Phoronix

While Plasma 6.3 feature development is continuing, KDE developers this week spent more time fixing bugs and polishing up existing code for ensuring a solid foundation to this open-source desktop...

Released last week was systemd 257-rc1 while succeeding that already is systemd 257-rc2 and it comes with a new tool: systemd-keyutil...

In commemorating twenty years since the release of the highly acclaimed Half-Life 2 game, Valve today released the Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary update with various fixes and other refinements. Half-Life 2 is also being made free-to-own through November 18th for those that never experienced this legendary game...

In addition to the EXT4 and XFS atomic write support, another interesting pull request sent in today by Microsoft's Christian Brauner is adding case-insensitive file/folder support for the Tmpfs file-system to benefit use-cases like Wine / Steam Play compatibility layers and sandboxing/container facilities like Flatpak...

Prominent Linux developer Christian Brauner with Microsoft has begun sending out various pull requests of VFS feature changes for the imminent Linux 6.13 merge window. One of the interesting early pull requests is the VFS untorn writes series with getting atomic writes support enabled for the EXT4 and XFS file-system...

While Linux 6.12 should be out this weekend with its many exciting features, following that will mark the start of the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle with what will be the first stable kernel release of 2025... Already there is a lot of exciting feature work expected to land during the Linux 6.13 merge window...

The GNOME Mutter compositor has switched its KMS thread priority from a real-time value over to high priority to workaround a situation where the GNOME Shell / Mutter could crash or see its process killed...

The Linux 6.12 kernel is expected to be released this coming Sunday, 17 November, barring any last minute issues that would force the stable kernel to be diverted to the following Sunday. Linux 6.12 is delivering many exciting new features and beyond that it's all the more exciting with it expected to be this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel version...

Google engineer Saravana Kannan has posted a set of patches to better optimize async device suspend and resume handling within the Linux kernel. With these patches there are "significant improvements" to async device suspend/resume with testing being done on a Google Pixel 6 smartphone but other devices stand to benefit too...

AMD ZenDNN 5.0 was rolled out this morning as the newest version of this deep neural network library that is compatible with Intel's oneDNN APIs and infrastructure. ZenDNN 5.0 is now optimized for AMD Zen 5 processors such as the EPYC 9005 series. ZenDNN 5.0 also ships performance enhancements for generative large language models (LLMs) with its PyTorch plug-in...

GCC 15 feature development is soon wrapping up to focus on bug fixing before releasing GCC 15.1 as stable in the early months of 2025. One of the latest features to make it in the compiler codebase is code generation support around Arm Guarded Control Stack (GCS) functionality...

Patches posted on Thursday for the Linux kernel add support for the newest hotkey being found on Lenovo ThinkPad laptops... The "Phone Link" hotkey for launching the Microsoft Phone Link software for linking your Android/iOS smartphone to your laptop. This hotkey can be adapted for similar purposes on Linux...

A number of Steam Controller improvements have been merged for SDL, this widely-used hardware/software abstraction layer that is common to cross platform games. Among the latest Steam Controller improvements in SDL are enabling the support by default...

In addition to the release today of OpenMP 6.0 ahead of the SC24 supercomputing conference in Atlanta, over at The Khronos Group they have provided an update on upcoming SYCL improvements to benefit high performance computing (HPC) and scientific computing applications...

The OpenMP Architecture Review Board announced from SC24 that OpenMP 6.0 is now available as a major upgrade to the OpenMP specification for multi-process programming within C / C++ / Fortran. A big emphasis on OpenMP 6.0 is making it easier for developers to embrace...

A new patch series posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list would block kernel modules/drivers from TUXEDO Computers from accessing GPL-only symbols in the kernel...

While it's difficult still finding Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" motherboards/servers widely available at Internet retailers/distributors, when it comes to the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors that launched just last month, there is better availability thanks in large part to leveraging the existing SP5 socket. For those wanting to assemble a single socket AMD EPYC 9005 series server, one of the readily available options in the retail channel is the Supermicro H13SSL-N motherboard.

The first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (RHEL 10) was released on Wednesday with a wide variety of new/updated packages, new features, and other changes over RHEL 9...

Last month AMD Linux engineers posted patches for a 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver for Linux that allows the user to communicate their cache vs. frequency preference depending upon workload and for the 3D V-Cache processors where some CCDs have the larger cache but not all. That driver is now ready for appearing in the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel...

A patch queued yesterday ino the Linux power management subsystem's "linux-next" branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.13 merge window will tune Intel Xeon Granite Rapids processors for better performance out-of-the-box...

Linux 6.10 introduced TPM bus encryption and integrity protection for enhancing the Trusted Platform Module support to protect against interposers from compromising them with TPM sniffing attacks. There is now a new option being added to opt-out of this protection due to a discovered performance bottleneck...

The newest Linux driver being developed by Intel is for the Touch Host Controller (THC) as a new high performance input tech for enhancing touch screen, touch pad, and stylus input handling...

Ahead of the expected final Linux 6.12 stable kernel release this weekend, a last round of Bcachefs file-system fixes were submitted today for this next kernel version...

AMD today went public with details on the "AMD Next-Gen Fortran Compiler" as a new Fortran compiler they are working on based on LLVM's Flang...

Last week Mesa 24.3 was finally branched and Mesa 24.3-rc1 subsequently issued for getting the release process kicked off for this quarterly 3D graphics driver feature release. Out today is Mesa 24.3-rc2 with an initial batch of fixes...

