Normal view

Yesterday — 28 October 2025Main stream

Initial Intel Crescent Island "CRI" Support Being Submitted For Linux 6.19

28 October 2025 at 15:57
Earlier this month Intel announced Crescent Island as a Xe3P graphics card with 160GB of vRAM optimized for AI inferencing at the enterprise scale. Crescent Island isn't expected to begin sampling until H2'2026, but already for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel initial Crescent Island support is being submitted for the Xe kernel graphics driver...

Fedora Linux 43 Now Available For Download

28 October 2025 at 14:43
It's Fedora 43 release day! This latest installment of Fedora Linux is now available for download with Fedora Workstation 43 using the GNOME 49 desktop, the modern Linux 6.17 kernel powering this distribution release, and many exciting improvements and other leading-edge software updates powering this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution...

OpenRazer 3.11 Released With Linux Driver Support For Newer Razer Devices

28 October 2025 at 04:21
OpenRazer 3.11 is out as the newest version of these out-of-tree but open-source and community-maintained drivers for Razer devices on Linux. Plus OpenRazer also provides a user-space daemon for controlling Razer RGB lighting and other features. Paired with the likes of the Polychromatic app, OpenRazer makes for a pleasant Razer device experience for gamers and enthusiasts under Linux...

FreeBSD Celebrates The Milestone Of Reproducible Builds & No Root Needed

27 October 2025 at 22:50
A big focus for the FreeBSD 15.0 development was on supporting reproducible builds as has been a growing trend in the open-source ecosystem in recent years. One month out from the official FreeBSD 15.0 release, the FreeBSD project is today celebrating having crossed the milestone of being able to be built reproducibly and as well now building FreeBSD without requiring root privileges...
Before yesterdayMain stream

AMD EPYC 9965 "Turin" 2P Performance Seeing Some Gains On Linux 6.18

27 October 2025 at 19:00
Beyond packing many exciting new features and changes, Linux 6.18 is expected to become this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version. Assuming the Linux 6.18 LTS designation, this next kernel version will see lots of use in enterprise environments and thus recently carried out some AMD EPYC 9965 2P "Turin" benchmarks between Linux 6.17 stable and the Linux 6.18 development kernel state...

AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 Linux Performance For Single & Dual GPU Benchmarks

27 October 2025 at 17:00
Today the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 is officially shipping as the company's new RDNA4-based offering designed for AI workloads and priced at $1299+ USD. The AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 offers 32GB of GDDR6 video memory and features 128 AI accelerators and rated for 96 TFLOPs peak half-precision compute, up to 1531 TOPS INT4 sparse, and has a 300 Watt TDP. Here are the initial benchmarks of the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 under Linux with ROCm 7.0 and testing both in single and dual R9700 graphics card configurations.

Splash DRM Client Proposed For Linux But Its Future Is Uncertain

27 October 2025 at 14:28
Sent out on Sunday to the Linux kernel mailing list was a proposal for a new Direct rendering Manager (DRM) client for providing "splash screen" type functionality such as for embedded systems and more. But with Plymouth in user-space already being the dominant solution here and upstream developers tending to prefer such functionality in user-space instead, its future remains uncertain with some developers already questioning the value of this proposed solution...

Intel Sends Out Initial Graphics Driver Patches For Multi-Device SVM

26 October 2025 at 14:23
As part of their Project Battlematrix effort, Intel has been working on enhancing their Linux graphics driver support for multi-device usage scenarios with wanting to support up to eight Intel Arc Pro graphics cards per system to help with AI LLMs and other larger use-cases. The latest code posted from Intel engineers is their initial implementation of multi-device Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support...

OpenGL Sees New Extensions Added To The Registry

25 October 2025 at 00:11
It's been rare in recent years seeing any new OpenGL extensions given the wild success these days of the Vulkan API with its vast hardware adoption and increasing software support around that modern graphics and compute API. Yet this October has been unusual with now seeing multiple new OpenGL extensions merged to the OpenGL registry...

