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)

Kernel Shader Variants Merged For Mesa's Rusticl OpenCL Driver

([Mesa] 11 September 05:46 AM EDT Kernel Shader Variants)

The latest Rust-written OpenCL driver "Rusticl" work by Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst is support for shader variants and introducing an optimized kernel variant.


wolfSSL "Immediately Retired" From Fedora Linux For Failing To Follow Packaging Rules

([Fedora] 10 September 08:11 PM EDT wolfSSL + Fedora)

WolfSSL is an embedded SSl/TLS library designed for a range of use-cases and available as open-source under the GNU GPLv2. WolfSSL was recently packaged and added to Fedora Linux since Netatalk began building against wolfSSL and in the longer-term plans to require its use. So the Fedora packager of Netatalk went ahead with packaging up wolfSSL. But this in turn has led to issues and as of today is now being "immediately retired from Fedora."


CentOS Stream 10 Showing Nice Performance Uplift In Early Benchmarks On AmpereOne

([Operating Systems] 10 September 04:00 PM EDT 5 Comments)

As part of the ongoing AmpereOne testing at Phoronix with the 192-core AmpereOne A192-32X flagship processor, I've been working on several different Linux distribution benchmarks with this Supermicro AmpereOne server. That comparison in full should be published next week while worth highlighting on its own are some of the gains seen with the in-development CentOS Stream 10 that serves as the upstream to what will be Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10. There are some nice performance gains seen on AArch64 with CentOS Stream 10 compared to CentOS Stream 9.


Intel CPU Microcode 20240910 Fixes Two Security Issues, Various Functional Issues

([Intel] 10 September 02:25 PM EDT Intel CPU Microcode 20240910)

Intel today as part of their "Patch Tuesday" released new CPU microcode for recent generation Core and Xeon processors. Two security updates were made along with fixing a handful of functional issues.


GNU C Library Tuning For AArch64 Helps Memset Performance By ~24%

([GNU] 10 September 01:00 PM EDT Glibc AArch64 memset Optimization)

A patch merged yesterday to the GNU C Library (glibc) codebase can help the memset() function's performance by 24% as measured on an Arm Neoverse-N1 core.


Intel Linux Graphics Driver To Finally Expose GPU Package Temperature

([Intel] 10 September 12:24 PM EDT Intel GPU Temperature Reporting)

With the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel the Intel graphics driver will finally be able to report GPU fan speeds. Another long sought feature is also on the way for this open-source Linux driver: GPU package temperature reporting for Intel discrete GPUs.


AlmaLinux Announces Certification SIG, Hardware Certification Program

([Operating Systems] 10 September 11:27 AM EDT AlmaLinux Hardware Certification)

AlmaLinux to further distinguish itself from other RHEL-based Linux distributions has announced a Certification Special Interest Group (SIG) and out of that is coming a AlmaLinux Hardware Certification Program.


Canonical Working To Package GraalVM For Ubuntu Linux

([Ubuntu] 10 September 10:42 AM EDT GraalVM For Ubuntu)

While OpenJDK Java is available via the Ubuntu package archive and the go-to JVM on Ubuntu Linux, Canonical is working to package up Oracle's GraalVM as another option for enhancing the Java stack on Ubuntu.


Intel QATlib 24.09 Improves Performance For Multi-Threaded Apps & Multi-Socket Servers

([Intel] 10 September 08:55 AM EDT Intel QATlib 24.09)

Intel today released a new version of QATlib, the QuickAssist Technology library for enjoying hardware-accelerated offloading of security, authentication, and compression needs. Recent Intel Xeon CPUs with built-in QAT accelerators stand to benefit a lot from the new QATlib 24.09 release.


Intel Preps Native PCIe Enclosure Management "NPEM" For Standardized Storage LEDs

([Intel] 10 September 07:00 AM EDT Native PCIe Enclosure Management)

Intel engineers have been working on enabling NPEM for Linux: Native PCIe Enclosure Management as a means of standardized storage LED indicators.


Canonical Shipping Updated Intel TDX Software For Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

([Ubuntu] 10 September 05:42 AM EDT Intel TDX + Ubuntu)

Last year Canonical delivered an Intel TDX "tech preview" for Ubuntu 23.10 to experiment with using Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) found on the latest Xeon server processors. With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS they began shipping a formal TDX software stack and now have rolled out an update to that software stack as a stable release update.


Ubuntu 24.10 Desktop To Ship With Sysprof Profiler Pre-Installed

([Ubuntu] 10 September 06:32 AM EDT Ubuntu 24.10 Sysprof)

Following Canonical's decision to enable frame pointers by default in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and then they ended up adding a number of performance tools to ship by default with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, for Ubuntu 24.10 a late change is adding another tool to be installed by default on the Ubuntu desktop: Sysprof.


