Phoronix

The open-source software pieces have come together where Fedora / Red Hat developers are hoping that for Fedora 41 there can be out-of-the-box support for the web cameras on newer Intel laptops...

Miguel Ojeda has sent out the big Rust pull request for the nearly wrapped up Linux 6.11 merge window. This contains all of the latest Rust programming language infrastructure now ready for the mainline kernel...

The HID subsystem updates recently landed into the mainline Linux 6.11 kernel codebase...

For fans of ollama as an open-source means for easily running large language models (LLMs) on your system, ollama v0.3 has been released with support for the newest exciting models...

This weekend the ASUS ROG Ally X began shipping as an upgraded version of the ASUS ROG Ally handheld gaming console that launched last year. The ASUS ROG Ally X is still powered by the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC and for the most part similar to the original model but now with 24GB of LPDDR5X-7500 memory up from 16GB of LPDDR5-6400, twice as large battery capacity, 1TB of NVMe storage rather than 512GB, improved input controls, improved cooling, and other refinements. But it still is running Microsoft Windows 11 out-of-the-box...

Following LLVM/Clang recently dropping support for AMD 3DNow! instructions, the open-source compiler stack is now pushing the MMX SIMD instruction set to a backseat. Moving forward the MMX intrinsics will not make use of MMX but rather be mapped to SSE2. This is all fine unless you are wanting to use this modern code compiler on an Intel Pentium MMX / Pentium II / Pentium III or AMD K6 / K7 processor from the late 90's...

While we have been super eager for the AMD Ryzen 9000 series "Zen 5" desktop processor launch that's been set for 31 July, AMD has issued a last minute delay. Instead the processors will launch in two stages in August...

One of the newest patch series out from AMD this week is on providing I3C HCI driver support for their MIPI I3C IP block found within their latest processors...

Going back two years has been the effort for adding getrandom() to the vDSO in order to enhance the performance. This work has yielded as much as 15x the performance in showing very fast while being secure user-space RNG needs. A few weeks back Linus Torvalds was unconvinced by adding getrandom() to the vDSO, but after going back through the patches he gave it another go. Today the work has managed to be mainlined for Linux 6.11...

The latest Rust for the Linux kernel work led by Miguel Ojeda is on preparing the Rust kernel code for various CPU security mitigations...

Intel today released IGC 1.0.17193.4 as the newest version of the Intel Graphics Compiler that is used for their compute stack on Windows/Linux as well as by their Windows graphics driver for shader compilation...

As a follow-up to last week's AMD Zen 5 overview with the Ryzen 9000 series and Ryzen AI 300 series, today the embargo has lifted on some additional Zen 5 CPU core details.

While not as notable as the nice EXT4 performance optimization making it into Linux 6.11 or features like XFS real-time FITRIM and self-healing Bcachefs on read I/O errors, the Bcachefs, F2FS, and Btrfs file-systems saw smaller updates for the Linux 6.11 kernel cycle...

It's not too often that the ATA pull request for a new Linux kernel merge window has much worth mentioning. With Linux 6.11 there is a change to the kernel defaults worth noting over the default SATA link power management policy. In this case most Linux distributions have been setting a better default themselves and is now a case of the upstream kernel defaults catching up...

The latest video acceleration improvements to report on with the open-source AMD Radeon driver front is support in Mesa 24.3-devel for passing HDR metadata in the AV1 encoder...

The latest printk patches have been submitted and merged for the Linux 6.11 kernel. The printk updates take another step toward the long-in-development work around threaded console printing / non-blocking "NBCON" consoles as the last major step to allow the real-time "RT" kernel patches to land...

Intel's OSPRay ray-tracing engine as part of their oneAPI rendering toolkit continues to serve as a great, scalable and portable RT engine for high fidelity visualizations. With OSPRay 3.2 released today, they continue advancing this open-source engine further...

The upstream Linux 6.11 kernel is making it easier to build a Pacman package of the kernel for use on Arch Linux and other Arch derived distributions relying on Pacman...

Ahead of launch for new discrete/integrated graphics backed by open-source Linux drivers, it can often be difficult to ascertain the level of support pre-launch given the complexity of today's GPUs, we are past the days of long monolithic patch series for new hardware enablement, and also not knowing about what features may be added for the next-generation hardware. But if latest Mesa developer comments hold, it looks like for Intel Xe2 graphics the open-source Vulkan driver at least has "most" of the code now in place...

DRM subsystem lead maintainer David Airlie recently submitted the DRM-Next pull request for merging into Linux 6.11. All of that Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) feature code has landed for the many kernel graphics/display driver updates along with changes to the few AI accelerator "accel" drivers also part of the tree. As usual, the Intel Xe/i915 and AMD AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel drivers see a bulk of the upstream open-source graphics improvements...

NVIDIA today released their first Linux beta driver in the new R560 driver release branch. Coming days after their NVIDIA 560 Windows driver, out this morning is the NVIDIA 560.28.03 beta Linux driver...

Following up on the previously noted proposal around Fedora Workstation 42 looking at adding opt-in user metrics, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now granted approval for this somewhat controversial feature...

As scheduled, LLVM Clang 19 was branched from mainline Git this morning and is now considered feature frozen ahead of its planned September release. LLVM Clang 20 in turn is now in development with the main Git branch...

