Phoronix

For those wanting to use an open-source Coreboot-based firmware on your desktop with modern hardware, a rare and leading option is 3mdeb's Coreboot-based "Dasharo" firmware on select MSI Z690/Z790 motherboards...

A change merged today for the Linux 6.8 kernel intentionally following yesterday's Linux 6.8-rc1 is a move to enable the "-Wstringop-overflow" compiler option by default...

As part of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series launch RTX Remix was announced for helping game modders remaster older game titles for RTX/ray-tracing. RTX Remix 0.1 debuted last April as the initial version of their software to provide path-tracing support for classic games. Out today is the latest work for helping to remaster classic games with the debut of RTX Remix 0.4...

FreeBSD developers are currently weighing the benefits and costs of allowing the Rust programming language to be used within the FreeBSD base system...

Fedora Linux already ships an iotop-c package for this C alternative to the common iotop program for reporting I/O metrics under Linux, but with the upcoming Fedora 40 release it's looking at having iotop-c replace the original iotop...

Released earlier this month was Linux Mint 21.3 and out-of-the-box it continues to run on the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel... Quite old at this point and was the Ubuntu 22.04 default for which Linunx Mint 21 is based. For those unable to boot Linux Mint 21.3 due to running on newer AMD/Intel hardware or other platform compatibility issues, the Linux Mint 21.3 EDGE ISOs are now published that utilize Linux 6.5 by default...

While back in December the GNOME dynamic triple buffering was self-proclaimed to be "ready to merge", so far that hasn't happened yet. With the GNOME 46 feature freeze scheduled for 10 February, it remains to be seen if this long-worked-on dynamic triple/double buffering will be ready in time for this six month release. In any event, this past week saw a new optimization queued for this code...

Fedora 40 is looking at bpfman for serving as the default eBPF program manager to simplify the deployment and administration of said eBPF programs...

More than one week ago was the main Bcachefs feature pull for Linux 6.8 that included further enhancing the performance and other features of this new file-system merged back in Linux 6.7. Yesterday, just prior to the Linux 6.8-rc1 release, a secondary set of Bcachefs updates were merged for this next kernel version...

While Linux creator Linus Torvalds lost Internet and electricity amid winter storms last weekend and was without them for most of this week, he's still managed to deliver an on-time Linux 6.8-rc1 release following the two week merge window...

When it comes to the Linux kernel's "crypto" subsystem for various cryptographic and compression algorithms and various hardware drivers, the new additions for Linux 6.8 are particularly interesting on the Intel side...

Sent in last week were all of the media driver updates for Linux 6.8. Arguably most notable is the introduction of the StarFive Camera Subsystem driver as a new image sensor processor driver initially being treated as a staging driver...

Following the work on enhancing the scalability of the MQ-Deadline I/O scheduler, Linux storage expert Jens Axboe has applied similar scalability improvements to the BFQ I/O scheduler...

Along with the USB/Thunderbolt changes for Linux 6.8, Greg Kroah-Hartman also submitted the char/misc changes during the back-half of the week for this new kernel version...

Merged this week were the USB and Thunderbolt driver changes for the nearly-closed Linux 6.8 merge window...

For those on a new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series system at least, the recently released Linux 6.7 stable kernel is looking mighty good at least for the Threadripper 7980X when testing on the newly-launched System76 Thelio Major...

Serpent OS as the latest Linux distribution project of well known developer Ikey Doherty is off to a great start for 2024. Following all their Rust infrastructure work last year, that infrastructure work has continued while also taking on new challenges for the new year...

While the new PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs may feel fast with pushing 11~12k MB/s sequential reads and writes, a Ceph storage cluster has just broken the 1 TiB/s threshold...

Submitted and merged on Friday for the ongoing Linux 6.8 merge window were the LoongArch processor changes for this new kernel version. Most singificant for these Chinese processors is now supporting the Rust Linux kernel integration...

There's just over one month to go until the release of the KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop along with the new KDE Gear apps and KDE Frameworks 6. This week KDE Plasma 6.0 and KDE Gear applications have been branched...

Last weekend the Linux 6.8 merge window paused due to Linus Torvalds losing Internet connectivity and electricity. It lasted for the better part of the week but then managed to get back to work and now thankfully has been back online albeit with intermittent electrical issues following a brutal winter storm...

While SDL 3.0 remains under development as the next major release for this hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by games and other software for cross-platform handling, SDL 2.30 RC1 was released today as the newest of the SDL2 series...

With Mesa's Gallium3D architecture there are different state trackers like for VA-API and OpenGL that in turn run atop the different Gallium3D hardware drivers with an aim for common code re-use and making the most of capabilities for each of the drivers. With Mesa's Vulkan drivers there isn't quite that level of code sharing/re-use given Vulkan's low-level API approach, but now the idea is raised whether the Mesa Vulkan drivers may benefit from a more Gallium3D-like runtime...

Days after delivering a nice boost to Linux I/O performance, Linux storage expert Jens Axboe has tackled another storage-related bottleneck within the kernel...

Merged as part of an initial batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD fixes for the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel is support for enabling the GFXOFF feature when ROCm compute applications are active on GFX11 (RDNA3) hardware...

