Phoronix

Last week saw Plasma 6.0.1 for an initial batch of bug fixes for this major desktop environment that debuted the week prior. Out today is Plasma 6.0.2 with another round of bug fixes that have been addressed over the past week...

VUSec and IBM Research Europe today announced Speculative Race Conditions (SRCs) as a as a new class of vulnerabilities where thread synchronization primitives using conditional branches can be microarchitecturally bypassed on speculative paths using a Spectre-V1 attack. The researchers have dubbed CVE-2024-2193 as GhostRace and is said to affect all major CPU vendors...

Intel has released new CPU microcode for addressing five security issues and additionally there is newly-merged Linux kernel code for mitigating the new Register File Data Sampling "RFDS" micro-architectural vulnerability affecting Atom / E cores...

With the upgraded Linux kernel, compiler, and other software upgrades with next month's Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, those using recent AMD EPYC server processors like the 4th Gen EPYC Genoa(X) / Bergamo / Siena processors stand to benefit from greater performance over the current Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release...

The recently covered overhaul of the x86 CPU topology code to clean-up quite a code mess has been merged for Linux 6.9. Among other benefits, this improved topology code properly accounts for modern Intel Core hybrid systems with a mix of P and HT-less E cores...

The big set of networking subsystem updates have been sent in for the Linux 6.9 merge window including a number of new wired and wireless devices being supported as well as a number of core networking improvements and optimizations...

AdaptiveCpp 24.02 is out this week as the newest version of this SYCL compiler formerly known as hypSYCL and Open SYCL. AdaptiveCpp supports C++-based heterogeneous programming models targeting all major CPU and GPU vendors thanks to SYCL and C++ standard parallelism...

An interesting anecdote was mentioned as part of the x86/misc changes queued for the Linux 6.9 kernel: on some unnamed AMD systems, NMI debug messages were too excessive that they actually slowed down the systems...

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...

A "request for comments" patch series was posted on Monday for a new dynamic kernel stacks feature for Linux. Early testing has shown the potential for significant memory savings...

After two years of talking about Intel FRED as Flexible Return and Event Delivery for overhauling how transitions are done between privilege levels (CPU rings), the support code was finally in good shape for merging now with the Linux 6.9 kernel...

This is their LLVM/Clang-based shader compiler for compiling HLSL programs into the DirectX Intermediate Language (DXIL) that can then be fed to DirectX GPU drivers from the different vendors. While Microsoft Windows is obviously the main focus, today's update does improve the Linux build support...

SUSE's David Sterba sent out the Btrfs updates today for the Linux 6.9 merge window. Besides stabilization and bug fixes there are also some minor performance optimizations to see with this next kernel...

The in-development Linux 6.9 kernel is finally landing support for AMD Preferred Core as part of the power management updates for this mid-2024 kernel release...

Intel this morning released Continuous Profiler as open-source, a software solution developed by Intel Granulate for aiming to help boost CPU performance...

GNU Linux-libre 6.8-gnu is out as the newest downstream kernel variety endorsed by the Free Software Foundation that takes the upstream Linux kernel but does away with proprietary module support and stripping out drivers/functionality contingent upon binary-only microcode/firmware and other elements not deemed up to their free software standards...

The Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release next month will roll out initial support in its server installer for being able to handle root file-system setups on NVMe-over-TCP scenarios for remote drives...

The x86/core changes were submitted today for the now-open Linux 6.9 merge window. Among other changes, the x86 CPU security mitigation options within the Linux kernel Kconfig have been adjusted where appropriate to make more clear the options/features are for security mitigations...

While Linux 6.8 carries some elements of Zen 5 CPU support, more upstream Linux enablement for the next-generation AMD processors remains ongoing. Sent out this morning were the initial patches around AMD Zen 5 performance monitoring and events for the perf subsystem...

Igalia continues maintaining the Broadcom V3D open-source graphics driver code that is used by the Raspberry Pi single board computers. With a new patch series posted today for the V3D DRM driver, support for Super Pages is enabled to help with enhancing the graphics performance. In many benchmarks having Super Pages can enhance the performance by a few percent but in some extreme cases can be 19~42% faster...

A number of x86-related pull requests were already submitted today for kicking off the new Linux 6.9 merge window. With the x86/cpu pull for this new kernel cycle there is just one patch and it's for slightly easing future AMD Zen processor enablement under Linux...

Linus Torvalds has gone ahead and released Linux 6.8 as stable today rather than drawing this cycle into overtime...

Depending upon how Linus Torvalds is feeling today, Linux 6.8 could debut today as stable and in turn mark the opening of the Linux 6.9 merge window... Otherwise it will be punted off by one week. In any event, there's a lot of interesting work queuing for Linux 6.9 as shared in today's preview...

The AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver works with Zen 2 and newer processors supporting ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Controls (CPPC) but to date this hasn't worked for Threadripper 3000 series processors with the TRX40 chipset. That though is finally being fixed up with Linux 6.9 thanks to a one-line code change...

Thanks to the nature of open-source and AMD making their Radeon Memory Visualizer "RMV" open-source under the GPUOpen umbrella, outside of AMD graphics drivers it's found usage elsewhere. Back in January I wrote how Intel's open-source Vulkan driver was adapted for being able to interface with the Radeon Memory Visualizer. Now this week the Qualcomm Adreno "TURNIP" Vulkan driver has also been wired up for enabling RMV integration...

Niri is an interesting scrollable tiling Wayland compositor inspired by PaperWM that has been gaining user interest in recent months. This weekend marked the v0.1.3 release of this Wayland compositor...

All of the Rust feature patches have already been submitted in a pull request to Linus Torvalds ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 merge window...

Last year saw a lot of code clean-up work on the Linux kernel and working to remove support for obsolete hardware no longer being actively maintained within the mainline kernel tree for years. On the CPU side one of the efforts has been to remove unused SPARC 32-bit CPU support for old Sun workstations. The patches for removing unused SPARC32 code was updated this weekend and now undergoing review...

The GNOME 46 release candidate was officially rolled out today as the last chance to test the GNOME 46 desktop software ahead of its stable release later this month...

Linux 6.8 could debut as stable as soon as tomorrow if all goes well... Linus Torvalds last week was unsure whether an extra release candidate would be needed after the quiet 6.8-rc7 release. This week's seen a continued flow of fixes land, so we'll see what Linus decides on Sunday but in any event there are already a number of early 6.9 pull requests...

Not only have KDE developers been very busy this week but so has the GNOME crew working toward the GNOME 46 release later this month as well as working on various other improvements to land past the 46 cycle...

Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver for open-source NVIDIA support has merged sparse memory support. This is a big milestone as it's needed for running a number of newer games under Linux...

The lightweight LXQt desktop environment is fully ready to take on the Wayland world...

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...

Wine 9.4 is out today as a rather notable bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

While the Linux v6.8 kernel may debut as stable as soon as this weekend, a last-minute pull request of some new AMD graphics IP was submitted today to DRM-Next in aiming to make it for the imminent Linux 6.9 merge window...

Vulkan 1.3.280 is out today as the newest spec update for this high performance graphics, compute, and video API...

While Ubuntu 24.04 LTS won't be officially out until the back-half of April, here is an early look at how the Intel Xeon Scable "Emerald Rapids" performance is looking right now compared to Ubuntu 23.10 and the current Ubuntu 22.04 LTS series in a variety of benchmarks. As largely expected with the software updates, the new Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will help achieve greater server/HPC performance on recent Intel processors.

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...

AMD engineers and those debugging s2idle suspend/resume issues for Ryzen laptops under Linux will soon have more information at disposal for newer SoCs supporting MP2 STB functionality...

The optional case-insensitive file/folder handling under Linux that's hooked up for various file-systems like EXT4 and F2FS will benefit from improved performance on the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle...

Sent in today as part of the input subsystem fixes for the current Linux 6.8 kernel cycle are adding support for several more HP HyperX gaming controllers...

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...

A proposal has been laid out by Canonical engineers to include various performance tooling in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by default to help in those trying to squeeze out greater performance gains out of their hardware/software and/or debugging/profiling issues. The proposal wants to "make Ubuntu absolutely great for performance engineers" but would mean somewhat significant size increases to the Ubuntu desktop and server ISOs...

While Mesa Gallium3D drivers with capable GPUs have already supported accelerated AV1 video deocding, to date it's been limited to the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). With newly-merged code for Mesa 24.1, the VDPAU state tracker can now also handle AV1 decoding with supported drivers/GPUs...

GNUnet 0.21 has been released as a major update to this GNU project building a network stack for secure, decentralized, and privacy-preserving distributed applications. GNUnet continues striving for a "GNU internet" and with the v0.21 release has rolled out a new transport layer and working to address prior design shortcomings...

The upcoming GTK 4.14 toolkit release with the new renderers should yield crisper font rendering...

The performance is likely to be atrocious, but the Mesa Lavapipe driver implementing the Vulkan API for CPU-based execution has rolled out support for Vulkan ray-tracing...

The Etnaviv DRM kernel driver providing reverse-engineered support for Vivante graphics and NPU IP has sent out their latest feature changes to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 merge window...

Steven Rostedt this week posted some interesting albeit experimental patches for the Linux kernel to support persistent traces that work across a reboot or crash...