Phoronix

The latest GNU C Library (Glibc) development code this week has begun dropping various SSSE3 optimized code paths...

MediaTek this week posted their initial "request for comments" code on stateless AV1 decoder support for their video codec driver...

Since 2015 the Linux kernel has supported UEFI mirrored memory functionality for x86/x86_64 while now Huawei is working on adding that functionality for AArch64...

GNU Coreutils 9.1 is out this weekend as the latest feature update to these widely-used core utilities on Linux and other platforms with supplying cp, cat, ls, and other common commands...

AMD today sent in an initial batch of new feature code today to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the Linux 5.19 kernel cycle...

As previously talked about on Phoronix with the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel there is a change to the Linux kernel scheduler around the NUMA imbalance handling when spanning multiple LLCs as is the case with AMD Zen CPUs. Already I've carried out benchmarks looking at some of the areas where AMD EPYC CPUs are enjoying speed-ups on Linux 5.18. Since benchmarking the AMD EPYC 7773X with its hefty 1.5GB of L3 cache for 2P servers via AMD 3D V-Cache, I've been curious to try this forthcoming kernel on that Milan-X configuration. Here are such benchmarks looking at the AMD EPYC 7773X 2P performance on Ubuntu 22.04 with its default Linux 5.15 kernel against Linux 5.17 stable and then the 5.18 development kernel.

A new version of Mold has been released, the high-speed open-source linker successfully challenging the likes of GNU Gold and LLVM LLD...

The exFAT file-system driver for the Linux kernel continues maturing nicely with new features, fixes, and performance improvements. The latest Linux exFAT driver improvement worth mentioning is a significant performance improvement from a Sony engineer...

While AMD's official graphics driver on Windows has effectively moved to legacy pre-Polaris graphics card support, in the open-source world on Linux even the old "R600" Gallium3D driver for Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics cards sees the occasional new feature work by the community. The latest is a new NIR back-end being rewritten for this R600g driver and should debut soon...

This week saw KDE developers tackling many bug fixes to their open-source desktop software with Plasma Wayland fixes still being one of the dominant areas receiving bug fixing attention...

FreeBSD 13.1 is working its way toward release later this month and out today is the second to last release candidate...

Following yesterday's Mesa 22.1 code branching / feature freeze, Mesa 22.1-rc1 was released this afternoon as the first step towards releasing Mesa 22.1 next month. Mesa 22.1 is bringing improvements for old NVIDIA graphics on open-source, many Radeon "RADV" Vulkan enhancements, a lot of work as always on the Intel side, the new Imagination Rogue PowerVR driver, and much more...

With the Linux 5.19 kernel there is going to be the initial graphics driver support for Raptor Lake S with the initial batch of PCI IDs being added. Published today in patch form and still potentially making it to mainline in v5.19 is Raptor Lake P support...

The folks at open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb have published a new blog post outlining the current state of open-source firmware on Intel Tiger Lake platforms...

Next week's Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" is using Linux 5.15 by default given that the kernel is also a "Long Term Support" release. While it makes sense in theory, in practice with Linux 5.16 having been out as stable since January and Linux 5.17 out for several weeks already there is a lot of hardware improvements past the v5.15 that haven't been back-ported or otherwise picked up by Ubuntu Jammy's kernel build. The main pain point this presents is for those using the latest-generation Intel "Alder Lake" processors with a mix of performance and power efficiency cores. My testing of Alder Lake this week on the latest Ubuntu 22.04 LTS build still shows that its 5.15-based experience being less than desirable with measurable -- often very significant -- improvements if using v5.16 or later.

Public code reviews started this week on Qt platform support for Google's Chromium open-source browser code...

Going back to last October has been work by AMD developers in leveraging the DRM buddy allocator code started by Intel within their AMDGPU kernel driver. With the Linux 5.19 kernel this summer, AMDGPU is ready to finally make use of that buddy allocator...

Cloud-Hypervisor is the Rust-written, KVM-leveraging VMM started by Intel that is now developed under the Linux Foundation umbrella with Arm, Microsoft, and others also contributing to this project focused on cloud virtualization needs. Cloud-Hypervisor 23.0 is out today with the latest features for this increasingly capable open-source virtual machine monitor...

As anticipated the code for Mesa 22.1 has now been branched with the first release candidate imminent for this quarterly Mesa3D update...

While every few days it seems like we are writing about new DG2/Alchemist graphics code being prepared for the Linux kernel or related components like Mesa -- and it's been something going on for many months now -- knowing the actual working state of Intel Arc Graphics on Linux hasn't been exactly clear given no formal announcements/communication out of Intel yet as to Linux support expectations / version requirements and not yet having any hardware access. While much of the graphics support has been squared away for Intel Arc DG2/Alchemist as covered in prior articles, it turns out the compute support is still settling but there is now a patch series pending for actually exposing it...