Phoronix

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Phoronix: news regarding free and open-source software



Linux 6.19 Enables Per-CPU BIO Caching By Default For Helping Performance

([Linux Storage] 1 Minute Ago File-System Performance)

Last week saw the main set of block and IO_uring feature patches for the Linux 6.19 merge window but some additional block subsystem material was merged on Monday. There are various NVMe updates now merged plus enabling per-CPU BIO caching by default to help with file-system performance.



FFmpeg Integrates Video Encoder For Advanced Professional Video (APV)

([Multimedia] 5 Minutes Ago APV Encoder)

One week ago FFmpeg merged decode support for Samsung's Advanced Professional Video "APV" codec. APV is designed for professional-grade video recording purposes and is a royalty-free video codec geared for prosumers. Now arriving within FFmpeg Git is APV video encode support.



AWS Graviton4 96-Core Performance vs. AMD EPYC & Intel Xeon CPUs

([Processors] 1 Minute Ago)

Last week I published some initial benchmarks of the Amazon/AWS Graviton4 processors now available within the EC2 cloud using the new "R8g" instances. That initial comparison was a 64 vCPU comparison of Graviton4 against AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon 64 vCPU AWS instances. In today's article is a look at the 96-core Graviton4 bare metal performance using the "r8g.metal-24xl" AWS instance type. The Graviton4 r8g.metal-24xl performance was then compared in today's article against various bare metal AMD EPYC, Ampere Altra Max, and Intel Xeon processors in the lab at Phoronix.



F2FS Brings More Performance Optimizations To Linux 6.19

([Linux Storage] 18 Minutes Ago F2FS Optimizations)

The Flash-Friendly File-System "F2FS" is enjoying more performance optimizations and other improvements for the Linux 6.19 kernel cycle.



Rust-Based Project Aims To Provide Modern Thumbnails For Audio/Video Files On GNOME

([GNOME] 9 Hours Ago gst-thumbnailers)

Since Showtime replaced Totem as the default video player of GNOME, the desktop has lacked thumbnail capabilities for audio and video files. But to address that defect, the Rust-based gst-thumbnailers project has been in development to leverage GStreamer and paired with Rust to provide safe thumbnail generation capabilities for audio and video content.



Mesa 26.0 Lands Initial Support For Adreno Gen 8 - Including For The Snapdragon X2

([Mesa] 10 Hours Ago Freedreno Gallium3D)

The newest Mesa 26.0-devel code as of today has landed initial support for Qualcomm Adreno Gen 8 graphics into the Freedreno Gallium3D driver. The Adreno Gen 8 graphics so far are most notably used by the new Snapdragon X2 Elite laptop SoC with its X2-85 GPU as well as the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with Adreno 840 graphics.



Linux 6.19's Hung Task & System Lockup Detectors Can Provide Greater Insight

([Linux Kernel] 8 December 04:00 PM EST More Dumping)

Beginning with the Linux 6.19 kernel, the hung task detector and system lock-up detector are now optionally able to provide greater insight into the issues by dumping additional system information. The new lockup_sys_info and hung_task_sys_info sysctl knobs were merged over as part of the pull requests managed by Andrew Morton.



Live Update Orchestrator "LUO" Merged For Linux 6.19

([Linux Kernel] 8 December 03:17 PM EST Live Update Orchestrator)

Google engineers for the past number of months have been working on the Live Update Orchestrator as a new way of applying live Linux kernel updates. The Live Update Orchestrator "LUO" builds atop the Kexec Handover "KHO" functionality already within the kernel. Google has since been deplyoing LUO in their production environments for faster security updates to kernels, especially when involving VMs. LUO is now upstream in Linux 6.19.



Meson 1.10 Build System Adds OS/2 Support, Experimental C++ "import std"

([Programming] 8 December 01:22 PM EST Meson 1.10)

Meson 1.10 is out today as the newest feature release for this popular cross-platform build system.



Firefox 146 Now Available With Native Fractional Scaling On Wayland

([Mozilla] 8 December 11:24 AM EST Firefox 146)

The Mozilla Firefox 146.0 release binaries are now available with a very exciting improvement for Linux users relying on Wayland.



