Phoronix

While I have been eagerly following the AMD openSIL project for open-source CPU initialization that will eventually replace AGESA, today AMD announced a new open-source firmware drop: the SEV firmware has been made open-source...

AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are working on a new set of interfaces for user-space to support OverDrive overclocking. While AMD GPU OverDrive overclocking has been supported on Linux for years, the current interface isn't sufficient for all the power/overclocking controls moving forward...

Some code cleaning within the sysctl space of the Linux kernel will eventually eliminate around 64 bytes of bloat per array within the kernel where a sentinel can be removed...

While we are eagerly awaiting ROCm support for more RDNA3 GPUs said to be coming later this calendar year, shipping Tuesday night was ROCm 5.6.1 as the newest point release for this open-source GPU compute stack...

MidnightBSD 3.1 is now available for this desktop-minded, FreeBSD-forked operating system that aims to be "the BSD for everyone" with an Xfce-based desktop and focus on ease of use...

Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) has been part of the mainline kernel for two decades to provide a security module implementing access control security policies and is now widely-used for enhancing the security of production Linux servers and other systems. Those that haven't been involved with Linux for a long time may be unaware that SELinux originates from the US National Security Agency (NSA). But now with Linux 6.6 the NSA references are being removed...

The Linux 6.6 modules infrastructure is changing to better protect against the illicit behavior of NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver...

XDG-Desktop-Portal as the portal front-end for Flatpaks is out with a new development release that brings accent color support to sandboxed desktop apps as well as other new features...

GNU Coreutils 9.4 is out today as the latest version of this collection of utilities common to GNU/Linux systems and other platforms...

The big set of Linux networking subsystem updates were sent out today for the recently-started Linux 6.6 kernel merge window. There are a number of core networking improvements this cycle, support for various new wired and wireless chipsets, and improvements made to existing Ethernet and WiFi drivers...

To help harden the Linux kernel from memory vulnerabilities and in particular heap spraying, set to be merged into the Linux 6.6 kernel is optional support for randomized slab caches for kmalloc() calls...

The EEVDF scheduler code has been merged for the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel. EEVDF replaces the existing CFS scheduler code. There is the likelihood of some performance regressions initially though but the developers will be working to address them as they arise. Additionally, this scheduler pull also re-introduces cluster scheduling for Intel Core hybrid processors...

Among the exciting early pull requests to land in the new Linux 6.6 kernel cycle are some nice improvements to the IOmap code that should yield some substantive I/O benefits with this new kernel...

Google is using their NEXT'23 conference today to announce that C3A instances are debuting in private preview form for these new AArch64 VMs powered by AmpereOne processors...

ClamAV 1.2 was released on Monday as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform anti-virus engine currently maintained by Cisco Systems...

The Intel-led SVT-AV1 open-source AV1 video encoder is out with a major release that delivers on more performance improvements across the board...

Btrfs in Linux 6.5 brought various performance improvements and prior to that it was a busy cycle with Linux 6.4 while now with Linux 6.6 the Btrfs file-system driver is mostly centered on delivering fixes...

The Alliance For Open Media has released libavif 1.0, the reference library for the AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) with image encode and decode support...

For HotChips 2023, Intel has made some new disclosures around Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest.

Over the summer AMD Linux engineers began sending kernel patches for Family 1Ah (Family 26) processors that almost surely are for next-gen Zen 5 processors. Among the initial bits sent out for this next-generation AMD CPU Family are HWMON temperature monitoring and EDAC reporting, which are now on their way for the Linux 6.6 kernel...

The Firefox 117 release binaries are now available for download ahead of Mozilla's official announcement going out on Tuesday...

The CentOS ISA special interest group (SIG) has been evaluating the performance of CentOS Stream in the event its x86_64 baseline were to be raised from x86-64-v2 to x86-64-v3. Currently CentOS Stream 9 targets x86-64-v2 but in upping the support requirements to x86-64-v3, it would allow the ability to engage AVX/AVX2 by default and make use of other newer instruction set features. The x86-64-v3 baseline roughly correlates to Intel / AMD CPUs from 2015 and newer...

Back in April AMD Linux engineers posted enabling a new CPU feature called Dynamic Boost Control to be found with some unspecified Ryzen SoCs for tuning the processor cores for optimal performance. The Dynamic Boost Control functionality depends upon the AMD Cryptographic Co-Processor (CCP) / Platform Security Processor (PSP) and this functionality was submitted today as part of the crypto updates for Linux 6.6...

Building off yesterday's release of Linux 6.5, GNU Linux-libre 6.5-gnu is now available for this downstream kernel maintained by the Free Software Foundation Latin America crew that removes support for binary-only kernel modules and stripping out other kernel code that depends on non-free-software microcode/firmware and other elements not deemed in the interests of pure free software...

Thanks to this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a student developer took the initiative in working on an automated Gentoo Linux system updater to help begineers and ease the roll-out of security updates to users...

As part of the Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) updates submitted today for the Linux 6.6 kernel is adding a quirk/workaround for dealing with current AMD Zen systems where a processor bug could lead to erroneously increased error severity and unneeded kernel panics...

In addition to the fchmodat2 system call, another early pull request submitted by Microsoft's Christian Brauner even before the Linux 6.5 kernel was released is one to introduce multi-grained timestamps with Linux 6.6. Multi-grained timestamps are intended to address an issue exhibited with NFS around caching and the current coarse-grained timestamp handling used for (in)validating caches...

