Category Archives: Linux

[$] As ye clone(), so shall ye AUTOREAP

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The facilities provided by the kernel for the management of processes have
evolved considerably in the last few years, driven mostly by the advent of
the pidfd API. A pidfd is a file
descriptor that refers to a process; unlike a process ID, a pidfd is an
unambiguous handle for a process; that makes it a safer, more deterministic
way of operating on processes. Christian Brauner, who has driven much of
the pidfd-related work, is proposing
two new flags for the clone3()
system call, one of which changes the kernel’s security model in a
somewhat controversial way.

Google Cloud N4 Series Benchmarks: Google Axion vs. Intel Xeon vs. AMD EPYC Performance

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Google Cloud recently launched their N4A series powered by their in-house Axion ARM64 processors. In that launch-day benchmarking last month was looking at how the N4A with Axion compared to their prior-generation ARM64 VMs powered by Ampere Altra. There were dramatic generational gains, but how does the N4A stand up to the AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon instances? Here are some follow-up benchmarks I had done to explore the N4A performance against the Intel Xeon N4 and AMD EPYC N4D series.

Join Us for Fedora Hatch at SCaLE 23x!

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Fedora is heading back to sunny Southern California! As we gear up for SCaLE 23x, we are thrilled to announce a special edition of Fedora Hatch. This is taking place on Friday, March 6 as an embedded track at SCALE. Whether you’re a long-time contributor, a curious user, or someone looking to make your very […]

Modern AMD Graphics Driver Surpasses Six Million Lines Of Code In Linux 7.0

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It was less than four years ago that the modern AMDGPU/AMDKFD open-source driver stack was at four million lines of C code and header files. Now with the Linux 7.0 kernel it has surpassed six million lines. Or put another way, by the same calculations Linux 7.0-rc1 is at 39.2 million with the modern AMD kernel graphics driver now making up 15% of the kernel’s entire codebase as the single largest driver…

[$] The second half of the 7.0 merge window

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The 7.0 merge window

closed on February 22 with 11,588 non-merge commits total,
3,893 of which came in after
the article covering the first half of the merge
window. The changes in the second half were weighted toward bug fixes over
new features, which is usual. There were still a handful of surprises, however, including
89 separate tiny code-cleanup changes from different people for the rtl8723bs
driver, a number that
surprised
Greg Kroah-Hartman. It’s unusual for a WiFi-chip driver to receive that much
attention, especially a staging driver that is not yet ready for general use.

Vlad: Weston 15.0 is here: Lua shells, Vulkan rendering, and a smoother display stack

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Over on the Collabora blog, Marius Vlad has an overview
of Weston 15.0, which was released on February 19. Weston is the
reference implementation of a Wayland compositor. The new
release comes with a new shell that can be programmed using the Lua language, a new, experimental Vulkan
renderer, smoother media playback, color-management additions, and more.

One of Weston’s fundamental pillars has always been making the most efficient use of display hardware. Over time, all the work we did to track and offload as much work as possible to this efficient fixed-function hardware has come at the cost of eating CPU time. In the last couple of release cycles, we’ve focused really hard on improving performance on even the most low-end of devices, so not only do we make the most efficient use of the GPU and display hardware, but we’re also really kind on your CPU now. As part of that and to improve our tooling, Weston 15 now comes with support for the Perfetto profiler.