Running XWayland in rootful mode now allows for working HiDPI and fractional scaling support...
It has taken many years but the Mesa 3D open-source graphics drivers have proven very successful from the open-source AMD Vulkan and OpenGL drivers proving they can be capable of competing with the closed-source drivers not only for gaming but also workstation tasks, the Windows vs. Linux graphics driver performance gap largely closed, Microsoft even leveraging Mesa for their translations to the D3D12 API, vendors like Imagination developing once unthinkable open-source drivers, etc. But with the increasing importance to corporations, so has the responsibilities and concerns of Mesa driver developers...
More AMD SEV-SNP bits are upstreamed now for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel that is putting the EPYC processor support on the mainline kernel trajectory for "the ultimate goal of the AMD confidential computing side" to hopefully be in great shape come Linux 6.10 later in the year...
Following recent benchmarks looking at how the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release is looking on Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids as well as the performance gains for AMD EPYC 9004 series on Ubuntu 24.04, I next turned to the Ampere Altra ARM64 server processor for seeing what the performance is looking like there with this Long Term Support Linux distribution release due out in just over one month.
Oracle has announced the general availability of OpenJDK Java 22...
Announced last summer was the Ultra Ethernet Consortium started by the Linux Foundation along with AMD, Intel, Cisco, Meta, Microsoft, Broadcom, and other organizations. Ultra Ethernet aims for high performance networking for the likes of AI and HPC. The group announced today they've courted an additional 45 organizations to become members of this consortium and they are on track for their v1.0 specification in Q3...
Following last week's main set of power management updates for Linux 6.9 that saw AMD P-State Preferred Core support and tuning for Intel Meteor Lake, a secondary set of power management subsystem changes were sent out today for this new kernel...
The x86 cache updates for Linux 6.9 offer an improved memory bandwidth throttling heuristic such as used by Intel Resource Director Technology (RDT) and also AMD EPYC CPUs with the resctrl code...
The Linux 6.9 kernel has a big rework to the CPU timer code that has been years in the making and has some power and performance benefits...
Merged today were all the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel...
XWayland had targeted both the Generic Buffer Management (GBM) and EGLStream APIs due to NVIDIA not supporting GBM like all of the other Linux drivers. But now that the NVIDIA proprietary Linux graphics driver has been boasting GBM support and advancing with their Wayland platform support in general, XWayland is letting go of the EGLStream mess...
The Firefox 124.0 release binaries are now available ahead of the official release announcement tomorrow...
With my recent NVIDIA GH200 Grace CPU benchmarks carried out remotely via GPTshop.ai, besides looking at areas like the 64K kernel page size performance benefits I also ran some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance difference when the binaries were generated by LLVM Clang rather than the default GCC compiler on Ubuntu Linux. This article shows off the performance difference for the 72-core Neoverse-V2 server/HPC processor when leveraging LLVM Clang rather than the GNU Compiler Collection.
CoreCtrl 1.4 was released this weekend as the newest version of this open-source, independently-developed GUI utility for managing CPU and GPU performance characteristics and power/thermal monitoring under Linux, among other capabilities. CoreCtrl does a good job at offering basic GUI-driven controls and monitoring for CPUs and GPUs in the absence of any official GUI solutions by the likes of AMD and Intel...
Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund continues investing significant sums of money for important open-source projects. Among the latest projects receiving funding from the STF are the Rust-written Coreutils implementation and Reproducible Builds...
Back in February AMD posted GCC compiler enablement support for Zen 5 with the new "znver5" target ahead of launch. Since then it's been rather quiet and nervous not seeing this support merged ahead of the upcoming GCC 14 stable release, but this morning it's finally happened: the AMD Zen 5 processor enablement has been merged to GCC Git in time for the GCC 14.1 stable release that will be out in the coming weeks...
Along with the input subsystem updates for the Linux 6.9 kernel, the HID subsystem updates were also merged in recent days for this next Linux kernel release. Notable of this pull is enabling support for some newer Samsung Wireless input devices...
Last year Linux kernel developers began clearing out code for Intel's nearly two decade old "Carillo Ranch" platform that was a 90nm 32-bit single core processor for embedded devices in the sub 20 Watt space. It was a ~2007 product that never shipped but the Linux kernel code was left in the upstream tree until beginning to see it removed last year...
While AMD P-State driver's Preferred Core support was merged for Linux 6.9, another notable addition to this driver is still undergoing the patch review process: Core Performance Boost...
The input subsystem updates were merged on Sunday for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel merge window, among various other input changes is adding support for Snakebyte GAMEPADs to the XPad driver...