When it comes to AMD Zen 4 laptop testing to date I've done a lot of testing with the Ryzen 7 7840U as well as the Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U which have proved to be very capable 8-core / 16-thread laptop processors with performant integrated graphics and running great on Linux -- besides the current lack of Ryzen AI. Recently TUXEDO Computer sent over their newly announced Pulse 14 Gen 3 Linux laptop featuring the Ryzen 7 7840HS part, which is the focus of today's testing.

For those wanting to build/mod their own Linux gaming handheld or craft a controller for other uses, the Adafruit Seesaw gamepad has a driver premiering with Linux 6.8...

Wayland Protocols 1.33 was released today by Daniel Stone for this de facto collection of Wayland protocols for implementing by the various Wayland compositors...

The Servo open-source browser engine originally started by Mozilla has seen renewed development in recent time by Linux Foundation Europe and via developers at firms like Igalia. Last year they drafted plans for focusing on making Servo embed-friendly so that this Rust-written code could be easily leveraged by desktop apps and frameworks. Today more light was shed on this embed initiative and their focus on integrating with Tauri...

For those making use of the AppArmor Linux kernel security module, there is a notable change coming with the Linux 6.8 kernel...

The developers behind the Genode open-source operating system framework have shared their 2024 road-map of new features they hope to accomplish this calendar year...

Following last month's FreeRDP 3.0 release with many improvements for this Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation, FreeRDP 3.2 is out today with a number of fixes -- especially as it pertains to Wayland support...

A second batch of s390 architecture changes were sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.8 merge window...

Last week Linux creator Linus Torvalds spotted a bad performance regression with the early Linux 6.8 kernel state that was leading to his kernel build times doubling. Since then kernel developers were working on analyzing the issue and devising a fix. A few minutes ago the fix has worked its way into the mainline kernel...

Building off this week's release of Wine 9.0 for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms is now Hangover 9.0. Hangover as a reminder is the project based on Wine initially focused on running x86 32-bit Windows apps on AArch64 Linux. Hangover works by running Wine atop various emulators such as QEMU, FEX, or Box64 for handling the processor/ISA translation...

For those in the market for a high-end Linux workstation for carrying out a lot of code compilation, AI workloads, or other creator or HPC tasks, the new System76 Thelio Major goes on sale today and it's a real winner. I've been trying out the new System76 Thelio Major powered by the new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7900 series processors and it delivers excellent Linux performance and all comes nicely working out-of-the-box with their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

ReiserFS file-system creator Hans Reiser who is currently remains imprisoned in California for murdering his wife in 2006 has commented on the Linux kernel mailing list by way of a letter exchange from prison...

Being developed the past several years by the SYRMIA embedded software firm is Autocheck, an LLVM/Clang-based project to check C and C++ code to evaluate if it's suitable for running inside automobiles and other safety critical environments. Autocheck is now free and open-source for those wanting to help evaluate the safety of your C/C++ code...

The third alpha release of Python 3.13 is now available for testing as the developers continue work on removing the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) and enhancing the overall performance of this scripting language...

With Linus Torvalds back to work, merged to mainline on Wednesday were the RISC-V architecture updates for the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel cycle...

Mesa 24.0 is shaping up to be a great release for this quarter's set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux and other platforms. Mesa 24.0-rc2 is out today to facilitate the latest weekly test release...

Last weekend the Linux 6.8 merge window was thrown into a mess with Linus Torvalds losing Internet access and electricity during some significant winter storms battling the Portland, Oregon area. After nearly five days without being able to manage the Git merges for the Linux 6.8 merge window, a few minutes ago activity was restarted...

The past two months I've been using the Gigabyte (Giga Computing) G242-P36 and it's been a refreshing delight for an ARM64 server platform running well with the mature Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max processors while boasting support for up to two GPUs and up to two DPUs or other PCIe adapters to make for a nice GPU/AI accelerated computing server.

After being in development since 2019, the NetBSD 10.0 stable release looks like it will happen soon. Those wanting to help in last minute testing can find NetBSD 10.0 RC3 now available...

This week the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) signed off on a large number of change proposals for the Fedora 40 release due out in April...

For those interested in Linux on IBM Z / s390, there's a small change yielding measurable benefits to the s390 system call entry performance with the forthcoming Linux 6.8 kernel...

Last week I wrote about GTK landing their new unified GPU renderer and as part of that the Vulkan API support is set to be enabled by default. Linux distribution vendors are being encouraged moving forward to indeed ship with the GTK Vulkan support enabled, so we'll be seeing more Vulkan API use on the Linux desktop with OpenGL slowly fading away...

Linux 6.7 introduced the "ia32_emulation=" boot option for enabling/disabling support for x86 32-bit programs and the ability to execute 32-bit system calls. This is part of the effort of some Linux distributions working to restrict x86 32-bit user-space support where not needed in order to reduce the software attack surface while still having a boot-time option for those wanting to enable 32-bit support or to otherwise disable it if your kernel build keeps it enabled...

Jiri Kyjovsky of Red Hat has shared news today of Log Detective, a new tool being developed that will leverage an AI model to help in analyzing build failures for RPM packages...

Longtime AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olak has laid out a proposal to integrate the libdrm code within Mesa rather than being maintained as its own separate project...