Phoronix

This summer saw official Ubuntu Linux images released for the StarFive VisionFive RISC-V board while now Canonical engineers are working to ensure their Linux distribution is all squared away for the upcoming VisionFive 2...

Last week with Linux 6.1-rc5 there was concerns raised by Linus Torvalds that the v6.1 cycle may need an extra week of testing and fixes. Now Linux 6.1-rc6 is available with Torvalds' latest prognosis for the Linux 6.1 kernel cycle...

While Razer still sadly isn't officially supporting their various gaming-focused computer peripherals under Linux, the OpenRazer project providing open-source drivers for Razer products continues working out well and offering broad hardware support under Linux...

One of countless great open-source projects from Intel over the years is IWD as a modern wireless daemon for WiFi devices on Linux. IWD has been in the works for over a half-decade as a new replacement to wpa_supplicant and with time has implemented many features and seen widespread adoption. Released this week was IWD 2.0 as the latest milestone for this open-source wireless daemon...

Since the introduction of the AMD P-State driver to the mainline kernel, enthusiasts and gamers have been experimenting with the amd_pstate driver and some distributions like Ubuntu have went with using this driver in place of ACPI CPUFreq by default for Zen 2 and newer processors. Patches posted this week by AMD make it easier to switch between the AMD P-State driver and ACPI CPUFreq...

In addition to Linux 6.2 promoting [DG2] Arc Graphics to stable, this next kernel version will no longer deem the Intel In-Field Scan (IFS) driver as "broken" now that it's API/ABI is in good shape...

Thanks to this year's Linux Plumbers Conference it looks like the compute accelerator subsystem/framework is finally coming together. The fourth and potentially final iteration of the accelerator framework patches have been sent out with hopes of them being mainlined for the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel...

Libinput 1.22 was released this weekend by José Expósito as the newest version of this widely-used input handling library that is now common to the Linux desktop by both X.Org and Wayland based environments...

GIMP 2.99.14 is out this weekend as the latest development release on the way toward the elusive GIMP 3.0...

A final batch of drm-intel-next feature patches were submitted on Friday to complement the drm-intel-gt-next patches. Most exciting with this last minute PR for Linux 6.2 is the DG2/Alchemist discrete GPU support no longer being treated as experimental...

In early 2020 the software engineers at Micron announced an open-source storage engine designed for SSDs and persistent memory. The storage engine prided itself on being a speedy key-value store database and there was also a MongoDB-based implementation. Last year HSE 2.0 debuted and the updated storage engine no longer relied on modifications to the Linux kernel and now strictly a user-space based solution. This week the Micron engineers are celebrating HSE 3.0 as their latest work on this open-source storage engine...

Being queued up via the x86 platform driver's "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.2 cycle is the dell-wmi-ddv driver, which is for exposing the WMI interface of the Dell Data Vault (DDV)...

Back during the summer was news that Ikey Doherty was going to work full-time on Serpent OS, a new Linux distribution he started. Ikey Doherty as a reminder previously created the Solus Linux distribution, worked for Intel on Clear Linux, and has other software accomplishments to his name. It's been a quiet few months for Serpent OS but it turns out they've been busy establishing their build infrastructure and tooling...

As KDE developers approach the holidays they have more bug fixes and features in store for their users of this open-source desktop environment...

Last week when launching the AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors, AMD released AOCC 4.0 as the newest version of their optimizing C/C++ compiler that now supports their Zen 4 micro-architecture. Last week I ran some initial AOCC 4.0 benchmarks and this LLVM/Clang downstream was looking rather favorable in relation to upstream LLVM/Clang, while since then I've been able to conduct more thorough benchmarks across a wide variety of C/C++ open-source workloads. Here is that more extensive round of AOCC 4.0 benchmarking against the open-source LLVM/Clang and AOCC compilers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced this week that their Krakatoa product-grade, volumetric renderer has been made open-source. AWS also open-sourced their XMesh software to optimize animated 3D geometry asset files...

Mesa VirGL with the virglrenderer library has allowed for virtual 3D GPU support within QEMU virtual machines. This Gallium3D-leveraging code has allowed for OpenGL and other functionality to work within VMs while leveraging the host's GPU. The latest notable addition is adding VirGL video encoding support with H.264 and H.265 initially being supported for accelerated support in VMs...

This summer AMD announced the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer "RRA" as part of their developer software suite for helping to profile ray-tracing performance/issues on Windows and Linux with both Direct3D 12 and the Vulkan API. Initially the RRA 1.0 release was binary-only but now AMD has made good on their "GPUOpen" approach and made it open-source...

Cloud Hypervisor as the open-source, Rust-written and modern hypervisor project that was started by Intel and now also backed by AMD, Arm, Microsoft, and other vendors is out with a big release...

For going along with the i915 DRM kernel driver support to premiere in Linux 6.2, the Mesa 23.0 development code for Intel's Vulkan driver is exposing performance metrics / hardware counters for DG2 "Alchemist" Arc Graphics hardware...

With Linux 6.1-rc6 due out this weekend we are reaching the point at which the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem maintainers will be cutting off new feature code from being queued into DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.2 cycle. Intel engineers today sent out a final batch of drm-intel-gt-next changes to make it for this next kernel version...

AMD has been putting out a number of ROCm compute stack point releases recently with ROCm 5.3.3 having been the latest to premiere on Thursday...

Barring any unforeseen issues from coming about, Mesa 22.3 will hopefully be released next week...

For those wondering about the out-of-the-box performance of different modern Linux distributions when running the new Intel Raptor Lake processors, here are six different distributions running on the current flagship Core i9 13900K processor. Tested this round was CentOS Stream 9, Clear Linux, Debian Bookworm (Testing), EndeavourOS, Fedora Workstation 37, and Ubuntu 22.10.

