November was filled with interesting Linux benchmarks ranging from the Apple M4 testing kicking off to ongoing AMD Zen 5 benchmarks both for desktops and servers, a lot of exciting upstream kernel activity (and some drama...), and more. Even with the end of year holidays around, there remains new and original content on Phoronix each and every day. During November there were 250 original news articles on Phoronix along with another 14 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured-length benchmark articles.

Before getting to the November highlights, with the holiday season upon us, if you're interested in showing your support for this 20th year of operating Phoronix, still ongoing is the [1]Phoronix Premium Cyberweek sale to join [2]Phoronix Premium for ad-free viewing, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits. Most importantly Phoronix Premium provides support to help me with resources to be able to continue publishing Phoronix each and everyday. Unfortunately the ad situation online for web publishers remain dire especially with niche areas like Linux and where ad-block use is rampant. So if you are able to, please consider the [3]Phoronix cyber week special that is running through end of day Tuesday (3 December).

As for the news of November, there was a lot going from Linux 6.12 being released to Linux 6.13 beginning to take shape and a lot of interesting commentary on the Linux kernel mailing list, among other news:

[4]Intel Spots A 3888.9% Performance Improvement In The Linux Kernel From One Line Of Code

Intel's Linux kernel test robot has reported a 3888.9% performance improvement in the mainline Linux kernel as of this past week.

[5]ReiserFS Has Been Deleted From The Linux Kernel

Linus Torvalds just merged the change to the Linux 6.13 kernel that goes ahead and deletes the ReiserFS file-system from the source tree. Removing ReiserFS from the Linux tree lightens the kernel by 32.8k lines of code.

[6]Linux CoC Announces Decision Following Recent Bcachefs Drama

Following the recent messaging from Bcachefs lead developer Kent Oversteet that Bcachefs changes for Linux 6.13 were rejected on the basis of his Code of Conduct, the Linux CoC committee has now formally announced their decision.

[7]Rust-Based Redox OS Gets RISC-V Working, Also Now Booting On The Raspberry Pi 4

The Redox OS open-source Rust-based operating system project is out with their newest monthly development update.

[8]Bcachefs Changes Rejected Reportedly Due To CoC, Kernel Future "Uncertain"

While the Bcachefs feature changes for Linux 6.13 were already submitted even before the Linux 6.12 stable kernel was released, merging these changes are supposedly on hold due to the kernel's Code of Conduct (CoC) board.

[9]Ubuntu Hoping To Remove Qt 5 Before Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

Ubuntu developer Simon Quigley laid out the plans for hoping Ubuntu packages will move from Qt 5 to Qt 6 so that by the time of the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle in early 2026 that the older version of this graphical toolkit can be removed.

[10]Linux 6.13 Will Report The Number Of Hung Tasks Since Boot

Following all of the MM patches earlier this week sent in by Andrew Morton, on Sunday morning he sent out all of the non-MM patches that he manages for the Linux kernel. Notable for Linux 6.13 with this pull request is presenting the hung task counter as well as finishing off the folio conversion in the NILFS2 code.

[11]Fedora KDE Desktop Spin Promoted To Same Tier As GNOME-Based Fedora Workstation

Earlier this year was a Fedora change proposal seeking to make KDE Plasma the default over GNOME for Fedora 42. A compromise of sorts has now been settled on with the Fedora Desktop Spin being promoted to an "Edition" status that will put it on the same level as the GNOME-based Fedora Workstation Edition.

[12]Valve Engineer Fixes Massive Performance Issue For RADV Driver With AMD FSR2 Sample

With the upcoming Mesa 24.3 release there is a huge improvement coming for those using the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver with the AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 sample app.

[13]KDE Will Nicely Notify You When Apps Are Being Killed Due To Out-Of-Memory

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary of interesting KDE changes in closing out October.

[14]Microsoft Makes An Interesting Improvement To Kernel Modules With Linux 6.13

Sent out on Tuesday was the modules pull request for Linux 6.13 that have some low-level improvements but it noted that the biggest kernel modules highlight wasn't in that pull request itself but had been added by way of the memory management pull. This was a change by a Microsoft engineer around caching of kernel modules into huge pages.

[15]9elements Takes Over Intel 1st Gen Xeon Scalable "Skylake" Support Within Coreboot

For those still running a 1st Generation Xeon Scalable "Skylake" era server, support for it within the open-source Coreboot firmware may continue to improve all these years later thanks to firmware consulting firm 9elements.

