Phoronix

Now that Linux 6.9-rc1 was released on Sunday to mark the end of the merge window, here is a look at all of the new features that have been merged for the Linux 6.9 kernel cycle.

Ubuntu Long-Term Support (LTS) releases have been support for 10 years of updates by Canonical while now that has been extended to 12 years but only for Ubuntu Pro customers going for their legacy support add-on. This 12 year support is extended retroactively going back to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS...

The latest upstream development code for the Inkscape vector graphics program has transitioned to using the GTK4 toolkit...

The Linux 6.9 kernel will be able to boot systems with large amounts of memory -- and in particular making use of HugeTLB pages -- much faster than with previous kernels, netting a noticeable reduction in boot times...

AMD open-source Linux driver patches posted last summer enabled the new "VPE" IP block as a general purpose copy engine for future AMD GPUs. This VPE block might premiere in the upcoming AMD RDNA3.5 refresh (RDNA3+) integrated graphics but in any event AMD is already working on the incrementally improved VPE 1.1 IP with that now being supported by the Mesa 24.1 RadeonSI driver code...

It was just last week that Tiny Corp put their AMD Radeon graphics powered compute boxes "on hold" after being frustrated with the lack of select firmware source code and ultimately hitting various bugs. This wasn't the first time they had put their AMD Radeon graphics plans on-hold or dismissed it outright. With the start of the new week now comes plans to re-introduce an AMD Radeon graphics option for their compute boxes alongside their recently announced NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 compute rigs...

Intel today published a new version of its NPU Linux driver user-space components that goes along with their iVPU accelerator kernel driver for enabling the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found within their latest Meteor Lake systems...

Since last year Red Hat engineers have been developing xwayland-run and wlheadless-run for spawning X11 clients within its own dedicated XWayland rootful instance and for running a Wayland client on a set of supported Wayland headless compositors, respectively. The intent is on improving the Wayland headless experience as well as being able to get classic X11 sessions up and running via rootful XWayland. Out today is the XWayland-Run v0.0.3 release...

While most Linux distributions have long since moved on from SysVinit in favor of systemd for init duties, this weekend SysVinit 3.09 was released for any legacy users and holdouts still enjoying the System V-init style experience...

Linus Torvalds just released the first release candidate for Linux 6.9 that now marks the formal end of the two-week merge window...

Sam Lantinga released an SDL preview release today of SDL3 for helping to encourage developers to test out the new SDL 3.0 API...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine changes for Linux 6.9 continue to enhance the capabilities of the open-source Linux virtualization software stack...

Out this weekend is a new version of uutils' Coreutils 0.0.25 as the Rust-written drop-in replacement to GNU Coreutils for common utilities found on Linux platforms and other systems...

The speakup driver that's long existed within the Linux kernel is a speech synthesizer that can interface with various synthesizer hardware and from user-space software can interface with /dev/synth for submitting data to the synthesizer. With Linux 6.9 the speakup driver is seeing two useful improvements...

Linux 6.8 dropped the SLAB allocator after its deprecation in v6.5 and now just leaving SLUB for all allocation duties. For Linux 6.9 there is continued cleaning from that SLAB removal as well as making more SLUB improvements...

With security concerns at all-time highs in the industry, Linux 6.9 is seeing yet more work to beef up its security hardening with various additional safety checks and other compile-time defenses for ensuring security best practices...

The IO_uring changes were merged early during the nearly-over Linux 6.9 merge window. This round brought yet a few more features to this wonderful and innovative kernel feature...

Workqueues are commonly used within the Linux kernel for asynchronous process execution contexts. With Linux 6.9 the workqueue (WQ) code has seen "significant and invasive" changes...

The Linux 6.9 changes for the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem are heavy on the AMD changes...

The DIRT 5 racing game was one of the titles that hadn't worked on Intel graphics under Linux due to the sparse memory support for the ANV Vulkan driver. But with sparse support now enabled, the game was crashing at launch. But now a workaround is in place to allow Intel's Mesa 24.1 Vulkan driver to work with DIRT 5...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were merged at the start of the Linux 6.9 merge window and include the recent trend of more all-in-one liquid/water cooling systems seeing Linux driver support to enable convenient monitoring and controls...

So far when it comes to Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) / Kernel Mode-Setting (KMS) display drivers for Linux, there are Rust efforts underway for the Apple Silicon kernel graphics driver with the Asahi Linux project as well as the new Nova effort for a modern open-source NVIDIA kernel driver from Red Hat. Also now out from Red Hat is posting the Rust bindings for KMS to review plus porting the existing Virtual KMS driver over to Rust as the "RVKMS" driver...

KDE developers continue to be quite busy fixing a variety of regressions -- including some crashes -- with the new KDE Plasma 6 desktop stack. Plasma 6.0.3 will ship next week with yet more fixes while some feature work toward Plasma 6.1 is also underway...

