AMD Ryzen 9000 Series & Linux Kernel Drama Made For An Exciting August
As exciting as August was in the hardware and software world, operations for web publishers remain a difficult affair especially when catering to a niche like I do with Linux enthusiasts. As happened a few days ago, well known (Windows) tech website AnandTech folded. With the state of the web ad industry, advertisers focusing on YouTube, ad spends also going to Meta, and other factors, times are rough for the industry. If you enjoy the daily, original content found on Phoronix, please consider disabling any ad-blocker on your site when visiting or otherwise consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium. Phoronix Premium gets you ad-free access to the site, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode support, and other features while supporting the site. Tips via PayPal and Stripe are also supported and much appreciated during these difficult times for (written media) web publishers.
With that out of the way, the Linux hardware/software news highlights for August included:
One Of The Rust Linux Kernel Maintainers Steps Down - Cites "Nontechnical Nonsense"
One of the several Rust for Linux kernel maintainers has decided to step away from the project. The move is being driven at least in part due to having to deal with increased "nontechnical nonsense" raised around Rust programming language use within the Linux kernel.
Linus Torvalds Begins Expressing Regrets Merging Bcachefs
There's been some Friday night kernel drama on the Linux kernel mailing list... Linus Torvalds has expressed regrets for merging the Bcachefs file-system and an ensuing back-and-forth between the file-system maintainer.
Intel Discontinues High-Speed, Open-Source H.265/HEVC Encoder Project
As part of Intel's Scalable Video Technology (SVT) initiative they had been developing SVT-HEVC as a BSD-licensed high performance H.265/HEVC video encoder optimized for Xeon Scalable and Xeon D processors. But recently they've changed course and the project has been officially discontinued.
Linux Will Be Able To Boot ~0.035 Seconds Faster With One Line Kernel Patch
The Linux kernel itself can already boot quite fast but with a simple one-line patch another ~0.035 seconds will be able to be shaved off the boot time.
Open-Source AMD GPU Implementation Of CUDA "ZLUDA" Has Been Taken Down
Back in February of this year you may recall the interesting news that was announced on Phoronix that AMD Quietly Funded A Drop-In CUDA Implementation Built On ROCm: It's Now Open-Source. That open-source ZLUDA code for AMD GPUs has been available since AMD quit funding the developer earlier this year. But now the code has been retracted. It's not from NVIDIA legal challenges but rather AMD reversing course on allowing it to be open-source.
AMD & FreeBSD Begin Collaborating Over OS Improvements
The FreeBSD open-source operating system project published their Q2'2024 status report that outlines some interesting work happening to this leading BSD project.
GIMP 3.0 Enters String Freeze, Inching Closer To Release
Today marks the beginning of the string freeze for the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 open-source image editor release as one of the leading free software alternatives to Adobe Photoshop.
GhostWrite Vulnerability Affects RISC-V CPU, Mitigating Takes A ~77% Performance Hit
Security researchers with the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have disclosed GhostWrite, a new CPU vulnerability affecting a common RISC-V processor.
Microsoft Offloads The Mono Project To Wine
Coming as a surprise this afternoon is Microsoft deciding to contribute the Mono Project to be stewarded by the Wine development community.
Linux 6.12 To Optionally Display A QR Code During Kernel Panics
Submitted today via DRM-Misc-Next to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window in mid-September is optional support for displaying a QR code within the DRM Panic handler infrastructure when a Linux kernel panic occurs.
Reimplementing A Linux Rust Scheduler In eBPF Shows Very Promising Results
NVIDIA software engineer Andrea Righi has implemented his "scx_rustland" Linux Rust scheduler within eBPF for very promising performance results.
Rust-Written Redox OS Now Has A Working Web Server
The Redox OS project that is a from scratch open-source operating system written in the Rust programming language now has a working web server, among other improvements achieved during the month of July.
