Granite Rapids, AmpereOne & PREEMPT_RT Landing Made For An Exciting September
September was a very busy month with the launch of the Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" processors, finally having hands-on with the 192-core AmpereOne processor, the Linux 6.12 merge window with real-time "PREEMPT_RT" and sched_ext finally landing along with many other new features, continued AMD Zen 5 desktop/laptop benchmarking fun, and a lot of other interesting open-source innovations.
Below is a look back at the most viewed content for the month. As always if you appreciate all the daily and original content authored by myself, please consider joining Phoronix Premium or at the very latest to not use any ad-blocker on this site. Ads suck and the ad industry remains in a downward spiral but without them the site cannot survive. At least if you go Phoronix Premium you can enjoy the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode, and other benefits.
The most popular news for September included:
Unauthenticated RCE Flaw With CVSS 9.9 Rating For Linux Systems Affects CUPS
There's been much speculation since this morning over a reported "severe" unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) flaw affecting Linux systems that carries a CVSS 9.9.9 score... The embargo has now lifted with the details on this nasty issue.
KDE Again Operated At A Loss During 2023
KDE e.V. announced the availability today of their annual report for covering 2023. While they made a lot of accomplishments and worked a lot on KDE Plasma 6 development, it was another year they unfortunately operated in the red funding wise.
NVIDIA Publishes Open-Source Linux Driver Code For GPU Virtualization "vGPU" Support
NVIDIA engineers have sent out an exciting set of Linux kernel patches for enabling NVIDIA vGPU software support for virtual GPU support among multiple virtual machines (VMs). In aiming for upstream-focused Linux support, this NVIDIA vGPU support is built around the adapted Nouveau driver with the code previously posted for splitting up the Nouveau/NVKM driver components.
AMD GPU Linux Driver Becoming "Really Really Big" That It's Starting To Cause Problems
The modern AMD kernel graphics driver "AMDGPU" is the biggest driver within the mainline Linux kernel and is approaching six million lines of code albeit a large chunk of that is made up of auto-generated header files for each supported GPU. But this AMDGPU kernel driver is becoming "really really big" that it's beginning to cause issues for Plymouth that commonly provides the initial boot splash screen experience on modern Linux desktops.
Linux Very Close To Enabling Real-Time "PREEMPT_RT" Support
We're very close to the finish line for the mainline Linux kernel being able to enable real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel support.
Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development
Valve open-source graphics software engineer Mike Blumenkrantz is well known in the Linux community for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver code, various Mesa driver optimizations, and creative writing on his blog. He's also taken up a new task: further accelerating Wayland protocol development.
Even NVIDIA Has Jumped Big On The Open-Source OpenBMC Train
OpenBMC as the Linux Foundation project backed by vendors like Intel / Microsoft / Google / Meta for an open-source BMC firmware stack continues to be a growing success. This alternative to long-used proprietary BMC software stacks continues to grow in popularity with AMD now using it on their reference motherboards and Supermicro being another notable user with some of their server platforms. Not entirely new but been meaning to write about it and NVIDIA talked more openly about it this week: NVIDIA is also a big supporter and user of OpenBMC for their high-end AI/HPC servers and BlueField DPU hardware.
Redox OS Unlocks Faster VM Performance, "Slightly Faster" Than Linux In Some Benchmarks
The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system has managed to address a performance bottleneck allowing this platform to perform much faster now when running as a virtual machine (VM) and for some synthetic benchmarks even able to run "slightly faster" than Linux.
Raspberry Pi Showcases Rust On The RP2350 Microcontroller
While C tends to be the go-to launguage for microcontrollers, Raspberry Pi is promoting the prospects of using Rust on their RP2350 microcontroller.
Wow! Microsoft DirectX Adopting SPIR-V Moving Forward
Well this is a hell of a surprise... Microsoft announced today that DirectX will be adopting SPIR-V as the interchange format of the future. Microsoft's DirectX 12 will accept shaders compiled to SPIR-V, the intermediate representation defined by The Khronos Group and commonly associated with Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenCL drivers.
Debian Developers Figuring Out Plan For Removing More Unmaintained Packages
While there are more than 74k packages available within Debian's package management system for x86_64 systems, not all of the packages are well maintained and a portion of them haven't seen any maintenance/updates in ages. Debian developers have recently begun discussing how to begin removing more of those long unmaintained packages from the archive.
