Phoronix

Cloud Hypervisor as what started out as an Intel open-source project and now lives under the Linux Foundation umbrella as a virtual machine monitor (VMM) for use with Linux KVM and Windows MSHV is out with a new feature release...

Gentoo developer Andreas Hüttel "Dilfridge" is experimenting with binary Gentoo package hosting and finding out what improvements to Portage are needed for making it more of a reality at a larger scale...

Following last week's release of Vulkan 1.3.219 that introduced the VK_EXT_shader_module_identifier extension and Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) adding support for it earlier this week, Intel's open-source Vulkan driver "ANV" has landed support for this new extension to close out the week...

The past few months we have been closely covering the Coreboot port to an MSI retail motherboard for Intel Alder Lake. This port carried out by the 3mdeb consulting firm has been with their downstream "Dasharo" firmware based on Coreboot while as of yesterday the motherboard port has begun landing in upstream Coreboot...

Canonical engineers have been continuing their quest to improve the start-up time for the Snap version of Mozilla Firefox that is used by default on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. With the latest improvements now pushed to the Firefox Snap, they are seeing around a 50% reduction in start-time for the web browser...

Last year when the Intel Core i9 12900K "Alder Lake" processor launched, Windows 11 was outperforming Linux to much surprise in general but explainable due to some late Linux kernel patches around Intel's hybrid architecture. Back in February I looked at the situation again and Linux started outrunning Windows 11 on the i9-12900K with the latest Linux kernel at the time. But with a few more months having passed and for the Intel Alder Lake hybrid processors to mature under Windows and Linux, how do things stand now? Here are some new benchmarks.

With the upcoming feature-packed Linux 5.20 kernel adding to the growing list of features is Intel SGX2 support looking like it is set to land...

At least some of Lenovo's new AMD Rembrandt powered laptops with Microsoft Pluton security co-processor are set by default to only trust Microsoft's key and not the Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA Key that Linux distributions and others use for UEFI Secure Boot support. Thus by default only Microsoft Windows will boot with the default firmware configuration on some new Lenovo laptops...

Wayland-Protocols 1.26 was released on Thursday as the collection of protocol specifications for Wayland. With Wayland-Protocols 1.26 is the new Single Pixel Buffer protocol and enhancements to existing protocols...

Red Hat engineers continue working on Stratis Storage as their means of providing Btrfs and (Open)ZFS like features atop the mature XFS paired with DM + Clevis + LUKS. Stratis 3.2 is out today as the newest update to this Linux storage stack...

The rewritten NIR back-end for the R600 Gallium3D driver with a focus on improving performance for old Radeon HD 5000/6000 series hardware has been merged! This also allows proper FP64 usage finally for the Radeon HD 6900 "Cayman" series graphics cards...

FEX-Emu is an open-source emulator project that has been particularly focused on being able to run x86/x86_64 games on AArch64 with great speed including around Steam and Steam Play (Proton) Windows games...

Back in Linux 5.17 the AMD P-State "amd_pstate" driver was introduced for Ryzen and EPYC systems as an alternative to the ACPU CPUFreq frequency scaling driver with an emphasis on delivering better power efficiency for modern AMD Zen 2 and newer systems. Since the mainlining there hasn't been too much change to this driver but now a new patch series has been sent out with some updates...

Established last year was the CentOS Hyperscale SIG as a special interest group with the backing of Facebook and Twitter among other hyperscalers in providing updated packages and other optional modifications to CentOS Stream to make the distribution more practical for use within their large-scale infrastructure environments...

From the recent setup of the MSI Alder Lake motherboard flashed with Dasharo/Coreboot I had an extra LGA-1700 motherboard around. With some Phoronix readers in the past having inquired about more Alder Lake benchmarks on the low-end, I picked up a Core i3 12100 processor that features four performance cores / eight threads. For those curious about the CPU performance and that of the integrated UHD Graphics 730, here are some Ubuntu Linux performance benchmarks with the i3-12100 and other similar processors.

The Blender open-source 3D modeling software is in the process of working on a new GPU-accelerated, real-time compositor...

The newest version of the MGLRU patches were posted and I've also finished up some more benchmarks of this Multi-Gen LRU kernel feature...

Mesa 22.2 as the quarterly feature update to this collection of open-source predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers has been pushed back by two weeks. This delay is for allowing more last minute features to land, which will hopefully ensure that Intel Arc Graphics and RDNA3 support is in better shape for this release...

As time goes on more open-source projects are beginning to make better use of AVX-512 support even though it's no longer enabled in the latest Alder Lake processors. After reporting on the big AVX-512 wins for JSON parsing with simdjson, another open-source project finding gains is the Tesseract optical character recognition (OCR) engine...

Following yesterday's debut of Meteor Lake platform support within Intel's Graphics Compiler, Intel's "i915" Linux kernel graphics driver has begun seeing patches around Meteor Lake support as that 14th Gen Core successor to Raptor Lake...