Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Valve Is A Wonderful Upstream Contributor To Linux & The Open-Source Community
Valve Is A Wonderful Upstream Contributor To Linux & The Open-Source Community
16 Hours Ago - Valve - OSS EU 2023 - 45 Comments

This shouldn't come as any surprise to any longtime Phoronix readers and dedicated open-source/Linux enthusiasts, but Valve with their work on the Steam Deck and SteamOS have been lifting the open-source ecosystem as a whole. A talk this week at the Linux Foundation Europe's Open-Source Summit highlighted some of the great and ongoing contributions by Valve and their partners.

Reminder: The 2023 Phoronix Premium Oktoberfest/Autumn Special
Reminder: The 2023 Phoronix Premium Oktoberfest/Autumn Special
17 Hours Ago - Premium - Friendly Reminder - Add A Comment

This is just a friendly reminder that if you wish to go ad-free on this site while supporting the ongoing Linux operations at Phoronix, enjoy native dark mode, and view multi-page articles on a single page, there remains an ongoing "Oktoberfest" sale for our Phoronix Premium subscription service.

21 September

Linux 6.5 With AMD P-State EPP Default Brings Performance & Power Efficiency Benefits For Ryzen Servers
Linux 6.5 With AMD P-State EPP Default Brings Performance & Power Efficiency Benefits For Ryzen Servers
21 September 10:30 AM EDT - Software - 15 Comments

With the new Linux 6.5 kernel stable series one of the many new features is defaulting to the AMD P-State driver with the EPP/active mode compared to the long-used default of the ACPI CPUFreq driver. As shown in various Phoronix articles this can help with the mobile/desktop performance with this new default change while this article is looking at the Ryzen for server benefits too.

AMDGPU LLVM Backend Begins Seeing Additions For New RDNA3 Refresh Instructions
AMDGPU LLVM Backend Begins Seeing Additions For New RDNA3 Refresh Instructions
21 September 06:39 AM EDT - Radeon - GFX1150 - Add A Comment

Over the summer the AMDGPU compiler back-end in upstream LLVM began with new targets for GFX1150 and GFX1151 which given all things known are likely the "RDNA3 Refresh" APUs. That work started out light with not much in the way of different code paths from the existing GFX11 support but we're beginning to see some new instructions added for the RDNA3 refresh graphics processors.

20 September

Project Amber Officially Launches As The Intel Trust Authority
Project Amber Officially Launches As The Intel Trust Authority
20 September 12:35 PM EDT - Intel - Intel Trust Authority - 5 Comments

Last year Intel announced Project Amber as an effort to verify the trustworthiness of clouds. Project Amber was talked up as "an innovative service-based security implementation" for the remote verification of the trustworthiness of compute assets. Project Amber is now rolling out as the Intel Trust Authority.

XDC 2023 To Provide Update On AMD HDR For The Steam Deck, Rusticl & Wine Wayland
XDC 2023 To Provide Update On AMD HDR For The Steam Deck, Rusticl & Wine Wayland
20 September 10:29 AM EDT - X.Org - XDC 2023 Talks - 9 Comments

There's just under one month to go now until the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) returns to A Coruña, Spain for the annual development conference focused on open-source graphics drivers (Mesa), Wayland, and related Linux display/graphics infrastructure although the X.Org Server itself hasn't received much attention in recent years. Here's a look at some of the planned talks for the exciting XDC 2023.

Glibc Lands HWCAPs Support For LoongArch
Glibc Lands HWCAPs Support For LoongArch
20 September 10:14 AM EDT - GNU - glibc HWCAPs - 6 Comments

When it comes to Glibc HWCAPs for allowing the C library to load optimized libraries based upon the CPU features at run-time, it's mostly been focused on the x86_64 world for targeting higher x86-64 levels or being able to load optimized libraries for systems with AVX support. Loongson though has now contributed initial LoongArch HWCAPs support.

HiSilicon Posts SMT Run-Time Control Patches For ARM64 Linux
HiSilicon Posts SMT Run-Time Control Patches For ARM64 Linux
20 September 08:27 AM EDT - Hardware - Run-Time SMT Controls - 8 Comments

While Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) isn't as common on Arm SoCs as it is in the x86 and POWER worlds, there are some SMT-capable designs like with the HiSilicon Kupeng 930 for Arm servers. HiSilicon engineers are working now to extend Linux's SMT run-time controls to work on ARM64 (AArch64).

19 September

Linux 6.6 Looks To Be Very Lucrative For AMD Server Performance
Linux 6.6 Looks To Be Very Lucrative For AMD Server Performance
19 September 02:10 PM EDT - Software - 20 Comments

As a continuation of last week's article looking at Linux 6.6 bringing some impressive gains for AMD EPYC Bergamo, over the past few days I've also tested Linux 6.5 stable and Linux 6.6 Git on Genoa and Genoa-X processors as well as Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" in looking at this next kernel version's performance. The Sapphire Rapids performance was largely flat while for an interesting class of workloads the Linux 6.6 performance drives the AMD EPYC server performance much higher.

Intel oneAPI Initiative Evolves Into The Unified Acceleration "UXL" Foundation
Intel oneAPI Initiative Evolves Into The Unified Acceleration "UXL" Foundation
19 September 09:00 AM EDT - Software - 7 Comments

Here's a surprise announcement I was briefed on last week and now made public by the Linux Foundation and Intel... The Linux Foundation is forming the Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation that is an evolution of Intel's oneAPI initiative and has the potential to make the compute accelerator ecosystem as a whole more open and unified across vendors.

