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



Vulkan 1.4.335 Released With The Very Notable VK_EXT_present_timing

([Vulkan] 1 Minute Ago Vulkan 1.4.335)

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.


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.


Fedora 44 Cleared To Replace Kernel Console With User-Space KMSCON

([Fedora] 34 Minutes Ago Using KMSCON For VT Console)

A proposal was raised a month ago for Fedora Linux 44 to replace the kernel's frame-buffer console "FBCON" with KMSCON in user-space. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now granted approval for making this change in Fedora 44 as part of a larger foal to eventually deprecate FBCON/FBDEV emulation in the kernel.


Linux 6.18 Officially Promoted To Being An LTS Kernel

([Linux Kernel] 88 Minutes Ago Linux 6.18 LTS)

Not exactly a big surprise but the recently released Linux 6.18 kernel is now officially promoted to being this year's Long Term Support "LTS" kernel.


Microsoft ACPI Fan Extensions & Configurable Hibernation Threads For Linux 6.19

([Linux Kernel] 112 Minutes Ago Linux 6.19 Power Management)

The pull requests landing the power management subsystem updates for Linux 6.19 along with the ACPI and thermal control code have landed. There is new hardware support, Microsoft ACPI Fan Extensions support, and other new features for Linux power management in this new kernel.


LibreOffice 26.2 Alpha 1 Released For Testing

([LibreOffice] 2 Hours Ago LibreOffice 26.2)

The first alpha release of the LibreOffice 26.2 open-source and cross platform office suite is now available for testing ahead of its official release in February.


Sound Open Firmware 2.14 Released With Intel Wildcat Lake & Nova Lake Support

([Multimedia] 5 Hours Ago Sound Open Firmware 2.14)

Sound Open Firmware is one of the projects started originally by Intel but has grown into a multi-vendor initiative for open-source audio digital signal processing (DSP) firmware and development tooling for a variety of platforms under the Linux Foundation umbrella.


Scoped User Access In Linux 6.19 To Reduce Speculation Barriers & Its Performance Hit

([Linux Security] 6 Hours Ago Scoped User Mode Access)

Merged yesterday to the Linux 6.19 Git codebase was the "core/uaccess" pull that introduces new scoped user-mode access with auto-cleanup functionality. This can reduce the number of speculation barriers encountered when needing to access user-mode memory and thereby avoiding some of the performance penalties incurred by speculation barriers.


AES-GCM Optimizations Land In Linux 6.19 - Benefiting AMD Zen 3, AVX-512 CPUs Too

([Linux Kernel] 6 Hours Ago AES-GCM Optimizations)

Google engineer Eric Biggers who is known for his many Linux crypto subsystem performance optimizations has seen his latest pull requests land in Linux 6.19. Notable among them are some AES-GCM optimizations benefiting AMD Zen 3 processors and separately AVX-512 processors also benefit too from this latest round of optimization work.


X.Org Server's xkbcomp Updated For Four Security Issues Dating Back Years

([X.Org] 6 Hours Ago xkbcomp 1.5)

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer announced the release today of xkbcomp 1.5, the CLI utility used for compiling X Keyboard Extension (XBD) keyboard descriptions for the X.Org Server. Driving this new xkbcomp release are fixes for four security issues.


Intel LASS, SGX EUPDATESVN & Microcode Staging Features Land In Linux 6.19

([Intel] 2 December 08:26 PM EST New Intel Features)

In addition to new AMD CPU features being merged today for Linux 6.19, there are also some new Intel CPU features that hit Linux Git today that are worth highlighting.


AMD Zen 6 RAS Preparation, AMD SDCI Features Merged For Linux 6.19

([AMD] 2 December 04:28 PM EST AMD Zen 6 RAS + SDCI Merged)

Linus Torvalds just merged another set of pull requests to Git for the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. With the latest round of merges, there are two separate AMD changes worth highlighting.


3mdeb Ports Their Dasharo Firmware To A Recent ASRock Rack Motherboard

([Coreboot] 2 December 02:53 PM EST ASRock Rack SPC741D8/2L2T)

Open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb published a blog post today outlining their work on bringing their Coreboot-downstream Dasharo to the ASRock Rack SPC741D8/2L2T, a recent server motherboard for supporting Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids processors.


Important Performance Work: Overhaul Of RSEQ & CID Management Merged For Linux 6.19

([Linux Kernel] 2 December 02:29 PM EST core/rseq)

An important set of patches were just merged a few minutes ago to Linux Git for the ongoing Linux 6.19 kernel with some important performance implications.


Linux 6.19 Merges "klp-build" As New Livepatch Module Generation Solution

([Linux Kernel] 2 December 01:00 PM EST Linux 6.19 klp-build)

Merged as part of the objtool changes for the Linux 6.19 kernel is introducing the "klp-build" script as a new solution to generate livepatch modules using a source .patch file as the input. This klp-build effort was spearheaded by Josh Poimboeuf with ideas learned from the out-of-tree Kpatch project over the past decade.


TornadoVM 2.0 Released For Java On NVIDIA PTX, OpenCL & SPIR-V Devices

([Programming] 2 December 12:23 PM EST TornadoVM 2.0)

TornadoVM 2.0 is out today as the newest feature release for this OpenJDK and GraalVM plug-in that allows Java programs to run on heterogeneous hardware. TornadoVM targets continue to be OpenCL, NVIDIA PTX, and SPIR-V compatible devices for a range of accelerator support for use from conventional Java code.


Linux 6.19 To Allow File-Systems To Increase The Writeback Chunk Size

([Linux Storage] 2 December 10:12 AM EST Larger Writeback Chunk Size)

Linux has maintained a default 4MB minimum writeback chunk size but with the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel it will allow file-systems to override that minimum value. This in turn can help avoid fragmentation and yield a better experience for zoned rotation media and other uses.


NVIDIA 590.44.01 Beta Linux Driver Released With Wayland Improvements

([NVIDIA] 2 December 09:08 AM EST NVIDIA 590 Beta)

NVIDIA today released the 590.44.01 Linux driver build as the first beta of their R590 series driver branch for Linux customers.


Canonical Now Offering Ubuntu Pro For WSL

([Ubuntu] 2 December 08:24 AM EST Ubuntu Pro For WSL)

Evidently Canonical has been pretty pleased with the uptake of Ubuntu on Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) within enterprise/corporate environments as they are now offering Ubuntu Pro for WSL.


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WHEN THE PROFESSOR SAYS: YOU WRITE:

Probably the greatest quality of the poetry John Milton -- born 1608
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