Phoronix

DTrace used to be one of the Solaris features long sought after by Linux developers but over time the Linux kernel tracing capabilities have improved and Oracle has been supporting DTrace on Linux now for years without too much fanfare. DTrace 2.0.0-1.14 was released this past week as the latest iteration of this user-space implementation that builds off the Linux kernel tracing functionality like BPF...

For those running the official Raspberry Pi OS on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 series single board computers, the Mesa V3DV Vulkan driver is now shipping by default to provide for a better out-of-the-box experience...

Linux 6.9-rc3 is released and most notable are the Bcachefs fixes to which Torvalds quipped, "if you had a corrupted bcachefs filesystem you'd probably want this, and if you thought bcachefs was stable already, I have a bridge to sell you. Special deal only for you, real cheap." Plus various other fixes throughout...

Similar to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Fedora 39, and other recent Linux distributions increasing its vm.max_map_count default in order to satisfy some Windows games running under Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and other memory-intensive software, Arch Linux is also increasing its default value...

While recently there has been more Linux distribution vendor interest in evaluating x86-64-v2 and/or x86-64-v3 baselines for future Linux distribution releases as well as offering optimized packages for higher x86-64 baselines either for x86-64-v3 with being able to assume AVX/AVX2 or in the x86-64-v4 level where AVX-512 is introduced, the prospect of x86-64 micro-architecture feature levels for future processors isn't clear...

Framework Computer as the company behind the popular Framework 13 and Framework 16 upgradeable/modular laptops is hiring for an open-source firmware developer...

For confidential computing "CoCo" virtual machines where the VM host is assumed to be un-trusted and aims to be as isolated as possible, RdRand hardware random number generator instructions are one of the limited sources of entropy for guest VMs. Right now RdRand can fail and the CoCo guest VMs will continue to boot albeit with limited or no entropy to see the VM's random number generation. But being merged today as part of x86 fixes for Linux 6.9 is now requiring seeding RNG with RdRand for CoCo environments otherwise a kernel panic...

One of the latest areas being worked on for enabling Rust programming language use within the Linux kernel is for CPU frequency "CPUFreq" scaling drivers...

A new version of the Debian Policy Manual has been published that outlines the policy requirements for Debian around the package archive and various design matters of the platform...

Last month I wrote about the V3D kernel graphics driver preparing for 1MB "super pages" support to help boost the performance for this open-source Broadcom DRM driver most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi single board computers. The latest iteration of these patches have now been posted for supporting both super pages and big pages...

With the recent Mesa 24.1 support for Wayland explicit sync with Vulkan drivers, GNOME merging explicit sync support, Wayland-Protocols 1.34 introducing linux-drm-syncobj, and XWayland explicit sync also nearing the state of being merged, there's been much talk recently about Wayland explicit sync. KDE KWin developer Xaver Hugl has written a detailed blog post for those interested in the topic...

In addition to KDE's busy week of development work, GNOME developers have also been busy working on features like improving the systemd-homed integration and beginning to work on mock-ups for an OS installer...

KDE developers have had another busy week working on fixes for Plasma 6.0 while simultaneously preparing new features for Plasma 6.1...

Back in 2022 Cloudflare began talking about replacing Nginx with their own in-house, Rust-written code called Pingora, talked about Pingora more in 2023, and then this past February made this Pingora framework open-source for creating reliable and fast networked systems. Today marks the first official release of Pingora with the v0.1 tag...

Wine 9.6 has just been issued as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications under Linux...

Veteran Linux kernel developer Peter Zijlstra is working to wrap-up feature work around the EEVDF kernel scheduler code...

The OpenZFS file-system has merged support for using multiple task queues (TaskQs) to enhance performance for multi-core systems...

OpenBLAS 0.3.27 is out as the newest version of this prominent open-source Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) library...

Richard Hughes of Red Hat has published Fwupd 1.9.16 as the newest update to this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems that pairs with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for easy firmware redistribution...

The very exciting FFmpeg 7.0 multimedia library has been released! FFmpeg 7.0 rolls out most notably the new native VVC decoder that is currently experimental for supporting Versatile Video Coding as well as introducing the multi-threaded FFmpeg CLI tool...

Following the Intel Linux kernel graphics driver patches last month adding two new DG2/Alchemist PCI IDs that when digging through the Intel Compute Runtime sources were confirmed as the Arc Graphics A580E and A750E, the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers have now added support for these new graphics processors...

Theo de Raadt has released OpenBSD 7.5 as the newest version of this security-focused BSD operating system. With OpenBSD 7.5 there is a number of improvements for ARM (AArch64) hardware, never-ending kernel optimizations and other tuning work, countless package updates, and other adjustments to this popular BSD platform...

OpenCL 3.0 debuted back in 2020 and while we haven't heard talks of any major revision on the horizon, it does continue to see new point releases. Released on Thursday was OpenCL 3.0.16 that adds one new extension while finalizing eight formerly provisional extensions...

Following up on their tweet earlier this week that they would be working to open-source more of their GPU software stack and hardware documentation, AMD now says they will be releasing documentation followed by the source code for their Micro-Engine Scheduler (MES) IP block found within Radeon GPUs...

After years being used by Ubuntu Server/Cloud, Ubuntu 23.10 began making use of Canonical's Netplan declarative network configuration software and now Netplan is fully ready to take on all duties with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. After seven years of development, Netplan 1.0 is ready for primetime use from servers to desktops...

