Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the founder and principal author of Phoronix, having founded the site on 5 June 2004. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org. Michael has authored thousands of articles on open-source software, the state of Linux hardware and other topics.


Learn more at MichaelLarabel.com or @MichaelLarabel on Twitter.


 

Some of The Recent Popular Articles By Michael Larabel:

HDMI Forum Rejects Open-Source HDMI 2.1 Driver Support Sought By AMD

One of the limitations of AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver has been the inability to implement HDMI 2.1+ functionality on the basis of legal requirements by the HDMI Forum. AMD engineers had been working to come up with a solution in conjunction with the HDMI Forum for being able to provide HDMI 2.1+ capabilities with their open-source Linux kernel driver, but it looks like those efforts for now have concluded and failed.

28 February - HDMI 2.1 - 242 Comments
X.Org Server Clears Out Remnants For Supporting Old Compilers

There are still no signs of a new X.Org Server feature release coming in the near-term with most of the major stakeholders divesting from the xorg-server besides the XWayland portion of the code-base. But for those interested in the past few days there have been some NetBSD/OpenBSD build fixes to the X.Org Server as well as clearing out some remnants of old compiler support.

20 February - Sun Pro / Sun Studio & More - 163 Comments
Intel Continues Prepping The Linux Kernel For X86S

Nearly one year ago Intel published the X86S specification (formerly stylized as "X86-S") for simplifying the Intel architecture by removing support for 16-bit and 32-bit operating systems. X86S is a big step forward with dropping legacy mode, 5-level paging improvements, and other modernization improvements for x86_64. With the Linux 6.9 kernel more x86S bits are in place for this ongoing effort.

12 March - More X86S Code In Linux 6.9 - 64 Comments
Linux 6.9 Set To Drop The Old NTFS File-System Driver

Merged two years ago with Linux 5.15 with the "NTFS3" driver developed by Paragon Software with working read-write support and other improvements for supporting Microsoft's NTFS file-system driver. This driver was a big improvement over the original NTFS read-only driver found in the mainline kernel and faster than using the NTFS-3G FUSE file-system driver. Now with enough time having passed and the NTFS3 driver working out well, the older NTFS driver is set for removal.

8 March - NTFS Driver - 43 Comments
Lisa Su Says The "Team Is On It" After Tweet About Open-Source AMD GPU Firmware

George Hotz with Tiny Corp that is working on Tinygrad and TinyBox for interesting developments in the open-source AI space has previously called out AMD over ROCm issues. Yesterday yielded new tweets by "the tiny corp" over AI training runs crashing with MES errors and then called for AMD open-sourcing the firmware to which AMD CEO Lisa Su has responded.

6 March - Lisa Su Responds - 38 Comments
Fedora Workstation 41 To No Longer Install GNOME X.Org Session By Default

Fedora Workstation has long defaulted to using GNOME's Wayland session by default, but it has continued to install the GNOME X.Org session for fallback purposes or those opting to use it instead. But for the Fedora Workstation 41 release later in the year, there is a newly-approved plan to no longer have that GNOME X.Org session installed by default.

7 March - Fedora 41 - 144 Comments
AMDGPU Linux Driver No Longer Lets You Have Unlimited Control To Lower Your Power Limit

The AMDGPU Linux driver up until the recent Linux 6.7 kernel release has let you lower the power limit of your graphics card with, well, no limits... This has allowed AMD Radeon Linux users to limit their GPU power draw when desiring for power/efficiency reasons. But since Linux 6.7 they've begun enforcing a lower-power limit set by the respective graphics card BIOS. Users petitioned to have this change reverted but in the name of safety this lower-limit enforcement will stand.

4 March - AMDGPU Power Limits - 94 Comments
Windows NT Synchronization Primitive Driver Updated For The Linux Kernel

For years Wine developers have been after a better synchronization API for the Linux kernel to better match the semantics of Microsoft Windows. Posted back in January was a request for comments on an "NTSYNC" Linux kernel driver to implement Windows NT synchronization primitives for the Linux kernel. At the start of the month a post-RFC version was posted of this open-source driver and today the latest iteration of that work has been published to the kernel mailing list.

19 February - NTSYNC - 30 Comments
KDE Plasma 6.0 Ready For Release Next Week, Plasma 6.1 Seeing Early Feature Work

It's hard to believe we are already just down to a few days left before the release of Plasma 6.0 next week alongside KDE Frameworks 6 and KDE Gear apps ported over to the Qt6 toolkit. KDE Plasma 6.0 is pretty much primed for release while already fixes are beginning for Plasma 6.0.1 as well as early feature work underway for Plasma 6.1.

24 February - KDE Plasma 6 - 44 Comments
Linux Developers To Meet Again To Work On HDR, Color Management & VRR

Last April was a display/HDR hackfest hosted in the Czech Republic by Red Hat. Another Linux display hackfest has been announced for this year so upstream stakeholders can collaborate around high dynamic range (HDR) monitor support, color management, variable refresh rate (VRR), and other topics.

18 February - Display Hackfest - 54 Comments
GNOME Prompt Becomes Ptyxis

The GNOME Prompt terminal emulator in-development by Christian Hergert with a focus on GPU-acceleration and being a very speedy and beautiful terminal option has been renamed to Ptyxis.

29 February - GNOME Ptyxis - 69 Comments
KDE Developers Are Currently Seeing 150~200 Bug Reports Per Day

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary outlining the interesting feature work and bug fixes to land in the KDE space. Being fresh off the recent Plasma 6.0 release, a lot of bug reports are still coming in while developers are already busy tackling new features for Plasma 6.1.

9 March - Plasma 6.0 Recovery - 133 Comments
Microsoft Ending Support For Windows Subsystem For Android

Microsoft announced today they will be winding down their support for Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA), which is similar to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) but was designed to run Android apps from the Amazon Appstore atop Windows 11.

5 March - Windows Subsystem For Android - 28 Comments