NVIDIA Open Kernel Driver News, AMD EPYC 4004 & Linux 6.10 Made For A Fun May
It was a busy May but in comparison to June may be quiet ahead of the storm. Next week is a busy Computex week. Next week on 5 June also happens to mark the 20th birthday of Phoronix! Stay tuned for more commentary there as well as a Phoronix Premium special for the Phoronix 20th birthday. At least on the software/hardware side there is a lot of interesting things going on while unfortunately from the ad/business side operations remain tight due to rampant ad-block use and the overall state of the web ad industry...
For the most interesting news on Phoronix during the month of May, the most popular stories included:
Linux 6.10 Honors One Last ReiserFS Request Made By Hans Reiser
While ReiserFS is obsolete and will eventually be dropped from the upstream Linux kernel in Linux 6.10 is one last ReiserFS change that was requested by former lead developer Hans Reiser.
NVIDIA's Open GPU Linux Kernel Driver Will Soon Be The Default For Turing & Newer GPUs
While we are all waiting for the NVIDIA R555 series Linux driver beta that is expected to debut as soon as next week based on prior information with Wayland improvements (explicit sync) and more, with the NVIDIA R560 series Linux driver successor is a very interesting change: NVIDIA is planning on defaulting to using their open-source GPU kernel driver by default for GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" GPUs and newer.
Amazon Cloud Traffic Is Suffocating Fedora's Mirrors
A massive uptick in traffic to Fedora's package mirrors is causing problems for the Linux distribution. Some five million additional systems have started putting additional strain on Fedora's mirror resources since March and appear to be coming from Amazon's cloud.
Torvalds Voices Thoughts On Linux Mitigating Unexpected Arithmetic Overflows/Underflows
For those interested in some insightful Linux kernel mailing list reading this weekend, there's been a vibrant discussion on the ability for the Linux kernel to mitigate unexpected arithmetic overflows/underflows/wraparounds.
Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg
Following Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund providing significant funding for GNOME, Rust Coreutils, PHP, a systemd bug bounty, and numerous other free software projects, the FFmpeg multimedia library is the latest beneficiary to this funding from the Germany government.
Microsoft Rolling Out New Windows Subsystem For Linux "WSL" Features For 2024
Given Microsoft's recent BUILD conference, Microsoft has announced a number of sizable updates to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
Linus Torvalds Is Doing More ARM64 Linux Testing Now That He Has A More Powerful System
Linux kernel and Git creator Linus Torvalds is known for his current use of an AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation as his main system after years of using Intel hardware. The past few years he's also been doing more ARM64 testing now that he has an Apple MacBook using Apple Silicon that serves as a nice travel device and for routinely compiling new ARM64 Linux kernel builds. More recently, his ARM64 Linux testing has increased now that he has a more powerful AArch64 system to complement his collection of routine gear.
Linux 6.10 Will Print The Number Of Populated Memory Slots At Boot Time
As a small information heads up, the Linux 6.10 kernel will print the number of populated memory slots at boot time to the kernel log as a little helper.
Memory Sealing "mseal" System Call Merged For Linux 6.10
Merged this Friday evening into the Linux 6.10 kernel is the new mseal() system call for memory sealing.
Linus Torvalds On Dogfooding The Linux Kernel
Besides Linus Torvalds examining various elements of code he's merging and build testing it on his AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation and now also testing more on ARM64 with Ampere Altra, he does these days still believe in "dogfooding" and is in fact running the leading-edge Linux kernel code even during the merge window.
Valve Working On Explicit Sync Support For "NVK" NVIDIA Vulkan Driver
In addition to all of the contributions Valve graphics engineers have been making to the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver, they have also begun investing in improvements to the open-source Mesa NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver too. With pending patches there is now explicit GPU synchronization support working for the NVK driver in conjunction with their Gamescope compositor.
NetBSD On The State & Future Of X.Org/X11
While on Linux the desktop environments, graphics stack, and other application software is steadily adopting Wayland support and focusing less on X11/X.Org support, the state of Wayland support and the open-source graphics driver stack in general is less robust among the BSDs. The NetBSD project published a status report around their ongoing dependence and modifications to their X.Org stack.
