AMD RX 7600, Intel X86-S & Other Exciting Linux/Open-Source News From May
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The most popular news during May on Phoronix included:
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.
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.
Intel Issues New CPU Microcode Going Back To Gen8 For New, Undisclosed Security Updates
Well, this is a bit strange... Intel just published Friday afternoon CPU microcode updates for all supported processor families back to Coffee Lake "Gen 8" for undisclosed security updates.
KDE Developers In Germany Planning For Plasma 6.0
Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham shared that key KDE developers are currently in Germany for an in-person Plasma 6.0 development sprint.
XFS Metadata Corruption On Linux 6.3 Tracked Down To One Missing One-Line Patch
Last week XFS users began encountering metadata corruption on the latest Linux 6.3 point releases. Following kernel developers and those testing the kernels on affected hardware over the US holiday weekend, it's believed the issue has been tracked down to one missing patch that is a one line of code being deleted.
System76 Virgo Aims To Be The Quietest Yet Most Performant Linux Laptop
System76 continues teasing the in-house laptop design they are working on codenamed Virgo.
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.
CodeWeavers Now Controlled By An Employee Ownership Trust
CodeWeavers, the company known for its CrossOver software for running Windows games/apps on Linux / macOS / Chrome OS and in turn being the main corporate backer to the Wine project, is now transitioned to being an employee ownership trust. This comes with Jeremy White deciding to leave the company after 27 years.
Linus Torvalds Cleans Up The x86 Memory Copy Code For Linux 6.4
In recent years Linus Torvalds hasn't had the time to write too much original new code for the Linux kernel himself with these days mostly managing developers, providing insightful mailing list posts, and reviewing code for merging into the kernel tree along with related tasks. For Linux 6.4 though he did manage to write up some new code.
LLVM's libc Gets Much Faster memcpy For RISC-V
Being merged into LLVM's libc library recently are an optimized memory copy function "memcpy" implementation for the RISC-V architecture.
Intel Publishes "X86-S" Specification For 64-bit Only Architecture
Intel quietly released a new whitepaper and specification for their proposal on "X86-S" as a 64-bit only x86 architecture. If their plans workout, in the years ahead we could see a revised 64-bit only x86 architecture.
Fedora Program Manager Laid Off As Part Of Red Hat Cuts
As part of the Red Hat layoffs announced in April with around a 4% reduction in headcount for the IBM-owneed company, one of the surprising casualties from that round of cost-cutting is the Fedora Program Manager.
Big Patch Series Prepares The Linux Audio Drivers For MIDI 2.0
Nearly forty years after the MIDI digital music protocol was first introduced, in 2020 the MIDI 2.0 protocol was announced as a major overhaul for this widely used standard by musical devices. A big patch series sent out today prepares the Linux kernel sound drivers for MIDI 2.0.
Linux Features Loved By Microsoft Engineers Working On WSL2
In addition to Microsoft having a significant present at last week's Linux Security Summit, there were also multiple Microsoft engineers at the Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit that was also taking place in Vancouver. Among the Microsoft Linux talks this week was a presentation on the Linux kernel usage by WSL2 -- including how it's moving closer to a mainline/upstream status and also mentions of Linux kernel features loved by Microsoft's engineering team.
Raspberry Pi OS Updated - Now Powered By Linux 6.1 LTS, Updated libcamera
Raspberry Pi has released a new version of Raspberry Pi OS as their Debian Linux based distribution currently built atop the Debian 11 "Bullseye" base.
Those Using The XFS File-System Will Want To Avoid Linux 6.3 For Now
Multiple users have been reporting metadata corruption issues on the XFS file-system when upgrading to the Linux 6.3 stable kernel.
Steam Beta Now Honors KDE & GNOME Global Scaling Factor
Today's Steam client beta will be a delight for some Linux gamers with the Steam client finally recognizing the GNOME and KDE desktop global scaling factor for text sizing.
NVIDIA Announces The GeForce RTX 4060 Series
NVIDIA today announced the GeForce RTX 4060 series consisting of the $399 RTX 4060 Ti 8GB while in July an RTX 4060 Ti 16GB version will come along with a $299 RTX 4060.
