Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the founder and principal author of Phoronix, having founded the site on 5 June 2004. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org. Michael has authored thousands of articles on open-source software, the state of Linux hardware and other topics.


Learn more at MichaelLarabel.com or @MichaelLarabel on Twitter.


 

Some of The Recent Popular Articles By Michael Larabel:

Red Hat's Long, Rust'ed Road Ahead For Nova As Nouveau Driver Successor

Red Hat's display driver team has recently been devising plans for Nova, a new to-be-developed Linux DRM kernel driver written in Rust for open-source NVIDIA graphics support as the successor/replacement to Nouveau for newer NVIDIA GPU generations supporting the GPU System Processor (GSP). Making this effort all the more involved is being written in Rust at a time when various kernel abstractions are still being devised and not yet upstreamed.

20 March - Open-Source NVIDIA In Rust - 59 Comments
Intel Continues Prepping The Linux Kernel For X86S

Nearly one year ago Intel published the X86S specification (formerly stylized as "X86-S") for simplifying the Intel architecture by removing support for 16-bit and 32-bit operating systems. X86S is a big step forward with dropping legacy mode, 5-level paging improvements, and other modernization improvements for x86_64. With the Linux 6.9 kernel more x86S bits are in place for this ongoing effort.

12 March - More X86S Code In Linux 6.9 - 64 Comments
Linux 6.9 Set To Drop The Old NTFS File-System Driver

Merged two years ago with Linux 5.15 with the "NTFS3" driver developed by Paragon Software with working read-write support and other improvements for supporting Microsoft's NTFS file-system driver. This driver was a big improvement over the original NTFS read-only driver found in the mainline kernel and faster than using the NTFS-3G FUSE file-system driver. Now with enough time having passed and the NTFS3 driver working out well, the older NTFS driver is set for removal.

8 March - NTFS Driver - 44 Comments
Lisa Su Says The "Team Is On It" After Tweet About Open-Source AMD GPU Firmware

George Hotz with Tiny Corp that is working on Tinygrad and TinyBox for interesting developments in the open-source AI space has previously called out AMD over ROCm issues. Yesterday yielded new tweets by "the tiny corp" over AI training runs crashing with MES errors and then called for AMD open-sourcing the firmware to which AMD CEO Lisa Su has responded.

6 March - Lisa Su Responds - 38 Comments
Fedora Workstation 41 To No Longer Install GNOME X.Org Session By Default

Fedora Workstation has long defaulted to using GNOME's Wayland session by default, but it has continued to install the GNOME X.Org session for fallback purposes or those opting to use it instead. But for the Fedora Workstation 41 release later in the year, there is a newly-approved plan to no longer have that GNOME X.Org session installed by default.

7 March - Fedora 41 - 147 Comments
AMDGPU Linux Driver No Longer Lets You Have Unlimited Control To Lower Your Power Limit

The AMDGPU Linux driver up until the recent Linux 6.7 kernel release has let you lower the power limit of your graphics card with, well, no limits... This has allowed AMD Radeon Linux users to limit their GPU power draw when desiring for power/efficiency reasons. But since Linux 6.7 they've begun enforcing a lower-power limit set by the respective graphics card BIOS. Users petitioned to have this change reverted but in the name of safety this lower-limit enforcement will stand.

4 March - AMDGPU Power Limits - 95 Comments
GNOME Prompt Becomes Ptyxis

The GNOME Prompt terminal emulator in-development by Christian Hergert with a focus on GPU-acceleration and being a very speedy and beautiful terminal option has been renamed to Ptyxis.

29 February - GNOME Ptyxis - 69 Comments
KDE Developers Are Currently Seeing 150~200 Bug Reports Per Day

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary outlining the interesting feature work and bug fixes to land in the KDE space. Being fresh off the recent Plasma 6.0 release, a lot of bug reports are still coming in while developers are already busy tackling new features for Plasma 6.1.

9 March - Plasma 6.0 Recovery - 133 Comments
Microsoft Ending Support For Windows Subsystem For Android

Microsoft announced today they will be winding down their support for Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA), which is similar to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) but was designed to run Android apps from the Amazon Appstore atop Windows 11.

5 March - Windows Subsystem For Android - 28 Comments
XWayland Nukes The NVIDIA EGLStream Backend

XWayland had targeted both the Generic Buffer Management (GBM) and EGLStream APIs due to NVIDIA not supporting GBM like all of the other Linux drivers. But now that the NVIDIA proprietary Linux graphics driver has been boasting GBM support and advancing with their Wayland platform support in general, XWayland is letting go of the EGLStream mess.

18 March - GBM Only - 101 Comments
AMD FreeSync Video Facing Retirement In Linux 6.9

Back in 2020 AMD rolled out a video mode optimization for FreeSync on Linux, continued being revised in 2021, FreeSync Video mode then attempted by default in 2022 but then was reverted and then only last year FreeSync Video enabled by default. But now come Linux 6.9, the feature appears to be effectively retired.

2 March - FreeSync Video - 6 Comments
VirtualBox KVM Backend Adds Support For SR-IOV Graphics

Announced one month ago by Cyberus Technology was an open-source KVM back-end for VirtualBox. This work by Cyberus allows for using the KVM hypervisor with VirtualBox as opposed to its custom kernel module maintained by Oracle. That KVM back-end has now been extended to support SR-IOV graphics virtualization.

8 March - SR-IOV For VirtualBox KVM - 27 Comments