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)

Linux Fix Pending For Annoying Intel Lunar Lake Laptop Problems

([Intel] 8 November 11:33 AM EST X86_BUG_MONITOR)

A patch is working its way to the mainline Linux kernel for addressing an annoyance affecting new Intel Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" laptops.



Google Axion CPU With GCE C4A vs. AWS Graviton4 Performance

([Processors] 8 November 09:00 AM EST 4 Comments)

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.



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

([Fedora] 8 November 07:00 AM EST Fedora KDE Desktop Promoted)

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.



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

([Intel] 8 November 06:40 AM EST 3888.9% Performance)

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



Mesa 24.3 Code Branched, Mesa 25.0 Enters Development

([Mesa] 8 November 06:14 AM EST Mesa 24.3)

Mesa 24.3 feature development is now over and Mesa 25.0 has entered development with Mesa Git.



AMX-AVX512 Support Merged For LLVM Clang 20 Compiler

([Intel] 8 November 05:57 AM EST Intel AMX-AVX512)

As the latest on the compiler enablement front for Intel's next-gen Xeon "Diamond Rapids processors, LLVM Git has merged support for the AMX-AVX512 instructions for next spring's Clang 20 compiler release.



Intel Linux Patch Would Report Outdated CPU Microcode As A Security Vulnerability

([Intel] 7 November 08:39 PM EST Old Intel Microcode As A Vulnerability)

A patch posted on Thursday by one of Intel's long-time Linux kernel engineers would begin treating outdated Intel CPU microcode as a security vulnerability that would be reported to user-space via the existing sysfs vulnerabilities reporting.



NVIDIA GH200 Grace CPU vs. AMD EPYC 9005 Turin CPU Performance

([Processors] 7 November 12:37 PM EST 20 Comments)

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.



Linux 6.13 To Allow Controlling Zero RPM Feature For Radeon RX 7000 Series GPUs

([Radeon] 7 November 10:19 AM EST Zero RPM Fan Control)

Sent out yesterday was an AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver pull request with the last few feature additions and patches slated for the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel merge window. Alongside other AMD kernel graphics driver updates, the new driver code with Radeon RX 7000 series RDNA3 graphics cards will finally allow controlling the zero RPM fan feature under Linux.



FreeBSD Reduces OS Support From 5 To 4 Years, Continues Collaboration With AMD

([BSD] 7 November 08:39 AM EST FreeBSD Q3-2024 Report)

The FreeBSD project issued today their Q3'2024 progress report to outline enhancements made to this open-source BSD operating system over the prior quarter.



Haiku Enjoyed A Busy October Implementing More Features

([Operating Systems] 7 November 06:42 AM EST Haiku OS)

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS has remained very active implementing more features and fixes as we approach the end of 2024.



Mesa RADV Driver Delivers Conformant Vulkan 1.3 Support For Old AMD GFX6/GFX7 GPUs

([Radeon] 7 November 06:56 AM EST Vulkan 1.3 Conformance)

While old Radeon GFX6/GFX7 era graphics processors are no longer actively supported by AMD on Windows and haven't been for quite a while, under Linux with the upstream open-source driver stack they remain supported and still enjoying improvements in large part from common code. The most recent fascinating aspect is the old AMD GFX6/GFX7 era GPUs seeing official Vulkan 1.3 support that has been deemed conformant by Khronos.



Mesa 24.3 Merges Vulkan FIFO Support On Wayland

([Mesa] 7 November 06:33 AM EST Vulkan FIFO Presentation Mode)

Yet another feature merging into Mesa 24.3 with the code branching (feature freeze) yet to take place is Vulkan FIFO presentation mode support under Wayland.



OpenCL Headers & SDK Updated For OpenCL 3.0.17

([Programming] 7 November 06:19 AM EST OpenCL 3.0.17)

Near the end of October OpenCL 3.0.17 was released as the newest maintenance update to this low-level compute API for cross-vendor GPUs and other accelerators. The OpenCL Headers and SDK have now been updated for the new revision.



AMD ROCm 6.2.4 Released With Radeon PRO V710 Support & Documentation Updates

([Radeon] 6 November 08:41 PM EST ROCm 6.2.4)

AMD ROCm 6.2.4 is out today as the newest point release for this Radeon and Instinct open-source GPU compute stack.



GIMP 3.2 Will Aim To Be Out Within One Year Of GIMP 3.0

([Free Software] 6 November 04:22 PM EST GIMP 3.2 One Year After GIMP 3.0)

Following the GIMP 3.0-RC1 tagging, the GIMP project has now put out their lengthy write-up outlining many of the new features to enjoy with this first release candidate of the much anticipated GIMP 3.0. Plus there is a few words about future releases when moving past the upcoming GIMP 3.0 stable.



Fresh Take On Linux Uncached Buffered I/O "RWF_UNCACHED" Nets 65~75% Improvement

([Linux Storage] 6 November 03:02 PM EST RWF_UNCACHED)

Linux I/O expert and block/IO_uring maintainer Jens Axboe of Meta has recently revisited his patches around uncached buffered I/O. Back in 2019 the "RWF_UNCACHED" effort was started by Axboe to address a throughput cliff in performance once the page cache fills up. That work faded away but Axboe recently took to crafting a set of fresh patches for implementing uncached buffered I/O and they are showing extremely promising results.



systemd 257-rc1 Released With A Ton Of New Features & Changes

([systemd] 6 November 12:47 PM EST systemd 257-rc1)

Systemd 257-rc1 is out today as a big feature update for this release that brings many new features and other refinements to this key piece of the Linux operating system stack.



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

([Processors] 6 November 09:00 AM EST 59 Comments)

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.



Intel Prepping Linux For SNC6 With Six Nodes Per L3 Cache

([Intel] 6 November 08:30 AM EST Intel Sub-NUMA Clustering SNC6)

Patches for the Linux kernel over the past week are preparing for an SNC6 sub-NUMA clustering mode. This is the first time I've seen patches or mentions of an SNC6 mode compared to SNC 1/2/3/4 modes with existing processors.



More

You know you're in trouble when...
(1) Your car horn goes off accidentally and remains stuck as you
follow a group of Hell's Angels on the freeway.
(2) You want to put on the clothes you wore home from the party
and there aren't any.
(3) Your boss tells you not to bother to take off your coat.
(4) The bird singing outside your window is a buzzard.
(5) You wake up and your braces are locked together.
(6) Your mother approves of the person you're dating.