Following the recent HID driver updates for Linux 6.1, the other input subsystem driver updates for this new kernel version have been submitted. The input driver updates this cycle range from supporting the optional PinePhone keyboard to a driver enabling the IBM Operation Panel used by some IBM servers...
Among the new applications becoming available with Ubuntu 22.10 "Kinetic Kudu" later this month is GNOME-Network-Displays for dealing with Miracast wireless displays...
In early September AMD announced their new P-State "EPP" driver for Linux systems to further evolve their P-State driver effort started last year. This P-State EPP driver effort is aiming for better performance and power control while this weekend they sent out the second iteration of these Linux kernel patches...
Erik Faye-Lund of Collabora raised an interesting discussion this past week at XDC 2022 about leveraging Zink for post-OpenGL graphics development. With Zink able to run "anywhere" and currently focused on existing OpenGL APIs atop Vulkan, Zink could be used as a vehicle for developing new OpenGL APIs or trying to evolve the API in its own right while being able to run atop Vulkan API drivers on Windows or Linux...
EROFS as the read-only Linux file-system started by Huawei originally for Android devices continues seeing new adoption, including in the area of container use-cases beyond the original Android focus...
Andrew Morton this afternoon submitted his memory management "MM" related updates for the Linux 6.1 merge window. Most notable with this pull request is the inclusion of Multi-Gen LRU "MGLRU" and the Maple Tree kernel features...
With Qt 6 porting and KDE Frameworks 6 development continuing at full-speed, KDE developers are looking at Plasma 5.27 being the last feature release in the Plasma 5 series...
Taking place this week alongside the X.Org Developers Conference (XDC 2022) was WineConf as the annual gathering of Wine developers. CodeWeavers organized the co-hosted events in Minneapolis and during WineConf were two days of interesting talks for enjoying Windows games/applications on Linux and macOS...
Intel engineers have released libva 2.16 as the newest feature update to this open-source VA-API common library used for video acceleration by many drivers and multimedia applications...
The HID subsystem updates have been submitted for the ongoing linux 6.1 merge window of which there are several notable driver additions for bettering the hardware support on several fronts...
The OpenChrome DRM driver has been in development for over a decade for providing open-source display driver support for VIA's aging x86 chipsets. For years now OpenChrome development has been down to one developer left on the project, Kevin Brace, and months ago he hoped to get the driver finally merged into the Linux kernel. He still holds out on those ambitions but will first aim to get basic acceleration working with a stable user-space API/ABI before mainlining...
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly development summary concerning all of the progress made to the open-source desktop over the past two weeks. This status update actually covers the past two weeks due to last weekend being preoccupied with the annual KDE Akademy developer conference...
Systemd 252-rc1 is out as the first test candidate ahead of this next big feature release for this dominant Linux init systemd. Systemd 252 has been working on a new "systemd-measure" tool and a wide variety of other changes...
Fwupd 1.8.6 is out today as the newest stable release of this open-source firmware updating tool most notably used by Linux systems but also supported on various BSDs and even Windows...
At the end of September when the review embargo lifted I looked at the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and 7950X for our launch-day Linux testing and that was then followed by the Ryzen 7 7700X Linux review. Since then I received the fourth and final Ryzen 7000 series desktop processor currently available: the AMD Ryzen 5 7600X. The Ryzen 5 7600X is currently AMD's most affordable Zen 4 processor at $299 USD and provides six cores / 12 threads and a boost clock up to 5.3GHz.
Red Hat's Karol Herbst has managed to get his Rust-based OpenCL implementation "Rusticl" running atop the Zink Gallium3D driver that in turn runs atop Vulkan drivers...
For the past nearly two years the CentOS Hyperscale effort has been working on adapting CentOS Stream to make it more applicable for use within large scale deployments like those at Twitter, Facebook/Meta, and other large companies. This week the special interest group published their latest quarterly report outlining their activities...
A change now merged for Linux 6.1 will attempt to print the CPU core where a segmentation fault happens. The hope by printing the CPU/core where a segmentation fault happens is that over time trends may materialize with this information potentially being useful for helping to spot faulty CPUs...
Valve has worked their way through the pre-orders and ramped up the production of the Steam Deck to the point that the reservation queue is over. You can now order your Steam Deck today in-stock and Valve has also made available the much anticipated Steam Deck Dock docking station...
The networking feature pull for the Linux 6.1 kernel brings 127k lines of new code and 50k lines of code removed as a rather hearty set of wired/wireless networking driver updates and core improvements this round...
