Phoronix

Over the summer Jason Donenfeld of WireGuard fame proposed adding getrandom() to the vDSO for better performance to enjoy by user-space developers. This past week he sent out the latest version of this proposed kernel patch where he's seeing around a ~15x speed-up with this change...

Google engineer Yu Zhao this morning published MGLRU v15, the latest revision to this patch series dealing with improving the Linux kernel's page reclamation code. Multi-Gen LRU "MGLRU" has proven to offer performance benefits and particularly improve the Linux experience when dealing with low-memory situations...

Along with the Linux kernel preparing for its initial Rust integration, Rusticl landing in Mesa this week as the first major Rust usage within Mesa, and Cloudflare announcing an Nginx HTTP proxy replacement written in Rust, some additional Rust adoption news for the week is that the GStreamer project is now ready to ship Rust-written plug-ins as part of their official binary releases...

Proposed a few years ago was Kernel Address Space Isolation (KASI / ASI) for limiting data leaks with the growing number of speculative execution attacks on CPUs. Several organizations have been involved with Address Space Isolation efforts for the Linux kernel including IBM, Oracle, and Google with various approaches. Google engineers earlier this year posted a newer iteration of ASI focused on KVM use for the cloud / VMs. ASI still hasn't made it to the mainline kernel but Google engineers this week at LPC argued that it should be be the path forward for mainline in better dealing with these CPU security vulnerabilities...

Over the past year since launching Intel Alder Lake processors, Intel engineers have made a number of improvements to the Linux kernel for better dealing with the hybrid processor approach mixing P and E cores. While Alder Lake is running great with recent kernels and the P vs. E core selection for tasks on Linux is better than it was at launch, there still are areas for improvement as raised by Intel engineers this week...

Longtime Linux kernel engineer Peter Zijlstra with Intel has sent out his latest "Call Depth Tracking" patches as a mitigiation for Retbleed that aims to be less costly on system performance than the current mitigation approach. With this latest patch series, he indicates he hopes to soon get this code mainlined...

Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been involved with many great Linux desktop/laptop hardware improvements over the years for work that would have otherwise likely gone unaddressed. One of the initiatives he has been focusing on recently that has long been a sore point for Linux laptops has been the user-space backlight/brightness interface. This week at Linux Plumbers Conference was a presentation on this effort that has long been ripe for improvement...

HarfBuzz is the text shaping library used by many open-source projects from UI toolkits to directly by desktops like GNOME and KDE and then over to other notable software like Java, Android, Firefox, Chrome, and many others. Out this weekend is HarfBuzz 5.2 and most notably adds support for Unicode 15...

While Plasma 5.26 beta released this week, KDE developers didn't kick back and relax but have pressed on with continuing to make improvements to this open-source desktop environment...

Well known NVIDIA AIB partner EVGA made a rather surprising and unfortunate announcement this Friday afternoon,..

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...