Drop-In CUDA On AMD, Kernel Discussions, NGINX Fork & Other Q1 Highlights
It was an exciting Q1'2024 with a lot happening in kernel space, never-ending developments in user-space from Mesa to systemd, interesting hardware launches, and more. Below is a look at the most popular news and reviews for the quarter. Looking ahead to Q2 there is more interesting Linux hardware milestones coming, never-ending Linux kernel excitement, and in June will also mark the 20th birthday of Phoronix.
The most interesting open-source and Linux news for the first quarter included:
HDMI Forum Rejects Open-Source HDMI 2.1 Driver Support Sought By AMD
One of the limitations of AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver has been the inability to implement HDMI 2.1+ functionality on the basis of legal requirements by the HDMI Forum. AMD engineers had been working to come up with a solution in conjunction with the HDMI Forum for being able to provide HDMI 2.1+ capabilities with their open-source Linux kernel driver, but it looks like those efforts for now have concluded and failed.
A 2024 Discussion Whether To Convert The Linux Kernel From C To Modern C++
A six year old Linux kernel mailing list discussion has been reignited over the prospects of converting the Linux kernel to supporting modern C++ code.
Linux 6.8 Network Optimizations Can Boost TCP Performance For Many Concurrent Connections By ~40%
Beyond the usual new wired/wireless network hardware support and the other routine churn in the big Linux networking subsystem, the Linux 6.8 kernel is bringing some key improvements to the core networking code that can yield up to a ~40% improvement for TCP performance when encountering many concurrent network connections.
Rust-Written Linux Scheduler Showing Promising Results For Gaming Performance
A Canonical engineer has been experimenting with implementing a Linux scheduler within the Rust programming language. His early results are interesting and hopeful around the potential of a Rust-based scheduler that works via sched_ext for implementing a scheduler using eBPF that can be loaded during run-time.
AMD Publishes XDNA Linux Driver: Support For Ryzen AI On Linux
With the AMD Ryzen 7040 series "Ryzen AI" was introduced as leveraging Xilinx IP onboard the new Zen 4 mobile processors. Ryzen AI is beginning to work its way out to more processors while it hasn't been supported on Linux. Then in October was AMD wanting to hear from customer requests around Ryzen AI Linux support. Well, today they did their first public code drop of the XDNA Linux driver for providing open-source support for Ryzen AI.
Ubuntu Looking At Discontinuing Its Source ISOs
Ubuntu's install media (ISO) generation recently broke the assembly of source ISOs. These are the ISOs containing all of the source code packages to Ubuntu Linux with the original motivation of helping GPL license compliance and ensuring the code is easily accessible. But the usefulness in practice is limited and now instead Ubuntu developers are considering the discontinuing of source ISOs.
Core NGINX Developer Forks Web Server Into Freenginx
Maxim Dounin as one of the longtime core developers of the Nginx web server announced the creation today of a new fork of the project called Freenginx.
The Linux Kernel Prepares For Rust 1.77 Upgrade
With Linux 6.8 the kernel's Rust code was brought up to Rust 1.75 while new patches posted this weekend port the code over to Rust 1.76 and then the upcoming Rust 1.77.
Windows NT Sync Driver Proposed For The Linux Kernel - Better Wine Performance
Following discussions from last year's Linux Plumbers Conference, a Windows NT synchronization primitive driver has been proposed for the Linux kernel. This driver would expose /dev/ntsync as a new character device for implementing some of the Windows NT synchronization primitives directly within the Linux kernel. In turn this would help the performance of some Windows games/applications running on Linux via Wine and in some cases would mean significantly better performance.
Linus Torvalds Hits Nasty Performance Regression With Early Linux 6.8 Code
It's not too often hearing Linus Torvalds himself raising the alarm bells over performance regressions of the Linux kernel, but that happened this evening with the ongoing Linux 6.8 merge window. Torvalds' AMD Ryzen Threadripper system suddenly was suffering from much longer build times at least as a result of new code for this kernel.
Red Hat's Long, Rust'ed Road Ahead For Nova As Nouveau Driver Successor
Red Hat's display driver team has recently been devising plans for Nova, a new to-be-developed Linux DRM kernel driver written in Rust for open-source NVIDIA graphics support as the successor/replacement to Nouveau for newer NVIDIA GPU generations supporting the GPU System Processor (GSP). Making this effort all the more involved is being written in Rust at a time when various kernel abstractions are still being devised and not yet upstreamed.
