Phoronix

With the Linux 6.6 merge window over, here's a look at the most interesting new features, hardware support, and other changes to find with this kernel that will debut as stable around the end of October.

Intel today announced Thunderbolt 5 as their next-gen Thunderbolt standard that will allow 80 Gbps of bi-directional bandwidth or a "Bandwidth Boost" mode of up to 120 Gbps...

While the Linux 6.6 merge window is over, sent out today were a set of x86 platform driver fixes that include adding a quirk so that the tablet mode switch event properly occurs with the new ASUS ROG Flow X16 laptop...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver used by Linux systems is now enabling by default the VK_EXT_mesh_shader extension for their graphics processors with mesh shader support...

While Bcachefs was not merged for the Linux 6.6 cycle with one of the concerns raised by Linus Torvalds being that it hadn't been vetted via the "linux-next" staging area, that process has now begun to raise hopes of potentially seeing the new file-system driver introduced for Linux 6.7...

One of the driver additions we've been eager to see for the mainline Linux kernel that didn't pan out in time for the recently closed Linux 6.6 merge window is the Intel Xe DRM kernel graphics driver as a modern alternative to their i915 driver. The Xe driver better supports non-x86 CPU architectures, better designed and more performant around their modern integrated and discrete GPUs, and overall is able to make better design choices and improvements in being a clean sheet driver design compared to all the code that has built up in i915 over the years. But for getting the Xe driver upstream even in experimental form, first some necessary DRM scheduler patches need to be ironed out...

One of the new Linux networking features we've been looking forward to seeing in the kernel is TCP Authentication Option (TCP-AO / RFC5925) as a means of improving TCP security and authenticity. The eleventh iteration of the TCP-AO patches were posted today for the Linux kernel with it looking like work on this network addition potentially wrapping up soon...

Merged for Mesa 23.3 today is the Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) to allow for the "PresentOptionAsyncMayTear" option that can be used to enable tearing under (X)Wayland if desiring peak performance at the cost of possible imperfect rendering...

The openSUSE Slowroll distribution is a middle-ground between the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed Linux distribution and the SUSE Linux Enterprise aligned openSUSE Leap with its fixed releases. The new openSUSE Slowroll is a rolling-release-like distribution with updates "every one or two months" but with constant bug/security fixes...

Sub-NUMA Clustering with Intel Xeon processors allows for splitting up the CPU cores, cache, and memory into multiple NUMA domains for enhancing the performance of NUMA-aware applications. While SNC can help in a number of cases especially plenty of HPC and server workloads, currently it's not properly supported if making use of Resource Director Technology (RDT) on modern Intel CPUs. That is in the process of changing with new Linux kernel patches being worked on by Intel...

KDE developer David Edmundson has written an interesting blog post looking at robustness improvements coming with Qt 6.6 via QtWayland compositor handoffs support...

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's stellar Linux graphics/Proton team has released VKD3D-Proton 2.10 as the newest feature release for this Direct3D 12 API implementation built atop Vulkan that allows for modern Windows games to run on Linux atop Steam Play...

With the Linux 6.6 merge window the cgroup changes brought one change worth mentioning...

The open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has merged support in its ray-tracing (RT) code path for monolithic pipelines...

The first release candidate of the inaugural GNU Boot has been released with users sought to try out this fork of Libreboot that in turn is derived from Coreboot...

The Linux 6.6 merge window is over as the period by which new features and improvements are added to the kernel. Linux 6.6-rc1 is out the door as the kernel developers and testing community begin stabilizing this next major Linux kernel release. With Linux 6.6 there are many exciting feature additions but also one notable addition that once again didn't make the cut...

In addition to the EEVDF scheduler replacing the CFS code in Linux 6.6, another fundamental and interesting change with Linux 6.6 is on the workqueue (WQ) side with a rework that can benefit systems with multiple L3 caches like modern AMD chiplet-based systems...

In addition to all the open-source kernel graphics/display driver updates for Linux 6.6, merged this afternoon ahead of the Linux 6.6-rc1 tagging is merging of the DRM continuous integration (CI) code to hopefully lead to better testing of DRM subsystem/driver changes...

With Linux 6.6 the KSMBD server is no longer "experimental" while this new kernel on the SMB3 client side also brings a notable addition: the new "dir_cache_timeout" option to control the cache time for directory contents...

Mike Blumenkrantz working for Valve's Linux graphics driver team has added implicit sync support to the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver, which in turn now opens this generic driver up for correctly providing GLAMOR rendering with X11 and XWayland environments...

While last week saw the main set of power management updates for the Linux 6.6 kernel, this week a follow-on pull request was submitted -- and merged -- with a few last minute additions...

More RISC-V architecture updates were merged this weekend for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window...

Merged overnight were the perf subsystem tooling updates for the Linux 6.6 merge window that is set to close later on Sunday...

The LoongArch CPU port is seeing a number of new kernel features enabled with Linux 6.6 as well as seeing some new hardware features wired up such as for Loongson Binary Translation (LBT) and allowing LSX/LASX instruction use in kernel-space...

Back in 2021 Samsung engineers posted KSMBD as an in-kernel SMB3 server alternative to the likes of the user-space Samba server. KSMBD merged into Linux 5.15 as an experimental SMB server while after two years of fixes and other improvements has now dropped its "experimental" marking...

A new version of DXVK-NVAPI is now available, the NVIDIA public NVAPI interface implemented atop DXVK for use by Direct3D games running on Valve's Steam Play (Proton). DXVK-NVAPI allows for NVIDIA DLSS for Vulkan / D3D11 / D3D12, NVIDIA Reflex support, PhysX, and other NVIDIA features to be enabled for popular Windows games running on Linux...

