During the month of August on Phoronix there were 260 original news stories and Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles written by your’s truly. Here is a look back at what excited Linux / open-source readers the most this month.
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The most popular news on Phoronix for August included Linux 5.19 drawing to completion, the features landing for Linux 6.0, new CPU security vulnerabilities, graphics driver improvements, and more:
NVIDIA Publishes 73k Lines Worth Of 3D Header Files For Fermi Through Ampere GPUs
In addition to NVIDIA being busy working on transitioning to an open-source GPU kernel driver, yesterday they made a rare public open-source documentation contribution… NVIDIA quietly published 73k lines worth of header files to document the 3D classes for their Fermi through current-generation Ampere GPUs!
Linux 6.1 Will Make It A Bit Easier To Help Spot Faulty CPUs
While mostly of benefit to server administrators with large fleets of hardware, Linux 6.1 aims to make it easier to help spot problematic CPUs/cores by reporting the likely socket and core when a segmentation fault occurs, which can help in spotting any trends if routinely finding the same CPU/core is causing problems.
Microsoft + Canonical Announce Native .NET 6 For Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
The latest partnership between Microsoft and Canonical is an announcement today of native .NET availability for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS hosts as well as containers.
Linux 6.0-rc1 Released With Exciting Performance Optimizations, New Hardware Support
After the two week long merge window, Linus Torvalds this afternoon released the first release candidate of Linux 6.0. Over the next roughly two months the Linux 6.0 kernel will stabilize but already from my early testing on various systems it is in nice shape and the features and performance are looking great.
Debian Begins A General Resolution To Decide What To Do With Non-Free Firmware
Debian has begun a general resolution process to solicit a vote by its stakeholders what to do with non-free firmware.
Asahi Linux May Pursue Writing Apple Silicon GPU Driver In Rust
When it comes to the Apple M1 and M2 support on Linux, one of the biggest obstacles to suitable daily use for end-users is the current lack of GPU acceleration. Reverse engineering has been happening for the Apple Silicon graphics processor, early experiments being carried out under macOS and Asahi’s m1n1 environment, and the next step will be to start writing a Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver. To some surprise, the feasibility of writing this DRM kernel GPU driver in the Rust programming language is being explored.
Greg KH Recommends Avoiding Alder Lake Laptops – Intel Webcam Linux Driver Long Ways Out
Greg Kroah-Hartman as the Linux kernel’s stable maintainer and effectively Linus Torvalds’ second-in-command has suggested avoiding Intel Alder Lake laptops. While much of the Alder Lake laptop support for Linux is in good shape, the exception is around web cameras. These newer laptops with Intel’s latest web-camera tech are not currently supported by the mainline kernel and require proprietary software for use. Some platforms like Ubuntu and ChromeOS are picking up these blobs for now while a proper open-source, upstream solution is likely months — or likely about one year — away.
GIMP 2.99.12 Released – “A Huge Milestone Towards GIMP 3.0”
GIMP 2.99.12 is out as a weekend surprise as the newest development release towards the GIMP 3.0 image manipulation program’s release.
Rust Code For The Linux Kernel Updated With More Features Implemented
Miguel Ojeda has posted the newest patch series implementing the Rust programming language infrastructure and initial sample code for the Linux kernel.
Glibc 2.36 Dropping DT_HASH Has Been Breaking Easy Anti Cheat Games With Steam Play
Those on rolling-release Linux distributions that are quick to adapt to new toolchain updates are finding Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) enabled games breaking when running on the recently released Glibc 2.36. The breakage stems from the DT_HASH section being dropped in GNU C Library but EAC being among the few software still expecting that section rather than DT_GNU_HASH.
Webmin 2.0 Released For Open-Source Web-Based Server Management/Administration
Webmin as a popular, open-source web-based server administration/management software package that is a popular alternative to the likes of cPanel and Plesk is out with its big “v2.0” release.
DreamWorks Animation To Open-Source MoonRay Renderer
DreamWorks Animation announced today that they intend to release their MoonRay production renderer as open-source softwate later in 2022. DreamWorks’ MoonRay renderer has been used for films such as How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Bad Guys, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, and other animated films.
Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS Released
Following a one week delay due to a last minute blocker bug being discovered, Canonical today has shipped Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS as the first point release to this current long-term support series.
Mesa Zink Improvements For OpenGL-On-Vulkan Reportedly Make It Faster Than Radeon OpenGL
The latest Mesa 22.3-devel code for Zink’s OpenGL on Vulkan implementation has hit an important milestone with the latest code refactoring: it looks like this OpenGL implementation atop the Vulkan API with the RADV driver is beginning to outpace AMD’s RadeonSI Gallium3D driver providing native OpenGL support for Radeon GPUs.
Proton 7.0-4 Released For Steam Play With Many Game Fixes, More Playable Titles
Valve has just released Proton 7.0-4 as their newest downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for enjoying many Windows games on Linux with great success for the Linux desktop, the Steam Deck, and more.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Is Eliminating GTK 2 Support
While we are about three years out from seeing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, it was announced today that the GTK2 toolkit will not be supported in that next major RHEL version.
NetworkManager 1.40 Released With Multi-Path TCP Support, Other Improvements
NetworkManager 1.40 has been released as this widely-used software for configuring wired and wireless network interfaces under Linux.
GNOME Console Could Be Ubuntu 22.10’s GNOME Terminal Replacement
Back in May was a proposal by Canonical desktop software engineer Jeremy Bicha to use the new GNOME Console as the default terminal application in Ubuntu 22.10, replacing the GNOME Terminal. That default change hasn’t happened yet but some necessary improvements have now been made to Ubuntu Kinetic’s gnome-console package ahead of that possible shift.
