Silly Open-Source Moves, AMD openSIL & Rust Happenings Made For An Interesting Month
For as exciting as April was on both the hardware and software fronts, operations at Phoronix unfortunately remain difficult due to the macro environment, the continued depressed state of advertisements on the web, and so many open-source/Linux enthusiasts happily using ad-blockers. The widespread use of ad-blocking continues to make operations sadly only more difficult, especially for delivering quality content. Aside from disabling ad-blockers, you can show your support by joining Phoronix Premium to view the site ad-free, multi-page articles rendered on a single page, native dark mode support, and other features all while helping to ensure Phoronix can see for a successful new birthday year with Phoronix.com set to turn 19 in June.
With that said, for the most popular news on Phoronix during April 2023 on Phoronix included:
Intel i219-LM Had Only Been Running At ~60% Of Maximum Speed Due To Linux Driver Bug
If you rely on an Intel I219-LM Gigabit Ethernet adapter, you will want to look forward to upgrading your Linux kernel build soon... A fix was committed today after Intel engineers discovered this particular Ethernet chipset had only been running at around 60% of its maximum speed due to a regression introduced back in 2020.
FSF Slams Google Over Dropping JPEG-XL In Chrome
Last October Google engineers decided they would deprecate JPEG-XL support in Chrome over some debated rationale for the move. Even amid the community uproar they went ahead to drop the JPEG-XL support. The Free Software Foundation has finally commented on the matter.
Linux 6.4 Bringing Apple M2 Additions For 2022 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini
Further adding to the excitement of the upcoming Linux 6.4 merge window is the mainline kernel seeing the Device Tree (DT) additions for Apple's current M2 devices including the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini systems. The upstream kernel still has more work to go around the M1/M2 support compared to the downstream state with Asahi Linux, but at least now with this DT support will provide some basic level of upstream kernel support for the Apple M2.
AMD openSIL Detailed For Advancing Open-Source System Firmware
Open-source fans, rejoice, the most exciting thing I have read all week or perhaps the month: "AMD is committed to open-source software and is now expanding into the various firmware domains with the re-architecture of its x86 AGESA FW stack - designed with UEFI as the host firmware that prevented scaling, to other host firmware solutions such as coreboot, oreboot, FortiBIOS, Project Mu and others. A newer, open architecture that potentially allows for reduced attack surface, and perceivably infinite scalability is now available as a Proof-of-Concept, within the open-source community for evaluation, called the AMD openSIL – Open-Source Silicon Initialization Library."
sudo & su Being Rewritten In Rust For Memory Safety
With the financial backing of Amazon Web Services, sudo and su are being rewritten in the Rust programming language in order to increase the memory safety for the widely relied upon software.
New Intel Linux Graphics Driver Patches Allow Tuning For Up To 10~15% Better Performance
After profiling and raising an issue by Google's Chrome OS engineers, there is a set of "request for comments" patches out today for the Intel Linux graphics driver that can provide 10~15% better performance when operating in the tuned mode.
System76 Teases Their "Virgo" In-House Manufactured Laptop
While for a number of years now System76 has manufactured their own Thelio desktop line of Linux PCs from their facility in Denver, Colorado (and their Launch Keyboard), they have long talked up ambitions for eventually manufacturing their own Linux laptops rather relying on other white-label manufacturers as they currently do. Today a first glimpse of their in-house laptop prototyping was shared,
Valve Shows A Huge Drop In Linux Gamers For March, But The Numbers Are Questionable
Valve just published their Steam Survey results for March 2023 and these initial numbers show a 0.54% drop to the Linux gaming marketshare, putting the overall Linux gaming population at around 0.84% of the Steam customer base. However, once again these numbers appear skewed/inaccurate.
Red Hat Begins Cutting "Hundreds Of Jobs"
The tech layoffs have now reached Red Hat with "hundreds of jobs" being cut and the initial round of layoffs being announced today.
Early KDE Plasma 6 Development State: "It's Still Rough, But It's Usable"
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap of notable KDE desktop developments for this first week of April.
Linux Kernel Drama: AMD's Spectral Chicken
There's a bit of Linux kernel code for AMD Zen 2 processors called the "spectral chicken" and a call for cleaning up that code, which was originally written by an Intel Linux engineer, has been rejected.
Fedora 38 Being Released Next Tuesday
The much anticipated Fedora 38 is cleared for releasing on Tuesday. There are no delays with the Fedora 38 cycle and in fact hitting their "early target date" for shipping on 18 April.
GTK3 Port Of GIMP Is "Officially Finished"
The long-awaited port of the GIMP image manipulation program to the GTK3 toolkit is now declared "officially finished".
CoreCtrl Now Available In Debian & Ubuntu 23.04 For Managing Your System
CoreCtrl as the open-source utility for managing your system's performance/vitals and supporting various application profiles has landed in Debian as well as being picked up for easy installation on the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04.
GTK 4.11.1 Released With Better Textures, Wayland Fractional Scaling
Following this week's Qt 6.5 LTS and Slint 1.0 Rust toolkit, debuting today is GTK 4.11.1 as the first development release of the new toolkit series in leading up to GTK 4.12.