One of the rather elusive items on the Linux desktop is High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support... There's been code in the works for years but across desktops and drivers, it's still a long-term effort getting HDR support on the Linux desktop. Even going back to 2016, with NVIDIA's cross-platform driver code the Linux desktop remained the bottleneck. There is at least some ongoing work to address this long-term issue with AMD this week presenting on the topic...
Merged last month into Mesa 22.3 was Rusticl as a Rust-written OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D that is beginning to work with the open-source Radeon Linux driver, the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver, and others. This is also the first Rust-written component within the Mesa code-base. Karol Herbst of Red Hat who has led Rusticl development presented this week in Minnesota on this promising cross-vendor OpenCL implementation that may also support SYCL in the future...
Last week at Intel's Innovation conference the Intel Developer Cloud "DevCloud" was announced, while on the AMD side there is already something similar: the AMD Cloud Platform. At the tail end of 2021, AMD announced the Accelerator Cloud as a way for trying out the latest EPYC CPUs and Instinct accelerators complete with a pre-configured ROCm compute software stack. The AMD Cloud Platform is a currently parallel effort to the Accelerator Cloud with the former intended more for developers while the latter is more customer-oriented. After trying out the AMD Cloud Platform, it's indeed an easy way to evaluate the latest AMD data center wares while having a easy-to-deploy, pre-configured software environment.
The Arm SoC and platform enablement pull requests were sent out this morning that provide the Linux 6.1 kernel with support for several new SoCs, various platforms including some newer smartphones, and other hardware support improvements...
There are patches that provide support for ZRAM to be able to handle multiple compression streams on a per-CPU basis. This kernel module for creating compressed block devices could be made more versatile with this proposed patch series...
In addition to the excitement of the Arc Graphics A750 and A770, Intel has unveiled oneVPL 2022.2 as the newest version of this open-source video processing library that is their flagship video decode/encode library and related video processing toolkit as part of oneAPI...
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) / Kernel Mode-Setting (KMS) driver updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.1 merge window. As usual, much of the interesting display/graphics driver work is happening within the open-source Intel and AMD Radeon drivers...
Taking place at the end of September in Mölndal, Sweden was the Open-Source Firmware Conference (OSFC 2022). While the event has now passed, the group has begun publishing the video recordings from the various sessions and many of the presentation slide decks are also available...
The real-time "RT" mainlining effort for the Linux kernel remains ongoing. While the finish line is coming near, PREEMPT_RT support for mainline still isn't over the last hurdle -- seemingly the main blocker it's still held up by are the printk changes with threaded console printing. But for the Linux 6.1 merge window there is at least more kernel code clean-ups...
Today the embargo lifts on reviews of the Intel Arc Graphics A750 and A770 graphics cards ahead of their retail availability set for next week. I've had the A750 and A770 at Phoronix the past week and today can share initial performance figures on these Intel DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics cards under Linux with their open-source driver stack.
The x86/core changes for Linux 6.1 have been merged and are headlined by making sure an INT3 instruction is inserted after every unconditional Retpoline jump (JMP) for the Retpolines handling on both Intel and AMD processors...
The Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) changes for Linux 6.1 but with a documentation update does provide a good reminder for a public service announcement: run-time disabling of SELinux is deprecated and will be removed in the future...
Yesterday on the first day of the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC 2022), Timur Kristóf of Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver team presented on the Vulkan mesh shader support being worked on for RADV...
After SUSE/openSUSE engineers began talking up the Adaptable Linux Platform "ALP" as their next-gen enterprise Linux focus, last week they talked up the imminent release of "Les Droites" as their first public ALP prototype. Today that prototype is now live...
The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver updates have been submitted and merged for the Linux 6.1 merge window of which there are a few notable additions on the Intel side...
RADV driver co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen of Google presented at today's X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC 2022) on the state of this open-source Mesa Vulkan driver's ray-tracing performance...
As written about for several months on Phoronix, an open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver has been in the works that by the end of the summer this "NVK" driver has been seeing a lot of activity by Jason Ekstrand of Collabora along with David Airlie and Karol Herbst of Red Hat. Jason today talked at XDC 2022 about this NVK driver effort...
Intel laptop users running Linux are being advised to avoid running the latest Linux 5.19.12 stable kernel point release as it can potentially damage your display...
Back in 2019 IBM completed its acquisition of Red Hat while today is a "quasi-acquisition" of sorts being announced with Red Hat's Storage team being transferred to the IBM Storage team...
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