Phoronix

With the Btrfs file-system popularity ticking back up, that seems to be helping upstream enthusiasm and development efforts as with Linux 5.17 there is yet more exciting work...

Intel announced new leadership changes today as 2022 gets started for what is expected to be an eventful year at the company with Sapphire Rapids, Raptor Lake, and Intel Arc graphics ahead...

While many were upset by CentOS Linux 8 going premature EOL at the end of last year, for those that made the move to CentOS Stream there continues to be a love of moment in part by the recently establisher Hyperscale SIG. For CentOS Stream 9, the big hyperscalers have been working on some interesting additions/backporting to the platform...

DragonFlyBSD 6.2 is now available as the latest version of this popular BSD open-source operating system...

Following last week's release of Chrome 97, Google has promoted Chrome 98 to beta form...

The x86 platform drivers area of the kernel remains very active in recent times thanks to the continued investments by Red Hat as well as growing IHV interest from the likes of Lenovo while also still having many contributions flow in from the likes of AMD and Intel. With Linux 5.17 are a number of driver additions and improvements for benefiting various x86 laptops and tablets...

The Linux networking subsystem updates for the in-development 5.17 kernel are quite exciting as usual given how prolific Linux is from large servers in the cloud to running on enterprise networking gear down to Linux on small IoT hardware. Not only is there a lot of hardware driver action as usual but also some key performance/latency optimizations...

The HID subsystem changes are rather exciting this time around of the new feature material for Linux 5.17...

With the Linux 5.17 kernel merge window formally open today, among the early pull requests sent out this morning were the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver updates which is notable this time in preparation for next-generation AMD EPYC server hardware...

It's been almost one year already since the last XWayland standalone feature release separate from the X.Org Server codebase itself while now the next feature installment will soon be out...

Following yesterday's release of Linux 5.16, the GNU folks have released GNU Linux-libre 5.16-gnu as their downstream that removes/disables any code depending upon non-open-source firmware/microcode binaries, the ability to load proprietary kernel modules, and other cleaning in the name of free software...

As expected the Linux 5.16 kernel has been promoted to stable...

Back on Christmas Eve I noted how the Linux 5.16 performance was looking real good for AMD APUs as a performance improvement not widely noted to that point with significant uplift over Linux 5.15 stable. The good news is Linux 5.16 is set to debut as stable today and the benchmark results with AMD APU graphics is looking very promising after carrying out tests on additional available systems.

Going back a number of months Google engineers have been working to address the issue of the Linux kernel's page reclaim code being too expensive for which they devised the multi-generational LRU framework "MGLRU" and it continues being worked on with mainline ambitions...

Sway 1.7 is up to its second release candidate for this popular i3-inspired Wayland lightweight compositor...

Among many other sound driver changes destined for the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle, Cirrus Logic has contributed CS35L41 HD audio codec support in the form of a new sound driver, cs35l41_hda...

While our testing has consistently shown how Clear Linux can deliver leading performance on Intel/AMD x86_64 platforms, one of the user criticisms to that distribution has been around the limited selection of packaged software especially on the desktop side. But the rather interesting Distrobox can help address that by leveraging Podman or Docker to run other Linux distribution user-space software packages atop...

What may end up being one of the greatest Linux kernel features of 2022 is the recently published "Fast Kernel Headers" effort for cleaning up the kernel headers and dramatically speeding up Linux kernel builds both for absolute/clean and incremental builds. Fast Kernel Headers can cut the Linux kernel build time in half or greater and out this weekend are the v2 patches...

The Linux 5.16 stable kernel is slated for release tomorrow and it delivers on some grand improvements to kick off 2022. But as for great as the Linux 5.16 features are, we are already looking forward to the enhancements on deck with Linux 5.17...

It should hardly come as a surprise given Fedora's history of always shipping with the very latest GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), but with this spring's Fedora 36 the plan is to ship with the yet-to-be-released GCC 12 and other very latest open-source compiler toolchain components...

KDE developers have kicked off 2022 into full-swing with new features and other improvements now on their way to the next round of KDE software releases...

Adding to the changes for GNOME 42 this spring is the Mutter Wayland compositor now taking into account sub-surfaces when determining direct scanout capabilities...

Gentoo Linux developers were very busy over the course of 2021 for this popular rolling-release operating system choice...