[16]Linux 6.13 KVM Eliminates An "Awful Idea", Many x86_64 Improvements

The KVM changes were merged yesterday for Linux 6.13 in further enhancing the open-source virtualization stack.

[17]NVIDIA Outlines Current Wayland Limitations & Upcoming Driver Features

Longtime NVIDIA Linux engineer Aaron Plattner shared a status update on Friday around the current feature parity difference between the NVIDIA driver stack on X11 and under (X)Wayland.

[18]Upstream Linux Developers Take Aim At TUXEDO's Out-Of-Tree GPLv3 Drivers

A new patch series posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list would block kernel modules/drivers from TUXEDO Computers from accessing GPL-only symbols in the kernel.

[19]Microsoft Continues "Demikernel" Development LibOS For Kernel-Bypass I/O

A Microsoft Research project that was quietly announced a few years ago to some fanfare but not hearing much about since has been Demikernel as their library OS architecture for kernel-bypass I/O. A Phoronix reader brought up Demikernel this week and while it hasn't been talked about much in recent years it does remain under active development with the most recent commits as of hours ago.

[20]Linux Kernel Performance Bottlenecks Spotted By Mold Developer

Open-source developer Rui Ueyama who is the lead developer of the Mold high performance linker and previously on the LLVM lld linker has written a detailed mailing list post that highlights some observed performance bottlenecks within the Linux kernel.

[21]Wine 9.22 Enables Wayland Driver By Default

Wine 9.22 is out this weekend ahead of the Wine 10.0-rc1 in two weeks.

[22]Red Hat & Microsoft Bringing RHEL To WSL

The latest Linux distribution being brought to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with Microsoft's blessing is none other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux... Microsoft and Red Hat jointly announced today that RHEL is coming to WSL.

[23]Linux 6.12 Released With Real-Time Capabilities, Sched_Ext, More AMD RDNA4 & More

As expected, minutes ago Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.12 kernel as stable. Linux 6.12 brings many new features, new hardware support, and is rounded out by the fact of expected to become this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version.

And the most popular reviews / featured-length articles of the month:

[24]Apple M4 Mac Mini With macOS vs. Intel / AMD With Ubuntu Linux Performance

Apple last week released their latest iMac, Mac Mini, and MacBook Pro products powered by their fourth-generation M-series Apple Silicon. The new Mac Mini in particular is interesting for under $600 starting out with the all re-designed Mac Mini with 10-core M4 and now the base model having 16GB of memory. It will take some time before there is any reasonable Linux support on the M4 hardware with Asahi Linux, but for those curious about how the M4 Mac Mini with macOS compares to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core CPUs under Linux, here are some preliminary benchmarks.

[25]AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D Linux Performance: Zen 5 With 3D V-Cache

Ahead of tomorrow's availability of the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor as the first Zen 5 CPU released with 3D V-Cache, today the review embargo lifts. Here is a look at how this 8-core / 16-thread Zen 5 CPU with 64MB of 3D V-Cache is performing under Ubuntu Linux compared to a variety of other Intel Core and AMD Ryzen desktop processors.

[26]8 vs. 12 Channel DDR5-6000 Memory Performance With AMD 5th Gen EPYC

As I wrote about last week within the Supermicro H13SSL-N EPYC Turin motherboard review, one of the factors leading me to purchasing that EPYC 9005 series motherboard was that this board offered support for full 12 channel DDR5-6000 memory performance compared to some of the other lower-cost Socket SP5 motherboards offering just 8 memory channels. For those wanting to quantify the performance difference between eight and twelve memory channels with AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors, here are some benchmarks for showing the workloads that can really benefit from all 12 memory channels and other workloads where eight memory channels can be largely sufficient if looking to minimize costs.

[27]NVIDIA GH200 Grace CPU vs. AMD EPYC 9005 Turin CPU Performance

With the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" testing over the past month since launch I have looked at how well the new EPYC Turin CPUs compete against Intel Xeon, how Turin Dense dominates in performance and power efficiency to AmpereOne at 192 cores, and the generational uplift from EPYC Genoa to Turin at the same core counts, among other Turin performance benchmark tests. Up for comparison today is a look at how the NVIDIA Grace CPU performance within the GH200 Superchip compares to the AMD EPYC Turin processors.

[28]Google Axion CPU With GCE C4A vs. AWS Graviton4 Performance

Last week Google announced the general availability of their C4A instances powered by their in-house Axion processors. I delivered launch-day benchmarks looking at the Google Axion CPU performance with the C4A instances compared to other Google Cloud instance types powered by Ampere Altra and Intel Xeon. In this article is a look at how the Google Axion processor performance compares to the competing Amazon/AWS Graviton4 processor.

