AMD EPYC 7773X "Milan-X" Performance & Power Nearly Four Years Later

([Processors] 5 December 10:20 AM EST 4 Comments)

Nearly four years have passed since AMD launched their EPYC Milan-X processors with 3D V-Cache. When recently rearranging some servers in the lab and realizing the four year anniversary was coming up in March, curiosity got the best of me in wondering where the Linux performance and energy efficiency on Milan-X is now with the latest Linux software stack compared to the numbers when Milan-X launched back in March 2022.

Intel Updates Cache Aware Scheduling For Linux With Better NUMA Balancing

([Intel] 5 December 09:38 AM EST Cache Aware Scheduling v2)

Intel engineer Tim Chen has sent out a second version of the proposed Cache Aware Scheduling patches for the Linux kernel to enhance the CPU performance of modern processors sporting multiple cache domains.

Venus Vulkan Driver Lands Mesh Shader Support In Mesa 26.0

([Mesa] 5 December 09:03 AM EST Venus + Vulkan Mesh Shader)

Venus is the VirtIO-GPU driver that allows for Vulkan support within guest virtual machines permitting sufficient host driver support and other requirements in place with hypervisors like CrosVM and QEMU. The Venus driver now supports Vulkan's mesh shader capabilities and in turn advances the DXVK-Proton support for Linux gaming within VMs.

Intel Graphics Score A Big Win With Linux 6.19: Color Management & Xe VFIO Driver Merged

([Intel] 5 December 08:15 AM EST Intel Graphics Driver)

On top of enabling Xe3P graphics for Nova Lake and Crescent Island plus other changes like CASF adaptive sharpening for Lunar Lake and newer, another set of Intel kernel graphics driver updates were merged overnight as a big win for the open-source Intel graphics stack on Linux.

Linux NTFS3 Driver Will Now Support Timestamps Prior To 1970

([Linux Storage] 5 December 06:13 AM EST Pre-Epoch)

While NTFSPLUS continues to be developed as a new and modern NTFS open-source driver for Linux systems, at the moment NTFS3 from Paragon Software remains the most capable NTFS file-system driver within the mainline kernel. For the Linux 6.19 merge window a variety of fixes have landed for this driver.

Intel Nova Lake Audio Support Merged For Linux 6.19

([Multimedia] 5 December 05:57 AM EST Nova Lake Audio)

The sound subsystem updates were merged on Thursday for enabling a variety of new audio hardware with the Linux 6.19. Among the hardware standing out is getting Intel Nova Lake audio support in order.

Linux 6.19 GPU Driver Features: Color Pipeline API, Intel Xe3P, AMDGPU For GCN 1.0/1.1

([Linux Kernel] 4 December 08:23 PM EST Linux 6.19 Graphics Drivers)

The big set of kernel graphics driver features were merged today for the Linux 6.19 kernel. As usual there is a lot of new feature work on the AMD Radeon, Intel, and NVIDIA graphics drivers plus the smaller Arm/embedded graphics like now having initial Qualcomm Gen8 GPU support. Plus the growing number of accelerator "accel" drivers for NPUs / AI accelerators.

Graviton5 Announced With Up To 192 Cores Per Chip, 5x Larger Cache

([Hardware] 4 December 06:44 PM EST AWS Graviton5)

Amazon AWS today announced Graviton5 as their newest-generation ARM64 server processor for their EC2 cloud. Graviton5 is being promoted as offering 25% higher performance over existing Graviton4 processors.

NVIDIA Releases CUDA 13.1 With New "CUDA Tile" Programming Model

([NVIDIA] 4 December 05:44 PM EST NVIDIA CUDA 13.1)

NVIDIA just released CUDA 13.1 for what they claim is "the largest and most comprehensive update to the CUDA platform since it was invented two decades ago." The most notable addition with the CUDA 13.1 release is CUDA Tile as a new tile-based programming model.

Linux 6.19 Brings Temperature Monitoring For The Steam Deck APU, Apple Silicon SMC

([Hardware] 4 December 04:33 PM EST Linux 6.19 HWMON)

The many hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem updates were merged today for Linux 6.19 that is predominantly around delivering new hardware support.

Bcachefs Ready With Its Reconcile Feature As Biggest Change In Two Years

([Linux Storage] 4 December 01:48 PM EST Bcachefs)

The out-of-tree Bcachefs file-system is ready with its reconcile feature, which previously was known as "rebalance_v2", and what lead developer Kent Overstreet calls the biggest feature to this copy-on-write file-system in the last two years.

FreeBSD 15.0 Benchmarks Versus FreeBSD 14.3 On AMD EPYC

([Operating Systems] 4 December 12:20 PM EST 10 Comments)

This week brought the official release of FreeBSD 15.0 as the latest major update to this BSD operating system. In being eager to test out this new FreeBSD release, for this first round of FreeBSD 15.0 benchmarking is seeing how it compares to the former FreeBSD 14.3 release on a Supermicro + AMD EPYC Turin server.

Rust-Written Redox OS Sees Initial Wayland Port

([Operating Systems] 4 December 11:28 AM EST Wayland On Redox OS)

Developers behind Redox OS, the original open-source operating system written from scratch in the Rust programming language, have ported Wayland to it with initially getting the Smallvil Wayland compositor up and running along with the Smithay framework and the Wayland version of the GTK toolkit.

Former Intel Open-Source Project SVT-VP9 Sees First Update In 5 Years

([Multimedia] 4 December 11:04 AM EST SVT-VP9)

The open-source SVT-VP9 project started by Intel as a high performance VP9 video encoder has seen its first new release in five years.

Printk Improvement For Linux 6.19 Can Significantly Speed-Up Boot Times For Some Systems

([Linux Kernel] 4 December 10:50 AM EST printk)

The Linux kernel's printk code for logging kernel messages has some useful improvements with the Linux 6.19 kernel.

Linux 6.19 Fixes A Thundering Herd Problem For Big NUMA Servers

([Linux Kernel] 4 December 08:11 AM EST Timers Issue)

The "timers/core" pull requests for updating Linux kernel timer-related code doesn't tend to be too interesting each kernel cycle, but this time around for Linux 6.19 it is for addressing a problem HPE discovered on big NUMA servers.

Zlib-rs 0.5.3 Expands AVX-512 Usage For Faster Performance

([Programming] 4 December 06:20 AM EST zlib-rs 0.5.3)

The Trifecta Tech Foundation today released zlib-rs 0.5.3 as the newest version of this Zlib implementation written in the Rust programming language for better memory safety. Zlib-rs is advertised as "a safer Zlib" for use by both C and Rust projects while delivering competitive performance to the C-based zlib-ng.