Framework Laptop EC Driver Being Prepared For Linux
The modular/upgradeable Framework Laptops employ an open-source embedded controller (EC) firmware derived from Google's Chrome OS EC project. This is great for open-source fans and allows re-using much of the same Chrome OS EC software support that already exists. But there is also vendor-specific commands supported by the Framework Laptop EC and thus a dedicated Linux kernel driver is now being worked on for handling those vendor/device-specific features.
GNOME Shell & Mutter Broke Their Good Faith With Ubuntu
GNOME Shell and Mutter had been covered by Ubuntu's GNOME MicroReleaseException "MRE" policy that allows for new point releases to ship rather easily as stable updates to existing Ubuntu Linux releases. But breaking the camel's back is GNOME 46.1 shipping explicit sync support. Due to landing a "significant new feature" into a point release, the GNOME Shell and Mutter are no longer covered by this exception.
Red Hat Announces RHEL AI
Red Hat Summit 2024 is underway in Denver, Colorado... Given the times, artificial intelligence (AI) is taking a heavy presence at the event with Red Hat announcing today RHEL AI.
Wine 9.8 Fixes Nearly 20 Year Old Bug For Installing Microsoft Office 97
Wine 9.8 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games/applications on Linux / Chrome OS, macOS, and other platforms.
ReactOS "Open-Source Windows" Making Good Strides On SMP CPU Support
The ReactOS project has posted their latest newsletter that outlines progress made during the past two months. ReactOS continues working to be an open-source operating system that offers application and driver binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows to in effect serve as a "open-source Windows" albeit the hardware support and application support are still an ongoing affair.
GNOME Shell's Layout Being Improved For Smaller Displays
There's been a lot of improvements coming about in the GNOME desktop space thanks to the ongoing Sovereign Tech Fund and other initiatives toward GNOME 47.
KDE Making Good Progress On HDR, Better Gamescope Integration
KDE developer Xaver Hugl has written a third blog post outlining some of the latest HDR and color management improvements that have been readied for KDE's KWin compositor as well as ongoing improvements to Valve's Gamescope compositor.
Zed Code Editor Making Progress On Linux Support
Back in January the Zed editor was open-sourced for this new code editor from the creators of the Atom editor and Tree-sitter syntax parsing framework. This high performance code editor has been initially focused on macOS support while the Linux support has begun coming together.
And the most popular Linux hardware reviews:
AMD EPYC 4004 Benchmarks: Outperforming Intel Xeon E-2400 With Performance, Efficiency & Value
Over the past several years we have seen AMD Ryzen processors being used for low-cost servers, budget web hosting platforms, game servers, and more. Since the Ryzen 5000 series we have seen the likes of ASRock Rack and Supermicro putting out interesting budget-friendly Ryzen servers and that has ramped up even more with AMD Ryzen 7000 series server performance being stellar thanks to AVX-512 and other improvements making it more practical for such workloads. AMD has now solidified its positioning for entry-level servers with the introduction of the EPYC 4004 series processors. The EPYC 4004 series is derived from the Ryzen 7000 series offerings to facilitate cost conscious server options and putting the Intel Xeon E-2400 series in the crosshairs. In this review is a look at the EPYC 4004 series along with benchmarks of nearly the entire EPYC 4004 product stack compared to Intel's current top-end Xeon E-2400 series processor, the Intel Xeon E-2488 Raptor Lake.
AMD Ryzen 5 8400F vs. Intel Core i5 14400F: 230+ Benchmarks For Sub-$200 CPU Performance
This week AMD announced the Ryzen 5 8400F and Ryzen 7 8700F processors as new Zen 4 budget CPU contenders lacking any integrated graphics. While part of the Ryzen 8000 series, the 8400F also lacks the Ryzen AI support found in the higher-end SKUs. The Ryzen 5 8400F offers 6 cores / 12 threads, a 4.2GHz base clock and 4.7GHz boost clock, and a 65 Watt TDP while retailing for $169~189 USD. Here are some initial benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 5 8400F in putting it up against 230+ benchmarks under Linux while also monitoring the CPU power consumption and comparing it to Intel's closest contender as the Core i5 1440F that retails for just under $200.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS & Fedora 40 Continue To Trail Intel's Linux Performance Optimizations
While Canonical has been investing more into the performance of Ubuntu Linux and engaged some new performance improvements in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it's still not the fastest Linux distribution out there on x86_64 hardware. Similarly, the recently released Fedora Workstation 40 features the brand new GCC 14 compiler and other leading-edge open-source software packages, but there's still more performance left on the table as shown by Intel. Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at how Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 40 are competing with Intel's in-house Clear Linux distribution that offers aggressive x86_64 Linux performance defaults and the best possible out-of-the-box Linux performance on modern x86_64 hardware.
