Linux 6.2, Linux 6.3 Developments, KDE Plasma 5.27 & More Made For An Exciting Month
In case you missed out on any of the original Phoronix content each and every day, below is a look at the most popular news articles on Phoronix for the month. Between the new kernel merge window, FOSDEM over in Brussels, and other milestones, it was a great month for open-source users. Sadly though on the web publishing front times remain difficult due to the admittedly sad state of the ad industry and rampant ad-block usage among the technically-minded audience. If you enjoy the original Phoronix content over the past nearly 19 years on Phoronix, consider joining Phoronix Premium to view the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, dark mode web viewing support, and other benefits. Or tips via PayPal and Stripe continue to be graciously accepted.
With that said the February 2023 highlights on Phoronix included:
The Rust Implementation Of GNU Coreutils Is Becoming Remarkably Robust
Coming about over the past two years has been uutils as a re-implementation of GNU Coreutils written within the Rust programming language. This Rust-based version of cp, mv, and other core utilities is reaching closer to parity with the widely-used GNU upstream and becoming capable of taking on more real-world uses.
Intel Publishes Blazing Fast AVX-512 Sorting Library, Numpy Switching To It For 10~17x Faster Sorts
Intel recently published an open-source C++ header file library for high performance SIMD-based sorting, which initially is focused on providing a lightning fast AVX-512 quicksort implementation. As of today that code has been merged to Numpy and is providing some 10~17x speed-ups.
Linux 6.3 Introducing Hardware Noise "hwnoise" Tool
As part of the tracing updates sent in for Linux 6.3 is the introduction of the new "hwnoise" tool within the kernel source tree for monitoring and quantifying hardware noise.
Linux 6.1 Officially Promoted To Being An LTS Kernel
Linux 6.1 was widely anticipated to be a Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel with normally the last major release series for the calendar year normally promoted to LTS status. Greg Kroah-Hartman as the Linux stable maintainer went ahead today and formally recognized Linux 6.1 as the 2022 LTS kernel.
Linux's SystemV Filesystem Support Being Orphaned
The Linux kernel's SystemV file-system support for enabling Xenix FS, SystemV/386 FS, and Coherent FS access is being orphaned and in turn could be slated for removal in the future.
Linux Looks To Retire Itanium/IA64 Support
It's been many years since Intel Itanium processors made a convincing story and faced a slow demise over the past decade. While the last of the Itanium 9700 "Kittson" processors shipped in 2021, just two years later now the Linux kernel is already looking at possibly seeing its IA-64 support removed over having no maintainers or apparent users.
A Non-GNU Linux Distribution Built With LLVM & BSD Software Aims For Alpha Next Month
In development now for nearly two years is Chimera Linux as a "non-GNU" Linux distribution built with the LLVM Clang compiler, leveraging musl libc, and commonly relying on BSD user-space software components. After a lot of work on bringing up Chimera Linux as well as getting a Wayland-based deskttop going, the project is aiming for its alpha release within the next month.
Intel Open-Sources Its OpenCL CPU-Based Runtime
As 718,996 lines of newly open-sourced code, Intel recently began opening up their previously proprietary CPU-based OpenCL run-time.
SSDFS Is The Newest Linux Filesystem & Catering To NVMe ZNS SSDs
Sent out for review on Friday evening were 76 patches implementing SSDFS, the newest open-source Linux file-system and catering to flash-friendly drives and particularly those with NVMe Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) support.
Debian 12 "Bookworm" Enters Its Soft Freeze
After last month's initial Debian 12 freeze, this week the "Bookworm" Linux distribution release entered its soft freeze.
KDE Plasma 5.27 Dubbed "The Best Plasma 5 Version Ever"
KDE developers and users are very excited for Plasma 5.27 that will be making its stable debut next week and also serves as the last major release of the Plasma 5 series.
AMD Has Many New CPU/GPU Features Ready For Linux 6.3
With the Linux 6.3 merge window opening up following tomorrow's stable debut of the Linux 6.2 kernel, there is a lot to be excited about if you are a customer of AMD's recent CPUs or GPUs.
FFmpeg 6.0 Will Be Big With AV1 Hardware Decoding, Many Other Features
Well known multimedia developer and VideoLAN president Jean-Baptiste Kempf presented at FOSDEM 2023 this weekend on the upcoming FFmpeg 6.0 release as well as dav1d v1.1.
NVIDIA Publishes DLSS Super Resolution SDK 3.1, Including Updated Linux Demo
NVIDIA just published to GitHub the DLSS Super Resolution SDK v3.1, their first software development kit update made public since last May when DLSS v2.4 was the latest and greatest.
GTK5 Development Likely To Heat Up Following GTK 4.12
A new GTK blog post summarized a recent meet-up of GTK core developers for better sorting out active GTK4 work as well as some planning toward GTK5.
Firefox 110 Released With Better WebGL Performance, GPU-Accelerated 2D Canvas
Mozilla has pushed out Firefox 110 today as the latest major version of their open-source web browser.
Fedora Planning Ahead For The Next 5 Years
The Fedora Project has been working on drafting its strategic plan to help shape the Linux distribution over the next five years. A draft of the plan written up by the Fedora Council has been published and is currently seeking community feedback on their road-map planning.