Apple last week released their latest iMac, Mac Mini, and MacBook Pro products powered by their fourth-generation M-series Apple Silicon. The new Mac Mini in particular is interesting for under $600 starting out with the all re-designed Mac Mini with 10-core M4 and now the base model having 16GB of memory. It will take some time before there is any reasonable Linux support on the M4 hardware with Asahi Linux, but for those curious about how the M4 Mac Mini with macOS compares to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core CPUs under Linux, here are some preliminary benchmarks.

Canonical's Interim Engineering Director for Ubuntu Desktop, Oliver Smith, has shared some early roadmap plans for the Ubuntu 25.04 development cycle...

Framework Computer has been promoting a RISC-V motherboard option for their Framework Laptop 13 to complement their existing Intel Core and AMD Ryzen motherboard options. This RISC-V motherboard is being developed in cooperation with DeepComputing. Early access pricing and more details on this quad-core StarFive JH7110 powered mainboard for the Framework 13 have now been announced...

Back in Linux 6.11 support for getrandom() in the vDSO was upstreamed for much better performance in providing speedy yet secure random number generation (RNG) needs. Since Linux 6.11 getrandom in the vDSO has expanded to more CPU architectures and now there's a notable user-space user ready to go: the GNU C Library "glibc" support was merged...

The Intel In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA) found in various Xeon SKUs since Sapphire Rapids can be of big benefit to Linux servers/workstations with a Linux kernel patch series that has been in the works to provide Zswap IAA compress batching...

The NVIDIA MLX5 driver for NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-5 network adapters is preparing to introduce a new Data Direct Placement "DDP" feature with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel merge window...

As covered last week Linux I/O expert Jens Axboe has been taking a fresh pursuit of uncached buffered I/O for Linux. This "RWF_UNCACHED" work was originally started back in 2019 while a renewed effort around it is showing ~65% faster read/write performance and so far has been extended to work across EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS file-systems...

The AlmaLinux operating system project that was started from the fallout of the RHEL/CentOS development shift several years ago has once again courted AMD as a sponsorship of this community enterprise Linux operating system...

Xcompmgr 1.1.10 was released yesterday as the newest update to this basic X11 compositor providing "eye candy" effects for classic X.Org usage...

The "intel_idle" driver provides CPU idle time management for Intel processors on Linux for helping to put the processor into low-power states in conjunction with the MWAIT instruction. With the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel, the Granite Rapids D support for the Intel Idle driver is set to be merged...

It's the second Tuesday of the month and this Patch Tuesday brings new CPU microcode for mitigating the latest Intel processor security vulnerabilities and updates to some previously disclosed issues...

One of the many changes to look forward to with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle is the AMD P-State driver to be used by default with the new EPYC 9005 series processors. While AMD Ryzen CPUs for a while now have been defaulting to the modern AMD P-State driver that makes use of ACPI CPPC platform support for allowing better power efficiency, AMD EPYC CPUs have kept to using the generic ACPI CPUFreq frequency scaling driver. But now AMD engineers have deemed amd_pstate ready for use with EPYC 9005 "Turin" CPUs and will be the default choice moving forward. Here is more information and power/performance benchmarks for this shift while testing using the EPYC 9755 processors.

Merged today to GNOME's Mutter compositor is improved logic for selecting the graphics processor to treat as the primary one within multi-GPU laptops...

Red Hat announced today they have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Neural Magic, an AI software company behind the likes of DeepSparse and nm-vllm...

As part of the transition to eventually drop the long dormant Clover OpenCL state tracker from Mesa's Gallium3D codebase in favor of the modern OpenCL Rusticl Rust-written driver, Mesa 25.0 has ended Clover support for NIR-based drivers...

Yesterday brought the eighth and ninth iteration of the AMD XDNA Linux kernel driver posted for review for enabling the Ryzen AI branded NPUs found in their recent SoCs...

Red Hat in cooperation with Intel, Bloomberg and IBM has been developing the Climatik open-source project as a means of power capping AI use within the data center for better energy efficiency and sustainability...

Merged today for the upcoming GCC 15 stable release is a new "X86_TUNE_AVX512_TWO_EPILOGUES" tuning optimization that is enabled by default for AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors...

DXVK 2.5 was just released as the newest version of this open-source project implementing Direct3D APIs atop the Vulkan API for better handling of Windows games on Linux systems as used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) software...

Memtest86+ 7.0 debuted back in January while now as we approach the end of 2024, Memtest86+ 7.20 is now available as the latest significant update to this open-source memory tester commonly used on Intel and AMD systems...

The latest terminology within the Fedora camp causing concern is "karma" that's long been used for conveying feedback around package updates with their Bodhi software used for gating Fedora Linux package updates...

Microsoft last month announced the open-source Rust-written OpenHCL for running confidential Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP virtual machines. Today Microsoft is announcing another interesting open-source, Rust-based project in the virtualization space: Hyperlight. Microsoft's Hyperlight project is an embed-friendly, lightweight VMM for use within Linux and Windows applications...

While not as exciting as if it were Apple M3/M4 device support hitting the upstream mainline Linux kernel, but for those with some older Apple (pre-M1) devices around, support for a number of older SoCs and boards is set to arrive with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel...

As another effort for boosting the energy efficiency and behavior of Intel Core platforms with a mix of energy efficient "E" and performance "P" cores, a set of patches were posted Friday night for adapting Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) to the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver with a focus on providing better energy efficient performance initially for Lunar Lake SoCs...

Set to be merged during the upcoming Linux 6.13 merge window is support with the Rust programming language infrastructure for allowing in-place kernel modules...