AMD Ryzen 7000 Series, Linux 6.0, MGLRU, Rust & IO_uring Made For An Exciting September
While the Linux hardware world continues to be constantly exciting and the pace of innovation in open-source/Linux software never lets up, sadly operations here at Phoronix remain difficult due to the rampant ad-block use, depressed state of the ad industry outside of Facebook and YouTube, etc. If you enjoy the new and original content on Phoronix each and every day, consider showing your support by joining Phoronix Premium as the number one way to provide support besides disabling any ad-blockers. You can also follow the content via Facebook and Twitter.
With that, the most exciting news on Phoronix for the month of September out of the 251 original news articles included:
A 20 Year Old Chipset Workaround Has Been Hurting Modern AMD Linux Systems
AMD engineer K Prateek Nayak recently uncovered that a ~20 year old chipset workaround in the Linux kernel still being applied to modern AMD systems is responsible in some cases for hurting performance on modern Zen hardware. Fortunately, a fix is on the way for limiting that workaround to old systems and in turn helping with performance for modern systems.
Cloudflare Ditches Nginx For In-House, Rust-Written Pingora
Cloudflare has long relied upon Nginx as part of its HTTP proxy stack but now has replaced it with their in-house, Rust-written Pingora software that is said to be serving over one trillion requests per day and delivering better performance while only using about a third of the CPU and memory resources.
MGLRU Looks Like One Of The Best Linux Kernel Innovations Of The Year
Hopefully being mainlined next cycle with Linux 6.1 is the Multi-Gen LRU, or better known as MGLRU, as a superior alternative to the kernel's existing page reclamation code. Assuming it lands for Linux 6.1 as the last complete kernel cycle of 2022, this would make it one of the most exciting innovations to make it into the kernel this year.
Rust-Written Apple DRM Linux Kernel Driver Renders First Cube
The very early stage Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver being written in the Rust programming language to support the Apple M1/M2 graphics processor achieved the milestone of being able to render a cube.
VMware: ESXi VM Performance Tanks Up To 70% Due To Intel Retbleed Mitigation
VMware's performance engineering team today announced a performance regression in Linux 5.19 affecting compute performance up to -70%, networking up to -30%, and storage up to -13%. But the unfortunate thing is the heavy hitting regressions are known and a side effect of the Intel Retbleed mitigation for older processors.
It's Past Time To Stop Using egrep & fgrep Commands, Per GNU grep 3.8
GNU Grep 3.8 was released today for this commonly-used command-line utility for search plain text data. With the GNU Grep 3.8 it's now made more clear that if you are still relying on the egrep and fgrep commands, it's past due for switching to just grep with the appropriate command-line arguments.
Ubuntu 22.10 Aiming To Support The $16+ Sipeed LicheeRV RISC-V Board
In addition to Ubuntu supporting the StarFive VisionFive and Nezha RISC-V boards, Canonical engineers are also working on supporting the Sipeed LicheeRV board too for next month's 22.10 release. The Sipeed LicheeRV is notable in being one of the cheapest RISC-V boards out there: pricing starts at $16.90 USD.
IO_uring Continues To Prove Very Exciting: Promising io_uring_spawn Announced
IO_uring continues to prove itself to be one of the most exciting fundamental innovations to the Linux kernel of the past decade. While started for async storage I/O, it has seen recent work around networking use-cases and also driving other innovations like the new "UBD" driver for a IO_uring-based user-space block driver. It also continues to be relentlessly optimized by Jens Axboe and others for maximum performance potential. The latest innovation around IO_uring that was announced this week at Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin is io_uring_spawn.
"Nest" Is An Interesting New Take On Linux Kernel Scheduling For Better CPU Performance
There has been a number of different efforts in recent time to further enhance the Linux kernel's scheduler to better adapt to modern hardware architectures whether it be for Intel hybrid CPU designs, adapting to new CPU cache configurations, or just better scaling with today's ever-increasing core counts. Another scheduler effort detailed this week is "Nest" that aims to keep tasks on "warm cores" with hopes of lower latency due to being already at higher clock/performance states and ideally operating at an optimal turbo/boost frequency. The Nest developers find that their scheduler "improves performance 10%-2x and can reduce energy usage" with modern hardware.
