DRM Client Library Code Ready Ahead Of Linux 6.13
The newest drm-misc-next pull request was submitted today ahead of the Linux 6.13 merge window opening up in about one month’s time… ⌘ Read more

FUTEX2 NUMA & Small Futexes Revived For Linux
Back in 2020~2021 there was lots of talk and work around FUTEX2 for improving the Linux kernel’s Futex implementation for fast user mutex. The FUTEX2 work was driven in large part for helping Steam Play / Wine gaming by better matching the behavior of Microsoft Windows with its WaitForMultipleObjects handling. While the initial code landed back in Linux 5.16, there’s been other remaining FUTEX2 features still desired like variable-sized futexes and NUMA-awareness. Fina … ⌘ Read more

Cloud Hypervisor 42 Released With SVE/SVE2 Support For AArch64 Guests
Cloud Hypervisor 42.0 is out as the newest update of this open-source, Rust-based hypervisor that began as an Intel software project but is now developed by a number of different organizations from Arm to Microsoft… ⌘ Read more

Intel Preps OA Sync, Panther Lake Workaround & Other New Graphics Code For Linux 6.13
For the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle there is Xe2 Ultra Joiner and GPU temperature monitoring support along with initial Xe3 graphics support for integrated form with Panther Lake among the Intel graphics driver changes expected so far. Another batch of the Xe kernel graphics driver changes were submitted today for modern Intel graphics with this upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle… ⌘ Read more

Some Clarity On The Linux Kernel’s “Compliance Requirements” Around Russian Sanctions
When a number of Russian Linux developers were removed from their MAINTAINERS file in the Linux kernel, it was described as due to “compliance requirements” but vague in what those requirements entailed. Linus Torvalds then commented on the Russian Linux maintainers being de-listed and made it clear that they were done due to government compliance requirements / legal issues around Russia. Now today some additional light ha … ⌘ Read more

Intel Core Ultra 9 285K “Arrow Lake” Delivers Strong Linux Performance
Earlier this month Intel announced the Core Ultra 200S “Arrow Lake” processors and today they go on sale. In turn, the review embargo also lifts for these new desktop processors. Up first today on Phoronix is the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Linux performance review for this flagship 24-core desktop processor. ⌘ Read more

AMD EPYC 9755 Performance On The Linux 6.11 & Linux 6.12 Kernels
For the recently launched AMD EPYC 9005 series “Turin” processors there is good support out-of-the-box running on the likes of Linux 6.8 as found with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The one exception is if wanting to engage CPU power monitoring you need a RAPL/PowerCap patch that was just upstreamed in v6.12. But what about using a newer kernel for greater performance in light of all the upstream optimizations to the kernel in general? Here are some Linux 6 … ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Shipping Around One Billion RISC-V Cores In Their 2024 Products
Going back to 2016 we’ve known of NVIDIA beginning to use RISC-V to replace their Falcon micro-controller and other micro-controllers within their graphics processors to using this common open-source ISA. That use has continued to grow and an unofficial estimate now puts it at around one billion RISC-V cores shipping in 2024 NVIDIA chips… ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ Launches: 26 TOPS Accelerator For $110
Following the launch of the Raspberry Pi AI Kit back during the summer with up to 13 TOPS performance for AI inference, the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ was announced today with up to 26 TOPS capabilities… ⌘ Read more

Intel Core Ultra 7 “Lunar Lake” Performance Up By ~22% With ASUS Linux Fix
Following the ASUS AIPT patch posting this weekend from an Intel Linux engineer that was analyzing my previously-published Lunar Lake results showing rather poor performance on the ASUS Zenbook S 14, the performance has been looking much better. On Monday I posted updated Intel Xe2 graphics results showing strong uplift now that the ASUS Lunar Lake laptop was operating in its standard mode rather than whisper mode. In today’s article is … ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds Comments On The Russian Linux Maintainers Being Delisted
Following yesterday’s news first featured on Phoronix of several Linux driver maintainers being de-listed from their maintainer positions within the mainline Linux kernel over their connections to Russia, Linus Torvalds has today commented on the matter… ⌘ Read more

