Benchmarks and Graphics Leftovers: x86, Zink, and Navi

• Intel Core i7 1165G7 Tiger Lake vs. AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U Linux Performance

  For the Intel Tiger Lake Linux benchmarking thus far with the Core i7 1165G7 on the Dell XPS 13 9310 it's primarily been compared against the Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U on the AMD side since those are the only Renoir units within my possession. But a Phoronix reader recently provided me with remote access to his Lenovo ThinkPad X13 with Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U (8 cores / 16 threads) for seeing how the Tiger Lake performance compares against that higher-end SKU. Phoronix reader Tomas kindly provided SSH access to his ThinkPad X13 with Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U and 16GB of RAM. The Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U is quite close to the Ryzen 7 4800U with 8 cores / 16 threads but graphics capabilities in line with the 4700U. He's been quite happy with the ThinkPad X13 as a replacement to the Dell XPS 13 for business usage and has been running it with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on the Linux 5.8 kernel.

• Mike Blumenkrantz: Catching Up

  A rare Saturday post because I spent so much time this week intending to blog and then somehow not getting around to it. Let’s get to the status updates, and then I’m going to dive into the more interesting of the things I worked on over the past few days. Zink has just hit another big milestone that I’ve just invented: as of now, my branch is passing 97% of piglit tests up through GL 4.6 and ES 3.2, and it’s a huge improvement from earlier in the week when I was only at around 92%. That’s just over 1000 failure cases remaining out of ~41,000 tests. For perspective, a table.

• AMD 'Big Navi' 3DMark Firestrike results shared by HW testing firm

  The Linux specialists over at Phoronix have noticed that the AMD Linux driver has been tweaked to add support for a new graphics card dubbed the "navi10 blockchain SKU". It comments that the only visible difference in support for this card vs existing Navi 1X support, from the driver perspective, is that the patches disable the Display Core Next (DCN) and Video Core Next (VCN) support - basically creating a 'headless' Navi 1X graphics card. Cryprocurrency is showing signs of a resurgence in popularity and values, and some are worried that the latest and greatest GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD will be plucked from retailers even faster if they are viable mining platforms. It has been reported that AMD is trying to make sure retailers follow certain distribution practices with its upcoming Radeon RX 6000 series products, to make sure they are distributed to gamers and enthusiasts rather than scalpers and such like. An initiative like creating appealing crypto-specific Navi 1X products might help everyday consumers get their hands on a new Navi 2X graphics card too.

Does the Snap Store Use Too Much Memory?

This week I noticed that the Snap Store app on my Ubuntu 20.10 laptop uses a tonne of memory, even when it’s not running — we’re talking more memory than the main GNOME Shell process uses, and that is always running! Naturally I assumed something in my config was to blame. I do make heavy use of Snap apps — don’t worry I use plenty of Flatpak and PPAs too. I’m pretty polyamorous when it comes to packaging formats and I did install using an Ubuntu 20.10 daily build. Therein lay bugs. I know the caveats. All good. Don’t mind. Whatever.

IBM/Red Hat/Oracle/Fedora Leftovers

• [IBM Emeritus IWB on] America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency

  The belief that efficiency is fundamental to competitive advantage has turned management into a science, whose objective is the elimination of waste, - whether of time, materials, or capital, - wrote Roger Martin in “The High Price of Efficiency,” a January 2019 article in the Harvard Business Review. Martin is professor and former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, as well as a prolific writer. “Why would we not want managers to strive for an ever-more-efficient use of resources?,” asked Martin. Of course we do. But, an excessive focus on efficiency can produce startlingly negative effects. To counterbalance such potential negative effects, companies should pay just as much attention to a less appreciated source of competitive advantage: resilience, - “the ability to recover from difficulties - to spring back into shape after a shock,” he presciently added a year before the advent of Covid-19. In his recently published book, When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic Efficiency, Martin expanded on his HBR article, arguing that an excessive focus on efficiency is not only detrimental to business but constitutes a serious threat to America’s democratic capitalism. “Throughout the first nearly two and a half centuries of America’s existence as a sovereign state, most citizens experienced an advance in their economic status in the overwhelming majority of those years. Based on that trend, Americans have, unsurprisingly, used their votes throughout the years to support and perpetuate capitalism as America’s economic system. But that consistent economic advance has stalled, and has been for a longer period than ever before in American history.” The book is based on a six-year project on the future of America’s democratic capitalism by the Martin Prosperity Institute. The project conducted in-depth interviews with a wide variety of Americans to understand what they thought about the directions of the country. It excluded people in the top 10% of the income distributions, focusing instead on the vast majority of the populations, which includes people with household incomes ranging from $25,000 to $110,000 with a median of $75,000.

