Phoronix

You may recall a few days ago how Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz boosted the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver draw throughput by +55%. Well, he now had a go at optimizing the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver and has squeezed out a 60% improvement to the draw throughput. Even more interesting is that it was just a few lines of code...

Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem maintainer has shared some notes following this week's Linux Plumbers Conference in Dublin. In particular, the matter of whether the growing number of accelerators / AI devices belong within the DRM subsystem or elsewhere and separately there is renewed talks of user-space consoles to potentially push Linux distributions towards moving away from the in-kernel VT...

Intel announced today that beginning with 2023 notebooks, the Intel Pentium and Intel Celeron brands will be replaced by... Intel Processor...

In addition to Ubuntu supporting the StarFive VisionFive and Nezha RISC-V boards, Canonical engineers are also working on supporting the Sipeed LicheeRV board too for next month's 22.10 release. The Sipeed LicheeRV is notable in being one of the cheapest RISC-V boards out there: pricing starts at $16.90 USD...

Along with the fresh look at the Intel Core i9 12900K vs. AMD Ryzen 9 5950X on Linux using the latest development kernel and other bleeding-edge software packages, today's article is a fresh look at how the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with 3D V-Cache is performing relative to the Ryzen 7 5800X.

Intel submitted their final set of "drm-intel-gt-next" feature changes intended for merging in the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel merge window that opens in early October...

Canonical announced this morning that they have partnered with ASUS IoT, the division of ASUS focused on providing "Internet of Things" hardware, to certify Ubuntu Linux for their devices...

Qt 6.4 is continuing to run on-schedule and out today is the release candidate ahead of the stable release expected around the end of the month...

A decade ago there used to be an annual Phoronix pilgrimage (and closest thing in many years to taking a vacation/holiday/day-off for me) to Oktoberfest and a meet-up of Phoronix readers. While Oktoberfest is kicking off this weekend in Munich after a two year hiatus due to the pandemic, unfortunately, there is no Phoronix event. But will be in spirit and making use of the occasion by running the annual "Oktoberfest sale" if wishing to show your support for all the Linux hardware reviews, benchmarking, and open-source news carried out each and every day. Additionally, Stripe is now accepted for Phoronix Premium subscriptions as an alternative to PayPal. Phoronix Premium corporate subscriptions are also now being offered...

Merged last year for the Linux 5.16 cycle was FUTEX2's futex_waitv() system call for waiting on multiple futexes in order to better match the behavior of Microsoft Windows. This FUTEX2 initiative was driven as an effort to further enhance Linux gaming performance/efficiency particularly for Valve's Steam Play. Originally there were other goals with FUTEX2 and now we are seeing another one of those being worked on: NUMA awareness...

The Khronos Group has published OpenCL 3.0.12 as the newest version of this API for compute across heterogeneous platforms, but mostly known for GPU compute...

CloudFlare has long relied upon Nginx as part of its HTTP proxy stack but now has replaced it with their in-house, Rust-written Pingora software that is said to be serving over one trillion requests per day and delivering better performance while only using about a third of the CPU and memory resources...

The Khronos Group's Vulkan Working Group today released Vulkan API 1.3.228. Aside from the usual assortment of fixes/clarifications to the Vulkan spec, this spec update promotes one of Valve's existing extensions aimed at enhancing Direct3D 12 emulation with Vulkan onto being a formal "EXT" extension...

It was just a few days ago that Godot 4.0 Alpha 17 was released while also announcing that W4 Games as the start-up created by Godot Engine developers has raised $8.5M USD to advance the open-source Godot ecosystem. They are now celebrating by releasing the long-awaited Godot 4.0 beta release...

In addition to Microsoft continuing to work on OpenGL / OpenCL / Vulkan atop Direct3D 12 by leveraging Mesa in order to benefit Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) and related use-cases, Microsoft engineers have also been working on exposing video acceleration to Linux software backed by Direct3D 12 Video Acceleration...

The KDE community has today released the beta of the upcoming Plasma 5.26 desktop...

While we are used to seeing Intel engineers dominating the speaker lists at various Linux events around the world, it's been a number of years since AMD engineers held multiple presentations like they did this week for the Linux Plumbers Conference and now the Open-Source Summit EU taking place in Dublin, Ireland...

There has been a number of different efforts in recent time to further enhance the Linux kernel's scheduler to better adapt to modern hardware architectures whether it be for Intel hybrid CPU designs, adapting to new CPU cache configurations, or just better scaling with today's ever-increasing core counts. Another scheduler effort detailed this week is "Nest" that aims to keep tasks on "warm cores" with hopes of lower latency due to being already at higher clock/performance states and ideally operating at an optimal turbo/boost frequency. The Nest developers find that their scheduler "improves performance 10%-2x and can reduce energy usage" with modern hardware...

Ever since OpenPrinting took over CUPS upstream from Apple, this widely-used, open-source print server has been back to having a vibrant future. CUPS development ceased at Apple and there wasn't much going on until last year when CUPS founder Michael Sweet and OpenPrinting provided new life to the project...

For a number of years Arm CPUs on the mainline Linux kernel have supported Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) as a means of providing the kernel's scheduler with the information to influence its scheduling decisions based on the estimated energy consumed by the CPU cores. EAS employs an energy model for helping to place tasks between the big.LITTLE cores for optimal energy efficiency and a minimal impact on throughput. Intel has been working to eventually support Energy Aware Scheduling on their x86 hybrid CPUs too...