Phoronix

Last year Fedora developers and users were discussing the packaging of ROCm components to make it easier to deploy this Radeon open-source GPU compute stack. Five months later, some of the Radeon Open eCosystem components have made it into Fedora for easier installation but the HIP and OpenCL front-ends to ROCm haven't yet been successfully packaged...

Linux 5.18 is bringing many random/RNG improvements thanks to the work of kernel developer Jason Donenfeld. One of the changes though that had to be backed out during the merge window was trying to get /dev/random and /dev/urandom to behave exactly the same. While reverted for now with the 5.18 code, Donenfeld has prepared a change that should get it into good shape for major architectures with the next kernel cycle...

We are less than one week out from the Linux 5.18 merge window having ended and already the first pull request of "drm-misc-next" material has been submitted to DRM-Next for staging until the Linux 5.19 cycle rolls around in late May...

Google engineer Yu Zhao has sent out the "v10" patches of the MGLRU Linux kernel feature for enhancing system performance and especially for providing a better experience in dealing with system memory pressure...

As a Linux kernel change for benefiting AMD CPUs going back to Zen 1 and for matching behavior Intel has had in place since the Core 2 times, AMD submitted a patch for having the Linux kernel use the MWAIT instruction instead of HALT for when the system isn't using the CPU idle driver either for C-states being disabled by the BIOS or the driver not part of the kernel build. In turn this can lead to around a 21% improvement in exit latency on affected systems...

Here is a combination not normally expected... Microsoft engineers have submitted patches for review enabling AMD GPU hot-plugging support with the Radeon "AMDGPU" Linux kernel driver...

At the end of March Ubuntu 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish" successfully transitioned from the former Mesa 21.3 series to Mesa 22.0 as the current stable series for these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers. There are also a few changes to mention with Ubuntu 22.04's Mesa support this LTS cycle...

Back in February AMD engineers sent out a "request for comments" on x2APIC virtualization (x2AVIC) support. Those patches have now been refined beyond the RFC state and sent out today as a patch series for further review on the Linux kernel mailing list...

Tachyum is a startup working on "the world's first universal processor" that can be used from AI to HPC to hyperscale computing needs. The Tachyum processor aims to replace the needs of discrete TPUs / GPUs / XPUs into a single homogeneous processor architecture. While still running as an emulated platform, Tachyum has announced that in addition to Linux they have managed to boot and run FreeBSD on their ISA...

Ahead of the upcoming Mesa 22.1 feature freeze, the Mesa Vulkan drivers both big and small have been preparing merge requests for wiring up a number of recently introduced Vulkan extensions...

A new Wayland protocol has been proposed for dealing with fractional scaling of surfaces that paired with wp_viewport can be used for achieving fractional scaling...

It had been over one month since the last AMDVLK code drop while now has been succeeded by a new AMDVLK version bring one new extension and several fixes...

Hitting the mainline Linux Git tree today was a rather interesting fix... It turns out that when Linux was resuming from S3 suspend, it wasn't correctly restoring the MSRs for the boot CPU around handling speculative execution mitigations...

While there are many new features with Linux 5.18 with its merge window having just ended days ago, feature code is already beginning to accumulate within the various "-next" branches for what will be Linux 5.19 this summer. Patches merged today get AMD Branch Sampling (BRS) functionality in place for Zen 3 processors with that next kernel cycle...

For the Fedora 37 release later this year the developers are looking at deprecating legacy BIOS support and making UEFI a requirement for x86_64 systems...

While in early access since last year, today Epic Games has officially announced the release of Unreal Engine 5...

AMD on Monday began shipping the Ryzen 5 5500 as a ~$159 USD processor in the Zen 3 family. The Ryzen 5 5500 offers 6 cores / 12 threads with a 65 Watt TDP rating in making for a fairly robust offering for its low price point. I've had the Ryzen 5 5500 in the lab the past few days and in this article are some initial benchmarks seeing how this mid-range processor performs.

Vulkan 1.3.211 is out today and comes with another new extension for helping implementations like Mesa's Zink for implementing the OpenGL API atop Vulkan...

Fwupd 1.7.7 is out this morning as the newest version of this open-source firmware updating solution that pairs with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for allowing robust BIOS/firmware updating under Linux...

Mozilla is officially shipping Firefox 99 today and the last feature release before next month's Firefox 100 milestone...