Phoronix

After a very exciting two weeks, the merge window for Linux 6.7 is now wrapped up and Linus Torvalds has published Linux 6.7-rc1 as the first release candidate leading up to the stable release around the end of the calendar year...

The Linux 6.7 merge window has been downright exciting with additions like Nouveau GSP support and the Bcachefs file-system being added. It's also been downright massive as one of the largest merge windows in recent history in terms of code changes. Here's some statistics of the Linux 6.7 merge window ahead of today's Linux 6.7-rc1 release...

The USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates were merged a few days ago for Linux 6.7. As Greg Kroah-Hartman put it in the pull request, "nothing really major in here, just lots of constant development for new hardware."..

While Intel hasn't released a new Atom SoC in years on the consumer side, thanks to the work by Red Hat engineers and others in the open-source community, even drivers for aging Intel Atom platforms continue to receive improvements. One of the areas of ongoing work has been the Linux kernel driver for the Atom ISP camera interface for image signal processing in supporting the web camera on some of these old devices. With Linux 6.7 there is yet more work on the Intel Atom ISP driver...

OBS Studio 30.0 was released as stable this evening as the latest version of this cross-platform software that is popular for screen-casting and widely-used by game streamers...

The Intel-developed Turbostat Linux CLI utility for reporting processor frequency and idle statistics is seeing a number of feature updates for Linux 6.7 as well as new hardware support...

One of the great aspects of Intel integrated and discrete graphics is the broad support for Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV). Intel "Gen12" graphics back to Tigerlake can handle SR-IOV when there aren't any firmware woes or other issues at play. There is SR-IOV support currently with the i915 kernel driver but Intel engineers are working to architect optimal SR-IOV integration into their forthcoming Xe DRM kernel driver...

While it was supposed to ship back in H1'2023, FFmpeg 6.1 finally released last night as the newest feature update to this widely-used multimedia library...

It's been an exciting week in the KDE space as along with releasing Plasma 6.0 Alpha, they have also committed to shipping Plasma 6.0 with the Wayland session being enabled by default...

Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers has introduced their first Ryzen 7040 series "Zen 4" Linux laptop in the form of the Pulse 14 Gen 3...

Wine 8.20 is out today and it takes care of quite a vintage bug report... A feature request from 2010 to be able to register URL protocol handlers under Linux...

In addition to the many x86/x86_64 and AArch64 improvements this round for Linux 6.7, on the RISC-V architecture side are some exciting kernel advancements too...

With recently picking up the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 powered by the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U and given the recent release of Fedora 39, I found it to be a nice time to provide a Lenovo ThinkPad retrospect of how the AMD Ryzen laptop Linux performance has evolved the past few generations. In today's article is a look at how the AMD Ryzen 7 mobile series laptop performance has evolved going back to Zen 2 for various ThinkPad models while all testing was carried out on the brand new Fedora Workstation 39 Linux release.

Slint as a reminder is a Rust-written open-source graphical toolkit that on Linux uses Qt currently underneath. Slint has been making good progress on its goals and today marks the availability of Slint 1.3...

Since announcing AVX10 earlier this year, Intel compiler engineers have been quite busy preparing the open-source compiler toolchains like GCC and LLVM/Clang for this next iteration of Advanced Vector Extensions. On Thursday night the latest AVX10.1 work was posted for the GNU Compiler Collection ahead of its upcoming feature freeze...

Recently there has been a fair amount of work done to clean-up the Intel/AMD x86 CPU microcode loading (also used by x86_64 CPUs) on Linux that has now been merged for Linux 6.7...

Vulkan 1.3.270 is out this morning as the latest routine spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API. In addition to the usual assortment of minor fixes/clarifications, there is one new extension this time around...

Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is known for their work on the AV1 video codec and AVIF image file format while now they have released their first royalty-free audio specification...

FreeBSD developers have been busy preparing for the release of FreeBSD 14 as well as making a variety of enhancements to this leading BSD operating system...

While AMD officially supports a much narrower range of more recent Radeon hardware with their official graphics drivers for Windows (and Linux - as it pertains to their Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver and AMDVLK official Vulkan driver), thanks to the open-source community around AMD's open-source driver code there are always nifty things that come about... As I wrote about earlier this year, an independent developer has been striving to bring Vulkan to the Radeon HD 6000 series. Yes, the 13 year old "Northern Islands" graphics processors...

The IOMMU changes for Linux 6.7 aren't particularly noteworthy besides adding SMMUv2 support for the Qualcomm SDM670 and SM7150 SoCs. But the IOMMU updates also take the kernel one step away from supporting Shared Virtual Addressing (SVA) on AMD platforms in the near future...

Valve just announced the Steam Deck OLED as an upgraded version of their Steam Deck handheld Linux gaming device...

In addition to the OpenZFS code this week landing sync parallelism to improve write performance scalability, another shiny new feature was also merged: RAIDZ expansion...

Cloud Hypervisor 36 has been released as this Rust-written VMM that started out as an Intel open-source project that since was folded into the Linux Foundation umbrella with support from Microsoft, Arm, and other vendors. More recently even the likes of AMD and Ampere Computing have been onboard with this cloud and security focused virtualization hypervisor...

Andrew Morton last week sent out all of the memory management "MM" changes for the Linux 6.7 kernel for which there is a lot of code churn...

