Phoronix

This past week saw the first two consumer PCIe 5.0 NVMe solid-state drives released to retail: the Gigabyte AORUS Gen5 10000 and the Inland TD510. I've been testing the Inland TD510 2TB Gen 5 NVMe SSD the past few days. While in simple I/O testing it can hit speeds almost up to 10,000 MB/s reads and writes, for more complex workloads it quickly dropped against popular PCIe Gen 4.0 NVMe SSD options. In my testing thus far of this first consumer Gen5 NVMe SSD it's left me far from impressed.

Merged on Saturday to upstream Coreboot was support for some of the latest Intel Alderlake (and signs of Raptor Lake) powered laptops from Linux vendor System76...

Ahead of the Linux 6.3-rc1 release later today, a set of "x86/urgent" patches were sent out Sunday morning that include the change to allow Single Threaded Indirect Branch Predictors (STIBP) to be used in the presence of legacy Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) for security reasons...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.3 is a new release of Wine-Staging, the experimental/testing blend of this software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux. Wine-Staging 8.3 carries more than 500 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base...

While GNOME 3.32 saw initial work on fractional scaling support for the GNOME Shell and Mutter compositor, the upcoming GNOME 44 release is bringing support for Wayland's fractional_scale_v1 protocol...

AMD in February quietly released version 1.1 of their in-development Unified Inference Front-end "UIF" that aims to be their catch-all solution for AI inference from CPUs to GPUs to FPGAs and other IP from their recent Xilinx acquisition...

Intel's "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa has landed a set of patches to fix a glaring performance issue affecting Skylake/Gen9 era graphics with the cross-platform GravityMark benchmark...

Yesterday saw GNOME Shell and Mutter drop the last of their GTK3 dependence while today there is another interesting change to mention on the Mutter compositor side... An experimental option for enabling some HDR modes with supported high dynamic range displays...

This week KDE Plasma's development branched to Qt6-only and a lot of other development happenings around Plasma 6.0 occurred...

Wine 8.3 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

Intel announced today it has cancelled Rialto Bridge and Lancaster Sound development while shifting its Max Series focus to their Falcon Shores XPU that is now set to ship in 2025...

The GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor have completed their migration off GTK3...

If better open-source AMD Coreboot support was on your bingo card for years but long thought to be a lofty dream, get ready to celebrate... AMD dropped a juicy tid-bit of information to be announced next month with "openSIL" as it concerns open-source AMD x86 silicon initialization library, complete with AMD Coreboot support...

There should be "slight improvements for I/O performance" coming to Intel Xeon Scalable Ice Lake and Sapphire Rapids servers on a future kernel release with a patch having surfaced to remove a check that led to these newer processors not seeing HWP I/O boosting enabled...

Merged last cycle was a big Zstd update for Linux 6.2 that took the kernel's Zstandard compression/decompression implementation to match that of upstream v1.5 after being stuck in the v1.4 series for more than a year. Following that, Zstd 1.5.4 was released last month. The hope was Zstd 1.5.4 would quickly follow into the mainline kernel while that is now delayed to Linux 6.4 and for the 6.3 kernel cycle seeing just a few fixes...

A set of patches sent out this morning lay out the initial foundation for RISC-V auto-vectorization support within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...

Posted today was the "v1" patch series implementing threaded/atomic console infrastructure for printk. This is one of the last steps needed before the real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support can be finally mainlined into the Linux kernel...

After earlier this week providing the initial Linux benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D across many Linux gaming tests as well as nearly 400 other tests, in today's article I am looking at the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D as the 12-core / 24-thread processor with the hefty 128MB L3 cache on this Zen 4 desktop processor. Due to having less time with the 7900X3D thus far, today's article is just getting things started in looking at the Linux gaming performance -- both native Linux games as well as many Windows games running on Linux thanks to Valve's wonderful Steam Play (Proton + DXVK / VKD3D-Proton) software.

The rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed package has begun rolling out a new "patterns-glibc-hwcaps-x86_64_v3" package that is automatically installed on supported systems and allows for automatically installing "recommended" x86-64-v3 optimized packages where available in the name of enjoying greater performance...

For those doing large Linux kernel builds such as with the "allyesconfig" build option for including as many of the available drivers as possible into the assembled Linux kernel image, objtool improvements ready to go with Linux 6.3 should cut down on the RAM usage and also speed-up the kernel build time. These improvements were motivated by Linux kernel developers beginning to run out of memory when trying to carry out the "allyesconfig" kernel builds on desktops with 32GB of RAM...