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)

Valve's SteamOS 3.6.9 Beta Brings Many Fixes & Supports More Controllers

([Operating Systems] 7 August 09:09 PM EDT SteamOS 3.6.9)

Valve has just released a SteamOS 3.6.9 beta as the newest update to their Arch Linux derived operating system powering the Steam Deck and other gaming devices.



GhostWrite Vulnerability Affects RISC-V CPU, Mitigating Takes A ~77% Performance Hit

([RISC-V] 7 August 02:27 PM EDT GhostWrite Vulnerability)

Security researchers with the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have disclosed GhostWrite, a new CPU vulnerability affecting a common RISC-V processor.



More HDR Preparations Merged In Time For GNOME 47

([GNOME] 7 August 12:45 PM EDT Display HDR Prepping)

Following the recent Mutter 47 beta release that also marks the feature freze point for GNOME 47, there still are some High Dynamic Range (HDR) display preparations being merged ahead of this next stable desktop release due out in September.



AMD Ryzen 5 9600X & Ryzen 7 9700X Offer Excellent Linux Performance

([Processors] 7 August 09:00 AM EDT 84 Comments)

This could quite well be my simplest review in the past twenty years of Phoronix. The AMD Ryzen 9000 series starting with the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X launching tomorrow are some truly great desktop processors. The generational uplift is very compelling, even in single-threaded Linux workloads shooting ahead of Intel's 14th Gen Core competition, across nearly 400 benchmarks these new Zen 5 desktop CPUs impress, and these new Zen 5 desktop processors are priced competitively. I was already loving the Ryzen 7000 series performance on Linux with its AVX-512 implementation and performing so well across hundreds of different Linux workloads but now with the AMD Ryzen 9000 series, AMD is hitting it out of the ball park. That paired with the issues Intel is currently experiencing for the Intel Core 13th/14th Gen CPUs and the ~400 benchmark results makes this a home run for AMD on the desktop side with only some minor Linux caveats.



In 2024 Another Attempt To Get The Apple Touch Bar In Good Shape For Linux On x86 Macs

([Apple] 7 August 07:12 AM EDT Apple Touch Bar On Linux)

A set of nine patches were posted for review on Tuesday in aiming to get the Apple Touch Bar working well under Linux for the x86 T2-based Macs.



Intel Idle Linux Driver Gets Patch For Xeon 6 Granite Rapids

([Intel] 7 August 06:45 AM EDT Granite Rapids)

A seemingly late patch for the Intel Idle (intel_idle) Linux kernel driver enables support for upcoming Xeon 6 Granite Rapids processors.



Dragonfly As Redis Alternative Adds Multi-Tenancy & Alpha Level SSD Data Tiering

([Programming] 7 August 06:27 AM EDT Dragonfly 1.21)

Dragonfly 1.21 released today as the newest version of this modern, drop-in replacement to Redis and Memcached. This performance-optimized in-memory data store has added a few interesting features with the new release.



Mold 2.33 Adds New Flag To Further Speed Up The Linker

([Programming] 7 August 06:13 AM EDT Mold 2.33)

Mold 2.33 is out as the newest version of this high speed linker as an alternative to the likes of GNU Gold and LLVM LLD. With Mold 2.33 there are still new performance optimizations being worked out by lead developer Rui Ueyama.



OpenZFS 2.2.5 Released With Linux 6.9 Support, Some Linux 6.10 Bits

([Linux Storage] 6 August 08:48 PM EDT OpenZFS 2.2.5)

OpenZFS 2.2.5 is now available as the newest stable update to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.



Sway Compositor Lands Wayland Explicit Sync Support

([Wayland] 6 August 03:34 PM EDT Explicit Sync For Sway)

Yesterday the Sway i3-inspired Wayland compositor saw tearing control support merged while today another prominent Wayland protocol has been merged: linux-drm-syncobj-v1 for explicit sync support.



NVMe 2.1 Specifications Published With New Capabilities

([Standards] 6 August 12:49 PM EDT NVMe 2.1)

As part of the Flash Memory Summit this week, the NVMe 2.1 specifications were published today including the NVMe 2.1 Base specification, Command Set specifications (NVM Command Set, ZNS Command Set, Key Value Command Set), Transport specifications (PCIe Transport, Fibre Channel Transport, RDMA Transport and TCP Transport) and the NVMe Management Interface specification.