AMD Details “SQUIP” Side Channel Vulnerability For Zen’s Execution Unit Scheduler
In addition to Intel’s busy Patch Tuesday, AMD today made public CVE-2021-46778 that university researchers have dubbed the “SQUIP” attack as a side channel vulnerability affecting the execution unit scheduler across Zen 1/2/3 processors.
Cemu Emulator For The Wii U Now Open-Source, Building On Linux
Cemu is a popular emulator for the Nintendo Wii U that can successfully run many games as well as homebrew titles. Cemu started off with just Windows support but then at the beginning of the year laid out plans to go open-source and provide Linux support. They’ve pulled that off and the code is now out there in a public GitHub repository.
The most popular featured articles/reviews included initial benchmarks for Apple M2 on Linux, ongoing AMD Rembrandt and Alder Lake P benchmarking, initial Arc Graphics A380 Linux benchmarks, and more:
Apple M2 vs. AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U Performance In Nearly 200 Benchmarks
Last week I published initial Apple M2 vs. AMD Rembrandt vs. Intel Alder Lake Linux benchmarks using Asahi Linux and Arch Linux across the board. For ending out this week, here is a follow-up article looking more closely at the Apple M2 in the MacBook Air against the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U “Rembrandt” within the Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen3. This time around are also results from performance tweaks to each laptop for the CPUFreq governor and platform profile.
Apple M2 vs. AMD Rembrandt vs. Intel Alder Lake Linux Benchmarks
Given the significant interest from Phoronix readers about how well Apple M2 performs on Linux, especially after it was noted Linus Torvalds using an Apple MacBook Air M2, here are the first of many benchmark articles to come looking at how well Apple’s M2 performs under Linux against Intel/AMD x86_64 competition. The new Apple MacBook Air with M2 was benchmarked for this article against the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U “Rembrandt” Zen 3+, Intel Core i7 1280P “Alder Lake P”, an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX “Cezanne H”, and also for reference an Apple Mac Mini M1 model. All of these laptops were tested under Arch Linux (x86_64) and the Arch-based Asahi Linux (M1/M2).
Intel Arc Graphics A380: Compelling For Open-Source Enthusiasts & Developers At ~$139
Last week I outlined getting Intel Arc Graphics running on a open-source Linux graphics driver when using Linux 6.0 and later (along with a currently-experimental module option override) and then Mesa 22.2+. Now that I’ve had more days with the Intel Arc Graphics A380 as the company’s budget discrete GPU, here are more of my thoughts on this graphics card that has begun retailing in the US for $139.
Intel Core i7 1280P Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu vs. Clear Linux Performance
After recently looking at the AMD Rembrandt Windows 11 vs. Linux performance using the new Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U laptop SoC, you may be wondering about the latest Windows vs. Linux performance over on the Intel side with their latest “Alder Lake P” wares. If so, today’s benchmarks are for you with putting the Core i7 1280P on Windows 11 up against Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Intel’s own Clear Linux platform.
Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Benchmarks Are Very Competitive To Radeon OpenGL Driver
With this weekend having seen more Zink refactoring code land and Zink being faster than RadeonSI at least for some operations, it was time to fire up some fresh benchmarks of this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. From the newest Mesa code this weekend after the latest Zink patches were merged, here is a look at how the Zink performance is compared to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver’s native OpenGL support. All of the testing was done using an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card.
Mesa 22.2 Gaming Performance With Radeon RX 6700/6800 XT Graphics Cards On Linux
With Mesa 22.2 bringing many new features, you may be curious about how the performance of this next Mesa3D release is looking. For your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of Mesa 22.2 back from the day it was branched against that of the stock Mesa 22.0 on Ubuntu 22.04 if you have been wondering whether it’s worthwhile upgrading… Benchmarks for this article from the current-generation Radeon RX 6700 XT and RX 6800 XT graphics cards.
AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX Performance On Linux
Earlier this year AMD announced the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000 WX series but initially was limited to Lenovo workstations. Earlier this summer it was then announced the Threadripper PRO 5000 WX series would be heading to more system integrators and then the DIY market. Well, finally, these Zen 3 Threadripper chips are heading out to the DYI market and today the review embargo lifts. AMD recently sent over a Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX for my Linux testing at Phoronix and here is my initial review and performance benchmarks for this Zen 3 24-core / 48-thread HEDT chip.
AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U: ACPI Platform Profile Low-Power vs. Balanced vs. Performance
As with many new Intel/AMD laptops these days, the recently launched Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen3 with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U “Rembrandt” SoC boasts ACPI Platform Profile support that is exposed under Linux for switching between low-power, balanced (default), and performance modes. For those curious about this ACPI Platform Profile impact, here are some benchmarks from this 6850U laptop under Ubuntu Linux and its impact on power and thermal efficiency too.
Intel Xeon Platinum 8380: 2021 vs. 2022 Performance For Ubuntu, Clear Linux, CentOS Stream
With Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids expected to make more of a splash coming up, it’s a good time to revisit the Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 “Ice Lake” performance to see how the Linux software performance has evolved since last year’s launch. In this article are benchmarks of the dual Xeon Platinum 8380 server from May 2021 with CentOS Stream, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu compared to fresh installs now of those latest Linux distribution releases.
Linux 6.0 Supporting New Intel/AMD Hardware, Performance Improvements & Much More
Yesterday marked the release of Linux 6.0-rc1 and as such the merge window is now over and no more feature work is set to land in this kernel version. Here is my write-up of all the interesting new features and changes/improvements coming for Linux 6.0.
September will be very interesting too with the just-announced AMD Ryzen 7000 series, more Intel Arc Graphics benchmarks on Linux, and other events ahead.
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