Gentoo Linux Touts DTrace 2.0 Support
More than a decade ago the DTrace tracing framework from Sun Microsystems was one of the long sought features from Solaris desired by Linux developers. Oracle ended up porting DTrace to Linux over the years but without too much fanfare outside of Oracle Linux especially since the advent of (e)BPF on Linux and other tracing/debugging open-source advancements. With the recent DTrace 2.0, it’s now built atop the BPF engine and other upstream kernel tracing features on Linux. Gent … ⌘ Read more

Significant CRC32C Throughput Optimization On The Way To The Linux Kernel
Google engineer Eric Biggers has worked on some very nice performance optimizations for the crypto code within the Linux kernel such as faster AES-GCM for Intel and AMD CPUs, much faster AES-XTS disk/file encryption with modern CPUs, and many other optimizations over the years. His latest work is on enhancing the CRC32C crypto performance for x86/x86_64 processors… ⌘ Read more

Intel Preps PXP GuC Auto-Teardown & Improvements For Old iGPUs With Linux 6.13
Intel engineers this morning sent out their newest pull request of “drm-intel-gt-next” material to queue in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.13 merge window. There is a new feature enabled on newer Intel graphics hardware as well as some improvements for very old Intel integrated graphics… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.13 To Default To AMD P-State Driver For EPYC 9005 CPUs
It was just earlier this week that AMD posted Linux patches to switch EPYC over to using the AMD P-State driver rather than the long-used generic ACPI CPUFreq driver. This should lead to better power efficiency out-of-the-box and is a change being made just for EPYC 9005 “Turin” CPUs and future server processors. Already it’s looking like this change will be introduced for the upcoming Linux 6.13 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Cloudflare Continues To Praise Open-Source OpenBMC
It was just one and a half years ago that Cloudflare began rolling out OpenBMC on their massive array of servers to replace traditional proprietary Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) firmware stacks. Since the end of last year they’ve been talking up their successes using OpenBMC and now as we approach two years of their OpenBMC use within production, they continue singing the praise of this open-source, Linux-based BMC software stack… ⌘ Read more

Intel Upstreams Firmware For Newer WiFi Chipsets On Linux
Intel has upstreamed the firmware for their “BlazarU” core to linux-firmware.git for improving the out-of-the-box wireless experience with newer Intel WiFi adapters… ⌘ Read more

The Free Software Foundation Finally Has AI / Machine Learning Apps On Their Radar
The Free Software Foundation announced on Tuesday they have begun work on “freedom in machine learning applications”. Or in particular, a to-be-issued “statement” on free machine learning applications for software and the associated scripts and training data… ⌘ Read more

Rust-Written Rustls Now Reportedly Outperforming OpenSSL & BoringSSL
Rustls was initially talked up as a modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language for its memory safety guarantees. But now besides the talked up advantages due to being written in Rust, it has reached the point of reportedly being faster than both OpenSSL and BoringSSL… ⌘ Read more

Several Linux Kernel Driver Maintainers Removed Due To Their Association To Russia
Quietly merged into this week’s Linux 6.12-rc4 kernel was a patch that removes a number of kernel maintainers from being noted in the official MAINTAINERS file that recognizes all of the driver and subsystem maintainers… ⌘ Read more

AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10 Now Available For Testing, Derived From CentOS Stream 10
AlmaLinux Kitten 10 has been introduced today as what will be the next iteration of this community-based, RHEL/CentOS-derived enterprise-grade Linux distribution. AlmaLinux Kitten 10 is tracking the CentOS Stream 10 sources for what will eventually become the base of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10… ⌘ Read more

System76 Thelio Astra Reviewed: High-End ARM64 Developer Desktop
System76 is announcing one of their most innovative and interesting products going back to their Launch Configurable Keyboard and HP Dev One collaboration: the System76 Thelio Astra. The Thelio Astra is a high-end ARM64 desktop system geared for developers with a focus on AI / STEM / self-driving technologies and powered by Ampere Computing and NVIDIA. ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA R565 Linux Driver Beta Brings Improvements For Wayland, DMA-BUF & VKD3D
The first NVIDIA R565 series Linux driver beta was released this morning in the form of the NVIDIA 565.57.01 driver release… ⌘ Read more

