Phoronix

The Hantro VPU driver that has been developed the past several years for supporting the Hantro video/image processing IP found on various Rockchip and NXP SoCs is set to be promoted out of the Linux kernel's staging area...

The Hantro VPU driver that has been developed the past several years for supporting the Hantro video/image processing IP found on various Rockchip and NXP SoCs is set to be promoted out of the Linux kernel's staging area...

Mesa's Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation is finally ready to enable lazy descriptors by default, which in turn will mean better performance for this generic OpenGL implementation across many games/applications...

Mesa's Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation is finally ready to enable lazy descriptors by default, which in turn will mean better performance for this generic OpenGL implementation across many games/applications...

Google engineers have released Cirq 1.0 as their first full version -- and stable API -- of this open-source programming framework for quantum computing and written in Python...

Google engineers have released Cirq 1.0 as their first full version -- and stable API -- of this open-source programming framework for quantum computing and written in Python...

Last week AMD quietly released AOCL 3.2 as the newest version of their optimized CPU software libraries for use across Ryzen, Ryzen Threadripper, and EPYC platforms...

Last week AMD quietly released AOCL 3.2 as the newest version of their optimized CPU software libraries for use across Ryzen, Ryzen Threadripper, and EPYC platforms...

NVIDIA engineers have been working on NUMA distance metrics within the Linux kernel to replace the simple local/remote NUMA preference interface currently used by some drivers for NUMA-aware memory allocations. In their testing this improved NUMA distance handling is leading to "significant performance implications" for throughput and CPU utilization...

NVIDIA engineers have been working on NUMA distance metrics within the Linux kernel to replace the simple local/remote NUMA preference interface currently used by some drivers for NUMA-aware memory allocations. In their testing this improved NUMA distance handling is leading to "significant performance implications" for throughput and CPU utilization...

Following the recent discussions about -O3'ing the Linux kernel and other compiler optimizations, a request came in to see some fresh GCC compiler optimization benchmarks with the recently released GCC 12. So here is a fresh look at various GCC optimization levels up through -Ofast as well as with link-time optimizations (LTO) and "-march=native" tuning on the new GCC 12 with the mature AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X platform.

Added to Intel's documentation in late 2020 and initial kernel patches out since early 2021, Intel has been slowly working on Linear Address Masking (LAM) support for the Linux kernel. Out this past week was finally the latest iteration of this work for leveraging untranslated address bits of 64-bit linear addresses to be used for storing arbitrary software metadata...

A feature supported by the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that sadly isn't used more often is function multi-versioning (FMV) for supporting multiple versions of a function with the given function selected based upon the target processor in use. GCC FMV on x86_64 allows for different functions to be used whether supporting SSE4.2, AVX, or even a particular CPU micro-architecture. Arm is finally working on GCC function multi-versioning support for AArch64...

Nadav Amit who previously spearheaded work on reducing unnecessary TLB flushes, concurrent TLB flushes, and other low level optimizations over the years. The latest work is now on "relaxed" TLB flushes as another low-level performance improvement...

Yesterday marked the release of LightDM 1.32 as the first official release of this display manager since 2019...

In addition to AMD engineers being busy working on RDNA3 graphics support for their open-source Linux graphics driver stack, concurrently they have also been working on enabling GFX940 as their next-gen CDNA part, presumably to launch as the AMD Instinct MI300 if traditions hold...

While Retbleed was grabbing the headlines last week and attention of kernel developers, an Intel engineer sent out a new patch series adding Linux kernel support for "BHI_DIS" as a new hardware-based mitigation that appears to be coming with future Intel CPUs for better fending off Spectre-BHI (Branch History Injection) that was disclosed back in March. But initial indications are this new hardware-based prevention may be even more costly for performance and is not being enabled by default...

Canonical engineer Daniel van Vugt who is known for his work on enhancing the upstream GNOME desktop stack to improve the experience for Ubuntu has recently taken up interest in getting the AMD-Xilinx Kria KR260 working with the GNOME Wayland session. The Kria KR260 is for the recently-announced AMD/Xilinx Robotics Starter Kit...

AMD today published AMDVLK 2022.Q3.1 as their latest snapshot of this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems...

After dealing with the Intel Alder Lake P GuC firmware breakage around Linux 5.19 Git that is now to be addressed by the upstream Intel developers, it was on to performance testing the shiny new Core i7 1280P with this kernel due to be released as stable within the next two weeks... For those concerned about maximum performance, there was a glaring performance regression for this Alder Lake P on the new kernel being released as stable later this month. Well, a default change in performance/behavior at least but the power efficiency / performance-per-Watt tended to be better on this new kernel.