The Linux Kernel Preparing For An Upgrade To Its Rust Toolchain
Linux kernel developers are preparing for the first upgrade to its Rust toolchain since the Rust code initially merged in Linux 6.1.
Mesa 23.0.2 Released With Dozens Of Fixes
Another tardy Mesa stable release is now available for those wanting to run the latest open-source OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, and video acceleration code on your Linux systems.
Chrome 112 Released With WASM Garbage Collection Trial, CSS Nesting
Google today promoted the Chrome 112 web browser to their stable channel on all supported platforms.
Linux Patches Confirm Intel Meteor Lake Having An L4 Cache
A new Intel graphics kernel driver patch posted by Intel on Tuesday confirm that upcoming Meteor Lake processors will feature an ADM/L4 cache.
Linux 6.3 Released With More Meteor Lake Enablement, Zen 4 Auto IBRS & Much More
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.3 as the newest stable kernel version.
And the most popular featured articles:
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D Linux Performance
While the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Ryzen 9 7900X3D processors went on sale at the end of February as the first Zen 4 3D V-Cache processors, today marks the availability of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor. I've recently been putting the 7800X3D through its paces under Linux and have a plethora of benchmark data to share for launch day.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080/4090: Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 23.04 Performance
For those wondering how the NVIDIA Linux gaming/GPU performance is looking relative to Windows 11, here are some benchmarks using the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards. Both NVIDIA RTX 40 graphics cards were tested on Windows 11 Pro and Ubuntu 23.04 while primarily focusing on games making use of Valve's Steam Play to reflect current Linux gaming trends as well as featuring some other cross-platform GPU accelerated software.
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D: Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 23.04 Linux Performance
With the recent launch of the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, several Phoronix Premium supporters expressed interest in seeing how well the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance compared for this Zen 4 3D V-Cache processor. Given those requests, here are some CPU/system benchmarks looking at the performance of Windows 11 Professional against Ubuntu 23.04 in its near-final state on the 7800X3D desktop.
Intel Linux Optimizations Help AMD EPYC "Genoa" Improve Scaling To 384 Threads
Last month I wrote about Intel's Linux kernel engineering improvements to help enhance CPU scaling across various workloads by addressing low-level bottlenecks within the kernel. It's an area we'll likely see Intel continue to invest in as Sierra Forest comes next year with 144 E cores per socket. Already with the Linux kernel patches Intel is carrying at the moment via their in-house distribution, there are some significant benefits for Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids. I was curious to see how this Intel-focused work impacted AMD EPYC servers and thus in today's article is a similar analysis using two AMD EPYC 9654 "Genoa" flagship processors while evaluating Intel's Linux kernel optimizations.
Windows 11 WSL2 Performance vs. Ubuntu Linux With The AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
When carrying out the recent Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 23.04 benchmarks with the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D Zen 4 3D V-Cache desktop processor, I also took the opportunity with the Windows 11 install around to check in on the Windows 11 WSL2 performance. Here is a fresh look at Ubuntu with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2 on Windows 11) compared to the bare metal performance of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on the same hardware as well as the new Ubuntu 23.04.
Ubuntu 23.04 Laptop Performance Mixed Against Ubuntu 22.10
Today marks the release of Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" and I've already been trying it out on a number of test systems. Up today are some initial Ubuntu 23.04 vs. 22.10 laptop benchmarks. If you were hoping though for this release to improve performance, unfortunately that doesn't appear to be the case with overall across a range of workloads Ubuntu 23.04 is similar to -- or in some areas trailing -- Ubuntu 22.10 on both Intel and AMD hardware.
Corsair 2 x 24GB DDR5-7000 Memory Linux Performance
Corsair recently launched their line-up of 2 x 24GB DDR5 memory kits. With recent DDR5 memory prices falling, for as little as $215 USD it's now possible to obtain 48GB of DDR5-7000 RAM. With this being my first time testing a non-binary DDR5 memory kit, here is an initial look at the Corsair CMK48GX5M2B7000C40 compatibility and performance under Linux.
Ryzen Mobile Power/Performance With Linux 6.3's New AMD P-State EPP Driver
With Linux 6.3 there is the new AMD P-State EPP driver code for supporting the ACPI Energy Performance Preference (EPP) to further enhance the power efficiency and performance of modern AMD systems on Linux. Last week I ran some benchmarks of AMD EPYC with the new AMD P-State EPP mode while in today's article is a look at the laptop impact with Ryzen Mobile when comparing ACPI CPUFreq, the existing AMD P-State driver, and the new AMD P-State EPP mode and its multiple different preferences.
AMD Announces The Radeon PRO W7800/W7900 Series
As the "world's first pro chiplet GPU", AMD today is announcing the Radeon PRO W7000 series as their first RDNA3-based professional offerings.
AMD P-State EPP Performance With EPYC On Linux 6.3
Among the many new features coming in Linux 6.3 -- including many AMD additions -- is the AMD P-State EPP "Energy Performance Preference" support being merged for modern Ryzen and EPYC systems. AMD P-State EPP can further help tune the performance and power efficiency of AMD Linux systems beyond the existing basic AMD P-State driver support and address some existing deficiencies. Here are some benchmarks of the AMD P-State and ACPI CPUFreq driver configurations benchmarked on an EPYC Milan-X server with the in-development Linux 6.3 kernel.
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