Podman Desktop 1.0 Released As An Alternative To Docker Desktop
Released this week from the Red Hat Summit is Podman Desktop 1.0 as a container management tool akin to Docker Desktop.
Intel Arc Graphics A750/A770 Quick Linux Competition With The Radeon RX 7600
For those wondering how the performance of Intel Arc Graphics is relative to the newly-launched AMD Radeon RX 7600 and other recent graphics cards, here are a couple of benchmarks for the Arc Graphics using the new Linux 6.3 stable kernel paired with Mesa 23.2-dev for the latest open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.
And the most popular featured articles/reviews:
AMD Radeon RX 7600 Linux Performance
For those that have been interested in the Radeon RX 7900 series for the great open-source driver support on Linux but have been wanting a cheaper graphics card and perhaps are a 1080p gamer, today's launch of the Radeon RX 7600 will surely be of interest to you. The Radeon RX 7600 is a nice lower-end graphics card for 1080p gamers and has upstream open-source Linux support already -- including the ability to run out-of-the-box already on Ubuntu 23.04 and other newer distributions. Here is my Linux performance review of the AMD Radeon RX 7600.
LLVM Clang 16 vs. GCC 13 Compiler Performance On Intel Raptor Lake
For those wondering how the recent releases of the Clang 16 and GCC 13 are competing for the fastest generated binaries of these leading open-source compilers, here is a fresh round of benchmarks from an Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake" system looking at the performance for a variety of C/C++ workloads built under each of these compilers.
NVIDIA R530 vs. AMD Linux 6.3 + Mesa 23.2-dev Gaming Performance
Due to the constantly evolving state of the open-source Linux graphics drivers in particular, here is a fresh look at an assortment of AMD Radeon GPUs making use of the Mesa 23.2 development code for the newest RadeonSI and RADV drivers paired with the recently released Linux 6.3 kernel. These open-source Radeon Linux gaming benchmark results are going up against various NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30/40 series graphics cards using the NVIDIA 530.41.09 release as its latest Linux driver.
System76 Pangolin Makes For A Nice All-AMD Linux Laptop
I spent the past few weeks testing the latest System76 Pangolin laptop that has been working out well as an all-AMD 15-inch laptop running the company's increasingly-popular Pop!_OS Linux distribution.
Intel's One Line Of Linux Code For Speeding-Up Sapphire Rapids On Ubuntu
Recently I noticed out-of-the-box on Ubuntu Linux the performance of Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors was much improved for some workloads compared to tests done just weeks ago on the same Sapphire Rapids server. It ended up being an issue coming full-circle and ultimately boils down to one line of code added within the Linux kernel.
Linux 6.4 Features: Many Intel & AMD Additions, Better Desktop/Laptop Hardware Drivers
With Linux 6.4-rc1 released, here is my original overview of all the interesting changes coming for the Linux 6.4 kernel that will be released as stable at the end of June or in early July.
Corsair MP700: PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD But Not Without Issues
Last week Corsair announced the MP700 series as their first PCIe 5.0 NVMe solid-state drives. While the performance is quite speedy for sequential reads and writes, in practice this drive struggled under Linux with real-world workloads. When not adding an after-market heatsink, the MP700 was quick to exhibit EXT4 file-system errors.
LLVM Clang 16 vs. GCC 13 Compiler Performance On AMD 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa"
With the recent stable releases of LLVM's Clang 16 and GCC 13 compilers there is now initial AMD Zen 4 "znver4" support in these open-source compilers. Curious about the performance difference between these two compilers on the very newest AMD 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" server processors, I ran some LLVM Clang 16.0 and GCC 13.1 benchmarks on the flagship EPYC 9654 2P Linux server.
Ampere Computing Announces AmpereOne With Up to 192 Cores Per Socket
Ampere Computing announced this morning that their AmpereOne family of processors have entered production and provided additional details on these in-house designed Arm server processors.
Intel Provides AI-Accelerated HPC Update For ISC 2023
Intel is using ISC2023 this week in Hamburg, Germany to provide an update on its AI-accelerated HPC efforts. This includes reaffirming their upcoming data center product roadmap, reiterating their great software efforts, and also announcing full Aurora supercomputer specifications.
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