We appear to be on the heels of the AMD ROCm 6.2 software release for advancing the open-source AMD Radeon/Instinct GPU compute stack with new features...

Greg Kroah-Hartman described the char/misc pull request for the Linux 6.11 merge window as having "just loads of new drivers and updates." Among the new drivers is beginning to enable support for the KEBA CP500 as the latest FPGA seeing upstream kernel support...

The BSDs unfortunately continue to lag behind Linux in their GPU driver support. The latest example of this is OpenBSD only days ago seeing initial support for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) merged for GPU-accelerated video playback on that BSD platform...

The LoongArch CPU architecture changes were submitted and subsequently merged on Monday for the ongoing Linux 6.11 merge window. With the new kernel these Chinese processors support more kernel features for this MIPS-derived and RISC-V-inspired architecture...

Coming just a day after posting a big set of patches for improving VRR display support under the X.Org Server, Enrico Weigelt today announced the release of the X.Org Testing Ground v0.0.4 software that now supports OpenIndiana / Illumos (OpenSolaris) in addition to its Linux and BSD platform support...

Released this weekend was a new version of WPA_Supplicant along with hostapd for this WiFI Protected Access client and IEEEE-802.1x supplicant. WPA_Supplicant 2.11 is the first major release of this software since early 2022 and as a result comes packing many changes...

We have been eagerly awaiting the end of July for the planned alpha release of System76's Rust-written COSMIC desktop. For those awaiting COSMIC in the form of a new Pop!_OS development release, that at least will be coming in early August...

All of the "perf" performance events feature updates were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.11 merge window...

MidnightBSD 3.2 is out as the newest feature update to one of the few desktop-focused BSD operating systems still being maintained. MidnightBSD 3.2 continues to be derived from FreeBSD sources while shipping with a nice Xfce-based desktop experience...

Open-source developer Enrico Weigelt has in recent months taken to near single-handedly maintain and further enhance the aging X.Org Server codebase. The latest area that Weigelt has been working to improve is around the X.Org Server's Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support...

Andrew Morton on Sunday sent in his "MM" pull requests for Linux 6.11 of the areas of the kernel he manages...

GNU C Library "glibc" 2.40 is now available with more C23 features being enabled as well as some new performance tunables on x86_64 and AArch64 along with other improvements to this widely used libc implementation...

Yann Collet released LZ4 v1.10 today as a major update to this extremely fast compression algorithm. Most significant with LZ4 1.10 is adding multi-threaded compression support for much faster performance with today's modern multi-core processors...

In light of the CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage/disaster that has been wreaking havoc on corporate Windows systems around the world since Friday, systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering pointed out how such a situation on Linux systems could be averted by leveraging systemd's Automatic Boot Assessment functionality...

Way back at the start of 2023, French fabless semiconductor company Kalray posted Linux kernel patches for a "KVX" Linux kernel port to get Linux up and running on their MPPA3-80 "Coolidge" DPU SoC with the KV3-1 CPU architecture. A year and a half later this work still is outside the Linux kernel but finally a third iteration of the KVX Linux kernel port has been posted for review...

Konstantin Komarov with Paragon Software has prepared the latest patches for the NTFS3 kernel driver that is providing the modern NTFS read/write file-system support on Linux systems...

Intel's oneAPI Video Processing Library (VPL) GPU Runtime 2024Q2 release is now available along with an updated quarterly release of the Intel Media Driver...

Back in March were a set of patches to the Linux kernel's XZ embedded compression implementation with the project having switched from public domain to the BSD Zero Clause License along with other changes to update that in-tree code. Since then the notorious XZ backdoor situation was discovered in the upstream XZ project. With those major issues behind, Lasse Collin today sent out an updated set of patches for updating the in-tree XZ code for the Linux kernel...

Just prior to the Mesa 24.2 code branching / feature freeze on Thursday, two merge requests landed working on cleaning up some Mesa interfaces and code modernization...

Kees Cook submitted all of the hardening updates this week for the Linux 6.11 merge window in beefing up the kernel's defenses against various attack vectors and vulnerabilities...

A change proposal was raised this week for upgrading Fedora's LXQt desktop offering to the recently released LXQt 2.0 for the upcoming Fedora 41 release...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates for Linux 6.11 have been merged and it's a very exciting one for AMD EPYC servers with SEV-SNP guest VM support finally being in the mainline kernel...

Palmer Dabbelt on Saturday sent out the RISC-V architecture updates for the ongoing Linux 6.11 merge window...

OpenMandriva ROME 24.07 debuted as stable today for this rolling release model of OpenMandriva. With the new release comes the transition to the KDE Plasma 6 desktop but the OpenMandriva developers aren't yet comfortable enough to use Wayland by default and thus the X11 session is preferred...

Greg Kroah-Hartman on Friday sent out all of the USB/Thunderbolt subsystem feature updates destined for the Linux 6.11 kernel of which there are many different patches across the board...

The crypto subsystem updates have landed for the Linux 6.11 kernel...

With Linux 6.11 support for the Lenovo Yoga Slim7x and ASUS Vivobook S15 are upstreamed for some of the first Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite powered laptops. But for follow-on kernel cycles you can expect yet more Snapdragon X1 Elite/Plus powered laptop support to appear with new DeviceTree additions. On Friday, Linaro engineer Konrad Dybcio sent out the patches for enabling the X1 Elite powered Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 laptop...