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 6.11 Lands Support For Snapdragon X1 Elite ASUS Vivobook S15 & Lenovo Yoga Slim7x

([Hardware] 19 July 09:49 AM EDT Linux 6.11 SoC Updates)

All of the SoC and platform updates slated for the Linux 6.11 kernel have been merged including new SoCs and adding DeviceTree files for a number of new systems, including some of the first Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops.



NVIDIA's EGL-Wayland Library v1.1.14 Adds Explicit Sync

([NVIDIA] 19 July 08:27 AM EDT NVIDIA EGL-Wayland 1.1.14)

NVIDIA's EGL-Wayland library continues to be maintained as an EGLStream-based Wayland external platform library for client-side Wayland support to EGL atop EGLDevice/EGLStream.



Intel Panther Lake, Realtek RT1318 & Other Sound Hardware Supported By Linux 6.11

([Hardware] 19 July 07:02 AM EDT Linux 6.11 Sound)

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai has sent out all of the sound driver patches for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel.



Vulkan 1.3.291 Published With VK_AMD_anti_lag, AMD Anti Lag Extension

([Vulkan] 19 July 06:42 AM EDT VK_AMD_anti_lag)

Vulkan 1.3.291 was published this morning and with this specification update comes one prominent new extension: VK_AMD_anti_lag.



Linux 6.11 Brings A Dedicated Bucket Allocator For Better Security

([Linux Kernel] 19 July 06:35 AM EDT Linux 6.11)

The SLAB pull request landed in Linux 6.11 Git on Thursday with kmem_buckets-based hardening of kernel memory allocations.



Freedreno Gallium3D Driver Now Enables The Snapdragon X1 Elite/Plus SoC's GPU

([Mesa] 18 July 04:37 PM EDT Freedreno + Snapdragon X1 GPU)

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver that started out a decade ago providing reverse-engineered, open-source 3D driver support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware has now enabled support for the X1-85 GPU that is found within the Snapdragon X1 Elite and Snapdragon X1 Plus laptop SoCs.



Fedora 41 Proceeds With AMD SEV-SNP Virtualization Host Support For Confidential VMs

([Fedora] 18 July 02:43 PM EDT Fedora 41 + AMD SEV-SNP)

The Fedora change proposal was approved this week by their engineering and steering committee to support AMD SEV-SNP virtualization host support to allow easily launching confidential computing virtual machines (VMs) with Fedora 41.



AWS Graviton4 96-Core Performance vs. AMD EPYC & Intel Xeon CPUs

([Processors] 18 July 12:00 PM EDT 21 Comments)

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.



AMD RDNA4 "GFX12" Linux Driver Support Matures To Being Enabled By Default

([Radeon] 18 July 09:00 AM EDT AMD RDNA4)

It looks like the AMD RDNA4 "GFX12" graphics driver support is in good shape: AMD is now enabling the driver support for the next-generation graphics "out of the box" with the latest pending patches.



Sound Open Firmware 2.10 Brings Stable Support For Intel Arrow Lake & Lunar Lake

([Intel] 18 July 08:22 AM EDT Sound Open Firmware 2.10)

The Intel-initiated Sound Open Firmware project for open-source audio DSP firmware and related tooling is out with a new v2.10 release. SOF continues to be backed not only by Intel but also Google, AMD, Realtek, NXK, Mediatek, and other organizations.



GCC On AArch64 Handles Rewriting "-march=native" To "-mcpu=native"

([GNU] 18 July 06:56 AM EDT -march=native On ARM)

Toward the end of 2022 a GCC AArch64 compiler change was quietly made by Arm that allows "-march=native" to be handled on 64-bit ARM by treating it as the equivalent "-mcpu=native" option. The change happened to fly under my radar at that time and didn't draw much attention at large while now it's finally being officially documented in hopes of similar behavior being adopted by other compilers for AArch64.



Fedora 41 Looks To Ship Upcoming AMD ROCm 6.2 For Latest AI Capabilities

([Fedora] 18 July 06:22 AM EDT AMD ROCm 6.2)

The ROCm 6.1 series is the latest stable version currently of AMD's open-source GPU compute stack with an increasing large focus on AI. AMD has confirmed to Red Hat that ROCm 6.2 will debut before the release of Fedora 41, so the developers are now hoping to be shipping ROCm 6.2 packages with this upcoming Fedora Linux release.



EXT4 Has A Very Nice Performance Optimization For Linux 6.11

([Linux Storage] 18 July 07:45 AM EDT Faster Performance)

With the maturity of the EXT4 file-system it's not too often seeing any huge feature additions for this commonly used Linux file-system but there's still the occasional wild performance optimization to uncover... With Linux 6.11 the EXT4 file-system can see upwards of a 20% performance boost in some scenarios.



XFS Real-Time Enables FITRIM Support With Linux 6.11

([Linux Storage] 18 July 06:12 AM EDT XFS Real-Time + FITRIM)

The XFS file-system updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel.



Microsoft's WSL 2.3.11 Brings "Hundreds Of New Kernel Modules" & New Features

([Microsoft] 17 July 09:00 PM EDT WSL 2.3.11)

Microsoft today published a new version of their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in pre-release form.



Rust Safety Standard Proposed For The Linux Kernel

([Linux Kernel] 17 July 08:24 PM EDT Rust Safety Standard)

While Rust is viewed as a memory safe and robust programming language, there is the "unsafe" keyword within Rust that can be used for unsafe code that grants "unsafe superpowers" for the language. As dealing with Rust at low-levels as the Linux kernel can lead to needing to use "unsafe" Rust at times, a documentation standard has been proposed for dealing with such code inside the kernel.



NVIDIA Promotes Their Open-Source GPU Kernel Driver Support

([NVIDIA] 17 July 03:23 PM EDT Open-Source GPU Kernel Drivers)

It's been a wild two years since NVIDIA began publishing an open-source Linux GPU kernel driver for Turing GPUs and newer. With the latest NVIDIA 555 Linux driver series that open-source kernel driver support is in great shape and NVIDIA today is out with a lengthy blog post promoting it.



RADV vs. AMDVLK Radeon Vulkan Ray-Tracing Performance For Mid-2024

([Display Drivers] 17 July 11:50 AM EDT 9 Comments)

Last week with delivering a number of AMD vs. NVIDIA Vulkan ray-tracing benchmarks under Linux with the current drivers and using the new "Breaking Limit" benchmark, the question was raised how well does AMD's official "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver handle ray-tracing these days compared to the more popular Mesa RADV Vulkan driver used commonly by Linux gamers and as the default driver on most Linux distributions. Here is a fresh look at the RADV versus AMDVLK Vulkan performance on Linux with a focus on ray-tracing performance.



AMD Core Performance Boost & Fast CPPC Land In Linux 6.11, Intel Lunar Lake Improvements

([Hardware] 17 July 09:55 AM EDT Linux 6.11 Power Management)

The power management updates have been merged for Linux 6.11 that include some nice improvements for Intel and AMD processors.



spectre_bhi=vmexit Mitigation Merged For Linux 6.11 Cloud Use

([Linux Security] 17 July 08:41 AM EDT Spectre BHI Mitigation)

The "x86/bugs" code has been merged for the Linux 6.11 kernel that is just three patches this go around but includes a new Spectre BHI mitigation option.



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The trouble with heart disease is that the first symptom is often hard to
deal with: death.
-- Michael Phelps