Linus Torvalds Adds User-Access Fast Validation Via Address Masking To Linux 6.12
In between Linus Torvalds' busy week being in Vienna for the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit and related Linux Foundation events as well as managing the Linux 6.12 merge window with landing new features like sched_ext and real-time PREEMPT_RT, he also managed to finish up some of his own code for this next kernel version. Being merged today is his own code working on a new user access fast validation path using address masking.
Linux Preparing Support For The RISC-V Framework Laptop 13
Back in June it was teased that Framework Computer in collaboration with DeepComputing would be releasing a RISC-V motherboard for the Framework Laptop 13. That RISC-V laptop motherboard has yet to be officially released but Linux kernel patches were posted today for enabling the DeviceTree support so Linux can boot on this upcoming board.
AMD Reveals Latest Plans For Open-Source openSIL With Replacing AGESA, Zen 6 Milestone
Last year to much excitement in our community was the new AMD project announcement of openSIL as an open-source CPU silicon initialization project that is an advancement for open-source firmware and to eventually replace AMD's AGESA across both client and server processors. This week an exciting new update on AMD OpenSIL was shared and that they are still on-track for having it production-ready next year.
KDE Squeezes A Few More Features Into The Plasma 6.2 Desktop
While KDE developers this weekend are busy attending Akademy 2024 as their annual developer conference taking place in Würzburg, Germany, prior to that there were a few last minute features merged for the upcoming Plasma 6.2 desktop.
Systemd Looking At A Future With More Varlink & Less D-Bus For IPC
Taking place this week in Berlin was systemd's annual "All Systems Go" developer conference. Among the interesting talks was Lennart Poettering talking about the ongoing challenges of D-Bus for inter-process communication (IPC) with systemd and how they are looking at Varlink for IPC needs moving forward.
Fedora 42 On 64-bit ARM Might Make It Seamless To Run x86/x86_64 Programs
As one of the early feature proposals for Fedora 42, there is a proposal being considered to make for a nice out-of-the-box experience running x86/x86_64 game/application binaries atop Fedora 42 AArch64 hosts.
Valve's Proton 9.0-3 Brings Support For More Games On Linux, Many Fixes
After several weeks of testing Valve has released Proton 9.0-3 as the newest version of this Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for being able to enjoy Windows games on Linux.
Sched_ext Merged For Linux 6.12 - Scheduling Policies As BPF Programs
Linux 6.12 is shaping up to be a heck of a kernel update! Following real-time "PREEMPT_RT" going mainline after twenty years and many other kernel features merged this week, Linus Torvalds just pulled in the much anticipated sched_ext code!
Steam On Linux Drops Below 2% For August 2024 Survey
With the start of the new month comes the Steam Survey results for the month prior. The August 2024 data is in and it points to the Steam on Linux statistics dipping back below 2%.
And the most popular reviews:
Intel Xeon 6980P "Granite Rapids" Linux Benchmarks
With the Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" launch today the review embargo has now expired. I began with my Intel Granite Rapids Linux benchmarking a few days ago and have initial benchmarks to share for the flagship Xeon 6980P processors paired with MRDIMM 8800MT/s memory. This is just the beginning of a lot of Granite Rapids benchmarks to come on Phoronix. Compared to the existing AMD EPYC competition and prior generation Intel Xeon processors, the Xeon 6900P series performance surpassed my expectations and has debuted as an incredibly strong performer. In some areas of HPC and other workloads, Intel is able to regain leadership performance with Granite Rapids paired with MRDIMMs. In AI workloads where the software is optimized for AMX, the new Xeon 6900P CPUs can showcase staggering leads.
AMD Ryzen 5 9600X & Ryzen 7 9700X Linux Performance With 105 Watt cTDP
Motherboard vendors have begun rolling out updated BIOS versions for AMD AM5 platforms that allow a configurable TDP on the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X processors to allow a 105 Watt cTDP compared to the base 65 Watt TDP. For those wondering about the Linux performance and power efficiency impact from running these mid-tier Zen 5 desktop processors at the higher cTDP value, here is the full set of benchmarks compared to my original review data on Linux.
