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After two years of work, the Serpent OS Linux distribution has released its first public image for this innovative and original open-source operating system...

Among many open-source software project releases timed for the holidays is Manjaro 22.0 now being available for this popular desktop distribution built atop Arch Linux...

Christmas week didn't slow down KDE developers with there still being a number of features and fixes for this open-source desktop environment to land...

It was back in July 2021 that Haiku R1 Beta 3 was released for this spiritual successor to the BeOS operating system. Now before Christmas and closing out 2022, Haiku R1 Beta 4 has been released as the latest major milestone for this open-source operating system effort...

As a timely gift to programmers using the speedy and very successful Meson build system, the Meson 1.0 stable release has debuted just in time for Christmas. Besides the holiday, today is also notable in marking ten years to the day since Meson started development...

While AMD provided upstream open-source driver support for the Radeon RX 7900 series launch, the initial user experience can be less than desirable if running a new Radeon GPU but initially running an out-of-date kernel or lacking the necessary firmware support. With a new patch series posted AMD is looking to improve the experience by being able to more easily fallback to the firmware frame-buffer when their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver fails to properly load...

A change proposal to be evaluated still by FESCo would help ensure that system shutdowns and reboots can happen faster on Fedora Linux...

Embark Studios has released a new version of Rust-GPU that has a goal of making Rust a first-class programming language and ecosystem for GPU shader development...

If you are running the newest Intel Raptor Lake processors with integrated graphics and the latest Intel Arc Graphics discrete graphics cards under Linux, you are currently relying on the Intel "i915" DRM kernel graphics driver... As implied by the name, it's been used with Intel graphics going back to the old 915G chipset days nearly twenty years ago. But Intel has been working on a new "Xe" kernel graphics driver they have initially announced today and aim to make it production-ready in 2023 for supporting their modern Xe Graphics hardware...

Ahead of the Linux 6.2 merge window ending this weekend, a second batch of the perf subsystem changes have been submitted for this next Linux kernel version. Notable among the various additions to the powerful Linux kernel perf code is handling for various new performance monitoring events with new AMD Zen 4 processors...

The Qt Group has released Qt 6.5 beta just in time for Christmas as what will be their next toolkit feature release premiering as stable around the end of Q1...

Following the basic AMD Zen 4 "znver4" target enablement that was merged for the GCC 13 compiler in October, patches to begin providing tuned support have begun merging for this next GNU Compiler Collection release...

While this week saw the ratification of the Vulkan Video 1.0 extensions in stable form after being out as provisional extensions since early 2021, one of the sad aspects of it is still lacking support for the popular royalty-free VP9 and AV1 codecs. Fortunately, at least, it's been re-affirmed for VP9/AV1 support in 2023...

Fedora is looking at disallowing X.Org/XWayland clients of difference CPU endianness from connecting to the X.Org Server. Such a combination of different endianness between the X.Org Server and clients is rather rare these days but is yet another "large attack surface" of the X.Org Server that needs addressing...

Ampere Computing's SMPro is a system control processor that is an Arm Cortex-M3 serving as a co-processor and handles interfacing with the BMC, error handling, system booting, power fail detection, and other tasks. The SMPro is found starting with Ampere Computing's current Ampere Altra server processors while in Linux 6.2 a lot of its functionality is finally being upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel...

OpenBMC 2.12 has finally been tagged as the first new version since January 2021 for this open-source, Linux-powered baseboard management controller (BMC) software stack...

Intel's OpenVINO toolkit for deep learning is out with a major release ahead of the holidays and now has full support for Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" as well as full support now for their discrete GPUs...

Following the Wine 8.0-rc1 and code freeze from earlier this month, Wine 8.0-rc2 is out today as an off-schedule-due-to-holidays release...

It turns out the hand-written Assembly code providing an optimized string comparison "strcmp" function for the Motorola 68000 (m68k) processor architecture has "always been broken" and only now uncovered at the end of 2022...

One of the security improvements made by AMD with their 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors is upping their Secure Memory Encryption (SME) support from 128-bit to now 256-bit AES-XTS. AMD Secure Memory Encryption can be used for helping thwart attacks on the main system memory, but at what performance cost? In this article is an initial look at the AMD EPYC Genoa performance with AMD SME enabled/disabled.

For those dealing with RAW photos around the holidays, Darktable 4.2 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source photography workflow software that aims to compete with the likes of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom...

Merged last week to Linux 6.2 as part of Andrew Morton's memory management related patches is support within ZRAM for multiple compression streams...

With last week's release of Xfce 4.18 there was some disappointment expressed among readers over the lack of any major Wayland progress in this desktop release. While not part of Xfce 4.18, the work on adapting the Xfwm4 compositor / window manager code to using Wlroots for Wayland has continued progressing...

One of the best features to make it into the mainline Linux kernel this year is MGLRU as the Multi-Gen LRU for overhauling the kernel's page reclamation code. The MGLRU code that premiered in Linux 6.1 has been showing off very well in a variety of benchmarks...

The USB and Thunderbolt driver updates were merged a few days ago for the Linux 6.2 kernel with its merge window open until Christmas...

Red Hat and Fedora engineers are plotting a path to supporting Unified Kernel Images (UKI) with Fedora Linux and for the Fedora 38 release in the spring they are aiming to get their initial enablement in place...

After being in development for three years the first beta builds of the upcoming NetBSD 10.0 operating system release are now available for testing...

