Phoronix

It's been a fairly smooth week and Linus Torvalds is expected this Sunday to formally release the Linux 5.18 stable kernel. Unless he has any last minute reservations and decides to stretch it out an extra week, Linux 5.18 will be out as stable and with it comes a great deal of new features -- especially for benefiting AMD and Intel products from CPUs to GPUs...

Last week the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed switched to the new GCC 12 as the default system compiler and rebuilt its package set under this annual feature upgrade to the GNU Compiler Collection. For those curious here are some benchmarks before and after that GCC 12 transition for openSUSE Tumbleweed.

While Mesa's RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver continues seeing a lot of activity on a near daily basis by developers from Valve, Red Hat, Google, and other independent contributors, AMD continues with AMDVLK as their official open-source Vulkan driver derived from their internal, closed-source Vulkan driver for Windows and Linux. Out today is AMDVLK 2022.Q2.2 as the latest open-source snapshot of this Vulkan driver...

Fedora will keep around its legacy BIOS support that was decided earlier this month after a proposal to deprecate legacy BIOS support to focus resources on UEFI-only booting. However, Fedora will be relying more on the community to maintain that legacy boot support and as such the Fedora BIOS Boot SIG (Special Interest Group) is now established...

Since Ubuntu 20.10 there has been Active Directory integration in the Ubiquity installer while now it looks like the latest effort by Canonical on enhancing the Ubuntu desktop for the enterprise is around Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) integration...

While the kernel-side Intel AMX support landed in Linux 5.16 and KVM support for AMX in Linux 5.17, other Linux patches around Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) remain floating around. One important patch-set was updated this week for ensuring proper power management on AMX-enabled processors, coming with Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" this year...

Merged yesterday to the mainline X.Org Server for XWayland is the "-force-xrandr-emulation" option added for Valve's Gamescope / Steam Deck usage...

AMD has released a new version of AOMP, its LLVM/Clang compiler downstream where they stage their latest patches focused on OpenMP GPU offload support for their Radeon graphics cards / Instinct accelerators...

While the hostname on Linux systems is widely relied upon for different applications, setting the hostname is usually left up to user-space by the init system at boot. However, should any user-space processes try to read the system hostname prior to it being set, it could lead to unintended results. So now finally in 2022 there is a kernel parameter working its way upstream with "hostname=" should you want to ensure the hostname is set before user-space is started...

System76-Scheduler as the Linux PC vendor's effort to provide a Rust-written daemon to enhance Linux desktop responsiveness and shipping as part of their Pop!_OS distribution is out with a new feature release...

Hearing "open-source", "PSP", and "security" all together got me excited with my initial reaction thinking it was about AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP) albeit that's not the case here. Google's PSP announced today is the "PSP Security Protocol" and is designed for dealing with cryptographic hardware offloading at data center scale and used by Google already in production...

The Framework Laptop is a modular laptop design that launched a year ago and is designed to be upgrade-friendly and allows users for switching out lots of components from different ports to the motherboard itself. And the laptop is Linux-friendly -- see my Framework Laptop review from last year. For new systems or those wishing to upgrade their laptop's motherboard, Intel Core 12th Gen "Alder Lake" is now available...

Intel today has lifted the embargo on SYCLomatic, their new open-source tool to help migrate code-bases targeting NVIDIA's CUDA so they can be re-purposed to target C++ and SYCL -- thereby being able to leverage Intel's graphics processors and jiving with their oneAPI goals...

The KDE development community today announced the release of the Plasma 5.25 beta...

Given the recent releases of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Fedora 36 among other recent OS updates, it's time for a fresh look at how various Linux distributions are performing. This Linux benchmarking bout is looking at the Xeon Platinum 8380 2P "Ice Lake" performance across Arch Linux, Debian, openSUSE, CentOS Stream, AlmaLinux, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Intel's Clear Linux.

Last week I wrote about how well known Mesa developer Samuel Pitoiset who is employed by Valve already started working on GFX11 (RDNA3) support for RADV, the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver in Mesa that isn't officially supported by AMD but remains more popular than their own "AMDVLK" driver. More GFX11/RDNA3 preparation work remains ongoing and it's looking like if trends continue this open-source driver could be ready for RDNA3 graphics cards in time for launch...

POCL as the "Portable Computing Language" that gets OpenCL running on CPUs as well as via LLVM allowing for targeting NVIDIA GPUs, AMD HSA environments, and other cases, is now preparing to roll-out OpenCL 3.0 support...

Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) remains a very promising effort for enhancing Linux system performance and particularly about providing a superior experience when the Linux kernel is dealing with system memory pressure. MGLRU v11 was posted this week while we await to see if it will be mainlined come the v5.19 merge window...

Back in 2017 for the Linux 4.11 kernel the statx system call was added for allowing enhanced file information reporting. Since then various file-systems began adding Statx support and worked its way up into Glibc and the like in user-space for Linux finally having file creation time reporting and other attributes. Two separate statx-related additions are now working their way to the kernel...

Last week Red Hat announced at the Red Hat Summit that RHEL9 would be reach GA in the coming weeks while today it officially crossed that threshold...