Michael Larabel

It was just last week that Linux optimizations were leading to possible 6M IOPS per core and then at the start of this week new patches pushed Linux past 7M IOPS per-core with an ideal hardware configuration as well. In ending out the week, 8M IOPS has been reached!

Sent in this morning were an urgent set of x86 updates for the Linux 5.15-rc5 kernel due out later today.

Linux kernel developers have been working tirelessly to squeeze more performance out of IO_uring and the block / I/O code in general. IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe who also serves as the Linux block subsystem's maintainer (among other roles and major contributions over the years) has used his system as a baseline for evaluating such kernel improvements. He's now moved to using AMD Zen 3 while sticking to Intel Optane storage and is seeing a mighty speed boost out of AMD's latest processors.

There has been talk of Intel moving to offer more license-able/opt-in features for hardware capabilities found within a given processor as an upgrade. We are now seeing the Linux signs of that support coming with a driver for "Intel Software Defined Silicon" to allow for the secure activation of such features baked into the processor's silicon but only available as an up-charge option.

Given last week's release of Chrome 94, here are some fresh browser benchmarks looking at Firefox 92 stable against Chrome 94 running on Ubuntu Linux.

For several years now Facebook engineers have been working on BOLT as a way to speed-up Linux/ELF binaries. This "Binary Optimization and Layout Tool" is able to re-arrange executables once profiled to generate even faster performance than what can be achieved by a compiler's LTO and PGO optimizations. One of the latest BOLT efforts has been on optimizing the Linux kernel image.

At last week's Linux Foundation Open-Source Summit / Embedded Linux Conference there was a Sony presentation about their history with open-source/Linux and how since last year they have been "accelerating" their open-source contributions.

From our Ampere Altra Max M128-30 Linux performance preview earlier this week, one of the questions a number of readers were wondering about and a question I also still had open was on the Altra Max pricing... I've now received the current price list and actually comes in much lower than expected for a 128-core CPU in 2021.

The PinePhone Pro is being announced this morning as the organization's new smartphone building upon the successes and experience of the original PinePhone Linux smartphone.

Being sent in as a fix for the Linux 5.15 kernel this morning and to be back-ported to existing stable series is a behavior change that the Linux kernel will no longer use AMD Secure Memory Encryption (SME) by default on supported hardware but rather making it now opt-in due to shortcomings of some platforms.

NVIDIA 495.29.05 is out today as the first public Linux driver in the 495 series.

I've just been informed by AMD that they have now made their code public to a new project called GPUFORT. This new GPUFORT project will live under the Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) umbrella and is their latest endeavor in helping developers with large CUDA code-bases transition away from NVIDIA's closed ecosystem.

IBM engineer Pratik Sampat published an early prototype of a CPU namespace interface for the Linux kernel. This CPU namespace was devised to address coherency issues with current means of viewing available CPU resources as well as addressing possible security issues stemming from understanding resource access/positioning on the system.

Ubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri" is now officially available as the latest six-month update to Ubuntu Linux and also serving as the last release prior to the next long-term support cycle, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

Barring any last minute reservations it appears the initial "FUTEX2" work that is of much interest to Linux gamers enjoying Steam Play / Proton will find that kernel functionality in Linux 5.16.

Intel has contributed AVX-512 optimizations to upstream Numpy. For those using Numpy as this leading Python library for numerical computing, newer Intel CPUs with AVX-512 capabilities can enjoy major speed-ups in the range of 14~32x faster.

Not only is Ubuntu 21.10 releasing today but over on the BSD side of the table is the debut this morning of OpenBSD 7.0.

The Asahi Linux project that has been working nearly the past year on bringing up Apple M1 support under Linux has issued their September 2021 porting and reverse engineering report.

An effort going on for a while at Canonical has been to develop a new desktop installer for Ubuntu. With the recent Ubuntu 21.10 release they are still using their classic Ubiquity installer by default but have published a new preview build of Ubuntu 21.10 with their new desktop installer option. Here is a look at Ubuntu's forthcoming new installer.

SiFive just shared word that at today's Linley Conference they teased their Performance P550 successor that will "set a new standard for the highest efficiency RISC-V processor available."

Python 3.10 is out as the latest major update for this widely-used programming language's official implementation.

GCC 12 isn't seeing its stable release until around March~April as usual, but with feature development slowly wrapping up as approaching the next stage of development next month to focus on fixes, recently I wrapped up some preliminary benchmarks for how GCC 12.0 is currently performing against GCC 11.2 on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (Zen 3) system.

With the initial Steam Deck release quickly approaching, Valve continues to be quite busy on a variety of improvements to enhance their Steam Linux builds.

Flatpak 1.12 was just released along with issuing Flatpak 1.10.4 to address a security vulnerability in the portal support.

While earlier this year AMD shifted their Radeon Software driver focus to only supporting Polaris / GCN 1.4 and newer, when it comes to the open-source driver support on Linux there still is occasional activity going back to the ATI Radeon R300 days from nearly two decades ago.