Intel Arc B580 vs. AMD Radeon RX 9000 vs. NVIDIA RTX 50 Series For Llama.cpp Vulkan Performance

([Display Drivers] 8 December 10:50 AM EST 8 Comments)

Recently there were Phoronix benchmarks looking at the Intel Battlemage GPU compute performance since last year when the Arc B580 graphics card launched as well as the OpenGL and Vulkan graphics performance for the B580 on Linux since launch. There was much progress on the open-source Intel Linux graphics drivers at large this year but especially for Battlemage. Following that a Phoronix Premium reader asked about seeing some fresh Llama.cpp AI benchmarks with its Vulkan back-end now for the Arc B580 compared to competing AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards. Here are those benchmarks as requested.



Early Benchmarks Of Linux 6.19 Git Raising Some Concerns

([Linux Kernel] 8 December 09:50 AM EST Linux 6.19)

While just half-way through the Linux 6.19 merge window, over the weekend I began running some benchmarks of the current Linux 6.19 Git state compared to Linux 6.18 LTS stable. There are some minor performance improvements to note in a few of the tests on the first system I tested but also some regressions at this very early pre-RC1 state of the Linux 6.19 kernel.



AMD Working On Push-Based Load Balancing For Linux To Further Enhance Performance

([AMD] 8 December 09:27 AM EST Push-Based Load Balancing)

One of the new Linux engineering initiatives out of AMD is working to further enhance Linux performance on today's large core count systems by introducing push-based load balancing.



Several Logitech Devices Seeing New/Improved Support With Linux 6.19

([Hardware] 8 December 06:43 AM EST Linux 6.19 HID)

All of the Human Interface Devices (HID) subsystem updates were merged a few days ago for the ongoing Linux 6.19 kernel merge window. Standing out this cycle on the HID side are seeing new/improved support for several Logitech devices.



Linux I3C Gains "HDR" Support For Faster Data Transfers

([Hardware] 8 December 06:27 AM EST Linux I3C HDR)

I2C in Linux 6.19 brought support for Rust-written I2C drivers. The newer I3C "Improved Inter-Integrated Circuit" interface changes have now been merged and the big feature there is HDR support. Not to be confused with the more common High Dynamic Range acronym usage for HDR, HDR in the I3C context is for the "High Data Rate" mode for facilitating faster data transfers.



Arm MPAM Driver Upstreamed To The Linux 6.19 Kernel

([Arm] 8 December 06:12 AM EST Arm MPAM)

The ARM64 code changes were merged last week into the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. The most notable of the ARM64 architecture changes this cycle is landing the Arm MPAM driver for Arm's Memory System Resource Partitioning and Monitoring.



Iced 0.14 Released For Popular Rust Cross-Platform GUI Library

([Programming] 7 December 08:14 PM EST Iced-rs 0.14)

Released today is a new version of Iced, the popular cross-platform GUI library for the Rust programming language. Iced is notably used by the COSMIC desktop environment and a growing variety of different Rust apps.



Linux GPIB Drivers Declared Stable - 53 Years After HP Introduced The Bus

([Hardware] 7 December 02:47 PM EST General Purpose Interface Bus)

Merged to the mainline Linux kernel last year was GPIB drivers in the kernel's "staging" area. GPIB is the General Purpose Interface Bus launched by HP back in 1972 for lab equipment and more. After a year of cleaning up the code in the kernel's staging area, for Linux 6.19 the GPIB drivers have been promoted out of the staging area and into the Linux kernel proper. The Linux kernel now has stable driver support for this 8 Mbyte/s parallel bus that was introduced 53 years ago.



Linux 6.19 Introduces PCIe Link Encryption & Device Authentication, AMD SEV-TIO Enabling

([Linux Kernel] 7 December 12:26 PM EST PCI Express Link Encryption)

One of the most exciting merges this weekend to the Linux 6.19 kernel is establishing the infrastructure for supporting PCI Express link encryption and device authentication. Multiple vendors are working on PCIe link encryption for their hardware while this initial pull begins laying the foundation of AMD SEV-TIO Trusted I/O support for the mainline kernel.



Linux 6.19 Delivers Working USB3 Support For Apple Silicon Devices

([Apple] 7 December 07:00 AM EST USB3 For Apple Silicon)

Merged last night for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window were all of the USB and Thunderbolt driver changes. Standing out this cycle is Apple Silicon devices like the M1 Macs now having working USB3 support on the mainline Linux kernel.



More

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
-- Oscar Wilde