Orange Pi Neo Coming As A Ryzen 7 + Linux Powered Handheld Device
When hearing of "Orange Pi Neo" this weekend from sources at FOSDEM 2024, I just assumed it was yet another Orange Pi single board computer... But then to hear it's a handheld game console from Orange Pi again gives off the impression of some low-power ARM device. It turns out though that the Orange Pi Neo is a forthcoming AMD Ryzen powered handheld gaming console.
~5 Minutes Of Coding Yields A 6%+ Boost To Linux I/O Performance
IO_uring creator and Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe spent about five minutes working on two patches to implement caching for issue-side time querying in the block layer and can yield 6% or more better I/O performance.
AMD Proposes An FPGA Subsystem User-Space Interface For Linux
AMD engineers are proposing an FPGA Subsystem User-Space Interface to overcome current limitations of the Linux kernel's FPGA manager subsystem.
Torvalds Has It With "-Wstringop-overflow" On GCC Due To Kernel Breakage
One of the new features for Linux 6.8 that was merged late was enabling the -Wstringop-overflow compiler option to warn about possible buffer overflows in cases where the compiler can detect such possible overflows at compile-time. While it's nice in theory, issues on GCC has led Linus Torvalds to disabling this compiler option as of now Linux 6.8.
Ubuntu Looking At Applying Low-Latency Optimizations To Its Generic Kernel
Ubuntu has long provided a "low-latency" kernel build intended for industrial embedded systems and other latency sensitive environments. Ahead of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Canonical is looking at applying those low-latency optimizations to their generic kernel build.
Valve Makes All Steam Audio SDK Source Code Available Under Apache 2.0 License
With Valve's release today of the Steam Audio SDK 4.5.2 they have made the software development kit fully open-source under an Apache 2.0 license.
X.Org Server Clears Out Remnants For Supporting Old Compilers
There are still no signs of a new X.Org Server feature release coming in the near-term with most of the major stakeholders divesting from the xorg-server besides the XWayland portion of the code-base. But for those interested in the past few days there have been some NetBSD/OpenBSD build fixes to the X.Org Server as well as clearing out some remnants of old compiler support.
Linux Gains An Open File Server Implementation For Tractors & Agriculture Machinery
Pengutronix a short time ago on the Linux kernel mailing list announced the Open ISOBUS FileServer (FS) and Client Implementation... Piquing my interest, I looked up this ISO 11783-13 standard that this file server aims to implement, but it wasn't quite what I was expecting.
Intel Continues Prepping The Linux Kernel For X86S
Nearly one year ago Intel published the X86S specification (formerly stylized as "X86-S") for simplifying the Intel architecture by removing support for 16-bit and 32-bit operating systems. X86S is a big step forward with dropping legacy mode, 5-level paging improvements, and other modernization improvements for x86_64. With the Linux 6.9 kernel more x86S bits are in place for this ongoing effort.
And the most popular Linux hardware reviews / benchmarks for Q1:
AMD Quietly Funded A Drop-In CUDA Implementation Built On ROCm: It's Now Open-Source
While there have been efforts by AMD over the years to make it easier to port codebases targeting NVIDIA's CUDA API to run atop HIP/ROCm, it still requires work on the part of developers. The tooling has improved such as with HIPIFY to help in auto-generating but it isn't any simple, instant, and guaranteed solution -- especially if striving for optimal performance. Over the past two years AMD has quietly been funding an effort though to bring binary compatibility so that many NVIDIA CUDA applications could run atop the AMD ROCm stack at the library level -- a drop-in replacement without the need to adapt source code. In practice for many real-world workloads, it's a solution for end-users to run CUDA-enabled software without any developer intervention. Here is more information on this "skunkworks" project that is now available as open-source along with some of my own testing and performance benchmarks of this CUDA implementation built for Radeon GPUs.
Framework Laptop 16 Delivers Great Linux Support & Performance, Excellent Customizability
The review embargo has now expired on the Framework Laptop 16, the latest innovative and upgradeable laptop from this company that has made quite a name for itself with modular and user-upgradeable laptop designs for both AMD and Intel. The new Framework Laptop 16 offers even more customizability around the keyboard/touchpad and other options including over using a Radeon RX 7700S graphics module and more. Besides the immense customizability options and upgrades available with the Framework Laptop 16, the new model employs the AMD Ryzen 7040HS processor for even greater performance over the AMD Ryzen 7040U found with the latest Framework 13 model.
