Sent out today was the drm-intel-gt-next and drm-intel-next pull requests of the latest Intel graphics driver feature code for DRM-Next to then be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle. Both pull requests indicate these are the last planned feature updates ahead of Linux 6.6 but what’s interesting is that with the latest code upcoming Meteor Lake graphics are still being treated as experimental…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Meteor Lake Graphics Still Experimental “Force Probe” With Linux 6.6

LLVM/Clang developers have been working on C23 language support for some time already but to this point it’s only been exposed when using the -std=c2x target or -std=gnu2x for the GNU dialect. However, with C2x having been finalized this summer as C23, the LLVM Clang 18 compiler will now honor the -std=c23 option…

Source: Phoronix – LLVM Clang Now Supports -std=c23

Cloud Hypervisor — the Rust-written open-source VMM that was started by Intel while having evolved into a Linux Foundation project with backing from multiple organizations — is out with the Cloud-Hypervisor 34 release…

Source: Phoronix – Cloud Hypervisor 34 Brings QCOW2 Support for Backing Files, Paravirtualized Panic Device

It shouldn’t come as much surprise for those familiar with Fedora given its tendency to always ship with the very latest open-source compiler toolchain components, but this autumn’s release of Fedora 39 will once again have all the leading-edge GNU compiler pieces…

Source: Phoronix – Upgraded GNU Compiler Toolchain Approved For Fedora 39

Intel Arc Graphics customers have been eager to see the new Xe DRM kernel driver merged as a modern alternative to the long-standing i915 Direct Rendering Manager driver. The Xe driver should allow for better performance, is focused just on recent Intel graphics hardware, makes use of modern kernel features, and will allow for new features such as around the Vulkan sparse support. One of the blockers for getting the Xe driver merged at least in experimental form is getting the necessary DRM scheduler changes merged…

Source: Phoronix – DRM Scheduler Patches Updated That Clear The Path For Merging Intel’s Xe Driver

Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS is now available as the newest point release to this current long-term support series…

Source: Phoronix – Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS Released With Linux 6.2 + Mesa 23.0 HWE Stack

Microsoft has released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230805 as the newest monthly-ish update to their in-house Linux distribution used for purposes from Azure to WSL…

Source: Phoronix – Microsoft’s CBL-Mariner 2.0 Linux Distro Adds DNF5, Zstd-Compressed RPMs

As part of Intel’s ongoing AI push, the company announced today they have joined the PyTorch Foundation as a premier member…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Joins The PyTorch Foundation

OpenELA has been announced as the Open Enterprise Linux Association that brings together CIQ (Rocky Linux), Oracle, and SUSE for collaborating around RHEL-compatible Linux distributions…

Source: Phoronix – Open Enterprise Linux Association Brings Together CIQ, Oracle & SUSE

After resorting to buying a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card to be able to share Linux performance metrics for that more affordable Ada GPU, last month I posted the Radeon RX 7600 vs. GeForce RTX 4060 benchmarks as well as looking at the GeForce GTX 1060 through RTX 4060 GPU compute and renderer performance across several generations of NVIDIA GPUs. For those considering the RTX 4060 for a Linux gaming system or an upgrade to other recently released AMD or NVIDIA GPUs, here is a fresh round of Linux gaming performance metrics on the newest drivers.

Source: Phoronix – NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon Linux Gaming Performance For August 2023

AMD Linux engineers continue work on enabling the Family 1Ah CPU models for the Linux kernel as what would appear to almost surely be the next-gen Zen 5 processors…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Zen 5 EDAC & Temperature Monitoring Slated For Linux 6.6

A decade ago the Radeon R600g SB shader back-end proved useful for boosting gaming performance on pre-GCN graphics cards of the time and proved useful. But in more recent years in the R600g switch to NIR, the SB path hasn’t received much attention and its benefits have diminished. The R600g SB code has now been dropped…

Source: Phoronix – Radeon R600g Driver Retires Its SB Optimizer

The Nouveau DRM kernel driver changes for new user-space APIs to be used by the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver have now been submitted for pulling to DRM-Next from the current drm-misc-next queue. These Nouveau kernel driver additions for NVK in turn will then premiere with the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle…

Source: Phoronix – Nouveau Kernel Driver Changes For Supporting NVK Vulkan Submitted To DRM-Next

Merged for Mesa 23.3 is support for the VirGL code to handle accelerated AV1 video decoding within guest virtual machines…

Source: Phoronix – AV1 Video Decoding Added To Mesa’s VirGL For QEMU/KVM Guests

GRUB2 and Linux bootloaders in general don’t get too much attention these days as for the most part they “just work” well and most Linux distributions prefer to keep their GRUB menu hidden if at all possible. But at the same time it’s an often overlooked area and not an area where there is an eager and glamorous open-source community behind it. However, it looks like Red Hat at least may have some new ideas brewing and they are hiring now to improve the Linux bootloader experience…

Source: Phoronix – Red Hat Is Hiring To Improve The Bootloader

The consulting firm KDAB that is known for their work on the Qt toolkit has released KDGpu as a new library that is a thin wrapper around the Vulkan API and aims to allow for more productive GPU programming…

Source: Phoronix – KDAB Releases KDGpu As A Thin Wrapper Around Vulkan

In addition to Intel posting initial AVX10.1 patches for the GCC compiler, Intel has also begun sorting out their AVX10 plans for the LLVM/Clang compiler stack…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Begins Drafting AVX10 Plans For The LLVM/Clang Compiler

After a rather busy Patch Tuesday with the AMD Inception vulnerability and Intel Downfall going public, the Linux kernel saw a new bug fix merged today for a different issue… It turns out original AMD Zen 1 processors could end up leaking data in certain conditions after a divide by zero occurs…

Source: Phoronix – Linux Lands Fix For AMD Zen 1 Bug That Could Leak Data After A Division By Zero

With yesterday’s disclosure of the Intel Downfall speculative execution vulnerability and the updated CPU microcode and Linux kernel patches I have been very busy testing the performance impact of this mitigation. Here are some initial numbers and workloads I have found to be impacted as a result of this security mitigation for Skylake to Icelake/Tigerlake client and server processors.

Source: Phoronix – Initial Benchmarks Of The Intel Downfall Mitigation Performance Impact

Following yesterday’s disclosure of the AMD “Inception” security vulnerability and the Linux kernel patches merged for reporting the mitigation status as well as the kernel-based handling for earlier generation Zen CPUs, the Family 19h microcode mitigations have now been picked up by the linux-firmware.git repository…

Source: Phoronix – Updated AMD Family 19h Microcode Published Following “Inception”