The GNOME 45 release candidate is now available for testing ahead of the desktop's stable release later this month...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his newest weekly development summary as the developers work toward releasing Plasma 6.0 in February...

FreeBSD 14 Beta 1 is available this weekend for helping to test out this major BSD operating system update that should debut as stable before the end of October...

Earlier this year I wrote about Microsoft working on their first Vulkan extension and today it finally debuted within the Vulkan 1.3.264 spec update...

With the recently released Linux 6.5 kernel bringing AMD P-State EPP by default for modern Ryzen systems rather than the generic ACPI CPUFreq driver, running Linux 6.5 (or newer) in various workloads can lead to improved performance and/or power efficiency. Curious about the impact on the mobile side, I recently carried out some benchmarks of the ASUS ROG Ally gaming handheld with AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC from Linux 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, and 6.6 Git kernels.

In addition to the ASUS laptop improvements for Linux 6.6 with the ASUS-WMI driver, additional feature work is on the way for future kernel versions with one of those interesting additions being support for the ASUS Screenpad. Some higher-end ASUS laptops feature a secondary screen "screenpad" on the laptops and the pending ASUS-WMI driver patch will properly support it...

Since early this year AMD has been working on Linux enablement patches for Dynamic Boost Control (DBC). This is a new feature of some AMD SoCs that allow an "authenticated entity" to have greater control over certain SoC characteristics to improve the power/performance. AMD DBC was merged for Linux 6.6 just days ago while already new patches have been posted that extend the supported platforms for this Dynamic Boost Control functionality...

While we've been looking forward to Bcachefs landing and carrying out a fresh round of performance testing of Bcachefs against other file-system options, it's looking clear now that Bcachefs won't be landing for the Linux 6.6 merge window...

Merged on Thursday were a batch of KVM virtualization changes for the Linux 6.6 kernel...

OpenZFS 2.2 has been in the works to provide Linux container support, BLAKE3 checksumming, block cloning and other new features. It's looking like that release will be wrapped up soon while released on Thursday was v2.2-rc4 to help encourage last minute testing of this file-system driver for Linux and FreeBSD systems...

As a big win for Intel's QuickAssist Technology (QAT) accelerator found as an option with Sapphire Rapids processors and prior QAT hardware, there's been a QAT Zstd plug-in to provide big performance/efficiency benefits. Version 0.1 of that plug-in was released today...

Going along with KDE Plasma 6.0 releasing in early February will also be the Qt6-based KDE Gear applications and KDE Frameworks 6 happening in-sync...

In addition to the notable sound changes that merged last week for Linux 6.6 that included AMD VanGogh SOF support and enablement around a Valve "Galileo" device, sent in via the MFD pull request this week is work enabling the new Cirrus Logic CS42L43 audio codec...

Merged a few days ago for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window were the x86 platform driver updates, which bring a few interesting Intel/AMD laptop improvements as well as a new driver to support altering select HP BIOS settings from within the confines of Linux...

As covered in the launch-day Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT Linux review/testing, there is already upstream open-source driver support for these new RDNA3 graphics cards in recent versions of the Linux kernel and Mesa. It's a pleasant open-source out-of-the-box experience with the Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards with the possible exception of just needing to grab the recent AMDGPU firmware. But for those running older, enterprise Linux distribution releases, AMD has now released the Radeon Software for Linux 23.20 driver package to also enable the RX 7700/7800 XT support on those enterprise operating systems...

As an experimental feature for next month's Ubuntu 23.10 release, Canonical is introducing initial support for TPM-based full disk encryption to make use of your system's Trusted Platform Module (TPM). The downside though is this extra security relies on Snaps, including for the kernel and GRUB bootloader...

AMD today published version 1.2 of their Unified Inference Frontend (UIF) that is for supporting deep learning inference across AMD CPUs, GPUs, as well as Versal adaptive SoCs and FPGAs. AMD UIF aims to accelerate AI inference across all AMD compute platforms with machine learning frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow. With UIF 1.2 adds initial support for Radeon GPUs...

As part of a monthly status update concerning Plasma 6 development, KDE developer Nate Graham confirmed that the team is planning to release Plasma 6.0 in February of 2024...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has landed a set of 15 patches that can further help the Linux gaming performance for those using DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics...

The first alpha release of the OpenSSL 3.2 library is now available for testing. With OpenSSL 3.2 there are a number of new features, most notably the client-side work around QUIC support...

Going along with the MSM DRM driver support for the Qualcomm Adreno 700 series, the open-source TURNIP Vulkan driver this week merged its initial support for the Adreno 700 series...

In addition to the HID updates bringing rumble for Google's Stadia controller and other gaming peripheral improvements, the input subsystem updates were sent out this week for Linux 6.6 that bring more enhancements for Linux gamers. In particular, the common XPad driver saw some additions for this next kernel version...

A few days ago Bcachefs was proposed for inclusion to Linux 6.6 after it failed to be pulled for the prior Linux 6.5 kernel cycle. Since then we've been waiting to see what action Linus Torvalds would take with including Bcachefs... He's finally commented on it today but remains to be seen if it will land for this kernel release...

Igalia developers are working on extending the Broadcom V3D DRM kernel graphics driver, which is most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi devices, to support the notion of "CPU jobs" in kernel space to assist in their Vulkan support. These CPU jobs are for assisting the support where their Broadcom GPU driver isn't capable of some Vulkan commands and thus needs to be punted off and handled by the processor...