Svobodný software

AMD today sent out a first batch of "new stuff" feature patches to DRM-Next of new code for their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD compute driver of material for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle...

While there are a growing number of startups offering AI accelerators, many of them are more or less vaporware and the other big challenge even among those actually shipping products is their software stacks are very premature or an outright heaping mess. Surprisingly there's a company known as MemryX that was started out of the University of Michigan AI research that is both shipping actual hardware -- and at a decent price point -- and where the software stack is a pleasant experience that works on both Windows and Linux. Here are my initial experiences in testing out the MemryX M.2 module that features four of their in-house MX3 AI accelerator chips.

On Tuesday the UEFI Forum released the UEFI 2.11 specification alongside the Platform Initialization (PI) 1.9 specification...

A few weeks back I reviewed the SilverStone XE360-SP5 and XE04-SP5 cooling solutions catering to AMD EPYC 9004/9005 Socket SP5 processors. These coolers worked well with 400 Watt EPYC processors and especially the XE360-SP5 all-in-one liquid cooling was very performant and practical with today's server CPU TDPs ever increasing. After that SilverStone mentioned to me they had a new heatsink that could run up to 13 degrees cooler than the XE04-SP5 4U air cooler... Talk about intriguing. Meet the new SilverStone XED120S-WS for high-end air cooling for up to 450 Watt processors while working with multiple Intel and AMD CPU sockets.

Back for the Linux 6.12 kernel EROFS introduced support for file-backed mounts to help with container and sandboxing use-cases. As part of the EROFS "fixes" merged yesterday to the Linux 6.13 kernel, file-backed mounts are now using buffered I/O by default to speed-up container start times...

The latest house cleaning of the Linux kernel is looking to drop support for IBM Cell Blade servers for those platforms from the better part of two decades ago with Cell BE processors that also had worked their way into some supercomputers at the time...

A drm-intel-gt-next pull request was sent in today to DRM-Next of the latest batch of Intel kernel graphics driver updates destined for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle...

A patch posted on Tuesday for the Linux kernel would introduce new Lenovo Legion WMI driver options for supporting Lenovo Legion laptops as well as the Legion Go handheld gaming console to support different power/performance settings...

AOMP 20.0-1 was released on Tuesday as the newest version of this LLVM/Clang downstream focused on shipping the latest AMD patches around Radeon/Instinct OpenMP accelerator offload support...

Merged today to the Linux kernel are fixes for two vulnerabilities with the Xen hypervisor. One of them concerns a malicious network backend being able to crash a guest after a suspend/resume cycle of a Linux guest. The other more pressing issue addressed is a Xen hypercall page being unsafe against speculative CPU attacks...

System76 has been offering AMD-powered Linux laptops for a few years now and before rounding out 2024 they have announced the new Pangolin "Pang15" laptop with an updated SoC, 2K display with 16:10 screen ratio and 120Hz refresh rate, and other refinements to this all-aluminum build Linux laptop...

Last week with the availability of the Intel Arc B-Series Battlemage graphics cards I ran benchmarks looking at the GPU compute performance, Linux gaming benchmarks, and also the workstation graphics capabilities. The Intel Arc B580 graphics showed some nice generational uplift under Linux for most workloads but there were some anomalies where clearly the Intel Linux graphics driver had room to better optimize the new Xe2/Battlemage graphics support. Windows benchmarks of the Intel Arc B580 also showed it performing more competitively to the likes of the GeForce RTX 4060 compared to what I was seeing under Linux. Thus I spent the past few days working on some Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux graphics benchmarks for both Intel Arc Graphics of Alchemist and Battlemage GPUs to see how the performance compares.

Fedora Asahi Remix 41 as the re-base of the Asahi Linux work for Apple Silicon devices atop the recently released Fedora 41 is now ready for Apple device users...

The LLVM compiler stack offers a number of sanitizers like the AddressSanitizer, MemorySanitizer, UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer, and others for detecting different coding issues like data races, memory addressing issues, use of uninitialized memory, and more. The newest sanitizer addition to LLVM mainline is TySan as a Type Sanitizer...

NVIDIA today announced the Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit as their "most affordable generative AI Supercomputer" with this upgraded Jetson Nano offering 1.7x better GenAI performance while also costing less than its predecessor. This new product looks like an exciting addition to the NVIDIA Jetson line-up and will have performance benchmarks soon on Phoronix...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has decided to extend the Linux 6.1 LTS planned lifespan from four to five years...

While Fedora is often times eager to introduce new spins and other variants as well as supporting a comprehensive set of CPU architectures, it doesn't always drive new users. In the case of atomic versions of Fedora Linux for desktop use on POWER hardware, it turns out there are seemingly no active users...

Merged yesterday as part of "fixes" to the Linux 6.13 were new Intel support additions for their next-generation Core Ultra and Xeon processors...

Qt 6.9 beta is out today as the first test release for this updated Qt6 toolkit...

Fedora is among the Linux distributions that package up the Intel Compute Runtime stack to make it easy to run OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero workloads on Intel graphics hardware via the distribution package manager and without having to jump through any extra hoops. But now with upstream Intel Compute Runtime dropping support for Ice Lake and older leaves the Fedora support in a pickle. Currently they are focusing on the "legacy" branch with older hardware support but for Fedora 42 are looking at upgrading the support to focus on newer Intel graphics hardware support while leaving that older hardware support behind...