AMD Ryzen 5 8500G: A Surprisingly Fascinating Sub-$200 CPU
After reviewing the Ryzen 7 8700G and the Ryzen 5 8600G as these new Zen 4 processors with RDNA3 integrated graphics, the latest AMD 8000G series CPU in the Linux benchmarking lab at Phoronix is the Ryzen 5 8500G. The Ryzen 5 8500G is a 6-core / 12-thread processor with RDNA3 graphics that retails for just $179 USD. Here's a look at how it's performing against other AMD and Intel processors on Ubuntu Linux. The Ryzen 5 8500G ends up being decent on the GPU side but making me genuinely excited is the Zen 4C prospects in the low-power space for AI workloads at the edge, low power servers, and other different deployments for great low-power performance. Under load this AVX-512 wielding budget desktop processor was typically pulling 50 Watts or less!
AMD Ryzen 7 8700G Linux Performance
Today the review embargo lifts on the new AMD Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G desktop APUs. Announced back during CES, the Ryzen 8000G series pairs Zen 4 CPU cores with RDNA3 graphics and now also boasting Ryzen AI support too. Today's launch article is focusing on the AMD Ryzen 7 8700G Linux performance.
35-Way Linux GPU Graphics Comparison, Initial NVIDIA RTX 40 SUPER Linux Benchmarks
Here's a fresh look at the AMD Radeon versus NVIDIA GeForce Linux graphics/gaming performance across a variety of workloads as well as our first look at the GeForce RTX 4070 series and RTX 4080 SUPER performance. With recently receiving the rest of the GeForce RTX 40 series line-up currently released, we're now able to share a comprehensive look at how the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series versus AMD Radeon RX 7000 series performance is under Linux.
The Incredible Performance & Power Efficiency Of AMD Zen 1 vs. Zen 4C
While we are beginning to see AMD Zen 4C cores in client systems, these smaller cores have already proven themselves very interesting and capable with the AMD EPYC Bergamo high core count server processors and the extremely power efficient EPYC 8004 "Siena" processors. For showing how far Zen has come in power efficiency, I thought it would be fun to show how the original flagship EPYC 7601 "Zen 1" processor with 32-cores / 64-threads compared to Zen 4C with the EPYC 8324P(N) 32-core processors. But as that isn't even the top-end Siena part, I also tossed in the 64-core EPYC 8534PN too for a top of stack look for the current EPYC 8004 line-up.
AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT Linux Performance
AMD announced back during CES the Radeon RX 7600 XT as a $329 USD graphics card for 1080p/1440p gaming. Today that card goes on sale and the review embargo has lifted. Here is an initial look at the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT performance under Linux with AMD's open-source driver stack.
Intel Core i3 14100 / i5 14500 vs. AMD Ryzen 5 8500G / 8600G In 500+ Benchmarks
As part of the recent AMD Ryzen 5 8500G and 8600G Linux reviews I ended up picking up the Core i3 14100 and Core i5 14500 Raptor Lake Refresh processors for the similarly-priced Intel competition. It's not too often receiving review samples from Intel of the lower-end processor SKUs, so I'm back around today with even more benchmarks of these lower-tier AMD and Intel processors. In this article are 500+ benchmarks looking at the CPU and iGPU performance of the Intel Core i3 14100 and Core i5 14500 processors up against the AMD Ryzen 5 8500G and Ryzen 5 8600G processors under Ubuntu Linux.
Intel Core Ultra 7 Meteor Lake vs. AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme Performance
In recent days there have been leaks about an MSI "CLAW" gaming handheld device set to be announced this coming week at CES in Las Vegas. Making this gaming handheld device interesting is that unlike the Valve Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally or Legion Go, it's expected to be the first handheld featuring an Intel Meteor Lake SoC. In particular, the recently launched Intel Core Ultra 7 155H. For those curious about what the performance is likely to roughly be in comparison to the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance of these competing SoCs.
Intel Arc Graphics A580 / A750 / A770 Linux Performance For Early 2024
Earlier this week I posted a 35-way Linux graphics card comparison featuring the new NVIDIA RTX 40 SUPER graphics cards and other recent AMD and NVIDIA hardware I had available while using the latest Linux drivers. Intel Arc Graphics desktop graphics cards weren't part of that comparison for simply running out of time prior to the RTX 4080 SUPER embargo lift to facilitate that re-testing. But for those interested, here is a fresh look at the Intel Arc Graphics A580 / A750 / A770 Linux performance against those NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux.
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