[29]New AMD ERAPS Feature Yields Additional Performance Gains On Zen 5

At the beginning of November I wrote about AMD Linux engineers posting Linux patches enabling a new "ERAPS" feature for Zen 5. ERAPS wasn't talked about by AMD at the Zen 5 launches of the Ryzen 9000 / Ryzen AI 300 series or with the more recent EPYC 9005 "Turin" launch but when enabled, the Enhanced Return Address Prediction Security feature can help deliver some additional gains on new AMD Zen 5 systems by allowing some existing software security mitigations to be avoided. Here are some preliminary comparison benchmarks showing the benefit in affected workloads for using ERAPS on Linux with AMD Zen 5.

[30]Power Determinism Mode Still Proves Beneficial For AMD EPYC 9005 Performance

Typically in my launch-day Linux reviews of new AMD EPYC processors I try to include results both of the performance determinism (default) and power determinism modes available with these server processors since opting in to the power determinism mode can allow for additional performance uplift at the cost of slightly higher power costs. With the AMD EPYC 9575F / 9755 / 9965 benchmarks and review I didn't have a chance to complete all of the power determinism runs in time for that review, but for those curious about power vs. performance determinism modes with the 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" processors, here is a side-by-side comparison.

[31]Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake Graphics Compute / OpenCL Performance Looking Great

Now that Linux 6.12 has a fix for the Lunar Lake performance with the ASUS Zenbook I have been using for my Core Ultra 200V series Linux testing as well as there recently being an updated Intel Compute Runtime with Lunar Lake fixes, I have been working on some fresh Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics benchmarks using the very latest upstream open-source code. In today's article is exploring how the Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics is performing for OpenCL / GPU compute relative to the prior Meteor Lake Arc Graphics that were already a nice step-up over earlier Intel integrated graphics.

[32]Early Benchmarks: AMD EPYC 9005 Performance & Power Efficiency To Lead Further With Linux 6.13

One of the many changes to look forward to with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle is the AMD P-State driver to be used by default with the new EPYC 9005 series processors. While AMD Ryzen CPUs for a while now have been defaulting to the modern AMD P-State driver that makes use of ACPI CPPC platform support for allowing better power efficiency, AMD EPYC CPUs have kept to using the generic ACPI CPUFreq frequency scaling driver. But now AMD engineers have deemed amd_pstate ready for use with EPYC 9005 "Turin" CPUs and will be the default choice moving forward. Here is more information and power/performance benchmarks for this shift while testing using the EPYC 9755 processors.

[33]Supermicro H13SSL-N For AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" 1P Servers

While it's difficult still finding Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" motherboards/servers widely available at Internet retailers/distributors, when it comes to the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors that launched just last month, there is better availability thanks in large part to leveraging the existing SP5 socket. For those wanting to assemble a single socket AMD EPYC 9005 series server, one of the readily available options in the retail channel is the Supermicro H13SSL-N motherboard.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Cyber-Week-2024-Sale

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/phoronix-premium

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Cyber-Week-2024-Sale

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Linux-3888.9-Performance

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/news/ReiserFS-Deleted-Linux-6.13

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-CoC-Bcachefs-6.13

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Redox-OS-For-October-2024

[8] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Bcachefs-Uncertain-Kernel-Issue

[9] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Hopes-Removing-Qt-5

[10] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.13-Non-MM

[11] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-KDE-Desktop-Promoted

[12] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-FSR2-Mesa-24.3-Fix

[13] https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-OOM-Notifications

[14] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.13-Modules

[15] https://www.phoronix.com/news/9elements-SkylakeX-Coreboot

[16] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.13-KVM

[17] https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Wayland-Driver-Plans-24

[18] https://www.phoronix.com/news/TUXEDO-Drivers-Taint-Patches

[19] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-Demikernel-2024

[20] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Kernel-Bottlenecks-Mold

[21] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-9.22-Released

[22] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Red-Hat-MS-RHEL-WSL

[23] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.12-Released

[24] https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux

[25] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-linux

[26] https://www.phoronix.com/review/8-12-channel-epyc-9005

[27] https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-grace-epyc-turin

[28] https://www.phoronix.com/review/google-axion-graviton4

[29] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-zen5-eraps

[30] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9005-determinism

[31] https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-xe2-lunarlake-compute

[32] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9005-pstate

[33] https://www.phoronix.com/review/supermicro-h13ssln-epyc-turin