While the recently released Ubuntu 23.10 is bringing some performance improvements to Intel Xeon Max / Sapphire Rapids, Ubuntu Linux still isn’t delivering the best possible out-of-the-box server performance. For that Intel continues to show the importance of software optimizations with the likes of their in-house Clear Linux platform as well as the likes of CentOS Stream having more sensible defaults. Here is a look at the Intel Xeon Max 9480 performance across Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 23.10, CentOS Stream 9, Fedora Server 39, and Clear Linux 40130.

Source: Phoronix – Intel Continues To Demonstrate The Importance Of Software Optimizations: Clear Linux + Xeon Max Benchmarks

While most hardware vendors are relying on LLVM when it comes to offloading compute work to GPUs, AI accelerators, FPGAs, and similar heterogeneous compute environments, right now each vendor is basically creating their own LLVM offloading run-time among a lot of other duplicated — and often downstream only — code. The new “llvm/offload” project hopes to lead to better collaboration in this area…

Source: Phoronix – LLVM Looking To Better Collaborate Around Common AI/GPU/FPGA Offloading

Following an FCV optimization for the latest Intel graphics hardware, ASTC LDR emulation, some still-pending Vulkan sparse support for ANV atop the existing i915 driver, and other recent Intel open-source “ANV” Vulkan driver optimizations, another optimization was just merged into Mesa 23.3…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Vulkan Driver Lands Optimization To Help GravityMark, Other Demanding Software

The Etnaviv Gallium3D driver within Mesa has long been focused on reverse engineering and supporting Vivante graphics IP found in various SoCs. That driver has worked out well for open-source OpenGL support for Vivante graphics while more recently Etnaviv has begun tackling Vivante neural processing unit (NPU) support that is beginning to be found in various SoCs…

Source: Phoronix – Etnaviv NPU Support Coming Together, Mesa Upstreaming Next

After the Raspberry Pi 5 was excitingly announced a few weeks ago, Eben Upton shared today that ramping up the production has gone better than initially anticipated and that these AArch64 single board computers are beginning to ship to customers…

Source: Phoronix – Raspberry Pi 5 Single Board Computers Begin Shipping

Linus Torvalds today released the seventh weekly release candidate of Linux 6.6 while is hoping to release the stable kernel version next weekend…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6-rc7 Released: Linux 6.6 Final Likely Next Sunday

For those that happen to have QLogic 10Gb PCIe Ethernet adapters, the mainline Linux kernel is planning to remove this driver from the kernel source tree unless any active users step-up…

Source: Phoronix – QLogic 10Gb “QLGE” Ethernet Driver Set To Be Removed From The Linux Kernel

In addition to working on the likes of the Milk-V Duo and high-end Pioneer board, Milk-V has now announced the “Oasis” as a forthcoming mini-ITX RISC-V board that will feature 16 cores and up to 64GB of LPDDR5 system memory…

Source: Phoronix – Milk-V Oasis Sounds Like An Interesting RISC-V Board With 16 Cores, Up To 64GB LPDDR5

Linux sound patches queued for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.7 cycle are preparing for the upcoming introduction of the new “Xe” DRM kernel graphics driver…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.7 Sound Code Prepares For Intel’s Xe DRM Driver

AMD driver engineer Saroj Kumar has contributed Perfetto integration for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as the latest means of allowing tracing/profiling for this open-source OpenGL driver…

Source: Phoronix – RadeonSI Driver Integrates Perfetto Support

Zlib-ng 2.1.4 was released this week as the newest version of this Zlib data compression library intended for “next generation” uses. Zlib-ng continues having a lower barrier for new contributions and optimizations than the upstream Zlib repository itself to allow for it to more rapidly evolve on today’s systems…

Source: Phoronix – Zlib-ng 2.1.4 Brings LoongArch Port, New RISC-V & ARM Optimizations

Libreboot 20231021 was published for testing today as the newest Coreboot downstream focused on providing only fully free software support for system firmware with more stringent open-source requirements than Coreboot itself…

Source: Phoronix – Libreboot 20231021 Brings Some Additional Laptops, Desktops / Motherboards For Testing

An Intel engineer on Friday posted a set of Linux kernel patches that are working to refine the Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) mitigation handling for the Linux kernel to better protect some kernel data and also some very subtle performance benefits…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Optimizing Its MDS Mitigation Handling To Avoid Possible Kernel Data Leaking

Ever since the release of TuxClocker 1.0 last month, this open-source community software project for enhancing overclocking controls under Linux has been living up to the “release early, release often” mantra. Out today is TuxClocker 1.2…

Source: Phoronix – TuxClocker 1.2 Released With AMD GPU Thermal Monitoring, CPU Governor Controls

FreeBSD 14.0 is preparing for release in early November as a big update to this leading BSD operating system. It’s going to be a great release and Friday’s FreeBSD 14.0-RC2 milestone landed some last minute updates…

Source: Phoronix – FreeBSD 14.0-RC2 Pulls In OpenZFS 2.2, OpenSSH 9.5p1

Back in September GNOME developer Christian Hergert noted how Linux terminal emulators have the potential of being much faster based on his experiments. While at the time he didn’t plan to pursue it further, in the weeks since he’s been making enhancements to GNOME’s VTE code that is used by GNOME Console and other apps…

Source: Phoronix – More Optimizations Made For Making GNOME/VTE Terminals Go Faster

Thursday marked the 18th birthday of the Geany open-source text editor / lightweight integrated development environment (IDE) project. In celebrating Geany turning 18, the Geany 2.0 release was made available. Geany 2.0 continues to strive toward the project goal of being a fast and easy to use text editor for coding…

Source: Phoronix – Geany 2.0 Lightweight IDE / Text Editor Released

With the newest AMD Ryzen 7040 series laptops there is “Ryzen AI” as a dedicated AI engine based on Xilinx IP to help accelerate machine learning with the likes of PyTorch and TensorFlow. Sadly though this Ryzen AI with their new Zen 4 laptops is only supported under Microsoft Windows at this point. But it could change with sufficient customer interest…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Wants To Know If You’d Like Ryzen AI Support On Linux

Raptor Computing Systems as the company behind the open-source friendly, POWER-based Talos II server and Blackbird microATX desktop has continued leveraging POWER9 given the binary blobs and challenging state around POWER10. But looking ahead to next year it looks like they’ll be debuting some new hardware platforms…

Source: Phoronix – Raptor Computing Developing New Secure BMC & New OpenPOWER ISA 3.1 Based Systems

As shown already the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U works out well on Linux and is very speedy as shown with that prior benchmarking on Linux 6.3, but for those moving to Linux 6.5 or newer the performance and power efficiency is even better. Like for those moving to the newly-released Ubuntu 23.10 with Linux 6.5, there are some nice performance gains to find with this laptop — similar to the experience seen with various AMD Ryzen desktops on the new kernel.

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.5+ Is Great For The Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 / AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U