Few Lines Of Code Increases Intel's Vulkan Driver Draw Throughput By 60%+
You may recall a few days ago how Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz boosted the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver draw throughput by +55%. Well, he now had a go at optimizing the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver and has squeezed out a 60% improvement to the draw throughput. Even more interesting is that it was just a few lines of code.
Microsoft & Canonical Bring systemd To WSL
Microsoft and Canonical jointly announced today that systemd now works within Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2).
LPC 2022: Rust Linux Drivers Capable Of Achieving Performance Comparable To C Code
Held today during the first day of Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin was a Rust mini-conference about the ongoing work on making Rust a suitable systems programming language and integrating support for Rust within the mainline Linux kernel. There were many interesting talks from the status of the Rust integration from the Linux kernel to a Rust-written NVMe driver that can perform as well as the C written driver.
Fedora Linux Disabling Mesa's H.264 / H.265 / VC1 VA-API Support Over Legal Concerns
For Fedora Linux users currently making use of Mesa's VA-API support with the open-source AMD graphics driver or similar and using it to speed-up H.264, H.265, or VC1 decoding, you may soon be out of luck and will have to fall-back to either using CPU-based decoding or be relying on an unofficial/third-party Mesa build.
Richard Stallman Announces GNU C Language Reference Manual
GNU founder Richard Stallman has recently been working on crafting a GNU C Language introduction and reference manual.
Ubuntu Unity Becoming An Official Flavor With 22.10 Release
While it's been years since Canonical dropped Unity as the official desktop environment of Ubuntu, some within the open-source community have still been maintaining it and running an unofficial Ubuntu Unity flavor of the distribution. Now with next month's Ubuntu 22.10 release, Ubuntu Unity will be an official flavor/spin.
Linux 6.0 Merges The AMD Performance Fix For The Old "Dummy Wait" Workaround
This morning I called attention to some pending work around a 20 year old chipset workaround in the Linux kernel had been hurting modern AMD systems by erroneously still applying the change to modern hardware. Fortunately, that patch has now been picked up by Linus Torvalds in time for the Linux 6.0 kernel expected for its stable debut next weekend.
GNOME 43 Released With More Apps Ported To GTK4, Wayland Enhancements
GNOME 43 is out today as the newest version of this popular open-source desktop environment used by Fedora Workstation, Ubuntu, and many other Linux distributions.
Linux's Display Brightness/Backlight Interface Is Finally Being Overhauled
Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been involved with many great Linux desktop/laptop hardware improvements over the years for work that would have otherwise likely gone unaddressed. One of the initiatives he has been focusing on recently that has long been a sore point for Linux laptops has been the user-space backlight/brightness interface. This week at Linux Plumbers Conference was a presentation on this effort that has long been ripe for improvement.
Firefox 105 Now Available - Better Linux Performance Under Memory Pressure
While a number of recent Firefox releases have been rather "boring" on the Linux front with not many notable changes, Firefox 105.0 is out this morning and this time around is a bit more significant.
Phoronix Oktoberfest Special Begins, Premium Now Accept Stripe & Corporate Subscriptions Available
A decade ago there used to be an annual Phoronix pilgrimage (and closest thing in many years to taking a vacation/holiday/day-off for me) to Oktoberfest and a meet-up of Phoronix readers. While Oktoberfest kicked off this weekend in Munich after a two year hiatus due to the pandemic, unfortunately, there is no Phoronix event. But will be in spirit and making use of the occasion by running the annual "Oktoberfest sale" if wishing to show your support for all the Linux hardware reviews, benchmarking, and open-source news carried out each and every day. Additionally, Stripe is now accepted for Phoronix Premium subscriptions as an alternative to PayPal. Phoronix Premium corporate subscriptions are also now being offered.
And the most popular featured Linux hardware reviews for the month:
AMD Ryzen 9 7900X / Ryzen 9 7950X Benchmarks Show Impressive Zen 4 Linux Performance
The review embargo just lifted for the AMD Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" desktop processors ahead of their retail availability this week. As such there are a few Phoronix articles today looking at these Zen 4 processors under Linux and many benchmarks whole several more follow-up articles will be coming over the weeks ahead. For the launch-day review I have the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and 7950X processors. Let's take a look at the significant performance improvements to find with the AMD Ryzen 9 7900 series under Linux.