As of today with Mesa 23.0 Git the EXT_mesh_shader extension is finally enabled by default for AMD Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA2" graphics hardware when running on a new Linux kernel build...

The NTFS3 kernel driver, which was contributed to the mainline kernel by Paragon Software for read/write NTFS file-system support and other features while being faster than the NTFS-3g FUSE driver, is seeing a number of updates with the Linux 6.2 kernel...

SUSE has released a new prototype build of their Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) that will serve as the basis for the next-generation SUSE Enterprise Linux...

While NVIDIA is already out with multiple GeForce RTX 40 series products, coming only now with the Linux 6.2 kernel is initial open-source 3D acceleration support for the GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" graphics processors. Here is my initial experience with this open-source NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series support in Linux 6.2.

Intel last year published documentation concerning a feature for future CPUs that they dubbed FRED, the Flexible Return and Event Delivery. FRED has the capability of helping system performance and response time while now initial patches for the Linux kernel have been published for supporting FRED...

In addition to Linux 6.2 upgrading its Zstd implementation for speedier compression/decompression for in-kernel uses of the Zstandard compression algorithm, this new kernel version is adding another Zstd use-case: compressed debug info sections...

Over the past year we've seen a fair amount of work for enabling support for various Aquacomputer devices under Linux. The German parts vendor specializes in various PC cooling solutions and other cooling accessories that can be monitored and managed under Linux thanks to this open-source driver work...

Intel overnight released oneDNN 3.0 as the newest major release to this open-source project for assisting in building deep learning applications. This oneAPI software component can already be used by PyTorch, ONNX, MATLAB, and other prominent software while the v3.0 release prepares it for future Intel hardware...

In the event you missed out on participating in last month's Black Friday deal for joining Phoronix Premium to enjoy the site ad-free and multi-page articles on a single page while helping to support continued operations of Phoronix, the deal has returned for Christmas week and marking the end of the year...

EndeavourOS continues to prove itself as one of the easiest-to-use, quick-to-install Arch Linux powered operating systems out there. Out today is the EndeavourOS "Cassini" update with more desktop enhancements as well as a number of Arm hardware support improvements...

It finally happened! An updated Zstd kernel implementation based on Zstd v1.5 upstream has been merged for the in-development Linux 6.2 to provide better performance and reliability for Zstd compression/decompression use-cases from compressed firmware to transparent file-system compression...

The "char/misc" changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.2 as the random catch-all area of the kernel for drivers not fitting well in other subsystem areas. Notably with this update for Linux 6.2 is continued work on enabling the Intel-owned Habana Labs Gaudi2 AI accelerator...

With the great AMD 4th Gen EPYC Linux performance showing significant generational uplift and dominating against the current Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" competition, it's a combination of the twelve channels of DDR5 system memory support, up to 96 cores per socket, introduction of AVX-512, and other Zen 4 micro-architectural improvements. As follow-up testing articles to all of the Genoa data delivered thus far, over the weeks ahead I have additional benchmark results to share looking more closely at these different areas of improvement for AMD 4th Gen EPYC. In today's article is a look at the EPYC 9654 2P performance with AVX-512 on/off while also looking at the CPU power consumption impact and the affect on CPU clock frequencies and thermals.

In early 2021 the Vulkan Video extensions were published in beta/provisional form as a new industry-standard video encode/decode API with the context of Vulkan. As a nice Christmas gift this week from The Khronos Group, the extensions have been finalized as Vulkan Video 1.0 and are now deemed ready for production use...

The IBM Power/PowerPC architecture updates were sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.2 merge window and most significant with this update is the introduction of a new Power-specific qspinlock implementation designed to bolster large system scalability...

AMD kicked off Christmas week by posting an eighth version of their P-State EPP driver patches for implementing the AMD Energy Performance Preference handling within their recent processors/SoCs for software to hint a performance or energy efficiency hint. P-State EPP can address some of the shortcomings with AMD's original P-State driver implementation merged nearly a year ago and has been showing good results in numbers posted by AMD engineers...

A new set of patches posted for the Plan 9 (9p) resource sharing protocol code inside the Linux kernel can deliver roughly 10x better performance for file transfers...

For years XFS has been working toward online repair capabilities for the file-system and it looks like in 2023 that work may finally come to fruition...

Freed-ora had been a seldom talked about effort from the Free Software Foundation Latin America maintainers of GNU Linux-libre to ensure a fully free software kernel was installed on interested Fedora Linux systems and that no non-free packages were installed on the system. But now that effort has come to an end...

In early 2017 Microsoft open-sourced their DirectX shader compiler and shortly thereafter it's been possible to build it on Linux while finally as of this week Microsoft has begun providing official Linux binaries of their shader compiler...

Introduced nearly two years ago with Linux 5.12 was IDMAPPED mounts for many innovative use-cases from containers to systemd-homed. With the Linux 6.2 kernel, SquashFS is the latest file-system adding support for IDMAPPED mounts...

Introduced at the start of the year was an experimental open-source project implementing the VA-API interface over NVIDIA's NVDEC video decoding API. In turn this VA-API support for running atop NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver allows for GPU video acceleration within Firefox and other software only targeting the Video Acceleration API. Now in closing out the year is a new NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver release...

Merged back in Linux 5.13 last year was Landlock for allowing unprivileged application sandboxing. Landlock allows restricting ambient rights for a set of processes and is implemented as a stackable Linux security module (LSM) for establishing safe security sandboxes. With Linux 6.2 file truncation support is added for Landlock...