Phoronix

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...

In addition to the continued FUTEX2 improvements that landed in Linux 6.7, another pull request merged last week for the new kernel bring FUTEX support to IO_uring...

A set of 53 patches were upstreamed on Monday for syncing Mesa 24.0-devel against the latest Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver changes carried by Asahi Linux. This in turn is a big push for getting more of the open-source OpenGL functionality into Mesa for enjoying Linux on Apple M1 and M2 hardware...

Last week's locking set of changes for the Linux 6.7 kernel add new interfaces for the FUTEX2 system call ABI. This work is making FUTEX2 more extendable and addressing some of the prior limitations...

Going back to early last year saw AMD Linux engineers posting PerfMonV2 patches in preparation for Zen 4 processors. The PerfMonV2 updated performance monitoring capabilities with Zen 4 were merged last year and are supported with the latest EPYC 8004/9004 series processors. Coming only now though to Linux 6.7 is support for Unified Memory Controller (UMC) events as part of PerfMonV2...

While the next revision of the C standard won't see its formal publishing until the 2024 calendar year, the ISO C standards committee already decided on keeping "C23" as the informal name for this next major C update. As such, with today's GCC 14 Git the -std=c23 compiler option for targeting C23 is now honored along with -std=gnu23 for the GNU dialect of C23...

Systemd 255-rc1 is out this morning and it's packed with even more features for this dominant Linux init system and a growing list of other system utilities. Systemd 255 even is introducing systemd-bsod as a "Blue Screen of Death" for displaying important error messages during boot failure, systemd-vmspawn as a new tool to spawn virtual machines, and other new features...

After more than two years of work, a patch series was posted this weekend for a "fully functional" ffmpeg multi-threaded command-line application with multi-threaded transcoding pipelines being wired up...

"FIREFOX DEVELOPMENT IS MOVING FROM MERCURIAL TO GIT," began the email today from Mozilla announcing Firefox is finally shifting over to Git!..

A wide variety of x86 platform driver changes were merged for the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel from new hardware support to improving the state of Linux on various Intel/AMD laptops...

Released last week was the newest version of Hangover, the project from Wine developers for helping Wine run on non-x86 CPU architectures for ultimately helping to make it easier to run x86/x86_64 Windows games/applications more easily on Linux AArch64, POWER, and RISC-V environments. The main focus still so far though is about allowing these Windows apps/games on ARM Linux systems...

Since the AMD Inception vulnerability was made public in August there were kernel patches merged that day and since then there's been a few rounds of clean-ups and fixes for this mitigation code formally known as the Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO). With Linux 6.7, more SRSO mitigation clean-ups have been merged...

The NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver is an open-source independently-developed project that implements the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) atop NVIDIA's NVDEC interface so that software like Mozilla Firefox can enjoy video hardware acceleration on Linux using NVIDIA's proprietary driver...

The ReactOS project today published their latest newesletter that outlines development progress made in recent months for this open-source operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Windows device drivers and application/user-space software...

LXQt 1.4 debuted today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Qt desktop environment that was formed years ago as the merging of the LXDE and Razor-qt projects...

The first week of the Linux 6.7 merge window began with the surprise of the Bcachefs file-system being merged and now capping off the first week is another surprise... Nouveau GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware integration that allows making use of NVIDIA's binary GSP firmware on RTX 20 "Turing" and newer GPUs for having improved support. In turn this GSP route also provides initial support for GeForce RTX 40 series support...

The hardening updates for the Linux 6.7 kernel bring a new hardening configuration profile to help in building a security hardened kernel with some sane defaults...

The Linux kernel's subsystem for Compute Express Link that is playing a vital role in servers moving forward continues picking up new features and evolving the code-base as more CXL hardware enters the world...

As part of the effort to make GNOME Terminal and the VTE terminal emulator library render faster, the GNOME Terminal has been seeing more work lately in being ported over to using the GTK 4 toolkit. Additionally, the VTE terminal library has been working to overcome its long-standing 40 FPS rendering cap...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues to be improved upon in the mainline Linux kernel and with the ongoing v6.7 merge window has received some additional enhancements...

Blosc (c-blosc2) is a high performance compressor focused on binary data for efficient storage of large binary data-sets in-memory or on-disk and helping to speed-up memory-bound computations...

Linux 6.6 saw EEVDF merged and Intel hybrid cluster scheduling re-introduced. The core scheduler improvements merged this past week for the in-development Linux 6.7 isn't quite as exciting but still there are some healthy scheduler improvements this round...

