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While Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) isn't as common on Arm SoCs as it is in the x86 and POWER worlds, there are some SMT-capable designs like with the HiSilicon Kupeng 930 for Arm servers. HiSilicon engineers are working now to extend Linux's SMT run-time controls to work on ARM64 (AArch64)...

In addition to Oracle releasing OpenJDK 21 / Java 21 on Tuesday, their GraalVM team also carried out a same-day release of GraalVM with the new Java 21 features and more...

NVIDIA's latest patches intended for the upstream Linux kernel are over on the networking side of the house with their Mellanox wares as they prepare 800Gb/s (XDR) support within the RDMA/InfiniBand code...

As a continuation of last week's article looking at Linux 6.6 bringing some impressive gains for AMD EPYC Bergamo, over the past few days I've also tested Linux 6.5 stable and Linux 6.6 Git on Genoa and Genoa-X processors as well as Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" in looking at this next kernel version's performance. The Sapphire Rapids performance was largely flat while for an interesting class of workloads the Linux 6.6 performance drives the AMD EPYC server performance much higher.

Intel is kicking off their Innovation 2023 conference in San Jose with many exciting announcements. Freed from embargo this morning is news around their upcoming mobile and server processors, lots of AI talk, Intel's continued software advancements to complement their hardware, and more...

Java 21 and the JDK 21 release under a general availability (GA) status occurred a short time ago as the newest major update to the Java programming language...

The beta release of Fedora 39 is now available for testing ahead of its planned stable release prior to the end of October...

Here's a surprise announcement I was briefed on last week and now made public by the Linux Foundation and Intel... The Linux Foundation is forming the Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation that is an evolution of Intel's oneAPI initiative and has the potential to make the compute accelerator ecosystem as a whole more open and unified across vendors.

In addition to Fedora 40 planning to ship KDE Plasma 6.0 and without any X11 session support, Fedora stakeholders are also looking at shipping GNOME for the Fedora Workstation 40 release without any X11 session support...

The LLVM 17 compiler stack has been released as stable as LLVM 17.0.1 -- a slight mistake leaving the 17.0.0-rc tag meant the original v17.0.0 tag was skipped. This LLVM 17.0.1 stable release along with sub-projects like the Clang 17 C/C++ compiler bring many new features and improvements...

Hours after posting a large patch series for enabling the Nouveau kernel driver to use NVIDIA's GSP for improving the support for RTX 20/30 series hardware and finally enabling accelerated graphics support on RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs, the Red Hat maintainer has resigned from his duties...

While there is (sadly) once again no Phoronix pilgrimage/meet-up at Oktoberfest this year, there is the annual Phoronix Premium sale special for those wishing to support the site at a discounted rate to enjoy ad-free viewing, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode, and other benefits...

Microsoft has published a big feature update to Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" for running Linux binaries within the confines of Windows 11...

The long-awaited patches for allowing the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" upstream Linux kernel driver to leverage NVIDIA's GPU System Processor "GSP" firmware for handling GPU re-clocking and other hardware tasks with RTX 20 GPUs and newer have been posted. With this set of 44 patches also comes the initial GPU hardware accelerated support for the GeForce RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs that is built upon this new GSP driver code path...

Released late on Friday was the much anticipated SteamOS 3.5 preview for the Steam Deck with ongoing work around HDR and enhancing color management, VRR for external USB-C displays, various platform issues resolved, auto-mounting external storage, and more. With SteamOS 3.5 it also means some lower-level OS upgrades too like moving to the Linux 6.1 LTS kernel. For those wondering about the performance impact of going from SteamOS 3.4 stable to the SteamOS 3.5 preview release, here are some early benchmarks on the Steam Deck.

Since March of 2022 the ReiserFS file-system has been deprecated and with Linux 6.6 ReiserFS is marked outright as "obsolete" with plans to remove the file-system from the mainline kernel code-base in 2025. In stepping toward that eventual milestone, a new kernel patch series begins removing ReiserFS from the default kernel configurations...

XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.18 is out today as the newest stable release for this leading open-source app sandboxing and distribution tech. Flatpak's XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.18 adds yet more features for this cross-distribution solution for software deployment and package management...

Last November AMD introduced the first of the 4th Gen EPYC series with the EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors and that was then complemented earlier this year by the July launch of the Genoa-X processors for sporting AMD 3D V-Cache to help technical computing workloads and as well launching Bergamo for the Zen 4C based processor designs that allow up to 128 cores / 256 threads per socket. While AMD has a very robust portfolio for the high-end server space with 4th Gen EPYC, today AMD is introducing the EPYC 8004 "Siena" processors for "intelligent edge" servers. Siena is a step below Genoa but still very capable offering and coming in at a lower price point while being geared more for maximizing power efficiency and opening up EPYC to more deployments outside of the data center.

Stemming from Intel engineers finding significant overhead in some Linux scheduler functions when running PostgreSQL within a Docker instance, a new scheduler patch is on the way for Linux 6.7 that will help out at least Ice Lake and Sapphire Rapids with some migration-heavy workloads. With the change being in the common scheduler code, it's also likely to help out other hardware platforms too...

Since 2021 the Itanium IA-64 code was orphaned in the Linux kernel and over the course of this year there's been talk of retiring the Itanium code from the kernel, a.k.a. strip it out. It looks like 2023 will end with the Itanium IA-64 code indeed being removed from the Linux kernel...