Arc Graphics hardware...

Earlier this month Intel announced they would be discontinuing development of HAXM as a hardware-accelerated execution manager that's been popular on Windows and macOS for Android emulation. While the original announcement discontinued its development immediately, they decided to go ahead and put out one final version: Intel HAXM 7.8 is available today for concluding this open-source project...

Microsoft engineers seem to be working on getting the Dozen "dzn" Mesa driver up to speed as quickly as possible. It was just earlier this month it began passing nearly all Vulkan 1.0 conformance tests, Vulkan 1.1 was then exposed just a few days ago, and now Dzn is ironing out Vulkan 1.2...

For those making use of Intel's sub-NUMA cluster (SNC) configuration option available on their servers since Skylake, the Linux resource control "resctrl" kernel code is being improved upon to better handle this resource configuration...

The Intel "habanalabs" AI driver is moving to the new accelerator "accel" subsystem with the upcoming Linux 6.3 kernel cycle...

While Mesa 23.0 will hopefully be out next week, Mesa 22.3.4 was released today as the newest bi-weekly stable bug-fix release for the open-source Mesa 3D drivers...

Intel open-source engineers continue to be quite busy in bringing up the Linux support for Emerald Rapids as the successor to Sapphire Rapids and then as well for Granite Rapids as the Xeon Scalable processors following that. With the i10nm EDAC changes queued up ahead of Linux 6.3, there is support through Granite Rapids as well as confirming Granite Rapids supporting up to 12 channel DDR5 system memory...

Canonical announced this morning that their Ubuntu Pro subscription service has been promoted from beta to general availability (GA)...

With many Phoronix readers having been excited by the recent helloSystem v0.8 release as a FreeBSD-powered OS taking major design inspiration from Apple's macOS, I decided to run some benchmarks to see how this FreeBSD 13.1 based operating system was competing with a few different Linux distributions from an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (Zen 4) desktop.

Following the month-long Christmas break, the Vulkan API working group is back to carrying out weekly(-ish) updates to the Vulkan specification. Out this morning is Vulkan 1.3.240 that brings one new extension in addition to a number of clarifications and corrections to the document...

Now that Wine 8.0 shipped earlier this week, the Wine Git tree is back to accepting new feature patches after it was under a feature freeze since early December. With nearly two months worth of feature work to land, it's been a busy week landing new code for what in turn will be found in the Wine 8.1 bi-weekly development release...

PipeWire 0.3.65 is out today as the newest feature update to this novel server for managing audio/video streams on Linux...

FreeBSD has published its 2022'Q4 quarterly status report that outlines all of the progress made by this open-source BSD operating system project...

Following the recent release of the Intel Media Driver 2022Q4, Intel's oneVPL GPU runtime has been updated for its quarterly feature release that builds atop the Media Driver / VA-API stack and is about oneAPI integration for the video processing layer...

AMD sent out a set of 32 kernel patches today for their AMDKFD/AMDGPU kernel driver code in providing upstream support for debugging of their GPU compute instruction set architecture (ISA)...

Much of the Rust programming language support/infrastructure for the Linux kernel thus far has been with an x86_64 focus while obviously AArch64 is an important target as well. It's nice to see Arm Limited engineers working on the Rust Linux kernel support for AArch64/ARM64...

Arch Linux has five different officially supported kernel builds: stable, hardened, long-term. real-time, and Zen, but which of these is the fastest for desktop Arch Linux users? Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance out of these different kernel build options for Arch Linux and its derivatives.

Google engineer Ilya Tocar has introduced the notion of "light" AVX support within the LLVM compiler infrastructure for utilizing some benefits of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) but trying to avoid the power/frequency impact that AVX-512 use has on older generations of Intel processors...

Hitting the linux-firmware.git tree this morning were new AMDGPU firmware files for IP blocks found on upcoming hardware. It's likely these new firmware files are for the forthcoming Ryzen 7040 series mobile processors with RDNA3 graphics...