Fedora 40 Eyes Dropping GNOME X11 Session Support
Fedora 40 Eyes Dropping GNOME X11 Session Support
19 September 06:21 AM EDT - Fedora - No GNOME X.Org Session - 106 Comments

In addition to Fedora 40 planning to ship KDE Plasma 6.0 and without any X11 session support, Fedora stakeholders are also looking at shipping GNOME for the Fedora Workstation 40 release without any X11 session support.

LLVM 17.0 + Clang 17.0 Released With Many New Compiler Features
LLVM 17.0 + Clang 17.0 Released With Many New Compiler Features
19 September 05:52 AM EDT - LLVM - LLVM 17.0.1 - 14 Comments

The LLVM 17 compiler stack has been released as stable as LLVM 17.0.1 -- a slight mistake leaving the 17.0.0-rc tag meant the original v17.0.0 tag was skipped. This LLVM 17.0.1 stable release along with sub-projects like the Clang 17 C/C++ compiler bring many new features and improvements.

18 September

Go Ad-Free & Single Page Articles With The Phoronix 2023 Oktoberfest Sale
18 September 09:00 PM EDT - Premium - Phoronix Premium Special - 9 Comments

While there is (sadly) once again no Phoronix pilgrimage/meet-up at Oktoberfest this year, there is the annual Phoronix Premium sale special for those wishing to support the site at a discounted rate to enjoy ad-free viewing, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode, and other benefits.

Nouveau Patches Posted For Running On NVIDIA GSP-RM Firmware, Initial RTX 40 Ada Support
18 September 04:37 PM EDT - Nouveau - Nouveau + NVIDIA GSP Firmware Blobs - 21 Comments

The long-awaited patches for allowing the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" upstream Linux kernel driver to leverage NVIDIA's GPU System Processor "GSP" firmware for handling GPU re-clocking and other hardware tasks with RTX 20 GPUs and newer have been posted. With this set of 44 patches also comes the initial GPU hardware accelerated support for the GeForce RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs that is built upon this new GSP driver code path.

SteamOS 3.5 Delivering Some Decent Performance Gains For The Steam Deck
18 September 03:28 PM EDT - Operating Systems - 16 Comments

Released late on Friday was the much anticipated SteamOS 3.5 preview for the Steam Deck with ongoing work around HDR and enhancing color management, VRR for external USB-C displays, various platform issues resolved, auto-mounting external storage, and more. With SteamOS 3.5 it also means some lower-level OS upgrades too like moving to the Linux 6.1 LTS kernel. For those wondering about the performance impact of going from SteamOS 3.4 stable to the SteamOS 3.5 preview release, here are some early benchmarks on the Steam Deck.

Linux Patches To Begin Removing ReiserFS From Default Kernel Builds
18 September 03:20 PM EDT - Linux Storage - ReiserFS Dropping From Defconfigs - 19 Comments

Since March of 2022 the ReiserFS file-system has been deprecated and with Linux 6.6 ReiserFS is marked outright as "obsolete" with plans to remove the file-system from the mainline kernel code-base in 2025. In stepping toward that eventual milestone, a new kernel patch series begins removing ReiserFS from the default kernel configurations.

AMD Launches The EPYC 8004 "Siena" 4th Gen EPYC Processors
18 September 09:00 AM EDT - Processors - 15 Comments

Last November AMD introduced the first of the 4th Gen EPYC series with the EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors and that was then complemented earlier this year by the July launch of the Genoa-X processors for sporting AMD 3D V-Cache to help technical computing workloads and as well launching Bergamo for the Zen 4C based processor designs that allow up to 128 cores / 256 threads per socket. While AMD has a very robust portfolio for the high-end server space with 4th Gen EPYC, today AMD is introducing the EPYC 8004 "Siena" processors for "intelligent edge" servers. Siena is a step below Genoa but still very capable offering and coming in at a lower price point while being geared more for maximizing power efficiency and opening up EPYC to more deployments outside of the data center.

New Scheduler Optimization Can Help Out PostgreSQL & More On Sapphire Rapids
18 September 06:46 AM EDT - Intel - Linux Scheduler Optimization - 4 Comments

Stemming from Intel engineers finding significant overhead in some Linux scheduler functions when running PostgreSQL within a Docker instance, a new scheduler patch is on the way for Linux 6.7 that will help out at least Ice Lake and Sapphire Rapids with some migration-heavy workloads. With the change being in the common scheduler code, it's also likely to help out other hardware platforms too.

Linux 6.7 Set To Drop Support For Itanium IA-64
18 September 06:33 AM EDT - Intel - Linux Dropping Itanium - 42 Comments

Since 2021 the Itanium IA-64 code was orphaned in the Linux kernel and over the course of this year there's been talk of retiring the Itanium code from the kernel, a.k.a. strip it out. It looks like 2023 will end with the Itanium IA-64 code indeed being removed from the Linux kernel.

KDE On Wayland: "The Biggest Thing Needed Now Is Adoption By 3rd Party Apps"
18 September 06:18 AM EDT - KDE - KDE On Wayland Is Good - 210 Comments

Given the recent discussions stemming from Fedora 40 planning to ship KDE Plasma 6 and drop the KDE Plasma X11 session to focus solely on Wayland for the next-gen KDE desktop, prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has written a lengthy blog post to outline the current state and his thoughts on KDE Wayland support.

17 September

Linux 6.7 To Add POWER-Z Driver For Exposing USB Power Measurements
17 September 08:30 AM EDT - Hardware - POWER-Z KM003C USB Power Monitoring - 7 Comments

For those curious about the power consumption of USB-C devices, there are some nifty devices out there that have a LED display and can report the voltage, Amps, Wattage, and USB power delivery protocol version of connected devices. It's a neat display but with a new POWER-Z driver coming to the Linux kernel it's possible to propagate that information from the system itself with this new driver.

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