Phoronix

Both the GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers today saw support for Intel's Branch Hint extension merged today for this feature of Redwood Cove P cores as found with current generation Meteor Lake processors as well as upcoming Intel Granite Rapids server processors...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.10-rc7 as the latest weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 6.10 kernel...

GDB 15.1 was released on Sunday as the first version in the GNU Debugger 15 branch for this widely-used, open-source debugging solution...

Direct3D 8 support by way of the D8VK project has now been merged into DXVK, the widely relied upon open-source software for mapping Direct3D 9/10/11 atop Vulkan that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying Windows games on Linux...

Ubuntu-based Linux Mint 22 aims for release this month after a busier than usual period of bug fixing...

Upstreamed to the mainline Linux kernel last year was HID BPF as a means of more easily shipping new drivers and in particular quirks/workarounds for different HID devices. This allows for some nice continued innovations around (e)BPF within the Linux kernel. With Linux 6.11 there is yet more HID BPF capabilities to be upstreamed as well as new drivers...

When it comes to (non-Apple) ARM laptops all the excitement these days is around the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC. But for those that happen to have a 5+ year old Lenovo Yoga C630 WOS laptop or come across one in a bargain bin, the Linux kernel is seeing improved support for this older ARM laptop powered by an aging Snadragon 850 SoC...

The Linux kernel's block subsystem for storage is poised to introduce support for atomic writes with the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window...

The latest Linux kernel enablement work for upcoming Intel Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors is perf subsystem support...

This Week in GNOME is out with their newest issue to detail changes made by various GNOME components over the first few days of July...

It's been a busy start to July with KDE developers tackling more features for Plasma 6.2 while continuing to deliver fixes to the modern KDE Plasma desktop stack...

Intel's IDXD driver is what enables the Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) under Linux as found since Sapphire Rapids as part of Intel's accelerator offerings on their Xeon processors. With patches posted today, the IDXD driver will help the hardware recover in case of errors to provide a more robust experience...

Back in Linux 6.9 the Mobileye EyeQ5 SoC support was upstreamed for that MIPS-based platform powering Mobileye's level-5 autonomous driving system. With the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel, support for the newer Mobileye EyeQ6 is being upstreamed...

One of several nice Linux performance optimizations recently by Eric Biggers of Google has been speeding up DM-Verity via multi-buffer hashing. DM-Verity is used for transparent integrity checking of block devices and this multi-buffer hashing code looks like it will land with the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle...

As part of the memory management changes expected to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle is allowing more fine-tuned control over the swappiness setting used to determine how aggressively pages are swapped out of physical system memory and into the on-disk swap space...

While there were plans of adding getrandom() in the vDSO with the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window to speed up user-space random number generation access, Linus Torvalds is unconvinced by the work and intends to reject any pull request with it for Linux 6.11...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released Raspberry Pi OS 2024-07-04 as the newest update to this default operating system for Raspberry Pi ARM single board computers...

A Debian General Resolution was called following a lengthy and contentious period among Debian stakeholders on moving forward tag2upload, a system that lets Debian developers and maintainers more easily carry out source-only uploads by using a signed Git tag...

It's been nearly one decade since Intel began working on 5-level paging support for the Linux kernel to allow for greater virtual and physical address space with expanding memory sizes. The 5-level paging kernel-side bits were upstreamed back in Linux 4.12 in 2017 and enabled by default since 2019 with Linux 5.5. Intel CPUs for a while (since Ice Lake) have supported 5-level paging and AMD CPUs too since Zen 4. The Linux kernel may move to unconditionally enabling 5-level paging support for x86_64 kernel builds...

While Linux 6.10-rc7 is due out this weekend and it's usually around the -rc6 timeframe when is the effective new material cut-off to DRM-Next of new graphics/display driver code aiming for the next kernel cycle, AMD is working to squeeze a bit more in for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle...

Patches have been posted for enabling the ROCK 5 ITX board for working with the mainline Linux kernel...

This month's FEX 2407 release as the open-source emulator for running x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (64-bit ARM) is a big one with now handling AVX/AVX2...

The OpenMandriva ROME 24.07 RC is available for testing over the US holiday weekend or just summer downtime...

Oracle today published their newest release of UEK-Next, their forward-looking version of the "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" targeting Oracle Linux users...

In the making the past two years by developer Jason Donenfeld (of WireGuard fame) is adding getrandom() to the vDSO in the name of better performance. In some tests this has yielded as much as a ~15x speed-up to performance for user-space obtaining crypographically secure random number generation. It's looking like for the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window, this work will finally be merged...

Linux 6.10 introduces DRM Panic for providing a new panic screen in case of kernel errors and situations where the VT support may be disabled. This new kernel functionality is akin to Windows' Blue Screen of Death or thanks to open-source can be adapted to take on other forms such as a black screen of death and conveying monochrome logos rather than ASCII art. New patches provide for the ability to show QR codes of error messages within the DRM Panic screens...

