Phoronix

Due to yesterday's Native BHI vulnerability disclosure affecting all Intel processors with this variant of Branch History Injection (BHI) not requiring BPF to exploit, a slew of new Linux kernel stable releases are out today to back-port this security mitigation...

While the Gentoo Foundation has long existed, to reduce the organizational complexity and overhead as well as becoming effectively a tax deductible non-profit at the US federal level, Gentoo Linux has become an associated project with Software in the Public Interest (SPI)...

Microsoft's Azure Linux formerly known as CBL-Mariner for their in-house Linux distribution is out with a new version. Azure Linux 2.0.20240403 was released overnight and comes with a number of security updates and other fixes...

Following yesterday's news of Canonical launching Ubuntu Pro For Devices, the latest mobile/embedded news in the Ubuntu space this week is Canonical partnering with Qualcomm...

For several years Intel has been developing the OpenCL Intercept Layer to assist in debugging OpenCL software. It's been nearly two years since the last release of this open-source OpenCL interception layer while today brings v3.0.4 with a number of optimizations and new features...

Sent out this morning were a batch of x86 platform driver fixes by Intel engineer and platform-drivers-x86 co-maintainer Ilpo Jarvinen. Besides a couple of fixes, worth mentioning is the Intel HID driver seeing support added for upcoming Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake platforms...

UPower as the abstraction layer for enumerating power devices on Linux systems and allowing various battery / power supply features is out with a new feature update...

Disclosed back in March 2022 was Branch History Injection (BHI) as a new Spectre vulnerability affecting Intel and Arm CPUs. Then in July of 2022 were patches for Intel working on hardware-based prevention for Spectre-BHI attacks. Now two years later the Linux kernel is seeing mitigations added for the native Branch History Injection vulnerability given a new "Native BHI" variant...

Since SiFive ceased production of the HiFive Unleashed developer board we've been clamoring for a new and more powerful RISC-V developer board... Today SiFive announced the HiFive Premier P550 as a new developer system offering that will be available this summer...

Intel is using its Vision 2024 conference in Arizona today to announce the Gaudi 3 AI accelerator. With Gaudi 3 comes some rather bold AI claims from Intel: 50% on average better inference and 40% on average better power efficiency than the NVIDIA H100. All while costing "a fraction" of the NVIDIA H100. Gaudi 3 sounds quite promising and will be interesting to see how its adopted in the marketplace. In addition, Intel also is disclosing the new Xeon 6 branding for their upcoming server processors formerly codenamed Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids.

Similar to Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure spinning their own Arm-based processors for their data centers, Google Cloud today announced the Google Axion Processors that will be available in the future...

OpenSSL 3.3 is out today as the latest major feature release for this widely-used SSL library...

In addition to working on NOVA as a Rust-based, GSP-focused NVIDIA open-source kernel graphics driver being developed as the eventual successor to the existing Nouveau DRM kernel driver, over in user-space Mesa developers have begun landing a portion of their Nouveau/NVK driver library code rewritten in Rust...

One year in the making, NVIDIA's code for explicit GPU synchronization in XWayland along with the X.Org Server DRI3 and Present extensions has now been merged! This is a big culmination of all the recent work around Wayland explicit synchronization and notably takes care of a number of NVIDIA driver problems on Wayland in the process...

Linux Mint is working on providing "ultra fast" repositories for users obtaining system updates and installing new packages on this popular desktop Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu...

Complementing Canonical's existing Ubuntu Pro subscription service for expanded security maintenance, live kernel patching, compliance and hardening, real-time kernel flavor support, and other enterprise/support add-ons, Canonical today announced Ubuntu Pro For Devices...

An earlier fix to the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA kernel graphics driver with the new GPU System Processor (GSP) code path had fixed RTX 20 "Turing" GPU support but inadvertently broke the RTX 30 "Ampere" support. David Airlie sent out an urgent new fix today for addressing that regression in the NVIDIA GSP display code...

AMD is using the Embedded World conference in Bavaria for today introducing their Versal Series Gen 2 SoCs for AI-driven embedded systems. Today's embargo lift covers the Versal AI Edge Series Gen 2 and Versal Prime Series Gen 2 Adaptive SoCs...

Following the plans going back to 2022 for Fedora 39 to use DNF5 but last summer deemed weren't ready and then delayed DNF5 to Fedora 41 due to the RHEL10 branching from Fedora 40, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now given their sign-off for the updated package manager in F41...

For those making use of AES-XTS crypto for the likes of disk and file encryption on x86_64 CPUs, the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle is bringing some very tantalizing improvements especially if you are running recent AMD and Intel processors. With AMD Zen 4 processors the benefits can be as much as 155% faster while even Intel Ice Lake and Sapphire Rapids server processors can enjoy 127~151% faster AES-XTS-256...

With a few weeks having passed since the KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop release along with some point releases for addressing initial fall-out, I've been meaning to run some Plasma 6.0 Linux gaming performance benchmarks. I'll have up some interesting metrics soon using Fedora 40 while for this initial article is a look at the KDE Plasma 6.0 gaming performance between the Wayland and X11 sessions atop KDE Neon. Then similarly are the results for GNOME Shell with its X11 and Wayland sessions.

Engineers at the KDAB consulting firm have begun experimenting with embedding the Rust-written Servo web engine inside Qt software using CXX-Qt...

Following the launch last week of the AMD Ryzen Embedded 8000 Series, SolidRun today announced the Bedrock R8000 as the first industrial PCs designed around these new Ryzen Embedded 8000 series SoCs...

With the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle, the RISC-V architecture code is seeing kernel-mode FPU. This kernel floating point support is needed for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and particular its DCN display code. In turn this should allow recent AMD Radeon graphics cards to work on RISC-V with display support using the company's open-source driver stack...

