Vulkan 1.4.335 released a few hours ago as the latest iteration of this high performance graphics and compute API. With being just a week since the prior update and given the US Thanksgiving week, it's on the lighter side in terms of issues addressed. There is one new extension though and it's a big one: VK_EXT_present_timing is finally merged.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In addition to NVIDIA improving peer-to-peer (P2P) DMA for block devices in Linux 6.19, NVIDIA also led an effort providing DMA-BUF support for VFIO PCI devices for opening up some interesting new cases moving forward. As part of the VFIO pull request this new functionality has landed for Linux 6.19.

A week ago I wrote about AI being used to help modernize Ubuntu's Error Tracker. Microsoft GitHub Copilot was tasked to help adapt its Cassandra database usage to modern standards. It's worked in some areas but even for a rather straight forward task, some of the generated functions ended up being "plain wrong" according to the developer involved.

On top of the Rust driver core changes and other Rust code for Linux 6.19, the modules infrastructure for this new kernel version is also bringing some new code. Surprisingly, it's taken until now for Rust kernel modules/drivers to support module parameters as is common practice for passing different options when booting the kernel or manually loading kernel drivers with extra non-default options.