Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the founder and principal author of Phoronix, having founded the site on 5 June 2004. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org. Michael has authored thousands of articles on open-source software, the state of Linux hardware and other topics.


Learn more at MichaelLarabel.com or @MichaelLarabel on Twitter.


 

Some of The Recent Popular Articles By Michael Larabel:

Rust-Written LAVD Kernel Scheduler Shows Promising Results For Linux Gaming

Changwoo Min with Igalia presented yesterday at Open-Source Summit North America on optimizing the kernel's scheduler for Linux gaming. Of course, the motivation is around Valve's Steam Deck but for Linux gaming at large to benefit too from this scheduler work to ideally yield less stuttering during gameplay.

18 April - Rust-Written, BPF-Based Scheduler - 40 Comments
Linux 6.10 To Merge NTSYNC Driver For Emulating Windows NT Synchronization Primitives

Going through my usual scanning of all the "-next" Git subsystem branches of new code set to be introduced for the next Linux kernel merge window, a very notable addition was just queued up... Linux 6.10 is set to merge the NTSYNC driver for emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives within the kernel for allowing better performance with Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and Wine of Windows games and other apps on Linux.

14 April - NTSYNC QUEUED! - 37 Comments
Former Nouveau Lead Developer Joins NVIDIA, Continues Working On Open-Source Driver

Following last year Nouveau receiving support for running with the NVIDIA GSP firmware and initial GeForce RTX 40 series accelerated support, Ben Skeggs of Red Hat unexpectedly resigned as the Nouveau kernel driver maintainer. It turns out this longtime open-source Nouveau driver developer is now employed by NVIDIA Corp and continuing to work on the open-source Linux graphics driver.

17 April - Working At NVIDIA - 127 Comments
NVIDIA's Open GPU Linux Kernel Driver Will Soon Be The Default For Turing & Newer GPUs

While we are all waiting for the NVIDIA R555 series Linux driver beta that is expected to debut as soon as next week based on prior information with Wayland improvements (explicit sync) and more, with the NVIDIA R560 series Linux driver successor is a very interesting change: NVIDIA is planning on defaulting to using their open-source GPU kernel driver by default for GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" GPUs and newer.

10 May - R560 Series - 45 Comments
Linux Mint Looks To Fork More GNOME Software, Make XApp More Independent

Linux Mint published their monthly status update for April 2024 where they talk about ongoing testing for faster and more reliable repository access via the Fastly CDN to other more interesting software happenings like the likelihood that they will fork more GNOME applications as well as looking to make their XApp applications more distribution agnostic.

30 April - Linux Mint Changes - 80 Comments
Fedora 41 Looks To "-O3" Optimizations For Its Python Build

A change proposal has been filed for building the CPython interpreter and the Python standard library using the "-O3" compiler optimization flag rather than Fedora's imposed default of the "-O2" optimization level. This is being sought in the name of greater Python performance on Fedora 41.

13 April - -O3 Python - 30 Comments
Microsoft Updates Cascadia Code: Its Open-Source Font For Developers

Back in 2019 Microsoft open-sourced Cascadia Code as a font designed for terminals and code editors. The goals are similar to that of Intel's more recent One Mono as another open-source font for developers. It's been three years since the last update to the Cascadia Code open-source font while today rolled out version 2404.23.

30 April - Cascadia Code 2024 - 24 Comments
Framework Laptop EC Driver Being Prepared For Linux

The modular/upgradeable Framework Laptops employ an open-source embedded controller (EC) firmware derived from Google's Chrome OS EC project. This is great for open-source fans and allows re-using much of the same Chrome OS EC software support that already exists. But there is also vendor-specific commands supported by the Framework Laptop EC and thus a dedicated Linux kernel driver is now being worked on for handling those vendor/device-specific features.

6 May - Framework Laptop Embedded Controller - 25 Comments
NetBSD On The State & Future Of X.Org/X11

While on Linux the desktop environments, graphics stack, and other application software is steadily adopting Wayland support and focusing less on X11/X.Org support, the state of Wayland support and the open-source graphics driver stack in general is less robust among the BSDs. The NetBSD project published a status report around their ongoing dependence and modifications to their X.Org stack.

4 May - X.Org Dependence - 292 Comments
NVIDIA Developer Opens Feature Pull Request For Open-Source NVK Driver

If your interest didn't pique enough when the former Nouveau lead developer joined NVIDIA and sent out a big patch series for this originally-reverse-engineered, open-source NVIDIA kernel driver, here's another plot twist: another NVIDIA engineer opening a merge request adding to the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver.

25 April - What's Going On?!? - 44 Comments
Valve Working On Explicit Sync Support For "NVK" NVIDIA Vulkan Driver

In addition to all of the contributions Valve graphics engineers have been making to the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver, they have also begun investing in improvements to the open-source Mesa NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver too. With pending patches there is now explicit GPU synchronization support working for the NVK driver in conjunction with their Gamescope compositor.

4 May - NVK Explicit Sync - 96 Comments
Linux 6.10 Preps A Kernel Panic Screen - Sort Of A "Blue Screen of Death"

While systemd 255 last year introduced a "blue screen of death" inspired solution with systemd-bsod for presenting logged error messages full-screen, it's not appropriate for all errors. Systemd-bsod can work out for presenting full-screen messages in case of boot failures and other problems where user-space is alive. But the user-space code does little good in case of a kernel panic and similar issues bringing the system to a halt. Set to be introduced now with Linux 6.10 is a parallel "blue screen of death" like error presenting experience with the introduction of the DRM panic handler.

19 April - DRM Panic Handler - 31 Comments