Ubuntu 24.04 + Linux 6.9 Intel & AMD Server Performance
While earlier this week was looking at the AMD EPYC 4004 vs. Intel Xeon E-2488 performance for entry-level server performance, in today's benchmarking showdown is a fresh look higher up the stack at the current generation server performance out of Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids / Emerald Rapids and AMD EPYC Genoa(X) / Bergamo / Siena with a leading-edge open-source software stack of using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS while also jumping from Linux 6.8 to Linux 6.9 for the very latest x86_64 Linux server performance.
Intel Core Ultra 7 165U "Meteor Lake" Linux Performance
For those considering an Intel Core Ultra 7 165U "Meteor Lake" powered laptop, here are some benchmarks of the 165U using a Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 compared against the Acer Swift 14 with the Core Ultra 7 155H (Meteor Lake), the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U (Zen 4) within the Framework 13, and the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS (Zen 4) within the Framework 16 under Linux.
ECC DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-5200 Memory Performance For AMD Ryzen Zen 4
Back when looking at the AMD Ryzen 7000 series budget server performance last year, DDR5-4800 ECC UDIMMs were used with the ASRock Rack 1U4LW-B650/2L2T Ryzen server given that's what was broadly available at the time. Since then there's been more ECC UDIMMs coming to market above DDR5-4800 speeds. Recently I bought a pair of Kingston Server Premier 32GB 5600MT/s DDR5 ECC CL46 UDIMMs (KSM56E46BD8KM-32HA) and that's the focus of today's tests. For those curious if the faster ECC UDIMMs are worthwhile compared to the commonality of DDR5-4800 ECC UDIMMs, these benchmarks are for you.
AMD EPYC 4124P Benchmarks: A Quad-Core $149 Server CPU
Last week with the AMD EPYC 4004 review and benchmarks I tested nearly the entire product stack for these new AM5-based server processors with the EPYC 4244P (6 cores), EPYC 4344P (8 cores), EPYC 4364P (8 cores), EPYC 4464P (12 cores), EPYC 4484X (12 cores + 3D V-Cache), EPYC 4564P (16 cores), and EPYC 4584PX (16 cores + 3D V-Cache). The only EPYC 4004 class processor I wasn't able to finish testing in time was the entry-level EPYC 4124P as a 4-core processor with $149 retail price. I've now had the time to finish benchmarking that budget-focused Zen 4 server processor as well as seeing how it compares to the 4-core Skylake Xeons that were prolific for years.
Intel Baseline Profile Yields Odd Power/Performance On Linux
Intel motherboard manufacturers have begun rolling out BIOS updates containing an "Intel Baseline Profile" option to apply stock power limits to modern Intel processors. This is being driven by instability claims for 13th Gen and 14th Gen Intel Core processors having stability issues for some Windows gamers that is being attributed to multi-core enhancement (MCE) and other power options commonly set on enthusiast desktop motherboards. As the first of several ongoing tests I'm working on at Phoronix, here are some preliminary findings for using the Intel Baseline Profile option on an ASUS motherboard with the Core i9 14900K under Ubuntu Linux.
RISC-V Performance On Ubuntu 24.04 LTS With Scaleway's EM-RV1
Recently I've been testing out the Scaleway's Elastic Metal RV1 (EM-RV1) RISC-V cloud servers. Initially they were using Ubuntu 23.10 for providing an up-to-date Ubuntu Linux RISC-V experience while quickly upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. For those curious how Ubuntu 24.04 is performing on RISC-V hardware, here are some comparison benchmarks.
Benchmarking The First RISC-V Cloud Server: Scaleway EM-RV1 Performance
Scaleway by way of their Scaleway Labs group recently launched the Elastic Metal RV1 (EM-RV1) as the world's first RISC-V servers available in the cloud. These RISC-V cloud servers are built around the T-Head 1520 SoC and are an interesting way to explore the RISC-V architecture and/or otherwise make use of RISC-V for CI/CD deployments or other testing purposes. In this article are some benchmarks showing the RISC-V EM-RV1 performance against Intel and AMD x86_64 Linux.
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