NVMe 2.1 Specifications Published With New Capabilities
As part of the Flash Memory Summit this week, the NVMe 2.1 specifications were published today including the NVMe 2.1 Base specification, Command Set specifications (NVM Command Set, ZNS Command Set, Key Value Command Set), Transport specifications (PCIe Transport, Fibre Channel Transport, RDMA Transport and TCP Transport) and the NVMe Management Interface specification.
LinkedIn Migrates Their Servers From CentOS To Azure Linux
LinkedIn has replaced CentOS as their default server operating system choice with Azure Linux to power all of their server needs.
Canonical Moves To Shipping Very Latest Upstream Kernel Code For Ubuntu Releases
Following decisions like exploring -O3 package builds for Ubuntu Linux, another newly-announced change by Canonical I must applaud is their decision to commit to shipping the very latest upstream kernel code at release time.
Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS Delayed To End Of Month
Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS was scheduled to ship this week but has now been delayed to the end of August in order to address some high profile upgrade bugs.
NVIDIA 560.35.03 Linux Driver Released With More Wayland Fixes
Building off the prior NVIDIA 560 beta driver releases, the NVIDIA 560.35.03 stable Linux driver was released today for providing the latest official NVIDIA graphics/compute support for Linux systems.
Linux 6.12 To Drop Old Code That Slows Down CPU Frequency Polling
The Linux 6.12 kernel cycle later this year has a change coming that will impact users of the "Schedutil" CPU frequency scaling governor. This change is dropping the "LATENCY_MULTIPLIER" that has been within the kernel code the past two decades to slowdown how frequent the CPU frequency evaluation occurs. In turn the revised logic can allow for that CPUFreq frequency re-evaluation to occur more often.
AMD Preparing Linux For Smart Data Cache Injection With "Upcoming" CPUs
AMD Linux engineers are preparing the kernel for Smart Data Cache Injection (SDCI) as a feature for AMD EPYC server processors. Smart Data Cache Injection is a nifty new feature that allows for direct insertion of data from I/O devices into the CPU's L2/L3 cache.
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha Desktop - It's Looking Quite Interesting
System76 today is releasing an alpha build of Pop!_OS 24.04 that is built atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and making it very interesting is that it includes the alpha version of their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment. I've been playing around with this Pop!_OS 24.04 alpha in advance of today's embargo lift and it's been working out quite well.
And the most popular reviews / featured articles in August:
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X & Ryzen 9 9900X Deliver Excellent Linux Performance
Last Wednesday was the review embargo for the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X Zen 5 desktop processors that proved to be very exciting for Linux workloads from developers to creators to AVX-512 embracing AI and HPC workloads. Today the review embargo lifts on the Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X and as expected given the prior 6-core/8-core tests: these new chips are wild! The Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X are fabulous processors for those engaging in heavy real-world Linux workloads with excellent performance uplift and stunning power efficiency.
AMD Ryzen 5 9600X & Ryzen 7 9700X Offer Excellent Linux Performance
This could quite well be my simplest review in the past twenty years of Phoronix. The AMD Ryzen 9000 series starting with the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X launching tomorrow are some truly great desktop processors. The generational uplift is very compelling, even in single-threaded Linux workloads shooting ahead of Intel's 14th Gen Core competition, across nearly 400 benchmarks these new Zen 5 desktop CPUs impress, and these new Zen 5 desktop processors are priced competitively. I was already loving the Ryzen 7000 series performance on Linux with its AVX-512 implementation and performing so well across hundreds of different Linux workloads but now with the AMD Ryzen 9000 series, AMD is hitting it out of the ball park. That paired with the issues Intel is currently experiencing for the Intel Core 13th/14th Gen CPUs and the ~400 benchmark results makes this a home run for AMD on the desktop side with only some minor Linux caveats.
Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 24.04 Linux Performance For The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
With all of my AMD Ryzen 9900X and 9950X Linux benchmarking and Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X reviews as well, many have wondered if AMD Zen 5 is just really great on Linux, if Windows 11 is in particularly poor shape for these new AMD Ryzen 9000 series processors, if it's just the different/diverse benchmarks being run, or simply why are these new desktop CPUs running so well on Linux but less so with Windows?
Intel Continues To Show AMD The Importance Of Software Optimizations: 16% More Ryzen 9 9950X Performance
As part of my ongoing AMD Ryzen 9 9950X Linux testing, last week I provided a look at the AVX-512 benefits to Zen 5 and also the Windows vs. Linux performance for the Ryzen 9 9950X. For sharing today is a look at multiple Linux distributions up and running on the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (Zen 5) desktop. Among the distributions in the mix are Intel's Clear Linux distribution that is optimally tuned for maximum x86_64 Linux performance and once again even on AMD hardware shows the significant benefits to a well-tuned Linux software stack.
Quantifying The AVX-512 Performance Impact With AMD Zen 5 - Ryzen 9 9950X Benchmarks
With the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X Linux review out of the way yesterday, today's benchmarking of the Ryzen 9000 series is looking closely at the AVX-512 performance impact. With the Ryzen 9000 series the Zen 5 cores have a full 512-bit data-path compared to the "double pumped" 256-bit data path found in the Zen 4 processors as well as the Strix Point SKUs. In this article is an AVX-512 enabled versus disabled comparison for not only the Ryzen 9 9950X but also the prior generation Ryzen 9 7950X and looking too at the CPU power use, thermals, and peak frequency when engaging a variety of AVX-512 workloads.
An Initial Benchmark Of Bcachefs vs. Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. XFS On Linux 6.11
A number of Phoronix readers have been requesting a fresh re-test of the experimental Bcachefs file-system against other Linux file-systems on the newest kernel code. Your wish has been granted today with a fresh round of benchmarking across Bcachefs, Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS using the Linux 6.11-rc2 kernel. This round of testing was carried out on the newly-released Solidigm D7-PS1010 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs that offer very speedy performance for modern Linux desktops and servers.
Intel Raptor Lake 0x129 CPU Microcode Performance Impact On Linux
Motherboard vendors have begun releasing updated BIOS versions for Intel Core 13th/14th Gen motherboards that offer the new "0x129" CPU microcode that is intended to address the Raptor Lake stability issues that have been causing instability problems and crashing errors for a growing number of Intel Core 13th/14th Gen processors. Intel reported in their (Windows) testing that the 0x129 CPU microcode should offer negligible performance impact but I was curious to run my benchmarks under Linux of this new CPU microcode.
Trying Out The Ubuntu "-O3" Optimized Build For Greater Performance
Canonical engineers on Friday announced they are evaluating "-O3" compiler optimized package builds for Ubuntu Linux. As part of this evaluation of using GCC's -O3 compiler optimization level rather than -O2 when compiling Ubuntu packages, experimental Ubuntu desktop and server ISOs are available for testing with this change. Excitingly I ran some initial benchmarks over the weekend in looking at the performance difference.
AmpereOne A192-32X Benchmarks: 192 Core ARM Server Performance & Power Efficiency
Last week an AmpereOne server finally arrived at Phoronix! Ampere Computing sent over a reviewer server of the AmpereOne A192-32X flagship AArch64 server processor with 192 custom cores and using a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD platform. I have been carrying out a number of benchmarks for this much-anticipated AArch64 cloud native processor and have initial performance and power efficiency metrics to share today to see how it compares to prior Ampere Altra Max as well as the Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server competition.
AMD Ryzen 7 9700X Performance With DDR5-8000
With the new AMD Ryzen 9000 series processors the AGESA supports up to DDR5-8000 memory. With yesterday's testing of the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X review all of the tests were done at DDR5-6000 in matching with the Ryzen 7000 series and Intel Core 13th/14th Gen configurations. In this article today is an initial look at the DDR5-8000 performance with the AMD Ryzen 7 9700X while using Corsair Vengeance 2 x 16GB DDR5-8000 DIMMs (Corsair CMH32GX5M2X8000C36).
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