Wine 9.5 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications under Linux...

Microsoft is rolling out WSL 2.2.1 to WIndows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) users with more reliable networking support, hang fixes, and other improvements...

The RISC-V architecture updates were sent out today for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel ahead of the v6.9-rc1 release this Sunday...

While there is AOMP for OpenMP device offloading based on the LLVM/Clang compiler, less talked about and not as feature-rich is the AMDGCN back-end within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that is also worked on for OpenMP device offloading capabilities to Radeon GPUs. Squeezing in for the upcoming GCC 14.1 stable release is GFX1103 support for AMD APUs with RDNA3 integrated graphics...

Loongson continues enabling more kernel functionality for their LoongArch processor port for the upstream Linux kernel. With Linux 6.9 they sent out today a set of patches enabling more features for this Chinese CPU architecture...

The latest LibreOffice drawing code has enabled support for making use of multi-threaded 3D rendering...

Due to some games checking the graphics card's vendor ID and matching to NVIDIA then just assuming it's NVIDIA's official (proprietary) driver in use, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver has added a workaround to allow concealing the vendor ID in order to bypass NVIDIA-specific checks such as for the driver version in use...

BOLT that was upstreamed into LLVM in 2022 by Facebook/Meta allows for optimizing the layout of binaries as a post-linking step to yield increased performance. BOLT like Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) first requires the profiling step to generate perf recordings to feedback in for the optimization process, but the gains can be significant...

AMD on Thursday published AOMP 19.0-0 as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang downstream compiler focused on delivering the latest OpenMP device offloading support for their Radeon GPUs and Instinct accelerators...

With the frame-buffer device "FBDEV" subsystem changes sent out today for the Linux 6.9 kernel, there is support for larger console fonts to better handle today's ~4K displays...

After not making its early beta target for 12 March and then failing to make its intended release date of 19 March, Fedora Linux 40 Beta is now cleared for releasing next week...

Intel 5th Gen Xeon Scalable processors already offer some nice generational improvements with improved AVX-512, faster DDR5 memory support, and also the new Optimized Power Mode option. But if wanting to maximize the performance capabilities even further, Intel's Clear Linux distribution continues working out well for maximizing the performance capabilities of Intel x86_64 hardware.

For those that have been interested in Intel's Meteor Lake mobile processors for the great integrated Arc Graphics capabilities and/or the new integrated NPU with open-source Intel iVPU kernel driver upstream, System76 today announced the new Lemur Pro laptops with Core Ultra processors...

Merged this week into Mesa 24.1 for the Broadcom VideoCore V3DV Vulkan driver that is most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi boards is support for VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering...

The in-development Linux 6.9 kernel is introducing a new USB_DEFAULT_AUTHORIZATION_MODE Kconfig build-time switch to change the default authorization mode for how Linux should deal with attached USB devices...

The KSMBD in-kernel SMB3 server is gaining support for durable file handles in the Linux 6.9 kernel...

The latest file-system driver with notable mentions for Linux 6.9 is that for Microsoft's exFAT file-system...

Microsoft has submitted their various Hyper-V updates to the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel...

Wayland Protocols 1.34 was released on Wednesday with three new staging protocols for further enhancing Wayland's capabilities...

AMD used the Game Developers Conference (GDC 2024) this week to announce FSR 3.1, the latest iteration of their FidelityFX Super Resolution tech for game upscaling...

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...

The x86/entry pull request last week for the Linux 6.9 kernel contained just a single patch but it was a significant one at that in that it helps lower the overhead for CR3 writes and the benefits can be visible for workloads like Linux's perf functionality...

The GNOME project has announced the much anticipated release of the GNOME 46 desktop...

Announced back in 2021 by the Linux Foundation was Amazon Lumberyard becoming the Open 3D Engine and the Linux Foundation fostering the Open 3D Foundation for evolving this new open-source game engine. Three years later there is now a commercial game announced for the Open 3D Engine (O3DE)...

DXVK 2.3.1 has been released for this Steam Play component that implements the Direct3D 9/10/11 APIs atop Vulkan. Notable with DXVK 2.3.1 is VK_NV_raw_access_chains support for more efficient shader code generation on NVIDIA GPUs...

In-step with early Power11 patches in Linux 6.9, IBM engineers have posted the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) patches for enabling -mcpu=power11 targeting within this open-source compiler...

Tiny Corp has been frustrated before with AMD / ROCm and planned to drop AMD graphics cards in their planned compute boxes over it only to go back to AMD GPUs with their open-source driver stack later. It's now happened again following frustrations over firmware binaries. After recently lobbying AMD to at least open-source some relevant pieces of their firmware and at ~70% confidence over their plans, Tiny Corp announced on Tuesday they are dropping AMD GPUs again from their compute plans...