SDL 2.26 RC1 was released today as the pre-release for the upcoming SDL 2.26 library...

In addition to the very successful FEX-Emu emulator for enjoying Linux x86/x86_64 games on AArch64 and other x86/x86_64 software on Arm there is also the Box86 and Box64 projects with similar goals. Out today is Box64 v0.2 and Box86 v0.2.8 for running Linux binaries on other architectures...

The Khronos Group announced the release of Vulkan 1.3.235 as the latest routine spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API...

Being merged this week to GNU Binutils is initial support for reading and writing to new "SFrame" sections of binaries...

OpenSUSE has officially released openSUSE Leap Micro 5.3 as the newest version of their OS built atop SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4 and SLE Micro 5.3 for providing a lightweight, modern OS that is auto-updating, immutable, and provides other distinct features over Tumbleweed or Leap...

Currently when hot-plugging a new GPU to a running X.Org Server, the generic xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver ends up being utilized. However, a new "HotplugDriver" xorg.conf option has been introduced by AMD to allow users to specify their desired DDX driver. In turn this makes it possible for those hot-plugging hardware like AMD Radeon GPUs such as within eGPU enclosures to specify using the xf86-video-amdgpu driver instead...

Mesa's AGX "Asahi" Gallium3D driver for providing OpenGL / GLES support on Apple M1/M2 SoCs has begun making some early preparatory changes for eventually supporting the in-development DRM/KMS kernel driver. The kernel driver is still a work-in-progress and not close to being merged yet and the user-space API not yet set in stone, but some early changes in better preparing the Mesa driver for actually running on the Apple Silicon hardware under Linux have been merged...

This week's batch of platform-drivers-x86 "fixes" for the ongoing Linux 6.1 kernel is a bit more notable than usual. In particular, the Surface Pro 9 and Surface Laptop 5 devices are now supported along with some other hardware support enablement...

Adding to the material queuing in DRM-Next is another drm-misc-next pull which is likely the last batch of DRM core and small driver feature updates expected for Linux 6.2...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 was officially released today as the latest update to this leading enterprise Linux distribution. This afternoon also marked the release already of RHEL-derived AlmaLinux 9.1...

QEMU 7.2 is gearing up for release in December as the next feature release to this widely-used processor emulator by the Linux virtualization stack. QEMU 7.2-rc1 is available for testing with a number of new features and improvements coming in this release...

While Microsoft is celebrating the GA release today of SQL Server 2022, open-source developers have SQLite 3.40 premiering today as the newest version of this embed-friendly SQL database implementation widely used by many cross-platform applications and other software for lightweight SQL database engine needs...

In addition to Godot 4.0 adding a movie maker mode, some additional news for this popular open-source game engine this week is the debut of Godot 4.0 Beta 5...

Anbox Cloud as Canonical's solution for Android containers in the cloud is out with a shiny new feature release...

For going along with the recently merged initial AMD Zen 4 "znver4" support in GCC 13 (in case you missed it, there is further tuning work still ongoing), the Zen 4 support has now been merged to GNU Binutils...

Proposed last month was a Fedora 40 change proposal for "porting Fedora to modern C" that amounts to tightening its C language legacy support. This change focused on ensuring packaged C code is compliant with strict C99 compilers has now been signed off on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo)...

At this year's KDE annual developer conference, Akademy, they announced new community goals around software accessibility, environmentally sustainable software, and automating internal processes. A talk is being held later this month to further their agenda around these goals...

With a new patch queued up in the hardware monitoring subsystem's hwmon-next branch, several more ASUS motherboards for Intel and AMD processors will enjoy working sensor monitoring support...

Back in March AMD began sending out patches for PerfMonV2 support with Zen 4 CPUs. This updated AMD Performance Monitoring "V2" code has premiered now with AMD Ryzen 7000 series and AMD EPYC 9004 series processors and the host-side PerfMonV2 code was merged in Linux 5.19. But support for PerfMonV2 within KVM guests has been lacking while now an updated patch series is working to address the functionality there...

Adding to the growing list of changes expected to be sent in during the Linux 6.2 merge window next month is HID-BPF. This is the Red Hat led effort around using eBPF within the HID subsystem for input devices...

Last week for the AMD EPYC 4th Gen "Genoa" launch day I published initial AMD EPYC 9554 and EPYC 9654 Linux benchmarks as part of my review. Those 64-core and 96-core Zen 4 processors performed phenomenally with Genoa having AVX-512, twelve channels of DDR5-4800 system memory support, higher TDP allowance, and other improvements over prior Milan(X) server processors. The other SKU that AMD sent over for review is the EPYC 9374F as their new 32-core high frequency part. For less than $5k, the EPYC 9374F is a high frequency Zen 4 32-core part with a 320 Watt TDP. Today's benchmarks are looking at the EPYC 9374F against the EPYC 9554/9654 and various other AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon Scalable processors under Linux.

Canonical announced today they have collaborated with Intel to provide new enterprise-grade Ubuntu images designed for next-gen Intel IoT platforms...

Firefox 107 has been released as stable today by Mozilla...

After some release setbacks -- most recently by that OpenSSL security vulnerability -- Fedora 37 is now officially released...

IBM is working to extend Power10's MMA architecture with a new feature for "dense math" that is expected to premiere with future IBM Power processors...

Following Znver4 being added to GCC 13 at the end of October albeit a basic implementation, out this week is a follow-up patch to begin making more adaptations to the AMD Zen 4 target...