Intel Xeon 6980P vs. AMD EPYC Power Efficiency / Performance-Per-Watt Benchmarks
Earlier this week in the launch-day Intel Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids review/benchmarks I unfortunately wasn't able to provide any CPU power consumption and performance-per-Watt benchmarks due a Linux kernel issue and the minimal time ahead of launch for testing. I've now repeated the Xeon 6980P benchmarking on the Linux 6.8 kernel of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with power monitoring working and have those power efficiency numbers to share today for how Granite Rapids compares to prior Emerald Rapids / Sapphire Rapids / Ice Lake and against the current AMD EPYC Bergamo/Genoa(X) competition.
AMD AGESA PI 1.2.0.2 Performance With The Ryzen 9 9950X On Linux
There has been a lot of talk the past few days over the AMD AGESA PI 1.2.0.2 update that has begun rolling out to AMD AM5 motherboards with BIOS updates. The AGESA 1.2.0.2 is said to improve inter-core latency for Ryzen 9000 "Zen 5" processors when cores from different CCDs are cross-communicating. Some -- at least under Windows -- have reported performance improvements and thus several Phoronix readers have requested I run some of my tests with AGESA 1.2.0.2. Here are said comparison benchmarks using an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X on Ubuntu Linux.
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X Power/Performance With CPU Frequency Scaling Driver Tunables
Continuing on with the AMD Ryzen 9000 series Linux benchmarking, today's testing is looking at the performance and power impact of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X when adjusting the CPU frequency scaling driver, governor, and Energy Performance Preference (EPP) tunable to help look at the performance and power efficiency characteristics of this current flagship Zen 5 desktop processor.
AWS Graviton4 vs. AmpereOne 192-Core Benchmarks For Leading AArch64 Server Performance
With the Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD server that's in the lab for a few weeks for reviewing the AmpereOne A192-32X and delivering the first independent benchmarks of the AmpereOne 192-core AArch64 server processor, the AmpereOne benchmarks to date have been comparing to other Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server platforms. But if looking up to the cloud is the closest AArch64 server competition to AmpereOne there is: Amazon's Graviton4. In today's article ia showdown looking at how AmpereOne and AWS Graviton4 compete at 192 cores for ARM 64-bit server performance.
The Fastest AArch64 Linux Distribution On The 192-Core AmpereOne
When it comes to the question of the fastest x86_64 Linux distribution the answer is very easy with Intel's Clear Linux. But what about in the AArch64 world? When having the AmpereOne server in the lab curiosity got the best of me and I ran benchmarks across seven different Linux distributions on this Supermicro ARM server for seeing what platform had the fastest out-of-the-box Linux performance. The Linux distributions tested on this AmpereOne A192-32X server included Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Ubuntu 24.10 daily, Fedora Server 40, AlmaLinux 9.4, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Debian Testing, and CentOS Stream 10.
AMD Zen 5 Not Affected By Inception/SRSO, mitigations=off Yields No Benefit On Ryzen 9000 Series
One of the security changes with AMD Zen 5 processors that I haven't seen AMD publicly mention at least not prominently is that the new cores are not vulnerable to Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO). Unlike Zen 4 and prior, under Linux I noticed that Zen 5 is no longer affected by the SRSO "INCEPTION" vulnerability. But of course there does remain other CPU security mitigations in place carried over from Zen 4. For those wondering about the mitigation costs or if it's worthwhile running Zen 5 with the "mitigations=off" insane mode, here are some benchmarks.
AmpereOne Performance On Linux 6.11 Kernel, 4K vs. 64K Page Size Comparison
Continuing on with the AmpereOne performance benchmarking while having the AmpereOne A192-32X in the lab within a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD server, the next set of benchmarks is looking at the performance when using the near-final Linux 6.11 kernel. Additionally, quantifying the performance impact of using the ARM64 64K page size kernel as an alternative to the default 4K page size.
NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation vs. Radeon PRO Performance On Ubuntu Linux 24.04 LTS
For those wondering about the performance of the NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation workstation performance on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the up-to-date NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers now relying on the open-source kernel modules, this article is for you in looking at the performance of this high-end workstation graphics card on the up-to-date Linux software stack. The NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation is tested alongside the RTX 2000 / 4000 Ada Generation graphics cards and also the AMD Radeon PRO W7000 series competition atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
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