Mesa's Rust-based OpenCL implementation "Rusticl" has added initial support for the cl_khr_gl_sharing extension for working on OpenGL and OpenCL interoperability...

The Linux 6.7 sound subsystem changes submitted this week by maintainer Takashi Iwai include support for a number of new audio devices/platforms...

Recently there was some tuning in Mesa Git for helping with higher quality Radeon video encoding on Linux for GPUs using Video Core Next (VCN). Similar tuning has now been back-ported for older Radeon GPUs using the VCE encode engine and UVD video decoding...

The crypto subsystem updates for the Linux 6.7 kernel includes the usual churn like various crypto acceleration updates for different SoCs and other routine changes plus is also limiting the role of some insecure and/or obsolete crypto hashing algorithms...

The KDE Plasma 6 Alpha release is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, 8 November, along with the soft feature freeze for Plasma 6.0 at that time...

FreeBSD 14.0-RC4 was issued today and as a last minute change they have decided to keep (non-PNP) ISA and GIANT-locked drivers around until FreeBSD 15...

Last year Intel made available a packaged "Arc Graphics Driver" for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and later Ubuntu 23.04 to provide a DKMS-backported kernel driver and packaged Mesa driver to make it easier to use Arc Graphics (DG2/Alchemist) during the phase when the upstream kernel support was still stabilizing and not yet found out-of-the-box on Linux distributions at the time. This week marked another rare update for this packaged driver...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes were sent out on Thursday for the Linux 6.7 merge window...

The biggest surprise this week so far with the Linux 6.7 merge window has been the landing of the Bcachefs file-system. Here is an early look at Bcachefs with Linux 6.7 and some preliminary benchmarks.

As with each kernel cycle, the networking subsystem updates for Linux 6.7 are heavy with a wide assortment of core networking infrastructure improvements, (e)BPF features continue to be tacked on, and new wired and wireless network hardware is supported...

The AppArmor Linux security system has picked up a few improvements and new features with the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel...

One of the great open-source achievements for 2023 was DreamWorks Animation open-sourcing their MoonRay renderer as the OpenMoonRay project. Since then DreamWorks along with other open-source stakeholders have continued advancing this open-source renderer and today marks the release of OpenMoonRay 1.4...

Landlock was merged back in 2021 with Linux 5.13 for unprivileged application sandboxing. Landlock is focused on restricting ambient rights and is implemented as a stackable Linux security module (LSM). With Linux 6.7 the Landlock LSM is now moving beyond just file-system access controls to also introduce initial networking support...

While confidential computing is a hot area right now, there's been a limited amount of cross-vendor cooperation with AMD having their own route with Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Intel designing the Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) that is still available in limited form. As one improvement coming with Linux 6.7, "configfs-tsm" has been submitted for pulling as a cross-vendor solution for confidential computing attestation reports...

Following some release delays the past few weeks, it's been decided today that Fedora Linux 39 is now ready to ship next week...

One of the last major blockers before the remaining real-time "PREEMPT_RT" patches can be upstreamed is sorting out threaded / atomic console printing. With the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel, there's been more work upstreamed in that endeavor...

Last week with the AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1 driver, AMD removed support for Polaris and Vega GPUs from this official open-source Vulkan driver. But as mentioned this doesn't impact the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver maintained by Valve, Red Hat, and other open-source developers. In fact, this week another optimization for Vega/GFX9 was merged for Mesa 24.0-devel...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on shipping KDE Plasma 6.0 as the KDE desktop option for Fedora 40. Additionally, as part of this change, the plan is to drop the KDE X11 session to leave only the KDE Plasma Wayland session available...

Following Red Hat's decision to limit access to the RHEL source code to their customers, various RHEL-based Linux distributions were caught in a tailspin. CIQ (Rocky Linux), SUSE, and Oracle decided to form the Open Enterprise Linux association (OpenELA) to collaborate around the development of distributions with compatibility against Red Hat Enterprise Linux and ensuring open and free access to EL source code. Today they are announcing initial source available for their EL8 and EL9 packages...

Google engineers on Wednesday posted an initial "request for comments" set of patches that re-implement Android's Binder code within the Linux kernel in the Rust programming language rather than C...

We've been impressed with AMD Zen 4C cores with their initial appearance in Bergamo with the flagship EPYC 9754 and then over the summer with Siena for the likes of the EPYC 8324P(N) plus the EPYC 8354P(N) review soon. Today AMD is confirming what many had anticipated: Zen 4C cores will be coming to new Ryzen laptop SoCs.

There is some interesting new Arm and RISC-V SoC support to be found in the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel...