What's Excited Open-Source Enthusiasts & Linux Users The Most So Far In 2023
Among the top news so far this year has been around Intel software contributions to the open-source world, various Linux kernel enhancements, AMD continuing to make interesting Linux software advancements including their new openSIL initiative, and much more.
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With all that said, here's the most viewed Phoronix news so far in 2023 on Phoronix:
Intel Publishes Blazing Fast AVX-512 Sorting Library, Numpy Switching To It For 10~17x Faster Sorts
Intel recently published an open-source C++ header file library for high performance SIMD-based sorting, which initially is focused on providing a lightning fast AVX-512 quicksort implementation. As of today that code has been merged to Numpy and is providing some 10~17x speed-ups.
ipmitool Repository Archived, Developer Suspended By GitHub
The ipmitool utility on Linux systems is widely-used for controlling IPMI-enabled servers and other systems. This tool for interacting with the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is extremely common with server administrators while now its development is in a temporary state of limbo due to GitHub.
The Rust Implementation Of GNU Coreutils Is Becoming Remarkably Robust
Coming about over the past two years has been uutils as a re-implementation of GNU Coreutils written within the Rust programming language. This Rust-based version of cp, mv, and other core utilities is reaching closer to parity with the widely-used GNU upstream and becoming capable of taking on more real-world uses.
Asahi Linux To Users: Please Stop Using X.Org
Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin issued a lengthy post encouraging users of this Apple Silicon focused Linux distribution to stop using X.Org as Wayland is the future.
Linux 6.3 Introducing Hardware Noise "hwnoise" Tool
As part of the tracing updates sent in for Linux 6.3 is the introduction of the new "hwnoise" tool within the kernel source tree for monitoring and quantifying hardware noise.
Intel Thunder Bay Is Officially Canceled, Linux Driver Code To Be Removed
I hadn't heard any mentions of Intel's Thunder Bay in quite a while besides the occasional Linux kernel patch while now it has been officially confirmed as a cancelled Intel product and the Linux driver code being worked on the past 2+ years is on the chopping block.
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.
Linux 6.1 Officially Promoted To Being An LTS Kernel
Linux 6.1 was widely anticipated to be a Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel with normally the last major release series for the calendar year normally promoted to LTS status. Greg Kroah-Hartman as the Linux stable maintainer went ahead today and formally recognized Linux 6.1 as the 2022 LTS kernel.
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.
Red Hat Now Limiting RHEL Sources To CentOS Stream
Red Hat announced today that CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases.
AMD Has A One-Liner To Help Speed Up Linux System Resume Time
AMD engineers have been working out many quirks and oddities in system suspend/resume handling to make it more reliable on their hardware particularly around Ryzen laptops. In addition to suspend/resume reliability improvements and suspend-to-idle (s2idle) enhancements, one of their engineers also discovered an easy one-liner as a small step to speeding up system resume time.
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.
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.
DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 File-System Being Ported To NetBSD
NetBSD continues using the FFS file-system by default while it's offered ZFS support that has been slowly improving -- in NetBSD-CURRENT is the ability to use ZFS as the root file-system if first booting to FFS, for example. There may be another modern file-system option soon with an effort underway to port DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 over to NetBSD.
Linux's SystemV Filesystem Support Being Orphaned
The Linux kernel's SystemV file-system support for enabling Xenix FS, SystemV/386 FS, and Coherent FS access is being orphaned and in turn could be slated for removal in the future.
Vulkan 1.3.250 Released With Another New Extension From Valve
Vulkan 1.3.250 is out today as the latest routine spec update and brings a handful of spec fixes plus one new extension.
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.
KDE Plasma 6 Has Reached The Point Of Being "Fairly Livable"
Following yesterday's KDE weekly development summary, prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has published an update on the current state of affairs for KDE Plasma 6 along with when we may potentially see Plasma 6.0 actually released.
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."
Intel Continues With More Big-Time Optimizations To The Linux Kernel
I love Linux kernel patches that mention "massively", use exclamation points when talking about performance, and/or simply mention big speed-ups. Quite often such patches come out of Intel and last week they sent out another great performance optimization patch series to improve additional low-level bits of the kernel.
And the most popular reviews / featured articles for H1'2023:
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D Linux Performance
Ahead of tomorrow's launch of the AMD Ryzen 7800X3D / 7900X3D / 7950X3D processors, today marks the embargo expiry on the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X3D 3D V-Cache processor. Today I can share with you the initial performance around the performance of this $699 USD processor that features a 144MB cache.
AMD Ryzen 5 7600 / Ryzen 7 7700 / Ryzen 9 7900 Linux Performance
Last week at the AMD CES 2023 keynote hosted by Lisa Su, new 65 Watt Ryzen 7000 series processors were announced. These more affordable Zen 4 processors are going retail this week and today marks the embargo lift. Up on the Linux testing block are the Ryzen 5 7600, Ryzen 7 7700, and Ryzen 9 7900 processors.
Orange Pi 5 Is A Great & Very Fast Alternative To The Raspberry Pi 4
With an 8-core Rockchip RK3588S SoC, the Orange Pi 5 is leaps and bounds faster than the aging Raspberry Pi 4. With up to 32GB of RAM, the Orange Pi 5 is also capable of serving for a more diverse user-base and even has enough potential for assembling a budget Arm Linux developer desktop. I've been testing out the Orange Pi 5 the past few weeks and it's quite fast and nice for its low price point.
Intel Xeon Platinum 8490H "Sapphire Rapids" Performance Benchmarks
Now that the 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" and Xeon CPU Max Series overview is out of the way, you are probably very eager to see some independent performance benchmarks of the much anticipated Sapphire Rapids CPUs that are going up against AMD 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors for 2023... For kicking off our Sapphire Rapids benchmarking, first up is a look at the Xeon Platinum 8490H performance under Linux as the flagship SKU.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 / RTX 4090 Linux Performance
Recently we finally received the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards for Linux testing from NVIDIA. For those that have been eager to see how the RTX 40 series hardware performs under Linux, here are my initial Linux gaming benchmarks featuring a variety of Linux native titles as well as with Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux atop Proton + DXVK/VKD3D-Proton. The GeForce RTX 4080/4090 Linux performance is compared against a variety of other graphics cards including the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX with its open-source upstream Linux driver support.
X.Org vs. Wayland Linux Gaming Performance For NVIDIA GeForce + AMD Radeon In Early 2023
With recent NVIDIA's proprietary driver updates continuing to refine their Wayland support, the open-source AMDGPU Linux graphics drivers continuing to be enhanced, and work on the GNOME desktop with Mutter compositor continuing to advance, today's benchmarking article is looking at how the GNOME session under X.Org and Wayland for (X)Wayland is performing across various Linux games. It's been a while since I last ran a X.Org vs. (X)Wayland Linux gaming comparison so today's article is a fresh look from Ubuntu 22.10 while moving to the very latest graphics drivers and newest Steam Play Experimental state.
The Technical Workloads Where AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D/7950X3D CPUs Are Excellent
While the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D are promoted as great "gaming processors", these new Zen 4 desktop CPUs with 3D V-Cache also have great capabilities for various technical computing workloads thanks to the hefty cache size. In prior articles I've looked at the Ryzen 9 7900X3D/7950X3D in around 400 workloads on Linux while in this article I am looking more closely at these technical computing areas where these AMD Zen 4 3D V-Cache processors show the most strength and value outside of gaming.
The Performance Impact From Different Arch Linux Kernel Flavors
Arch Linux has five different officially supported kernel builds: stable, hardened, long-term. real-time, and Zen, but which of these is the fastest for desktop Arch Linux users? Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance out of these different kernel build options for Arch Linux and its derivatives.
AVX-512 Performance Comparison: AMD Genoa vs. Intel Sapphire Rapids & Ice Lake
With last week's launch of Intel's 4th Gen Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids server processors, Intel heavily talked up the shiny new accelerators and the big performance potential of AMX, but not really showcased and only heard through the grapevine was the improved AVX-512 implementation found with these new processors. With Sapphire Rapids there is reduced penalties from engaging AVX-512 -- and for some AVX-512 instructions, no longer any measurable impact -- compared to prior generation Xeon processors. In this article is a look at the performance for a wide variety of workloads with AVX-512 on/off not just for Sapphire Rapids but also for prior generation Ice Lake as well as AMD's new EPYC 4th Gen "Genoa" processors where they have introduced AVX-512 for the first time.
NVIDIA Gaming/GPU Performance: Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux Benchmarks
Last week was a fresh look at the AMD Radeon graphics/gaming performance between Windows and Linux using the very latest drivers. Today the testing wrapped up from some holiday benchmarking looking at the NVIDIA GeForce performance under Windows 11 and Ubuntu 22.10 Linux for how the drivers on both operating systems are currently competing.
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