Phoronix

Stemming from a recent reader request around seeing some fresh OpenJDK performance benchmarks, here are benchmarks of OpenJDK 9 through OpenJDK 18 plus the early access OpenJDK 19 builds. Additionally, OpenJ9 and GraalVM CE were tossed in as alternative implementations.

A set of patches have been posted for making the "-O3" compiler optimization level more easily accessible when building the Linux kernel but still it's not recommended and some kernel developers do not even want to see it as a Kconfig option...

This week's DRM-Misc-Next pull request was sent out of new DRM changes ready for queuing ahead of Linux 5.20. There isn't too much to get excited about for this week's code updates going to DRM-Next, but there is "fbcon: Improve scrolling performance" that did get my attention...

From 2011 to 2017 while Ubuntu had been using the LightDM display manager developed by Canonical, their engineers were actively supporting it and making new releases to coincide with new Ubuntu Linux updates. But with Ubuntu now using GDM as its default desktop display manager, there hasn't been a new LightDM release in three years and not much in the way of upstream activity. Today Canonical's lead LightDM maintainer issued a status update for the project...

The first beta of Krita 5.1 for this leading open-source digital painting program is now available for testing...

Adding to the list of features slowly building up that will be destined for the Linux 5.20 cycle, Jens Axboe has queued up the support for async buffered writes with XFS when using IO_uring can deliver some significant performance advantages...

OpenZFS 2.1.5 was released this afternoon as the newest maintenance release for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation that currently works on Linux and FreeBSD systems...

Last year I signed up for SpaceX's Starlink satellite Internet service with hopes of using it to replace the Internet connection used for running Phoronix. After months of using Starlink and carrying out thousands of benchmarks, Starlink in the US midwest / Chicagoland area has proven reliable but the performance can be rather volatile still and it was frustrating at first waiting for some Starlink accessories to ship, but the self-service nature and simplicity of the setup were great.

Back in March there were Linux kernel patches posted for review to boot Linux on the Nintendo Wii U game console after this Linux porting work has long been done out-of-tree. A new iteration of those Wii U enablement patches for the Linux kernel have now been posted...

Wine developers have released VKD3D 1.4, the newest version of their Direct3D 12 on Vulkan implementation that is useful with Wine for enjoying newer Windows games on Linux...

After AMD announced FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 back in March, as of today they have made good on their word to open-source it...

The open-source Mesa "R600" Gallium3D driver for supporting AMD graphics processors prior to the Radeon HD 7000 series, a rewritten NIR back-end has been published that enables better performance and proper FP64 usage...

With the AMD Radeon "HIP" acceleration in Blender 3.2 with the Cycles back-end, an unfortunate early limitation is that this is limited to just AMD RDNA2 (Radeon RX 6000 series) graphics processors while prior generation RDNA1 GPUs have issues with some textures like those used in the benchmarks. This week though AMD did post a new patch for Blender enabling HIP support on Windows and Linux for Vega/GFX9 graphics...

One of the multi-year efforts in the GNOME Wayland camp has been on deep color support and it's been of interest to Ubuntu developers among other parties. After not hearing about any progress on GNOME Wayland deep color support in a while, some progress is now being made...

Merged yesterday into Linux 5.19 as a post merge window change is making the kernel's signature verification code FIPS compliant...

AMD today released a new update to AMDVLK, their official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems that is derived from their internal Vulkan driver sources while plumbed to use the open-source LLVM AMDGPU shader compiler back-end. For Linux gamers this driver doesn't remain as popular as Mesa's RADV but the update today does deliver on some game performance optimizations...

Google today released Chrome 103 as the newest monthly feature update to its cross-platform web browser...

The PCI SIG today announced the PCI Express 7.0 specification that doubles the data rate to 128 GT/s and should be released to members in 2025...

To complement the AMD HIP, NVIDIA CUDA, and NVIDIA OptiX acceleration in Blender 3.2, Intel engineers are still hoping to have their Intel oneAPI SYCL support ready to premiere in Blender 3.3 for Intel GPU-based Cycles acceleration with Intel integrated and discrete graphics processors...

It's been known for a while that The Khronos Group and its Vulkan working group has been working on a cross-vendor extension for mesh shaders akin to what is offered already by Direct3D 12 and with NVIDIA by their VK_NV_mesh_shader extension. A few more details about the forthcoming Vulkan mesh shader support were detailed today...