The Latest Sheaves Work To Hopefully Improve Linux Performance

24 October 2025 at 21:49
Merged for Linux 6.18 was a new feature called Sheaves as an opt-in, per-CPU array-based caching layer. Plus there is a per-NUMA-node cache of Sheaves called a "Barn". In continuing to build out the Linux kernel usage of Sheaves, a set of initial patches were posted this week to replace the CPU slabs with Sheaves within the slub allocator code...

AMD EPYC Turin vs. Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids vs. Graviton4 Benchmarks With AWS M8 Instances

24 October 2025 at 19:00
With Amazon recently launching their M8a AWS instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin", for their M8 class instance types there now are all the latest-generation CPU options with AMD EPYC Turin (M8a), Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids (M8i), and their in-house Graviton4 processors (M8g). After recently looking at the M7a vs. M8a performance with Amazon EC2, many Phoronix readers expressed interest in seeing an M8a vs. M8i vs. M8g performance showdown so here are those benchmarks.

New Code Allows VCE 1.0 Video Acceleration To Work On AMDGPU Driver For GCN 1.0 GPUs

24 October 2025 at 14:22
Valve contractor Timur Kristóf for their Linux graphics driver team has been working on improving Linux driver support for old AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 generation GPUs. This has been about improving the AMDGPU driver to fill remaining gaps in GCN 1.0/1.1 support with those graphics cards by default relying on the older "Radeon" DRM kernel graphics driver compared to the AMDGPU driver used by default with GCN 1.2 and later. Another feature gap for AMDGPU is now being addressed with Video Coding Engine 1.0 support...

Linux's Kconfig Is No Longer Orphaned

24 October 2025 at 13:55
Back in August, open-source developer Masahiro Yamada stepped down from maintaining the Kconfig and Kbuild areas of the Linux kernel. While Kbuild maintainership was quickly passed on, no one immediately stepped up to maintain Kconfig as the infrastructure code for configuring the Linux kernel builds. That led to Kconfig officially being orphaned code within the kernel but now that situation has been addressed...

Intel Begins Adding Nova Lake Xe3P To Linux OpenGL/Vulkan Drivers - Some Will Lack Ray-Tracing

24 October 2025 at 04:36
Intel recently began sending out Xe3P kernel graphics driver patches for Nova Lake that will begin landing in the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle. Now on the user-space side, merged today for Mesa 26.0 were the first enablement patches for Xe3P Nova Lake for their open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux...

Linux's Proposed Cache Aware Scheduling Benchmarks Show Big Potential On AMD EPYC Turin

23 October 2025 at 18:50
The past number of months has seen a lot of work by Intel Linux kernel engineers on cache-aware scheduling / load balancing for helping modern CPUs that have multiple caches. With cache aware scheduling, tasks that will likely share resources could be aggregated into the same cache domain to enjoy better cache locality. With the cache aware scheduling patches recently updated and now working past the "request for comments" stage, I was eager to try out these new patches. Especially with a 44% time reduction reported for one of the benchmarks, I was eager to run some tests and the first of those results are being shared today.

Linux Looks To Orphan Its ISDN Subsystem

23 October 2025 at 14:09
Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) usage is long obsolete even where it had enjoyed some successes in the likes of Germany and Norway. With no activity in years to the ISDN and mISDN subsystem code for the Linux kernel, a patch was sent out today for orphaning the code...

Qualcomm Plumbing "SSR" Support To Deal With Crashes On AI Accelerators

23 October 2025 at 13:55
Crashes on NPUs and AI accelerators are unfortunately a thing and yet another obstacle to worry about it with modern computing. Qualcomm developers have sent out patches for Sub-System Restart "SSR" functionality for their Qualcomm AI Accelerator (QAIC) driver for Linux to handle restarts when workload crashes occur on their AI accelerator hardware...

Oracle OCI Compute E6 Benchmarks For Leading AMD EPYC Turin Performance In The Cloud

23 October 2025 at 04:40
Oracle recently launched their E6 compute shape for Oracle Cloud and powered by AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure also launched their Compute Cloud@Customer X11 and Private Cloud Appliance X11 platforms that are all powered by the E6 compute shape with 5th Gen AMD EPYC. For those curious about the performance and value of the Oracle Cloud E6 shape compared to prior-gen E5 as well as alternatives from Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, these benchmarks are geared for you.
❌
❌