While at the start of Linux 6.5 cycle Linus Torvalds was concerned this release "may be one of those releases that may drag out", in the end it is releasing today and right on schedule. Linux 6.5 was just published rather than going into overtime without any extra release candidate...

While Ampere Computing's wares with the Altra (Max) and forthcoming AmpereOne families of AArch64 server processors are designed for the data center, if you feel so inclined they have published a guide on being able to run Steam for Linux on these ARM64 processors -- including Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying Windows games on these Linux servers...

Ahead of the Linux 6.5 stable kernel being released there have already been a few pull requests submitted of new feature material for Linux 6.6. Among the early pulls for v6.6 is one from prominent Linux developer Christian Brauner at Microsoft that introduces the fchmodat2() system call as an evolution of fchmodat()...

The Flatpak open-source app sandboxing tech has merged support for the Wayland security context protocol...

While there are many exciting features with Linux 6.5 which will hopefully be released as stable later today, ahead for the imminent Linux 6.6 merge window are another hearty batch of new features set to be introduced...

While the release cycle dragged on for several extra months, available this weekend is the release of Mageia 9 for this Linux distribution long ago derived from Mandriva that in turn was an evolution going back to the glorious Mandrake days. Mageia 9 is a nice update pulling in many package updates along with other fundamental changes like shifting to SQLite for its RPM package database...

While Linux 6.5 is expected for release tomorrow, the flow of last minute fixes isn't over...

LXD 5.17 is now available as the system container and virtual machine manager, which since last month has been reigned into control by Canonical and maintainership being limited to Canonical engineers. With this new LXD release there is ZFS delegation support as found with the upcoming OpenZFS 2.2...

Barring any last minute problems from coming up, the Linux 6.5 kernel is expected to be released as stable tomorrow, 27 August. Here's a reminder about all of the great changes and new features with this next kernel version, which is especially heavy on exciting additions for Intel and AMD Linux users...

In addition to GNOME's Sysprof integrating CPU scheduler data this week for GNOME 45, this system-wide profiling tool has also added support for FlameGraphs...

Last week KDE Plasma 6 made the default change from single click to double click for opening files/folders while this week brings another notable default settings change for the desktop... Tap-to-click is finally enabled by default...

AMD used the Gamescom gaming conference in Cologne, Germany for announcing the Radeon RX 7700 XT and Radeon RX 7800 XT graphics cards as the newest consumer cards in the RDNA3 family.

Oliver Smith at Canonical who serves as the Product Manager for Ubuntu Desktop published a post on "charting a course for the future" of the Ubuntu desktop...

Since 2021 among other Snap'ing efforts for converting formerly Ubuntu DEB packages to Canonical's Snap sandboxed app packaging format has been the CUPS print server. The plan was to replace the Debian-packaged CUPS with the Snap-based CUPS for Ubuntu 23.10 but now that is being pushed back to next year...

It looks like the further-tuned AMD Inception / SRSO (Speculative Return Stack Overflow) mitigation code will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window...

Coreboot 4.21 is available this week as the newest tagged release for this open-source system BIOS/firmware solution. Coreboot 4.21 brings a number of new motherboard ports as well as various core improvements...

Miguel Ojeda who leads the "Rust for Linux" effort of integrating Rust programming language support into the Linux kernel has already submitted his pull request of planned feature updates for the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle...

Libinput 1.24 is available today for this input handling library used by Linux systems both legacy X11/X.Org desktops and especially by modern Wayland compositors for unifying input handling in the open-source world...

The Vulkan 1.3.262 revision to this industry standard for high performance graphics and compute is now published. There is the usual assortment of minor changes/fixes plus four new extensions, which all happen to be new vendor extensions from Qualcomm...

Following AMD recently posting Linux graphics driver patches for enabling a GFX 11.5 graphics engine and new DCN 3.5 display block that are presumably for an RDNA3 refresh such as for the Ryzen 8000 series APUs, today AMD posted additional open-source driver patch series for enabling additional new IP...

The Linux 6.5 kernel is expected to be released as stable this weekend barring any last minute issues from being raised. One of the notable changes with this new kernel version is Linux now defaulting to the AMD P-State "EPP" active driver configuration for modern Ryzen systems rather than the long-used generic ACPI CPUFreq driver default. In some cases this can mean better performance but particularly should yield a nice improvement to the power efficiency of Ryzen Zen 2 and newer platforms, especially laptops and other portable Linux systems like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally. I am working on some fresh AMD Ryzen Linux laptop comparison benchmarks but for this article is a look at Linux 6.5 on the desktop side with the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X.

SQLite 3.43 is out today as the newest version of this popular open-source embedded SQL database library that is widely used by countless applications and other software for a variety of data storage purposes...

OpenMandriva developers today formally announced the release of their rolling-release OpenMandriva ROME 23.08 Linux OS installation images, which are also being treated as a release candidate for the OMLx 5.0 non-rolling distribution variant. Making OpenMandriva ROME 23.08 more exciting is that they are now offering separate install media as well that features the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment in its current experimental state but is being offered by OpenMandriva as a "technical preview" around the future direction of the desktop...