For the past number of months AMD has been actively working on enabling AMD P-State Preferred Core functionality for Linux so that their modern processors can communicate “preferred” cores to the Linux kernel scheduler for making better decisions around task placement and ultimately ensuring best performance of Ryzen and EPYC processors running on Linux. This week they are up to their 11th take on these kernel patches…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Posts 11th Iteration Of P-State Preferred Core Patches For Linux

It’s been a number of years since many in the Linux/open-source space have been excited by the Jolla smartphone efforts with their failed smartphone/tablet devices and more recently focusing their Linux-based Sailfish OS devices for running on existing devices. The latest chapter in Jolla is the former management acquiring the Jolla business…

Source: Phoronix – Jolla’s Former Management Acquires The Business

Gigabyte (Giga Computing) recently sent over their G242-P36 HPC/AI Arm server platform built for Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max processors. This 2U server platform can accommodate up to four graphics cards or a mix of GPUs and DPUs if so desired, for maxing out the AI possibilities on Arm. I’ll have up a full review on the G242-P36 soon while in this article is a look at the direction of the Ubuntu Server Arm performance from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to now with Ubuntu 23.10 ahead of the important Ubuntu 24.04 LTS cycle.

Source: Phoronix – Ubuntu 23.10 Showing Nice Performance Improvements On Ampere Altra Max

The third and final part of the Vulkan enablement code for allowing Vulkan API graphics use within the Wine Wayland driver has been merged to Wine Git…

Source: Phoronix – Wine Wayland Driver’s Vulkan Support Is Now Usable

The LibreOffice 24.2 Alpha 1 builds for Linux, Windows, and macOS are now available for testing of this leading open-source office suite…

Source: Phoronix – LibreOffice 24.2 Alpha 1 Builds Available For Testing

The year began with Godot 4.0 making its much anticipated debut and now this open-source game engine project is ending out 2023 with Godot 4.2 as the second revision to the Godot 4.x engine…

Source: Phoronix – Godot 4.2 Released With More Stability Improvements, Improved Rendering & AMD FSR 2.2

The Free Software Foundation this week published their 2023 holiday shopping guide for services and products that comply with their pure free software standards, such as computer hardware devices that “respect your freedom” regardless of hardware age…

Source: Phoronix – Holiday Shopping 2023: FSF Endorses 802.11n WiFi, Opteron Boards & USB To Parallel Printer Cable

Immediately after the Bcachefs file-system was upstreamed into the Linux 6.7 kernel I began running some benchmarks on this new copy-on-write file-system. Shortly thereafter some scalability improvements and disabling a debug option by default were merged. So with the Bcachefs work for Linux 6.7 settling down the past few weeks, here’s a fresh look at how Bcachefs is performing against the likes of EXT4, XFS, F2FS, and Btrfs.

Source: Phoronix – Another Look At The Bcachefs Performance on Linux 6.7

Eric Engestrom with Igalia just released Mesa 23.3 as the much anticipated quarterly update to this set of open-source 3D drivers principally focused on OpenGL and Vulkan API support…

Source: Phoronix – Mesa 23.3 Released With Initial NVK Vulkan Driver, AMD RDNA3 Refresh & Raspberry Pi 5

The Linux Mint crew led by Clement Lefebvre released Cinnamon 6.0 today as the latest version of their customized desktop stack…

Source: Phoronix – Linux Mint’s Cinnamon 6.0 Brings Initial — Still Experimental — Wayland Session

KDE today announced their first beta of the “KDE 6th Megarelease” as the Plasma 6.0, KDE Frameworks 6, and latest Gear applications…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Plasma 6.0 Beta 1 Released With Frameworks & Gear Updated

Back in September AMD rounded out their Zen 4 server product line-up with the EPYC 8004 “Siena” processors that are optimized for delivering excellent energy efficiency with leading performance-per-Watt and maximizing value both for initial server costs and ultimately the TCO. These single-socket server chips are quite interesting for a range of workloads form the edge to networking and more. In today’s article are benchmarks of the top-end AMD EPYC 8534P and EPYC 8534PN 64-core server processors and showing how they can take on Intel Xeon Platinum “Sapphire Rapids” in raw performance and blow the competition out of the water when it comes to the incredible performance-per-Watt and value.

Source: Phoronix – AMD EPYC 8534P / EPYC 8534PN Benchmarks – Siena Delivers Incredible Value & Energy Efficiency For Linux Servers

Given the interest in the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX Linux performance and the benchmarks of Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows 11 on this 96-core / 192-thread workstation processor, I’ve extended that comparison to now feature five Linux distributions up against Microsoft Windows on this HP Z6 G5 A workstation for greater perspective into the results.

Source: Phoronix – Benchmarking Five Linux Distros Against Windows 11 On The Threadripper PRO 7995WX / HP Z6 G5 A

As part of Red Hat’s plans to avoid shipping the X.Org Server in RHEL10, Olivier Fourdan of Red Hat’s graphics team announced their work on a new xwayland-run helper utility along with wlheadless-run and xwfb-run utilities…

Source: Phoronix – Red Hat Developing New xwayland-run & wlheadless-run Utilities

If you are looking for a CPU heatsink-fan combination that will fit within 4U rackmount server height requirements while being capable of cooling the latest high-end Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC / Threadripper processors while not being too expensive nor noisy, the Arctic Freezer 4U-M is a rare solution that can cross off all those checkboxes.

Source: Phoronix – Arctic Freezer 4U-M Is A Nice 4U Cooler Capable Of Cooling High-End AMD & Intel CPUs

The open-source Roundcube webmail software project has “merged” with Nextcloud, the prominent open-source personal cloud software…

Source: Phoronix – Roundcube Open-Source Webmail Software Merges With Nextcloud

Ampere Computing has sent out its latest patch attempt at increasing the number of Arm CPU cores supported by the mainline Linux kernel. As it stands at the moment the 64-bit ARM mainline Linux kernel build supports 256 cores, which can be exceeded with Ampere’s new AmpereOne processors in a multi-socket configuration…

Source: Phoronix – Ampere Preparing The ARM64 Linux Kernel To Support Higher CPU Core Counts

Coming up for the Linux 6.8 kernel the Btrfs file-system is preparing to make use of the newer Linux file-system mounting API…

Source: Phoronix – Btrfs Slated To Make Use Of New Mount API In Linux 6.8

Generalized Memory Management “GMEM” has been proposed as a new solution to be developed for the Linux kernel to deal with memory management for external memory devices like the growing number of accelerators coming to market…

Source: Phoronix – “GMEM” Proposed To Deal With Memory Management For Accelerators, External Memory Devices

A new release of Coreboot is available today as the increasingly popular open-source system firmware solution that’s used by Chromebooks, increasing hyperscaler / data center industry interest due to increased code transparency and security, System76 laptops, and more. Coreboot 4.22 is the new release and brings initial AMD OpenSIL code integration, 17 new motherboard ports, and more. Coreboot 4.22 will be succeeded next year by Coreboot 24.02…

Source: Phoronix – Coreboot 4.22 Released: Initial AMD OpenSIL Code Added, 17 New Motherboards