RADV Merges Vulkan Pipeline Binary Support

([Mesa] 10 September 06:23 AM EDT VK_KHR_pipeline_binary)

Thanks to the work of Valve Linux graphics driver developer Samuel Pitoiset, the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver is now the first within Mesa supporting the new Vulkan pipeline binary extension.


Another Arrow Lake Graphics Device ID Being Added To Intel's Linux Driver

([Intel] 10 September 06:00 AM EDT Intel Arrow Lake ID)

The Intel Arrow Lake Linux graphics driver support appears largely wrapped up following a patch for properly handling the necessary GSC firmware requirements and building off all the existing Meteor Lake Arc Graphics driver code paths. There are a number of Arrow Lake PCI device IDs already present for the graphics while a new one is being added now to the kernel drivers.


Mesa 24.3 Removes Support For The Long-Abandoned OpenMAX API

([Mesa] 9 September 08:25 PM EDT Mesa Drops OpenMAX)

Some long-rotting code in Mesa has been flushed out today... Mesa 24.3 is now 11.6k lines of code lighter after removing support for the OpenMAX (OMX) API that was implemented as a Gallium3D state tracker long ago and hasn't seen any activity in recent years and the upstream OpenMAX standards work halted more than one decade ago.


Intel Efficiency Latency Control "ELC" Feature Slated For Linux 6.12

([Intel] 9 September 04:11 PM EDT Intel Uncore Efficiency Latency Control)

Last month I wrote about Intel Linux engineers working on a new Efficiency Latency Control feature for their uncore driver. This ELC option allows for adjusting the behavior of the Intel uncore for efficiency versus latency characteristics. Those Intel ELC patches to the TPMI uncore driver are now queued up for merging with the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle.


Latest "sched/rt" Commits Point To PREEMPT_RT Potentially Being Ready For Linux 6.12

([Linux Kernel] 9 September 02:38 PM EDT PREEMPT_RT Finally?!?)

Excitement is building that the real-time kernel "PREEMPT_RT" support might finally be ready for the mainline kernel as soon as the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window. It will be interesting to see if that long-awaited day finally comes this month but recently noted patches have now been queued into tip/tip.git's "sched/rt" branch ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window.


AWS Graviton4 vs. AmpereOne 192-Core Benchmarks For Leading AArch64 Server Performance

([Processors] 9 September 11:15 AM EDT 7 Comments)

With the Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD server that's in the lab for a few weeks for reviewing the AmpereOne A192-32X and delivering the first independent benchmarks of the AmpereOne 192-core AArch64 server processor, the AmpereOne benchmarks to date have been comparing to other Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server platforms. But if looking up to the cloud is the closest AArch64 server competition to AmpereOne there is: Amazon's Graviton4. In today's article ia showdown looking at how AmpereOne and AWS Graviton4 compete at 192 cores for ARM 64-bit server performance.


Redox OS 0.9 Brings COSMIC Apps, Better Performance & Improved Linux App Compatibility

([Operating Systems] 9 September 09:54 AM EDT Redox OS 0.9)

Redox OS 0.9 has been released today as a big update to this from-scratch Rust-written open-source operating system.


KDE Plans To Enhance Application Development Experience, Recruit More Contributors

([KDE] 9 September 08:35 AM EDT KDE Goals)

Earlier this summer KDE began soliciting ideas for what their goals should be over the next 2~3 years. This weekend at their annual Akademy KDE developer conference their next round of goals were solidified.


More

Festivity Level 1: Your guests are chatting amiably with each
other, admiring your Christmas-tree ornaments, singing carols around
the upright piano, sipping at their drinks and nibbling hors d'oeuvres.

Festivity Level 2: Your guests are talking loudly -- sometimes
to each other, and sometimes to nobody at all, rearranging your
Christmas-tree ornaments, singing "I Gotta Be Me" around the upright
piano, gulping their drinks and wolfing down hors d'oeuvres.

Festivity Level 3: Your guests are arguing violently with
inanimate objects, singing "I can't get no satisfaction," gulping down
other peoples' drinks, wolfing down Christmas tree ornaments and
placing hors d'oeuvres in the upright piano to see what happens when
the little hammers strike.

Festivity Level 4: Your guests, hors d'oeuvres smeared all over
their naked bodies are performing a ritual dance around the burning
Christmas tree. The piano is missing.

You want to keep your party somewhere around level 3, unless
you rent your home and own Firearms, in which case you can go to level
4. The best way to get to level 3 is egg-nog.