Phoronix

Earlier this year TUXEDO Computers announced their Stellaris 15 Gen4 laptop that when stationary could be water-cooled using their TUXEDO Aquaris water-cooling solution. Oddly for this Bavarian Linux PC retailer that was a Windows-only feature, but today they have announced Linux support for this laptop water cooling solution...

Developer "adlo" announced to Wayland developers today the work on porting Xfce's Xfwm4 window manager code to Wayland and this new "Xfway" compositor is being brought up using the wlroots library that is becoming increasingly common among the smaller Wayland compositors...

The openSUSE project is talking up their first-class support for the Nim programming language in joining Arch Linux for shipping up-to-date packages for this compiled programming language...

Coming for the Linux 5.20 cycle is a IO_uring user-space block driver developed by a Red Hat engineer...

The AMDGPU kernel graphics driver had been preparing to make use of the buddy allocator started by the Intel Linux graphics driver. But now with today's batch of DRM fixes that AMDGPU support is being reverted for Linux 5.19 due to it causing garbled screens for some users...

A final batch of feature updates for the AMDGPU/AMDKFD drivers were mailed in this afternoon to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the Linux 5.20 merge window opening later this month...

As a public service announcement for those who already have bought an Alder Lake P laptop or thinking of getting one, with kernel upgrades you need to be cautious/aware now of breaking accelerated graphics support due to versioned firmware requirements around the GuC micro-controller. While I am surprised Linus Torvalds allows this or wonder if he even is aware of it given his past statements on Linux kernel updates not breaking user-space, the Intel GuC firmware handling being versioned and not supporting backwards compatibility can throw a wrench into your upgrade experience like with the upcoming Linux 5.19 kernel...

Launched earlier this year was Alder Lake P series for modern Intel laptops with up to 14 cores / 20 threads for modern Intel laptops. Many Phoronix readers have been inquiring about Alder Lake laptop support and performance under Linux and recently I finally got my hands on an Alder Lake P device in the form of the MSI Prestige 14Evo A12M-231 that features the flagship ADL-P model of the Core i7 1280P. Today's article is focused on the Linux performance of that flagship Core i7 1280P compared to other AMD and Intel laptop processors.

Out today is the beta of the upcoming Linux Mint 21 "Vanessa" desktop-oriented Linux distribution that is built off Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

Rocky Linux 9.0 was officially released today that joins the likes of AlmaLinux 9.0 and Oracle Linux 9.0 as free alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0...

Recently on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS I've noticed that after installing dependencies for a number of benchmarks that the Ubuntu Linux installation is simply broken... I can start off with a clean install of Ubuntu 22.04 desktop but then after installing the dependencies for a number of tests, the Ubuntu installation is effectively unusable until going back and reinstalling numerous default packages. The desktop is no longer installed, networking support was dropped, and many other packages went missing. It turns out it's due to problematic and unintentional APT package management behavior that is now being fixed...

Launched earlier this year was Alder Lake P series for modern Intel laptops with up to 14 cores / 20 threads for modern Intel laptops. Many Phoronix readers have been inquiring about Alder Lake laptop support and performance under Linux and recently I finally got my hands on an Alder Lake P device in the form of the MSI Prestige 14Evo A12M-231 that features the flagship ADL-P model of the Core i7 1280P. Today's article is focused on the Linux performance of that flagship Core i7 1280P compared to other AMD and Intel laptop processors.

Merged last year for Linux 5.16 was the FUTEX2 system call for improving the FUTEX interface on Linux and with the original motivation for those improvements to wait on multiple futexes so Wine/Proton can better match Microsoft Windows' behavior for a more optimal Linux gaming experience. Beyond the performance/efficiency benefit of FUTEX2, other improvements have also been talked about while we are now beginning to see action on one of them: NUMA awareness...

GNOME Builder as the desktop's integrated development environment (IDE) is the latest software project to be ported to the GTK 4 toolkit...

The last set of drm-intel-gt-next changes intended for Linux 5.20 have now been submitted for pulling into DRM-Next. This pull has some notable changes, including initial Meteor Lake graphics bring-up...

The RkVDEC driver that is mainlined in the Linux kernel for supporting accelerated video decoding on select Rockchip SoCs has so far been focused on H.264 and VP9 video codec support. With a new patch series out on Wednesday, HEVC/H.265 acceleration is being ironed out...

Yesterday Retbleed was made public as a new speculative execution attack exploiting return instructions. While the "good" news is Retbleed only impacts prior generations of AMD and Intel processors, the bad news is the mitigated performance impact on Linux is quite severe. Since yesterday I have been benchmarking the newly-merged Linux patches on various Intel and AMD processors affected by Retbleed. It's very bad if you are on an affected processor.

Yesterday Retbleed was made public as a new speculative execution attack exploiting return instructions. While the "good" news is Retbleed only impacts prior generations of AMD and Intel processors, the bad news is the mitigated performance impact on Linux is quite severe. Since yesterday I have been benchmarking the newly-merged Linux patches on various Intel and AMD processors affected by Retbleed. It's very bad if you are on an affected processor.

DXVK 1.10.2 has been released as the newest version of this Direct3D 9/10/11 implementation atop the Vulkan API that is most notably used with Proton for Steam Play to enjoy Windows games on Linux...

Following the upstream discussions over -O3'ing the Linux kernel last month I ran some fresh benchmarks of the Linux kernel built with -O2 versus -O3. After the -O3 optimized kernel build results weren't too impressive, a number of Phoronix readers were virtually shouting that "-O3 -march=native" is where it's at for fun and performance... To appease those even though in the past it hasn't proven worthwhile and upstream kernel developers are against it, here are those numbers...