Phoronix

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.

Qualcomm has begun landing performance optimizations into the GNU C Library "glibc" for benefiting their new Oryon-1 CPU cores as found in the Snapdragon X Elite/Plus SoCs...

GNOME's Mutter 46.2-1ubuntu0.24.04.1 package was uploaded on Friday for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS users. This Mutter compositor update not only brings Mutter 46.2 changes to this current Ubuntu release but also pulls in all of the 46.1 upstream changes too...

Linux developer Stefan Wahren has been working on adding support for suspend-to-idle (s2idle) to the Raspberry Pi single board computers. It's working and there are power-savings benefits, but the downside is that initially the support is just for older Raspberry Pi boards...

Qualys went public today with a security vulnerability they have discovered within the OpenSSH server that could lead to remote, unauthenticated code execution...

With the month of June wrapped up, here is a look back at the most popular open-source/Linux news and reviews from notable hardware launches to a lot of exciting kernel activity...

AMD on Friday sent out another round of AMDGPU/AMDKFD patches for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.11 merge window opening up in about two weeks...

Arch Linux built EndeavourOS has released new install media in celebrating the project's fifth anniversary. Making this 5th anniversary release all the more exciting is the project has restored support for EndeavourOS on ARM...

GNOME 47 Alpha is approaching in the coming days and on Sunday evening the "47.alpha" versions were declared for GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor. This alpha milestone is a big one with seeing enhanced VR headset support, the ability to build Wayland-only desktop environments, GNOME Shell accent color integration, and other Wayland improvements...

The Linux 6.10 kernel cycle continues trending along nominally and giving hope for an on-time stable kernel release in two weeks...

The RISC-V kernel port with Linux 6.11 is introducing the ability to handle memory hot plugging/unplugging...

For those interested in laptops powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite SoC, it's looking like the ASUS Vivobook S15 model could be one of the first devices with decent Linux support. There are patches undergoing review for upstreaming the ASUS Vivobook S 15 DeviceTree support so that much of the basic functionality is working under Linux but various features are known to be broken...

The Etnaviv kernel graphics driver that provides reverse-engineered open-source support for Vivante graphics (and NPU) IP has seen a fresh round of patches ready to go for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.11 cycle kicking off in mid-July...

With the first half of the year drawing to a close, here is a look back at the most popular content on Phoronix so far in 2024. Year to date there has been 1,530 original news articles so far and 78 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles written by your's truly. There has been a lot happening in 2024 from Linux kernel improvements to exciting new hardware and other open-source advances...

Merged on Saturday ahead of today's Linux 6.10-rc6 release is the latest batch of x86 platform driver changes. Notable as part of this week's fixes is improving support for the very latest (2024) LG laptop models...

For those on the Debian stable train, Debian 12.6 is out this weekend as the newest point release to Debian Bookworm...

For the Branch History Injection variant of Spectre (Spectre BHI) there is a patch pending to add a new mitigation option for that two year old CPU security vulnerability...

The Open-Source Firmware Foundation is out with an interesting blog post by Google firmware engineer Subrata Banik around adapting the Coreboot-based Chrome AP Firmware for 64-bit booting. The transition to 64-bit booting is happening for the system firmware powering Chromebooks and other Chrome devices and is driven in part for Intel Panther Lake generation hardware...

This Week in GNOME is out with the latest summary to highlight all of the interesting changes this week...

Niri 0.1.7 is out today as the latest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor. While the version number may not signify it, Niri 0.1.7 is quite a notable feature update...

KDE developers have still been busy addressing early fallout from the Plasma 6.1 desktop that released earlier this month while also beginning more feature activity for Plasma 6.2...

Wine 9.12 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release and in passing roughly the half-way point before Wine 10.0 stable enters the sights for early 2025...

On top of already having queued Intel Battlemage display support and the Battlemage device PCI IDs and other Intel kernel graphics driver features like hardware hang replays, Intel engineers today sent out another batch of "drm-intel-next" material slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle...

The Rust-written Servo web layout engine continues progressing for this open-source project now stewarded by the Linux Foundation Europe and seeing code contribution from a range of developers. They have published their June 2024 status update to outline the latest accomplishments for this alternative web engine...

The DRM Panic handler in Linux 6.10 that is used for presenting a visual error message in case of kernel panics and similar when CONFIG_VT is disabled continues seeing new features. This is the Linux equivalent to Windows' Blue Screen of Death or in the case of DRM Panic can also be a black screen of death. With Linux 6.11, the DRM Panic display can now handle monochrome logos...