Solidigm D7-PS1010 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs Offer Great Performance For Servers

([Storage] 6 August 11:07 AM EDT 7 Comments)

Solidigm today is formally announcing the D7-PS1010 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs for the data center. The new D7-PS1010 solid-state drives offer phenomenal performance for PCIe Gen 5 servers as I've enjoyed in testing out a few of these D7-PS1010 SSDs the past several weeks and their leading performance that should be especially appealing for modern AI and HPC servers.



Open-Source AMD GPU Implementation Of CUDA "ZLUDA" Has Been Taken Down

([Radeon] 6 August 10:38 AM EDT Open-Source AMD CUDA)

Back in February of this year you may recall the interesting news that was announced on Phoronix that AMD Quietly Funded A Drop-In CUDA Implementation Built On ROCm: It's Now Open-Source. That open-source ZLUDA code for AMD GPUs has been available since AMD quit funding the developer earlier this year. But now the code has been retracted. It's not from NVIDIA legal challenges but rather AMD reversing course on allowing it to be open-source.



NVIDIA 560.31.02 Linux Driver Delivers Various Fixes

([NVIDIA] 6 August 10:17 AM EDT NVIDIA 560.31.02)

Following last month's NVIDIA 560 Linux driver beta release where the open GPU kernel modules are used by default with Turing GPUs and newer, the NVIDIA 560.31.02 Linux driver has debuted today in stable form for the R560 series.



QNAP TS-433 Making For A Nice Open-Source & Mainline Linux NAS Experience

([Hardware] 6 August 09:53 AM EDT QNAP TS-433)

While there is no shortage of consumer network attached storage (NAS) devices these days, those able to run a mainline Linux kernel, open bootloader, and other open/mainline software components is a bit more challenging. Thanks to the work of open-source developer Heiko Stuebner, the QNAP TS-433 is looking to be an interesting candidate for those wanting a nice 4-bay NAS while being able to load it with a mainline Linux kernel build and other upstream open-source software.



RadeonSI Driver Sees GPU Hang Fixes - RDNA4 Fixes, Optimally Programming "OREO MODE"

([Radeon] 6 August 08:46 AM EDT RadeonSI Driver)

A number of GPU hang fixes have been merged for AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver within Mesa. These fixes should help further enhance the current RDNA3 GPU driver support and also has fixes for stabilizing the upcoming RDNA4 GPU support.



PostgreSQL Sees Up To 4x Query Performance With SIMD-Optimized JSON Escaping

([Programming] 6 August 07:01 AM EDT Optimize JSON Escaping Using SIMD)

For those making use of JSON data with the PostgreSQL database server, now merged code to make use of SIMD for JSON escaping has shown up to a 4x improvement for query performance when dealing with lots of JavaScript Object Notation data.



AMD Posts Patches For VCN IP DUMP With Open-Source Linux Driver

([Radeon] 6 August 06:47 AM EDT AMD VCN IP DUMP)

AMD engineers posted a set of patches today for enabling VCN IP DUMP support with their open-source AMDGPU kernel driver. This allows for dumping the IP state of all Video Core Next (VCN) hardware from VCN 1.0 through VCN 5.0.



Linux 6.11 x86 Platform Driver Fixes Add More Zen 5 CPU IDs, ASUS ROG Ally X Quirk

([Hardware] 6 August 06:28 AM EDT x86 Platform Drivers)

Ilpo Järvinen of Intel sent in a new round of x86 platform driver fixes today for the ongoing Linux 6.11 kernel cycle. This pull request has a few items worth mentioning as part of this fixes queue.



Raspberry Pi Driver Updated With Vulkan 1.3 Support

([Vulkan] 5 August 03:30 PM EDT V3DV Now Does Vulkan 1.3)

The Broadcom V3DV driver living within the Mesa code-base that provides Vulkan API support most notably for Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers now advertises Vulkan 1.3!



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We seldom repent talking too little, but very often talking too much.
-- Jean de la Bruyere