Phoronix

VFX Reference Platform as a standards body that aims to help standardize software platforms in the realm of digital content creation (DCC) has published a detailed report for studios to consider in choosing their next Linux platform. Their new recommendations for visual effects and animation studios about moving to newer Linux distributions over the next year -- especially with many still relying on CentOS 7 -- is for moving to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 otherwise one of the downstreams like Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux. Close behind in their recommendations and as a longer-term objective is also tossing some support behind Ubuntu Linux...

Valve has just released Proton 7.0-4 as their newest downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for enjoying many Windows games on Linux with great success for the Linux desktop, the Steam Deck, and more...

For those weighing whether to pursue the full eight memory channel configuration for the new Ryzen Threadripper 5000 series or starting out with just four or six memory modules, here are some reference benchmarks across four, six, and eight memory channels with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX 24-core processor while running Ubuntu Linux.

The latest partnership between Microsoft and Canonical is an announcement today of native .NET availability for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS hosts as well as containers...

Up to this point loading updated CPU microcode on AMD processors under Linux has checked just to ensure every physical CPU core was loaded with the new microcode but not sibling threads for SMT processors. While logically that makes sense, it turns out some AMD microcode updates do carry out per-thread modifications that means the microcode updating needs to be carried out on every thread. A Linux fix is on its way to the kernel to adjust that behavior...

As part of today's "drm-misc-fixes" pull request, NVIDIA Ampere GA103 GPU support is set to be added to the Nouveau DRM driver with Linux 6.0...

Following Sunday's release of Linux 6.0-rc1, yesterday saw the release of 6.0-rc1-rt1 as the set of patches for providing real-time kernel support atop the upstream code-base. There is just roughly 50 patches to go until the PREEMPT_RT functionality is mainlined!..

Ahead of the upcoming openSUSE/SUSE Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP), whether to raise the x86_64 micro-architecture feature level required by the Linux OS continues to be evaluated and what options there are for making use of newer x86_64 instruction set extensions without necessarily forcing tightened CPU requirements / eliminating old hardware support...

When it comes to Linux on Arm laptops the recent excitement has been around the Asahi Linux porting work for the Apple M2 MacBooks and Linux 6.0 supporting the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 and the flagship Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Arm laptop. Launched a few years ago though was the Lenovo Yoga C630 powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 and thanks now to the work of Linaro that older Arm laptop is seeing Linux support improvements...

LZ4 v1.9.4 is out today as the first point release in nearly two years for this BSD-licensed, speedy, lossless compression algorithm...

After Qualcomm announced their Cloud AI 100 Accelerator back in 2019, in 2020 during the early days of the pandemic they posted a Linux driver for this accelerator. That driver didn't get picked up for the mainline Linux kernel and two years later there still is little fanfare around the Qualcomm AI Cloud Accelerator hardware. However, now they have posted a new Linux driver that goes the DRM driver route...

Google announced today that the Android 13 sources have been published to the Android Open-Source Project as part of officially releasing this newest version of Android...

The beta of GNOME 43 is now available for testing ahead of the stable release next month...

Yesterday marked the release of Linux 6.0-rc1 and as such the merge window is no over and no more feature work is set to land in this kernel version. Here is my write-up of all the interesting new features and changes/improvements coming for Linux 6.0.

Greg Kroah-Hartman as the Linux kernel's stable maintainer and effectively Linus Torvalds' second-in-command has suggested avoiding Intel Alder Lake laptops. While much of the Alder Lake laptop support for Linux is in good shape, the exception is around web cameras. These newer laptops with Intel's latest web-camera tech are not currently supported by the mainline kernel and require proprietary software for use. Some platforms like Ubuntu and ChromeOS are picking up these blobs for now while a proper open-source, upstream solution is likely months -- or likely about one year -- away...

AMD today sent out revised patches for improving the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling Linux driver that aims to provide better power efficiency than the generic ACPI CPUFreq driver that has long been relied upon for AMD processors...

Less than one month away is the release of Blender 3.3 and it looks like Intel's initial oneAPI GPU acceleration is ready and in decent shape for Windows and Linux...

While Linux 6.0 will bring a lot of shiny new features, Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) is one of the anticipated changes that isn't going to land now until Linux 6.1. But in the interim, MGLRU v14 was posted today that re-bases the code against 6.0-rc1 to help facilitate more testing of this kernel change that primarily helps Linux systems under memory pressure...

After the two week long merge window, Linus Torvalds this afternoon released the first release candidate of Linux 6.0. Over the next roughly two months the Linux 6.0 kernel will stabilize but already from my early testing on various systems it is in nice shape and the features and performance are looking great...

Not only is the AMD EPYC performance looking real good for Linux 6.0, but many of the scheduler changes and common kernel improvements also carry over well for Intel's Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" server processors too. For your viewing pleasure this weekend are some initial benchmarks looking at Linux 5.19 stable compared to Linux 6.0 Git as we approach the end of the merge window...