Phoronix

While not record-shattering like the 1.1 Exaflops Frontier supercomputer at ORNL that took the Top500 spot this year from Fugaku, LUMI was inaugurated today with the claim of Europe's most powerful supercomputer...

AMD's Radeon Memory Visualizer "RMV" tool from their GPUOpen initiative has allowed better understanding video memory usage with Windows across multiple APIs. In citing the "rising popularity of gaming on the Linux OS", AMD has now enabled Linux support for this tool...

After battling Ceph storage issues and related problems for the past day after two solid-state drives failed, the FreeDesktop.org GitLab that is used for the centralized, coordination of the open-source Linux graphics driver development and other open-source software is back online...

A patch from AMD to further tune the Linux kernel's scheduler around NUMA imbalancing has been queued up and slated for introduction in Linux 5.20. For some workloads this scheduler tuning can help out significantly for AMD Zen-based systems and even on Intel Xeon servers has the possibility of helping too...

GNOME developers are working on supporting the Linux KMS "Max BPC" connector property that is supported by some of the Direct Rendering Manager drivers for limiting the maximum bits per color permitted. In turn properly supporting this setting can take care of monitor issues seen on some systems where the monitor may randomly flicker or have other issues unless otherwise lowering the refresh rate or resolution...

EROFS-Utils 1.5 has been released as the set of user-space utilities for the EROFS Linux read-only file-system that is increasingly popular with Android/embedded use-cases and growing container usage...

Earlier this month marked the launch of the HP Dev One as an interesting collaboration between HP and System76 for a laptop optimized for Linux developers and running System76's Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS operating system. It's a very interesting laptop and well thought out for Linux use with an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U SoC and integrated Radeon graphics for satisfying the preferences of many Linux developers preferring a fully open-source driver stack. Thanks to the large scale manufacturing of HP, it's also a competitively-priced Linux laptop compared to many of the Linux laptops from smaller vendors that are based on Clevo or other white box laptop designs.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.19-rc2 with the fixes that have trickled in for this week past the closure of the Linux 5.19 merge window...

Centralized development around Mesa, the X.Org Server, and dozens of other open-source projects is at a stand-still this weekend due to FreeDesktop.org GitLab crashing with the entire service down...

In addition to all of the Linux 5.19 feature changes, sent in today for the Linux 5.19-rc2 release later today were some additional x86 platform driver updates. Sent in as part of the "fixes" for the week were some new device IDs adding in some new hardware support to existing drivers...

Introduced in the early 80's for the Motorola 68000 series was Versa Module Eurocard "VMEbus" standard that continues to see industrial uses. While still seeing some reported use today, unfortunately the same cannot be said for the quality of the VMEbus Linux support. After the VME subsystem was promoted out of staging a decade ago, the VME hardware drivers failed to ever leave staging and the code has fallen into disrepair and no maintenance now for the past half-decade. So the VME subsystem support is preparing to depart back to the land of the kernel's staging area...

Well known AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák landed more than two dozen patches this weekend fixing up Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) Stream-Out / Transform Feedback functionality for RDNA/RDNA2 GPUs ahead of the NGG Stream-Out enabling for upcoming RDNA3 graphics cards...

Last month I wrote about a new set of Linux patches that provide for better power management on AMX-enabled "Sapphire Rapids" servers. The patches help ensure AMX-enabled CPUs can reach their lower power states for maximum power-savings and that also helps ensure other CPU cores have a larger thermal/power budget for hitting their rated turbo frequencies. That change/fix will be coming in the Linux 5.20 cycle later this summer...

José Expósito continues with recently stepping up to manage libinput releases, the input handling library that for the modern Linux desktop is now widely used across both X.Org and Wayland environments. Libinput 1.21 debuted this weekend with various improvements over the prior release...

Established a few months ago was the Open-Source Firmware Foundation to promote open-source firmware usage throughout the industry. LinuxBoot is now the latest party joining the Open-Source Firmware Foundation...

DragonFlyBSD 6.2 was introduced back in January with the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver port, HAMMER2 improvements, and the NVMM hypervisor port, among other improvements. Out this weekend is DragonFlyBSD 6.2.2 with various bug-fixes atop that stable code-base...

Ahead of the KDE Plasma 5.25 desktop release next week, KDE developers have been busy this past week with last minute fixes ahead of that half-year update as well as beginning early work for Plasma 5.26...

PoCL 3.0 has been formally released today for this portable OpenCL implementation that supports execution on CPUs or other back-ends by way of LLVM such as for targeting AMD HSA, NVIDIA GPUs, and other accelerators. With PoCL 3.0 comes initial OpenCL 3.0 support while the actual conformance results are still pending...

This week's release of Blender 3.2 brings AMD GPU rendering support on Linux via AMD's HIP interface in conjunction with their ROCm compute stack. Eager to see the AMD GPU support on Linux finally arrive, I quickly began trying out this new Blender open-source 3D modeling software release while seeing how the AMD RDNA2 HIP performance compares to that of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 GPUs that have long enjoyed top-notch support under Blender.

MIT CSAIL today is lifting the embargo on a new hardware vulnerability affecting the Apple M1 SoCs (no word yet on exposure with the recently announced Apple M2) and dubbed the "PACMAN" attack...