Intel Preps GCC Compiler For New AMX & ISA Features Ahead Of Diamond Rapids
Intel’s compiler engineers today posted a number of feature patches for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for enabling new ISA features to be found with next-generation Xeon “Diamond Rapids” processors. Excitingly a number of new Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) features are coming with next-gen Intel Xeon… ⌘ Read more

Intel Compute Runtime 24.39.31294.12 Fixes Lunar Lake OpenCL, Disables Ice Lake & Older
Intel Compute Runtime 24.39.31294.12 was released on Monday as the newest update to this open-source Intel integrated/discrete graphics compute stack for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support for their hardware on Windows and Linux… ⌘ Read more

Suggestion Raised For Using PGO + LLVM BOLT To Optimize More Fedora Packages
Outside of the likes of the Arch Linux based CachyOS and Intel’s Clear Linux there aren’t too many distributions that widely rely on aggressive compiler optimizations in the name of bettering the system performance. A suggestion was raised recently though for Fedora to use profile-guided optimizations (PGO) and post-link optimizations with the likes of LLVM BOLT for more packages, but at this stage it’s not clear if such a shift in … ⌘ Read more

Wasmer 5.0-rc1 Adds Experimental Support For WASM, Interpreter Mode Support
For those interested in the prospects of WebAssembly for being able to write “universal apps” that can run anywhere, Wasmer as one of the leading WASM runtimes is closing in on its v5.0 feature release… ⌘ Read more

SysVinit 3.11 Released With An “Important Feature” At Long Last
For those still managing to avoid systemd use on Linux systems and preferring SysVinit as their init system of choice, SysVinit 3.11 is out today with a new “important feature” addition… ⌘ Read more

SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V Development Board Update
Earlier this year SiFive announced the HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V development board with plans for shipping in July. That timeframe for shipping since passed but SiFive today issued a new update on their RISC-V development board… ⌘ Read more

Intel Core Ultra 7 256V Lunar Lake With ASUS Zenbook Performing Better After New Linux Patch
On Sunday there was a new patch posted by an Intel Linux engineer to boost the Lunar Lake Linux performance out-of-the-box for ASUS laptops by adjusting the new ASUS Intelligent Performance Technology “AIPT” feature so that Linux follows the same behavior as Windows 11. My initial testing of this ASUS AIPT patch has indeed shown the Core Ultra 7 256V “Lunar Lake” yielding much better performance with this patch applied … ⌘ Read more

AMD Posts Linux Patches For EPYC To Further Enhance Performance-Per-Watt By Default
Making for an exciting Monday morning, AMD Linux engineers have kicked off the new week with a patch series introducing an exciting and long-awaited change: using the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver by default for EPYC server platforms moving forward rather than the ACPI CPUFreq driver… ⌘ Read more

Intel IWD 3.0 Wireless Daemon Released For Linux Systems
Intel’s iNet Wireless Daemon (IWD) for Linux systems is out with a v3.0 release for this featureful and modern alternative to WPA_Supplicant… ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds Growing Frustrated By Buggy Hardware & Theoretical CPU Attacks
Over the past week Linux creator Linus Torvalds has been active on a Linux kernel mailing list thread around avoiding barrier_nospec() in copy_from_user() due to being “overkill and painfully slow.” The conversation evolved into low-level discussions over CPU behavior and how to best handle, differing behavior/requirements with new Intel CPUs supporting Linear Address Masking (LAM), and the overall headaches these days around CPU … ⌘ Read more

Unvanquished 0.55 Released With Big Performance Optimizations For Its Engine
The Unvanquished 0.55 open-source game that was recently teased for its OpenGL 4.6 renderer work is out today with its shiny new release. As it’s been more than one and a half years since Unvanquished 0.54, this new beta comes with a load of improvements especially around optimizing its Daemon open-source engine that is long derived from id Tech 3… ⌘ Read more

Meson 1.6 Build System Adds Support For Flang & OpenXL Compilers
Meson 1.6 was published on Sunday as the newest feature update to this popular cross-platform build system… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.12-rc4 Released With MSI Claw A1M Controller Support, Intel & AMD Fixes
Linux 6.12-rc4 is out today as the half-way point to releasing the Linux 6.12 stable kernel around this time of the month in November… ⌘ Read more