For years Meta/Facebook has been exploring using BOLT with the Linux kernel to optimize the layout of the Linux kernel binary. Since BOLT was upstreamed into LLVM, they've continued work around BOLT'ing the kernel. There is now a public guide for carrying out a BOLT-optimized Linux kernel build and roughly 5% better system performance to expect from such an optimized kernel...

While CentOS 7 reached end of life a few days ago, CentOS Stream 10 as the future basis of RHEL 10 continues advancing along with other ongoing initiatives in the CentOS Stream space...

UC San Diego researchers have gone public with Indirector, high-precision branch target injection attacks on the indirect branch predictor. This UCSD security researchers found Indirector impacting recent Intel Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors. Intel believes though that no further mitigations are required...

Two years after originally posting patches for working on Unified Shared Memory (USM) support for OpenMP with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), there is finally an updated patch-set for implementing this shared memory functionality with both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs...

A new Ubuntu utility seeing an uptick in development recently is crypto-config as a means of system-wide cryptography configuration...

The GNU Hurd team has put out their Q2'2024 status update to outline recent activity around this micro-kernel platform...

The RADV Radeon Vulkan driver in Mesa 24.2-devel has received support for task shaders with the NVIDIA Device Generated Commands "DGC" extension...

A new preview release is available of Microsoft's Azure Linux 3.0 operating system...

In addition to proposed opt-in data metrics collection and the new web-based installer UI, some of the other early proposals for Fedora Linux 42 that isn't due out until April of 2025 is expanding the possibilities for unprivileged users...

The Intel kernel graphics driver code being queued for the Linux 6.11 kernel already has added the initial Intel Battlemage PCI IDs, Battlemage display support, eDP Panel Replay support, Hardware Replay to help with hang debugging, SR-IOV preparations, and more Lunar Lake / Xe2 enablement. Today another unexpected last minute pull request was submitted of a bit more Xe driver code...

Back in May there were Linux kernel patches posted as a workaround for Arm CPU errata around the Speculative Store Bypass (SSB) handling. Initially this workaround was just noted as the Cortex-X4 and Neoverse-V3 as being affected, but now it turns out many more exciting Arm processor cores are impacted...

Nearly every Linux kernel cycle has bought patches to bump the version of the Rust language targeted by the kernel as it worked toward having a suitable minimum version. With the latest Linux kernel patches, it looks like we may be finally approaching the point where a safe minimum version can be specified and for the Linux kernel to in turn allow supporting multiple different versions of the Rust compiler...

LLVM Clang 19 this morning landed initial support for the -std=c2y and -std=gnu2y options for targeting the next C programming language standard...

A change proposal has been filed by Red Hat engineer Miro Hronok for retiring Python 2.7 within Fedora 41 and to drop packages still depending upon Python 2...

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system is out with its monthly development summary that notes some interesting work taking place...

Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek has released Miracle-WM v0.3 as the newest version of this Wayland tiling compositor built atop Mir. Miracle-WM is beginning to be useful and practical enough for daily driving by its lead developer...

The kernel powering Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) has long been using the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel while finally it's now upgraded past that aging long-term support kernel and onto the current Linux 6.6 LTS series...

Vulkan 1.3.289 was released at the end of last week with a handful of clarifications/corrections to the Vulkan API specification plus one new maintenance extension...

Intel engineers today released version 2.22 of libva, the driver-agnostic library for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). Most notable with libva 2.22 is adding a new interface for Versatile Video Coding (VVC / H.266)...

With the start of the new month comes the Steam Survey hardware/software details for the month prior. The June 2024 results show a decline to the Steam on Linux marketshare but staying above the magic 2% threshold...

Data collection around users tends to be a very touchy subject in the Linux/open-source world even when opt-in and Fedora Workstation 42 has just seen a proposal raised to do just that. If approved the Fedora Workstation 42 release would roll-out an opt-in metrics system of anonymous user information from system settings to hardware information and desktop usage patterns...

AMD's Radeon Developer Tool Suite from their GPUOpen group has now migrated to the Qt6 graphical toolkit...

Linux Mint has kicked off the start of July by releasing the beta of Linux Mint 22 "Wilma" as the next iteration of their desktop distribution built atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and with plans to support it until 2029...

In part for preparing for upcoming Linux testing of AMD Ryzen AI 300 series laptops, I've been re-benchmarking various Intel/AMD laptops around the lab at Phoronix. In today's article is a fresh look at how the existing AMD Zen 4 laptop performance in the form of the popular Framework 13 and Framework 16 laptops is competing with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H "Meteor Lake" SoC while using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and upgrading to the latest Linux 6.10 development kernel as well as the newest Mesa open-source graphics driver support.