Michael Larabel

Illinois

Founder at Phoronix

Founder of @Phoronix. Lead developer of Phoronix Test Suite, @OpenBenchmark, @Anzwix, Reside@HOME, @Phoromatic, PHXCMS.

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Articles

RADV Vulkan Driver Lands Some "Random Bits & Pieces" For CDNA Accelerators

4 days ago | phoronix.com | Michael Larabel

The RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa supports GFX9/Vega graphics cards but not the later CDNA-based Instinct accelerators. However, some patches merged today for Mesa 25.2-devel did introduce some "random bits and pieces" for CDNA but not a full implementation. RADV co-creator Bas Nieuwenhuizen today landed several patches for the RDNA Vulkan API driver for CDNA.
IBM Already Working On What Is Likely Power12 Support For The GCC Compiler

4 days ago | phoronix.com | Michael Larabel

While we await the formal IBM Power11 launch in 2025, IBM engineers are already working on compiler support for "future" post-Power11 processors with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). Last week IBM engineers began with a patch series working on "-mcpu=future support for PowerPC". The GCC compiler already has Power11 support and thus this "future" target is for a post-Power11 processor family, likely to be Power12.
Intel Xeon 6300 vs. AMD EPYC 4005 SMT/HT Performance Review

4 days ago | phoronix.com | Michael Larabel

While the latest Intel Core Ultra processors have done away with Hyper Threading (HT), Intel Xeon CPUs continue supporting HT/SMT, including with their latest Xeon 6300 series budget server processors. As the new AMD EPYC 4005 "Grado" processors also support Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) and can be found at the same core/thread count count as the flagship Xeon 6369P processor, it makes for an interesting look at comparing the SMT/HT performance impact and power efficiency.
Firefox 140 Released With "Unload Tab", CSS Custom Highlighting API

4 days ago | phoronix.com | Michael Larabel

Mozilla Firefox 140 release binaries are available today as what's going to be the web browser project's next Extended Support Release (ESR) version. Firefox 140 downloads are now available and with this version comes the "Unload Tab" option when right-clicking on a browser tab. Now you can easily unload desired tabs to help reduce Firefox memory use and conserve CPU resources by unloading tabs that don't need to be loaded at that moment.
GIMP 3.1.2 Released As First Step Toward GIMP 3.2

4 days ago | phoronix.com | Michael Larabel

GIMP 3.1.2 was just released as the first development version on the road toward GIMP 3.2 stable. GIMP 3.2 is to be the next feature release following the long-in-development GIMP 3.0 release that happened back in March after being a decade in development in porting to GTK3 and many other improvements to this open-source image editing program that is one of the few viable alternatives to Adobe Photoshop.
Fair DRM Scheduler Looking Good For Better Fairness & Scheduling Of GPU Clients

4 days ago | phoronix.com | Michael Larabel

Being worked on for a while has been a "Fair" DRM scheduler inspired by Linux's CFS scheduler and aiming for better performance and scheduling behavior between multiple GPU interactive clients sharing GPU resources. The DRM scheduler is currently used by multiple Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers for what originally began as just the AMDGPU scheduler.
UEFI SBAT Support Coming Together Ahead Of Linux 6.17

4 days ago | phoronix.com | Michael Larabel

Support for UEFI Secure Boot Advanced Targeting "SBAT" looks like it could be buttoned up in the mainline kernel for the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle. UEFI SBAT is for enabling a new mechanism for dealing with UEFI SecureBoot revocations of UEFI binaries. UEFI SBAT aims to better handle vulnerabilities and other issues as part of the boot chain by having each component declare an SBAT generation. When a vulnerability or other fundamental issue is fixed, that generation version can be bumped.
RADV Driver Lands VK_EXT_shader_float8 Support

5 days ago | phoronix.com | Michael Larabel

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is now the first Mesa in-tree driver supporting 8-bit floating point use within shaders via the new VK_EXT_shader_float8 extension. VK_EXT_shader_float8 was introduced earlier this month with the Vulkan 1.4.317 spec update. VK_EXT_shader_float8 enables support for 8-bit floating point operations within shaders in order to support more AI / machine learning workloads with the Vulkan API.
AMD GFX1250 Support Starts Being Built Up Within LLVM

5 days ago | phoronix.com | Michael Larabel

Over the past three days the new AMD "GFX1250" GPU target has started being built out within the upstream LLVM compiler codebase for the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end. What AMD GFX1250 will correlate to remains to be seen. Based on prior AMD GFX1250 reference leaks there was some speculation that it could be for their upcoming UDNA architecture but that more likely will be for GFX13.
IceWM 3.8 Brings New Optimizations & Changes

5 days ago | phoronix.com | Michael Larabel

For those preferring an X11-based desktop experience on Linux, IceWM 3.8 released on Sunday as the newest version of this lightweight X11 window manager focused on speed and simplicity. IceWM 3.8 now presents the theme minimize button as a preview icon within the Themes menu. IceWM 3.8 also brings various performance optimizations and other changes, including less LLVM Clang compiler warnings on OpenBSD: Features - Show the theme minimize button as a preview icon in the Themes menu.