Intel Posts Patch For Fixing/Boosting Lunar Lake Linux Performance On ASUS Laptops
Since purchasing an Intel Core Ultra Series 2 “Lunar Lake” laptop for Linux testing last month, the performance has been coming in below expectations. Among the tests were finding Xe2 graphics on Lunar Lake performing slower that under Windows 11 and in comparison slower than Meteor Lake graphics on Linux. Intel engineers have been able to reproduce my original findings and they uncovered the culprit is a new ASUS laptop feature … ⌘ Read more

Concerns Raised Over Bitwarden Moving Further Away From Open-Source
Several Phoronix readers have written in this Sunday over concerns of Bitwarden further moving away from open-source. Bitwarden is a password management service that leverages an encrypted vault and supports multiple clients/platforms. Bitwarden operates on a freemium model and has provided some code as open-source while there are new concerns over Bitwarden further pivoting away from open-source… ⌘ Read more

ReiserFS File-System Expected To Be Removed With Linux 6.13
With ReiserFS having been deprecated for two years with plans to remove it in 2025, the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle for what will be the first major kernel release of the new year and past the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel is expected to do just that… ReiserFS is set to be stripped from the mainline kernel codebase… ⌘ Read more

Lightweight Guard Pages For Linux Showing 5x Speed-Up For Memory Mapping Invocations
Patches posted this week by Oracle’s Lorenzo Stoakes are the latest attempt at lightweight guard pages for the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Audio Firmware Upstreamed For Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 On Linux
Qualcomm has upstreamed the audio firmware for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 “X1E80100” series laptop SoCs to linux-firmware.git… ⌘ Read more

“100% Free” GNU Boot Discovers Again They Have Been Shipping Non-Free Code
GNU Boot is a “100% free software project aimed at replacing the non-free boot software” and is a downstream of Coreboot, GRUB, and SeaBIOS. While priding itself on being “100% free”, last December they had to drop some motherboard support and CPU code after discovering they were shipping some files that are non-free by their free software standards. Today they announced another mistake in having inadvertently been shipping additional non-free … ⌘ Read more

GNOME Making Progress On Full-Featured USB Portal For Flatpaks
Thanks to funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund, GNOME developers have been working on greater USB permissions/controls for Flatpak-based Linux applications… ⌘ Read more

Wine-Staging 9.20 Fixes An 11 Year Old Wine Bug Report
Building off yesterday’s release of Wine 9.20, Wine-Staging 9.20 is now available for this experimental blend of Wine featuring 357 extra patches currently atop the upstream codebase for various testing/experimental features and functionality… ⌘ Read more

Linux Might Drop Fieldbus Support For Industrial Systems With No One Maintaining It
Merged back in 2019 was the Fieldbus system for connecting different systems/components/instruments within industrial environments. Five years later the code isn’t being well maintained and looks like it will be on its way out the door if no one steps up to better maintain this driver support for industrial systems for process automation… ⌘ Read more

KDE Developers Wrapping Up Fallout From Plasma 6.2, Spinning More Plasma 6.3 Features
KDE developers are wrapping up addressing initial fallout/regressions from the recent Plasma 6.2 desktop release as well as pushing ahead with more feature work for Plasma 6.3… ⌘ Read more

Intel Working On Coreboot Support For Xeon 6 Platforms
Intel announced earlier this week ahead of the OCP Global Summit that they have partnered with the 9elements consulting firm for getting Coreboot up and running on Intel Xeon 6 “Granite Rapids” platforms… ⌘ Read more

Wine 9.20 Released With WineDbg Now Using Capstone Disassembler
Wine 9.20 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development version of this open-source software to enable running Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms… ⌘ Read more

Intel Working On Coreboot Support For Xeon 6 Platforms
Intel announced earlier this week ahead of the OCP Global Summit that they have partnered with the 9elements consulting firm for getting Coreboot up and running on Intel Xeon 6 “Granite Rapids” platforms… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Considers Replacing initramfs-tools WIth Dracut
As a possible change for Ubuntu 25.04, Canonical is evaluating the use of Dracut to replace initramfs-tools for initrd generation on Ubuntu Linux… ⌘ Read more