Phoronix

Linux 6.1 Cleans Up More Code For PREEMPT_RT

Wed, 10/05/2022 - 23:42

The real-time "RT" mainlining effort for the Linux kernel remains ongoing. While the finish line is coming near, PREEMPT_RT support for mainline still isn't over the last hurdle -- seemingly the main blocker it's still held up by are the printk changes with threaded console printing. But for the Linux 6.1 merge window there is at least more kernel code clean-ups...

Canonical Now Providing Free Ubuntu Pro Subscriptions For Up To 5 Systems

Wed, 10/05/2022 - 23:03

Canonical announced today the launch of free personal Ubuntu Pro subscriptions for up to five systems...

Intel Arc Graphics A750 + A770 Linux Gaming Performance

Wed, 10/05/2022 - 21:00

Today the embargo lifts on reviews of the Intel Arc Graphics A750 and A770 graphics cards ahead of their retail availability set for next week. I've had the A750 and A770 at Phoronix the past week and today can share initial performance figures on these Intel DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics cards under Linux with their open-source driver stack.

Linux 6.1 Hardening Retpolines With Ensuring An INT3 After Every Unconditional Jump

Wed, 10/05/2022 - 18:49

The x86/core changes for Linux 6.1 have been merged and are headlined by making sure an INT3 instruction is inserted after every unconditional Retpoline jump (JMP) for the Retpolines handling on both Intel and AMD processors...

SELinux Continues Path Of Deprecating Run-Time Disabling

Wed, 10/05/2022 - 18:11

The Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) changes for Linux 6.1 but with a documentation update does provide a good reminder for a public service announcement: run-time disabling of SELinux is deprecated and will be removed in the future...

The State Of RADV's Vulkan Mesh Shading Support

Wed, 10/05/2022 - 16:55

Yesterday on the first day of the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC 2022), Timur Kristóf of Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver team presented on the Vulkan mesh shader support being worked on for RADV...

EXT4 Rolls Up Some Fixes & Performance Optimizations For Linux 6.1

Wed, 10/05/2022 - 16:43

Ted Ts'o has submitted the EXT4 file-system updates for the Linux 6.1 kernel...

Wireshark 4.0 Network Protocol Analyzer Released

Wed, 10/05/2022 - 16:36

Wireshark 4.0 has been released as the newest version of this leading open-source network protocol analyzer...

SUSE Publishes First Prototype Of Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP)

Wed, 10/05/2022 - 06:19

After SUSE/openSUSE engineers began talking up the Adaptable Linux Platform "ALP" as their next-gen enterprise Linux focus, last week they talked up the imminent release of "Les Droites" as their first public ALP prototype. Today that prototype is now live...

Linux 6.1 To Feature Faster Intel Memory Error Decoding

Wed, 10/05/2022 - 03:40

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver updates have been submitted and merged for the Linux 6.1 merge window of which there are a few notable additions on the Intel side...

Mesa's RADV Radeon Vulkan Ray-Tracing Performance Continues Improving

Wed, 10/05/2022 - 02:25

RADV driver co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen of Google presented at today's X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC 2022) on the state of this open-source Mesa Vulkan driver's ray-tracing performance...

Radeon ROCm 5.3 Released With New APIs, Fine Grain Support

Wed, 10/05/2022 - 02:05

Officially released today is Radeon ROCm 5.3 as the newest version of AMD's open-source compute stack for Radeon and Instinct hardware...

Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan "NVK" Driver Continues Progressing

Wed, 10/05/2022 - 01:40

As written about for several months on Phoronix, an open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver has been in the works that by the end of the summer this "NVK" driver has been seeing a lot of activity by Jason Ekstrand of Collabora along with David Airlie and Karol Herbst of Red Hat. Jason today talked at XDC 2022 about this NVK driver effort...

Intel Laptop Users Should Avoid Linux 5.19.12 To Avoid Potentially Damaging The Display

Tue, 10/04/2022 - 23:16

Intel laptop users running Linux are being advised to avoid running the latest Linux 5.19.12 stable kernel point release as it can potentially damage your display...

IBM Does A "Quasi-Acquisition" Of Red Hat Storage

Tue, 10/04/2022 - 21:00

Back in 2019 IBM completed its acquisition of Red Hat while today is a "quasi-acquisition" of sorts being announced with Red Hat's Storage team being transferred to the IBM Storage team...

Btrfs Brings Some Great Performance Improvements With Linux 6.1

Tue, 10/04/2022 - 19:30

I always love pull requests that start off with "there's a bunch of performance improvements..." as is the case with the new Btrfs feature pull for Linux 6.1...

Disabling Spectre V2 Mitigations Is What Can Impair AMD Ryzen 7000 Series Performance

Tue, 10/04/2022 - 18:42

Last week I shared some initial numbers how surprisingly when disabling Zen 4 CPU security mitigations can actually *hurt* the Ryzen 7000 series CPU performance. While conventional wisdom and with past Intel/AMD processors yield better performance when disabling the CPU security mitigations, with the Ryzen 9 7950X it was found to be basically the opposite. I have since conducted more tests and using an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X to confirm the earlier results and dig deeper into the data.