• Call for Code Daily: Fighting racial justice and climate change with tech

  The power of Call for Code® is in the global community that we have built around this major #TechforGood initiative. Whether it is the deployments that are underway across pivotal projects, developers leveraging the starter kits in the cloud, or ecosystem partners joining the fight, everyone has a story to tell. Call for Code Daily highlights all the amazing #TechforGood stories taking place around the world. Every day, you can count on us to share these stories with you. Check out the stories from the week of October 19th:

• IRI Certifies Voracity with Oracle Linux

  The Oracle Linux and Virtualization Alliance team welcomes IRI, The CoSort Company, and its Voracity data management platform to our ISV ecosystem. Voracity enables customers to marshal data without the cost or complexity of multiple tools. IRI has certified and supports Voracity on Oracle Linux 7 and 8. This can provide a rich set of performance and security features for Oracle DBAs, big data architects, and data privacy teams.

• Release Osbuild 23

  We are happy to announce version 23 of osbuild. This release makes it possible to build Fedora on RHEL systems. Below you can find the official changelog from the osbuild-23 sources. All users are recommended to upgrade!

Kernel: Fedora Test Week for Kernel 5.9, Important Fix and Linux 5.10 Work

• Contribute at the Fedora Test Week for Kernel 5.9 - Fedora Magazine

  The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 5.9. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Monday, October 26, 2020 through Monday, November 02, 2020. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.

  

• Linux Gets Fix For AMD Zen 3 CPU Frequency Handling Stemming From 8 Year Old Workaround - Phoronix

  Since 2012 there has been a quirk in the Linux kernel to disable/override using ACPI _PSD data on all AMD processors as a workaround in turn for Windows-specific behavior that clashes with the semantics of the Linux ACPI CPUFreq driver for CPU frequency scaling. With AMD Zen 3 this quirk is no longer needed to behave correctly and thus Linux 5.10 is going to drop this eight year old quirk on Zen 3 and newer.  The change since 2012 in the Linux kernel for AMD CPUs has overrode the ACPI _PSD table supplied by the BIOS. But now for Family 19h / Zen 3, the table accurately reports the P-state dependency of CPU cores. That correct table is needed for proper CPU frequency control with the new processors and thus the new kernel will stop overriding it so it can be used by ACPI CPUfreq for its frequency handling on the shiny new CPUs. 

  

• EXT4 Changes Land In Linux 5.10 With Fast Commits, Big Boost For Parallel Writes - Phoronix

  The EXT4 file-system updates have landed in Linux 5.10 with some notable additions for this mature file-system. [...] Another big change is the new EXT4 "fast commits" mode by Harshad Shirwadkar of Google. This fast commit mode is relevant for EXT4 users operated in ordered mode (the mount option data=ordered) and maintains a minimal delta for recreating the affected metadata in the fast commit space shared with the JBD2 journal. That can yield up to a ~103% write performance improvement in the ordered mode with fast commits enabled.  The EXT4 changes also include other fixes and low-level code improvements.

  

• Linux 5.10 Has Initial Support For NVIDIA Orin, DeviceTree For Purism's Librem 5 - Phoronix

  Complementing the ARM(64) architecture changes for Linux 5.10 are now the SoC and board updates that are quite interesting this round.  The ARM platform/SoC support with Linux 5.10 ranges from initial bring-up of the NVIDIA Tegra Orin SoC to finally mainlining the DeviceTree support for the Purism Librem 5 smartphone revisions thus far to Raspberry Pi 4 display setup.