Phoronix
Wine 8.16 Restarts Work On Implementing Microsoft's Deprecated DirectMusic API

Wine 8.16 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

Phoronix
Ubuntu 23.10's Firefox Snap Enabling Wayland By Default

While the Ubuntu desktop has been using the GNOME Wayland session by default, Ubuntu's default Firefox browser build within its Snap confinements has continued relying upon XWayland. But the Firefox Snap beginning with Ubuntu 23.10 is now enabling the native Wayland support by default...

Phoronix
AMD Releases ROCm 5.7 GPU Compute Stack

ROCm 5.7 was released on Friday with the introduction of a new "hipTensor" library, the ROCgdb debugger being extended with Fortran and OMPD support, and new optimizations to the rocRAND and MIVisionX libraries. AMD has also announced end-of-support for the AMD Instinct MI50 accelerator while not yet formally announcing any new RDNA3 GPU support...

Phoronix
KDE Plasma 6.0 Lands More Performance Optimizations, Better Wayland Gaming Experience

KDE developers continue adding new functionality and performance optimizations for the Plasma 6.0 desktop that is aiming for its release in early February...

Phoronix
Linux 6.5 Now Powering Ubuntu 23.10

Just as anticipated, the Linux 6.5 kernel has landed in the Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic archive as the default kernel powering this next Ubuntu distribution release due out in October...

Phoronix
AMD Linux Gaming Performance Largely Unchanged With Linux 6.6 Git

With the AMD performance uplift on the Linux 6.6 kernel due to the EEVDF scheduler code, the workqueue enhancements for chiplet-based processor designs, and other improvements, many Phoronix readers have speculated over AMD Linux gaming performance improvements with this in-development kernel...

Phoronix
LWJGL 3.3.3 Released With Updated Bindings, GraalVM Native Image Support

Version 3.3.3 of the Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) is now available for this Java library that makes it easy to utilize native APIs from OpenGL and Vulkan to OpenCL compute and other OS APIs within Java's confines. LWJGL is used for Java games and can also be used with other Java software looking for rich API support particularly around GPU integration...

Phoronix
Linux's SLUB Allocator Preparing To Better Fend Off Cross-Cache Attacks

Following SLOB's removal and SLAB being deprecated and set for removal, the Linux kernel is all-in on the SLUB allocator. A new patch series posted on Friday is aiming to help prevent the possibility of cross-cache attacks with the SLUB memory allocator in the kernel...

Phoronix
Wine-Staging 8.16 Fixes A 16 Year Old Bug For Games Crashing

Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.16 is now Wine-Staging 8.16 for this experimental blend of Wine that offers up nearly 500 additional testing/in-development patches...

Phoronix
NBCON Console Patches Updated For Eventually Unblocking Real-Time Linux Kernel

The threaded / atomic console support for the Linux kernel is the last main blocker before the real-time "RT" patches can finally be mainlined...

Phoronix
Go Ad-Free & Single Page Articles With The Phoronix 2023 Oktoberfest Sale

While there is (sadly) once again no Phoronix pilgrimage/meet-up at Oktoberfest this year, there is the annual Phoronix Premium sale special for those wishing to support the site at a discounted rate to enjoy ad-free viewing, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode, and other benefits...

Phoronix
Linux 6.7 To Add POWER-Z Driver For Exposing USB Power Measurements

For those curious about the power consumption of USB-C devices, there are some nifty devices out there that have a LED display and can report the voltage, Amps, Wattage, and USB power delivery protocol version of connected devices. It's a neat display but with a new POWER-Z driver coming to the Linux kernel it's possible to propagate that information from the system itself with this new driver...

Phoronix
Linux 6.6-rc2 Released - 32 Years Since Linux 0.01 Released

Linus Torvalds released Linux 6.6-rc2 today and it also happens to be 32 years to the day since he introduced the Linux 0.01 kernel version...

Phoronix
New Scheduler Optimization Can Help Out PostgreSQL & More On Sapphire Rapids

Stemming from Intel engineers finding significant overhead in some Linux scheduler functions when running PostgreSQL within a Docker instance, a new scheduler patch is on the way for Linux 6.7 that will help out at least Ice Lake and Sapphire Rapids with some migration-heavy workloads. With the change being in the common scheduler code, it's also likely to help out other hardware platforms too...

Phoronix
Linux 6.7 Set To Drop Support For Itanium IA-64

Since 2021 the Itanium IA-64 code was orphaned in the Linux kernel and over the course of this year there's been talk of retiring the Itanium code from the kernel, a.k.a. strip it out. It looks like 2023 will end with the Itanium IA-64 code indeed being removed from the Linux kernel...

Phoronix
KDE On Wayland: "The Biggest Thing Needed Now Is Adoption By 3rd Party Apps"

Given the recent discussions stemming from Fedora 40 planning to ship KDE Plasma 6 and drop the KDE Plasma X11 session to focus solely on Wayland for the next-gen KDE desktop, prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has written a lengthy blog post to outline the current state and his thoughts on KDE Wayland support...

Phoronix
OpenVINO 2023.1 Released - More GenAI, Expanded LLM Support & Meteor Lake VPU

Intel's OpenVINO 2023.1 was just published to GitHub as the newest version of this open-source toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI workloads across their CPUs, GPUs, and now also having official support for the new VPU being found with Meteor Lake SoCs...

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AMD Launches The EPYC 8004 "Siena" 4th Gen EPYC Processors

Last November AMD introduced the first of the 4th Gen EPYC series with the EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors and that was then complemented earlier this year by the July launch of the Genoa-X processors for sporting AMD 3D V-Cache to help technical computing workloads and as well launching Bergamo for the Zen 4C based processor designs that allow up to 128 cores / 256 threads per socket. While AMD has a very robust portfolio for the high-end server space with 4th Gen EPYC, today AMD is introducing the EPYC 8004 "Siena" processors for "intelligent edge" servers. Siena is a step below Genoa but still very capable offering and coming in at a lower price point while being geared more for maximizing power efficiency and opening up EPYC to more deployments outside of the data center.

Phoronix
SteamOS 3.5 Delivering Some Decent Performance Gains For The Steam Deck

Released late on Friday was the much anticipated SteamOS 3.5 preview for the Steam Deck with ongoing work around HDR and enhancing color management, VRR for external USB-C displays, various platform issues resolved, auto-mounting external storage, and more. With SteamOS 3.5 it also means some lower-level OS upgrades too like moving to the Linux 6.1 LTS kernel. For those wondering about the performance impact of going from SteamOS 3.4 stable to the SteamOS 3.5 preview release, here are some early benchmarks on the Steam Deck.

Phoronix
Linux Patches To Begin Removing ReiserFS From Default Kernel Builds

Since March of 2022 the ReiserFS file-system has been deprecated and with Linux 6.6 ReiserFS is marked outright as "obsolete" with plans to remove the file-system from the mainline kernel code-base in 2025. In stepping toward that eventual milestone, a new kernel patch series begins removing ReiserFS from the default kernel configurations...