It's been a long journey but Valve's Samuel Pitoiset has now enabled VK_EXT_shader_object support by default with Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" for the upcoming Mesa 24.1 release...

DTrace used to be one of the Solaris features long sought after by Linux developers but over time the Linux kernel tracing capabilities have improved and Oracle has been supporting DTrace on Linux now for years without too much fanfare. DTrace 2.0.0-1.14 was released this past week as the latest iteration of this user-space implementation that builds off the Linux kernel tracing functionality like BPF...

For those running the official Raspberry Pi OS on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 series single board computers, the Mesa V3DV Vulkan driver is now shipping by default to provide for a better out-of-the-box experience...

Linux 6.9-rc3 is released and most notable are the Bcachefs fixes to which Torvalds quipped, "if you had a corrupted bcachefs filesystem you'd probably want this, and if you thought bcachefs was stable already, I have a bridge to sell you. Special deal only for you, real cheap." Plus various other fixes throughout...

Similar to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Fedora 39, and other recent Linux distributions increasing its vm.max_map_count default in order to satisfy some Windows games running under Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and other memory-intensive software, Arch Linux is also increasing its default value...

While recently there has been more Linux distribution vendor interest in evaluating x86-64-v2 and/or x86-64-v3 baselines for future Linux distribution releases as well as offering optimized packages for higher x86-64 baselines either for x86-64-v3 with being able to assume AVX/AVX2 or in the x86-64-v4 level where AVX-512 is introduced, the prospect of x86-64 micro-architecture feature levels for future processors isn't clear...

Framework Computer as the company behind the popular Framework 13 and Framework 16 upgradeable/modular laptops is hiring for an open-source firmware developer...

For confidential computing "CoCo" virtual machines where the VM host is assumed to be un-trusted and aims to be as isolated as possible, RdRand hardware random number generator instructions are one of the limited sources of entropy for guest VMs. Right now RdRand can fail and the CoCo guest VMs will continue to boot albeit with limited or no entropy to see the VM's random number generation. But being merged today as part of x86 fixes for Linux 6.9 is now requiring seeding RNG with RdRand for CoCo environments otherwise a kernel panic...

One of the latest areas being worked on for enabling Rust programming language use within the Linux kernel is for CPU frequency "CPUFreq" scaling drivers...

A new version of the Debian Policy Manual has been published that outlines the policy requirements for Debian around the package archive and various design matters of the platform...

Last month I wrote about the V3D kernel graphics driver preparing for 1MB "super pages" support to help boost the performance for this open-source Broadcom DRM driver most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi single board computers. The latest iteration of these patches have now been posted for supporting both super pages and big pages...

With the recent Mesa 24.1 support for Wayland explicit sync with Vulkan drivers, GNOME merging explicit sync support, Wayland-Protocols 1.34 introducing linux-drm-syncobj, and XWayland explicit sync also nearing the state of being merged, there's been much talk recently about Wayland explicit sync. KDE KWin developer Xaver Hugl has written a detailed blog post for those interested in the topic...

In addition to KDE's busy week of development work, GNOME developers have also been busy working on features like improving the systemd-homed integration and beginning to work on mock-ups for an OS installer...

KDE developers have had another busy week working on fixes for Plasma 6.0 while simultaneously preparing new features for Plasma 6.1...

Back in 2022 Cloudflare began talking about replacing Nginx with their own in-house, Rust-written code called Pingora, talked about Pingora more in 2023, and then this past February made this Pingora framework open-source for creating reliable and fast networked systems. Today marks the first official release of Pingora with the v0.1 tag...

Wine 9.6 has just been issued as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications under Linux...

Veteran Linux kernel developer Peter Zijlstra is working to wrap-up feature work around the EEVDF kernel scheduler code...

The OpenZFS file-system has merged support for using multiple task queues (TaskQs) to enhance performance for multi-core systems...

OpenBLAS 0.3.27 is out as the newest version of this prominent open-source Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) library...

Richard Hughes of Red Hat has published Fwupd 1.9.16 as the newest update to this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems that pairs with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for easy firmware redistribution...

The very exciting FFmpeg 7.0 multimedia library has been released! FFmpeg 7.0 rolls out most notably the new native VVC decoder that is currently experimental for supporting Versatile Video Coding as well as introducing the multi-threaded FFmpeg CLI tool...

Following the Intel Linux kernel graphics driver patches last month adding two new DG2/Alchemist PCI IDs that when digging through the Intel Compute Runtime sources were confirmed as the Arc Graphics A580E and A750E, the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers have now added support for these new graphics processors...

Theo de Raadt has released OpenBSD 7.5 as the newest version of this security-focused BSD operating system. With OpenBSD 7.5 there is a number of improvements for ARM (AArch64) hardware, never-ending kernel optimizations and other tuning work, countless package updates, and other adjustments to this popular BSD platform...

OpenCL 3.0 debuted back in 2020 and while we haven't heard talks of any major revision on the horizon, it does continue to see new point releases. Released on Thursday was OpenCL 3.0.16 that adds one new extension while finalizing eight formerly provisional extensions...

Following up on their tweet earlier this week that they would be working to open-source more of their GPU software stack and hardware documentation, AMD now says they will be releasing documentation followed by the source code for their Micro-Engine Scheduler (MES) IP block found within Radeon GPUs...

After years being used by Ubuntu Server/Cloud, Ubuntu 23.10 began making use of Canonical's Netplan declarative network configuration software and now Netplan is fully ready to take on all duties with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. After seven years of development, Netplan 1.0 is ready for primetime use from servers to desktops...