Intel Core i9 12900K vs. AMD Ryzen 9 5950X On Linux 6.0
Ahead of Intel Raptor Lake and AMD Zen 4, it's a lot of fresh CPU re-testing at Phoronix under Linux with the bleeding-edge software stack of the latest Linux kernel as well as many new/updated benchmarks, the latest motherboard BIOSes, and more. As over the past year there has been a lot of work by Intel open-source engineers around better tuning the Linux kernel for their hybrid architecture, here are some fresh side-by-side benchmarks of the Intel Core i9 12900K against the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X.
AMD Zen 4 AVX-512 Performance Analysis On The Ryzen 9 7950X
While much of AMD's briefings for the Ryzen 7000 desktop series were focused on gaming and other consumer workloads, one of the most exciting aspects for me with the Ryzen 7000 series is AMD now supporting AVX-512. But rather going for a 512-bit FPU data path and the possibility of reduced clock frequencies and power/thermal concerns, they employed a 256-bit "double pumping" strategy. When getting the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X in the lab, exploring the AMD Zen 4 AVX-512 performance was one of the areas I was most excited to evaluate. From the benchmarks about to be shown, AMD's initial AVX-512 implementation is promising and has me all the more excited for finding it on AMD EPYC "Genoa" processors.
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X vs. Ryzen 7 5800X3D On Linux 6.0 Benchmarks
Along with the fresh look at the Intel Core i9 12900K vs. AMD Ryzen 9 5950X on Linux using the latest development kernel and other bleeding-edge software packages, today's article is a fresh look at how the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with 3D V-Cache is performing relative to the Ryzen 7 5800X.
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D - Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Linux Benchmarks
With the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D as the first consumer processor with AMD 3D V-Cache technology that launched earlier this year, the Linux performance has been fantastic for a variety of workloads especially in areas of technical computing and other non-gaming workloads -- similar to the great results we've enjoyed with AMD EPYC Milan-X processors too. One of the areas I hadn't had a chance to look at until recently was how the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance is looking for this Ryzen CPU with its 96MB L3 cache. Here are those quick benchmarks.
GCC vs. LLVM Clang Compilers For The Apple M2 On Linux
With the Apple M2 running Asahi Linux you may be wondering whether it's better to use the GCC compiler as is the default on upstream Arch Linux or whether going for LLVM Clang will yield better performance given all the LLVM/Clang usage by AArch64 vendors, including Apple's own Xcode compiler toolchain making use of it. If you are wondering about GCC vs. Clang for building binaries on the Apple M2, here are some benchmarks.
AMD Ryzen 9 7900X / 7950X Linux Gaming Performance
Today the review embargo expires on the AMD Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors ahead of their retail availability this week. Over the past two weeks I have been testing the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and 7950X processors as the initial review samples (I should be receiving the Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 7 7700X CPUs this week, AMD is staggering their review seeding of the different models). In this article to get things started are my initial Linux gaming benchmarks with the Ryzen 9 7900X/7950X compared to an assortment of other AMD and Intel systems.
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X Linux Performance
Earlier this week I published my AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 9 7950X Linux review as well as an extensive Zen 4 AVX-512 analysis and Linux gaming performance tests. Since then I have received the Ryzen 7 7700X from AMD for Linux testing and out today are those initial Linux benchmarks. The AMD Ryzen 7 7700X is available in-stock at $399 USD from Internet retailers and is an 8-core / 16-thread processor with a maximum boost clock speed of 5.4GHz.
Following Retbleed, The Combined CPU Security Mitigation Impact For AMD Zen 2 / Ryzen 9 3950X
Following the July disclosure of the Retbleed CPU security vulnerability affecting older processors and an AMD change made in August, here is a fresh look at the performance impact of the Retbleed mitigations on Linux, including if opting for the IBPB-based Retbleed mitigation, and the accumulated CPU security mitigation impact for Zen 2 with the flagship Ryzen 9 3950X processor.
Blender 3.3 AMD Radeon HIP vs. NVIDIA CUDA/OptiX Performance
Earlier this month Blender 3.3 released and in addition to introducing an Intel oneAPI back-end, it's notable for bringing improvements to the AMD HIP back-end for Radeon GPUs. Significant on the AMD side is extending GPU support back to GFX9/Vega. Thus it's a good time for a fresh round of benchmarking for showing how the AMD Radeon HIP performance against that of NVIDIA's existing CUDA and OptiX back-ends.
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