Since the release of TuxClocker 1.0 back in September, this open-source and independently-developed overclocking/performance utility for Linux systems has been quick to tack on new features and rolling out new versions. A release candidate for TuxClocker 1.3 was issued a few days ago with yet more AMD graphics card controls...

Mesa 23.3-rc3 was released on Wednesday night as the newest weekly release candidate ahead of the Mesa 23.3 release as this quarter's feature series for this collection of OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers...

With the MIPS CPU architecture at the end of the road in light of RISC-V and LoongArch, there isn't much going on when it comes to MIPS development for the Linux kernel. Most cycles these days just brings bug fixes and removing old/unmaintained platforms. The latest MIPS platform now being removed is AR7 with Linux 6.7...

As mentioned last week, merged for the Linux 6.7 kernel is NVIDIA GSP firmware support in the Nouveau driver so that these NVIDIA firmware blobs can handle hardware initialization and power management related tasks. This support is optional right now for the GeForce RTX 20 / RTX 30 series hardware with Nouveau but necessary if wanting better performance via re-clocking the GPUs. The GSP firmware is a mandatory requirement for Nouveau with the NVIDIA RTX 40 GPUs and moving forward...

NetBSD 10 has been in development since late 2019 and the beta release is already a year old while now it's up to the release candidate phase with the availability of NetBSD 10-RC1...

There's been a number of patches quietly landing for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver by AMD engineers in making various clean-ups and appearing to prepare for future adjustments to the driver in eventually extending the support beyond the current RDNA3 "GFX11" graphics hardware...

The Multi-Function Device (MFD) updates were sent out last week for the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel for these drivers catering to heterogeneous hardware blocks...

Today marks the on-time alpha release of the "KDE 6th Megarelease" -- this encompasses the KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop, KDE Frameworks 6 libraries, and KDE Gear applications...

Microsoft engineers continue working on the Mesa drivers as part of their effort for implementing various industry standard APIs atop Direct3D 12. This support can be used in cases of Windows drivers lacking for these APIs as well as being used within WSL for the graphics support while relying on D3D12 with the host environment...

The staging changes for Linux 6.7 are on the heavier side in part due to many new contributors from Outreachy mailing in their first kernel patches with various minor fixes. But staging is also lightened up a bit by dropping a wired Ethernet and wireless driver as part of the ongoing kernel effort to remove unused and old WiFi drivers...

With Linux 6.7 the EROFS read-only file-system intended primarily for mobile devices and containers is considering their MicroLZMA compression support as stable...

Microsoft yesterday published CBL-Mariner 2.0.20231106 as the newest version of their in-house Linux distribution that is used for a variety of services from Azure to WSL...

FEX 2311 is out today as the newest version of this emulator for running x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on AArch64 systems...

Ankur Arora of Oracle on Tuesday sent out a set of 86 patches for making the Linux kernel preemptible. This is based on earlier work by prominent Linux kernel engineer Thomas Gleixner...

GIMP 2.10.36 was released on Tuesday for this long-running stable series of this open-source Adobe Photoshop alternative while GIMP 3.0 has been very slow to materialize...

Following last week's merging of the Bcachefs file-system into Linux 6.7, a secondary set of updates were merged today for adding a few new features as well as some fixes for this newly-merged Linux file-system...

A very enticing performance optimization was merged yesterday into the OpenZFS codebase to enhance the write performance scalability...

Following last month's launch of the Intel Arc Graphics A580 for a sub-$200 graphics card backed by an open-source Linux driver stack I ran some benchmarks looking at the Intel Arc Graphics compute performance against NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack. In today's article is a fresh look at the 1080p Linux gaming/graphics performance across Intel Arc Graphics, AMD Radeon, and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs while using the latest Linux drivers.

The Rust-written Servo browser engine that started at Mozilla but now developed by Linux Foundation Europe with contributors from Igalia and other organizations has been enjoying a fruitful 2023...

In addition to Canonical continuing to invest in developing Mir as a platform now built atop Wayland, over the past year Canonical developers have been quietly working on Miriway as a Mir-based Wayland compositor and it's becoming iteratively more useful...

While there is now the 4th Gen EPYC processors with the exciting and vast line-up from the very powerful general purpose Genoa(X) processors and Bergamo for CSPs and very dense servers to Siena for telco/edge, the 3rd Gen EPYC "Milan(X)" processors remain very viable. Especially for those seeking to minimize hardware costs, seeking very mature platforms, or looking to upgrade existing EPYC SP3 servers, the EPYC 7003 series remains quite competitive. Today AMD formally announced six new Milan processors...

While delayed by several weeks compared to their initial release goals, today marks the availability of Fedora 39 as a wonderful upgrade to this popular Linux distribution...

Ahead of the all-important Ubuntu 24.04 LTS cycle dubbed the "Noble Numbat", Canonical is making a technology preview of Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) available for Ubuntu 23.10...

Back at the OCP Summit in Prague earlier this year AMD detailed openSIL for advancing open-source system firmware by opening up the CPU silicon initialization process. An update was provided at the OCP San Jose event in October around the AMD OpenSIL effort...

The HID subsystem updates for the Linux 6.7 kernel don't bring any shiny new features or notable hardware support additions, but there is a clean-up to the Logitech HID++ (logitech-hidpp) driver probing code as well as some notable quirks/fixes to different hardware...