Svobodný software

Red Hat engineer Jocelyn Falempe has been working to sort out DRM Panic support for the AMDGPU driver. The DRM Panic infrastructure is useful since it's what allows presenting a panic screen, a.k.a. a "Blue Screen of Death" type experience when running into major kernel problems. With Linux 6.12 there's now the ability to show QR codes for error messages with DRM Panic...

The Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver has experimental code now available for testing that also implements the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) atop the Vulkan Video APIs. This is an interesting effort that now allows VA-API applications to rely on drivers with Vulkan Video support underneath...

Zrythm is an interesting open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software package. It's been making use of the GTK toolkit but now the developers have decided to switch to Qt6 instead...

The Rust-written Servo web layout engine project that was born at Mozilla and now continued by Linux Foundation Europe with other stakeholders like Igalia has been making steady progress in recent months. The project's September 2024 status report is now available that outlines recent improvements to this open-source browser layout engine...

A new set of patches from AMD Linux engineers today aim to boost the performance for heterogeneous CPU designs such as the recent Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" SoCs that have multiple core types...

Last week when kicking off the Intel Granite Rapids benchmarking with the Xeon 6980P processors there was particularly strong performance within HPC and other scientific computing workloads. Besides going now up to 128 cores / 256 threads per socket, another reason for the especially strong generational uplift and against the current AMD EPYC competition is Xeon 6 Granite Rapids introducing Multiplexed Rank memory support. One of the areas I've been eager to explore is quantifying the DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM 8800MT/s performance difference and this article is dedicated to looking at that memory performance impact for the Xeon 6900P series.

Last week with the launch of the Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" processors, Intel didn't disclose their list prices... Today they added the Granite Rapids list prices to their ARK database. With Granite Rapids making Intel much more competitive to the AMD EPYC competition and over prior generation Xeon CPUs, these new processors are commanding a higher price tag with the Xeon 6980P topping out at $17,800 USD...

Mesa 24.2.4 is out today as the newest stable point release to this collection of predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers...

Now that sched_ext was upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel as part of the many great features in Linux 6.12, Fedora's kernel builds are prepared to enable this innovative scheduler feature that allows for new scheduling policies to be loaded via (e)BPF programs...

Google engineers have been working on support for the Linux kernel to leverage AutoFDO feedback directed optimizations and Propeller optimizations when compiling the Linux kernel with LLVM/Clang. In turn this can help Linux systems see 2~10% better performance thanks to the more optimized kernel...

After years of AmpereComputing talking about AmpereOne AArch64 server processors, it looks like we are finally on the cusp of seeing broader availability of the processors and servers/motherboards for this ARM server platform up to 192 cores. At the end of August I finally received a temporary review system with the AmpereOne A192-32X flagship SKU. That server was the Supermicro ARS-211M-NR and is supposed to be seeing availability real soon. Now the latest on the AmpereOne front is Giga Computing (Gigabyte) announcing general availability of their servers...

NetworkManager 1.50 released on Wednesday as the newest version of this software commonly used on the Linux desktop for managing wired and wireless network connections...

The Unified Acceleration Foundation (UXL Foundation), which was formed out of Intel's oneAPI software efforts, will be hosting a virtual developer summit...

Steam's Remote Play feature that allows playing Steam games on phones / tablets / TVs / other PCs while streamed from your main gaming system now is able to handle AV1 video streaming...

If you have been trying out Linux 6.12-rc1 or a recent Linux Git snapshot and discovered your laptop's touchpad is no longer working, you are far from alone. The good news is the issue has been quickly tracked down and has led to a new input driver being reverted...

With the recent Intel layoffs and early retirement / buyout packages, I have been curious to see what impact it will have on the open-source/Linux software engineers at the company. There's at least a few driver maintainers that have unfortunately departed the company but at least no major exodus of their well respected Linux software engineers...

The Redox OS open-source Rust-written operating system project has published their September 2024 status update...

With the Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" processors that launched last week there are SNC3 and HEX clustering modes for these new processors. The default Sub-NUMA Clustering 3 (SNC3) mode for the three compute dies while the HEX mode is like SNC1 mode formerly for all three compute dies acting as one NUMA node. Using the flagship 128-core Intel Xeon 6980P processors, I ran some benchmarks looking at the real-world performance difference for SNC3 vs. HEX clustering modes on Granite Rapids.

A roadmap/schedule has been published for the lightweight Xfce 4.20 desktop. If all goes well this next iteration of the Xfce desktop will be out before Christmas...

For those wanting to build really nifty and complex text user interfaces (TUIs) for terminal applications, Notcurses is one of the options for maximizing the "terminal bling" with some rather vibrant features that goes well beyond what's offered with the likes of Ncurses. It's been nearly two years since the last release while was surprised today to see out a new version...