Earlier this week Wine developer Gabriel Ivncescu with CodeWeavers laid out a great proposal: leveraging AI for assisting with the code review process for more punctual review and upstreaming of patches into the Wine codebase for this software that allows Windows games and apps to run on Linux and other platforms. While great in theory, at this stage just amounted to an April Fools' gag for Wine...

Last week being surprised to see a number of AMD EPYC performance gains with Linux 6.9 using that in-development kernel, I was curious about what other platforms may be benefiting from better performance on this kernel that will debut as stable in May. This week I turned to running some fresh benchmarks of Intel Xeon Max using the Supermicro Hyper SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR. More than 230 benchmarks were carried out of Linux 6.8 stable versus Linux 6.9-rc2 in looking for any performance differences.

For years the PostgreSQL database server has been adding various JSON features while now the latest addition for dealing with JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) structured data is the JSON_TABLE() SQL function...

The Power Profiles Daemon software under the UPower project has released version 0.21 which now is automatically battery-state aware for adjusting the CPU power/performance behavior depending upon whether your Linux laptop is connected to AC or battery power...

LLVM's BOLT is an amazing tool for optimizing the layout of binaries and in turn can lead to some mighty useful performance improvements. But now an Arm compiler engineer has taken to leveraging BOLT for creating a binary analysis tool to vet the correctness of security hardening options...

Following the release of the Qt 6.7 toolkit earlier this week, released today is the Qt Creator 13 integrated development environment. Qt Creator is the Qt/C++ tailored IDE aimed to help accelerate developer productivity with tight Qt integration and supporting a variety of features...

Queued up recently into the crypto subsystem's development branch ahead of the Linux 6.10 merge window is support for VFIO live migration with Intel's QuickAssist Technology (QAT) driver...

Just two days after a Linux 6.9 pull request was submitted for Bcachefs to better cope with "extreme file-system damage", another pull request for this current cycle was submitted that aims to improve the recovery capabilities of this newer copy-on-write open-source file-system...

The Google Open-Source Blog today announced Jpegli, a JPEG coding library for encode/decode that maintains backwards compatibility with JPEG while offering around a 35% compression ratio improvement for high quality JPEG compression...

The Netherlands-based PC vendor NovaCustom that specializes in privacy/security minded hardware and user freedoms has announced their V54 and V56 laptops. These new laptops powered by Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" SoCs are self-proclaimed as the fastest Coreboot laptops in the world...

Last year the X.Org Server disabled byte-swapped clients by default over being a large and known attack surface within the X.Org/XWayland codebase. That's proven itself to further be the case with 3 of 4 new CVEs made public today being around the byte-swapped code...

David Malcolm of Red Hat's compiler team is out with his annual blog post summarizing the static analysis improvements to find with the upcoming GCC 14 stable compiler release...

In February was the announcement of the Crucial T705 PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 SSD while reaching retail channels in March. This is a very speedy PCIe 5.0 solid-state drive that Crucial recently sent over for our Linux testing and review.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has landed support in the RADV Vulkan driver for the Vulkan VK_EXT_device_address_binding_report extension with Mesa 24.1...

In addition to the Linux Foundation and others starting Valkey as a fork of the open-source Redis following the upstream move to dual source-available licensing, Redict is another new fork getting established...

The Ubuntu 24.04 beta won't be happening tomorrow as planned but has been pushed back by one week due to the XZ security nightmare and wanting to rebuild packages out of an abundance of caution...

Driven by the XZ security fiasco with malicious code aimed at remote code execution, more open-source projects are re-evaluating their dependence on XZ out of an abundance of caution. The latest to take action is the Fwupd Linux firmware updating utility with LVFS that will now prefer Zstd compression instead of XZ...

Sound Open Firmware 2.9 has been released for this open-source project providing audio DSP firmware infrastructure and an adjoining SDK. This effort that started out by Intel for opening up more of their audio hardware firmware has expanded into a multi-vendor project with the likes of AMD and Mediatek also participating around this sound firmware infrastructure, audio driuvers, etc...

AMD Radeon posted to Twitter/X that "coming soon" they will be open-sourcing additional portions of their software stack as well as putting out more hardware documentation...

After working at ATI/AMD for more than a quarter century and being the open-source graphics driver manager during the early days, John Bridgman has retired...

The PCI-SIG announced today that they have published their newest revision "version 0.5" of the forthcoming PCI Express 7.0 specification...

Mesa 24.1's Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code now has support for the Wayland linux-drm-syncobj-v1 protocol for explicit synchronization support...

The past two months I've been testing out the TUXEDO Pulse 14 Gen 3 laptop as a new AMD Ryzen laptop from this Bavarian Linux PC retailer. It's been working out very well under Linux (as would be expected of TUXEDO Computers) and quite adaptable for power and performance. For those needing a capable Linux laptop the TUXEDO Pulse 14 Gen 3 has proven quite stable and reliable under both their in-house TUXEDO OS distribution as well as Ubuntu Linux.

AMD today announced the Ryzen Embedded 8000 series processors -- their first AMD embedded chips to offer Ryzen AI with the onboard Neural Processing Unit (NPU). This AMD XDNA NPU support is similar to the existing Ryzen AI on the Ryzen 8000 series...

Following the recent upgrade to Rust 1.77, the Linux kernel Rust code is preparing to move to Rust 1.78 that will be released as stable in about one month...