Linux 6.2 Released With Intel Arc Graphics Promoted, Open-Source NVIDIA RTX 30
Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.2 kernel as stable and marks the first major kernel release of 2023.
The Best Linux 6.2 Features From Intel Arc Graphics To Better Performance For Older PCs
This weekend the Linux 6.2 kernel will be released as stable. As it's been two months already since I published the Linux 6.2 feature overview following the closure of the v6.2 merge window, here is a reminder of what makes Linux 6.2 a really exciting kernel update.
RustyHermit Delivers A Rust-Based, Modular Unikernel For MicroVMs
Showcased today at the annual FOSDEM conference in Brussels was RustyHermit, a Rust-written modular unikernel intended for handling micro virtual machines.
And the most popular featured articles / Linux hardware reviews:
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 / RTX 4090 Linux Performance
Recently we finally received the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards for Linux testing from NVIDIA. For those that have been eager to see how the RTX 40 series hardware performs under Linux, here are my initial Linux gaming benchmarks featuring a variety of Linux native titles as well as with Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux atop Proton + DXVK/VKD3D-Proton. The GeForce RTX 4080/4090 Linux performance is compared against a variety of other graphics cards including the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX with its open-source upstream Linux driver support.
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D Linux Performance
Ahead of tomorrow's launch of the AMD Ryzen 7800X3D / 7900X3D / 7950X3D processors, today marks the embargo expiry on the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X3D 3D V-Cache processor. Today I can share with you the initial performance around the performance of this $699 USD processor that features a 144MB cache.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090/4080 Linux Compute CUDA & OpenCL Benchmarks, Blender Performance
Last week I published a number of Linux gaming benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 high-end graphics cards now that they finally arrived for my Linux testing on Phoronix. For those more interested in creator workloads and GPU OpenCL and CUDA compute performance for these high-end consumer Ada Lovelace graphics cards, this article is for you with an initial look at the compute performance across a wide range of workloads from Blender OptiX and CUDA rendering to common OpenCL GPU benchmarks.
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X Linux Performance After Three Years
Today marks three years since AMD introduced the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, the first HEDT chip sporting 64 cores / 128 threads. While based on Zen 2, the shear multi-threaded compute power of the Threadripper 3990X still bodes well today. Besides 64 cores / 128 threads still being a lot, Linux software improvements over the past three years have helped maintain the competitiveness of the Threadripper 3990X. In today's benchmarks are results from the System76 Thelio Major as tested back in 2020 based on Pop!_OS / Ubuntu 22.04 LTS compared to the very latest state today when running an Ubuntu 23.04 snapshot on the same system and using a Linux 6.2 Git kernel.
CentOS Stream & Clear Linux Achieve Greater Performance On 4th Gen Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids, EPYC Genoa
As part of other ongoing performance tests of Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" testing, I was curious to see how the more well-tuned Linux distributions are performing with the flagship Xeon Platinum 8490H processors relative to the common Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release. Here are those benchmark numbers alongside AMD's flagship Genoa server platform with two EPYC 9654 processors.
Linux Schedutil Governor's Quirky Behavior Persists In 2023
Earlier this week I posted benchmarks looking at how the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X performance has evolved in the three years to the day since that 64-core / 128-thread HEDT chip launched. While overall the Threadripper 3990X performance has evolved nicely under Linux since 2020, when it came to the video encoding tests in particular they performed worse overall. As I had raised in that earlier article and now elaborated with some follow-up tests, that regression is driven by the default "schedutil" frequency scaling governor used by default.
TUXEDO OS 2 Being Prepared With Linux 6.0, Updated KDE Desktop & More
Bavarian Linux computer vendor TUXEDO Computers last year introduced TUXEDO OS as their tailored Linux distribution built atop Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. TUXEDO OS was delivering some performance improvements over stock (K)Ubuntu 22.04, ships with TUXEDO's configuration utilities by default, and other refinements to this desktop OS using the KDE Plasma desktop by default. The team in Augsburg is now preparing to ship TUXEDO OS 2 in the near future while this week they made available a public test snapshot.
Embree 4.0 Is Running Well On Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids"
This week Intel released Embree 4.0 as the newest version of their open-source, high performance ray-tracing library. While the headline feature is now having support for GPU acceleration with SYCL to take advantage of Arc Graphics and other GPU hardware with SYCL support, for those that have long been using Embree on CPUs its performance has also improved. Here are some initial CPU-based benchmarks I did this week on Embree 4.0 with Intel's new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors.
Noctua NH-L9a-AM5 Low-Profile Heatsink Works Great For 2U AMD Ryzen AM5 Servers
Noctua at the end of January announced the NH-L9a-AM5 and the all-black NH-L9a-AM5 chromax.black heatsinks as their new ultra low-profile active CPU coolers for the AMD AM5 socket that support AMD's recently announced Ryzen 7000 series 65 Watt CPUs. The height with fan at only 37 mm makes the new NH-L9a-AM5 heatsinks work out very well for small form factor (SFF) builds and for our case at Phoronix an instant hit for running the new AMD Ryzen processors within 2U rackmount enclosures.
Here's to an exciting March!
Add A Comment