Wine 7.0-rc5 is available for testing while the stable release of Wine 7.0.0 will be popped soon...

While the Linux 5.17 merge window doesn't open up until next week following Sunday's Linux 5.16 stable debut, due to lead Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem maintainer David Airlie going on holiday next week he has sent out the feature pull early. Here is a look at the many GPU/display driver updates for this next kernel version...

Across dozens of articles over the past year I have covered a variety of different open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver optimizations from their kernel driver through their Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and the popular RADV Vulkan driver, among other interesting open-source AMD contributions. For those wondering what the cumulative gain was for 2021 from all these AMD graphics driver changes, here are some end-of-year 2020 vs. 2021 benchmarks across a number of different Linux games while testing on Vega, Navi, and Navi 2 graphics cards.

A few minutes ago a new Ubuntu blog post hit the wire entitled "The Future of Snapcraft" where immediately I wondered if it was announcing plans to move away from their own app packaging/store/update tech and shift over to a Flatpak world like the rest of the Linux ecosystem for app sandboxing, app store, and distribution. Nope, but they are going to overhaul Snapcraft's architecture...

As part of the plethora of networking changes for Linux 5.17, NVIDIA is introducing support for Spectrum-4 networking ASICs...

Microsoft had a wild 2021 with Linux/open-source contributions and now days into 2022 we are already seeing more of their Mesa feature work as they look to further advance the capabilities of their Direct3D 12 back-end for running OpenGL/OpenCL atop native Windows D3D12 drivers...

We are closing in on the release of Wine 7.0 as the annual stable feature release for this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications under Linux, macOS, BSDs, and other platforms. Here is a recap of the many changes being introduced since last year's Wine 6.0 milestone...

While the Linux 5.17 merge window hasn't opened up yet, there have been a few early pull requests sent out this week ahead of this imminent next kernel cycle. One of those already sent out is the ARM64/AArch64 CPU architecture code updates for Linux 5.17...

Ahead of the Linux 5.17 merge window officially opening next week, random (RNG) subsystem maintainer Jason Donenfeld has submitted an exciting batch of updates for this next kernel cycle...

With starting a new year, it's an interesting time to take a fresh look at how the latest Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers are competing on the Linux desktop...

Helping make PipeWire suitable for the Linux desktop so quickly has been WirePlumber as a more featureful alternative to PipeWire's default session manager. Out today is WirePlumber 0.4.6 as the latest step forward on that front...

After a quiet holiday period the Linux 5.16 kernel is set to be introduced as stable this Sunday. Here is a look at the sixteen most exciting features to find with Linux 5.16...

As part of the various end-of-year Linux comparisons that I've made a habit of over the past 17 years, with the EOY 2021 benchmarking I was rather curious to see how Intel's Clear Linux distribution has evolved Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" performance since that platform launched in Q2'2021. It turns out there have been some terrific optimizations squeezed out of that latest-generation Xeon Scalable platform on Intel's Clear Linux. In this article is a look at the Ubuntu and Clear Linux performance on the flagship Xeon Platinum 8380 2P reference server back around the time Ice Lake launched and then again using the latest software packages that closed out 2021.

For those assigning VFIO devices to guest virtual machines, the initialization/start-up process may soon be much faster with a set of patches volleyed by Oracle...

In preparation for Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors, Linux 5.16 adds support for Advanced Matrix Extensions. But that AMX bring-up is more invasive than when introducing AVX as with AMX the feature needs to be "requested" for use by user-space, among other changes. As such extra handling also needed to be introduced for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) that hadn't made it for v5.16 but now it looks like the AMX KVM support may be ready for mainline...

Longtime Linux users will likely recall when it was commonplace to modify /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* files for managing your network connections. Fortunately, that's largely a thing of the past and Fedora 36 is looking to remove support for those legacy network configuration files from new Fedora installs...

It looks like EXT4 with Linux 5.17 will finally be supporting the FS_IOC_GETFSLABEL and FS_IOC_SETFSLABEL ioctls that several other prominent file-systems have been supporting the past few years...

Recently there have been reports of some AMD Ryzen powered notebooks being unable to correctly suspend from resume in s2idle mode. It appears the issue ultimately stems from a firmware setting issue and a set of Linux patches were sent out today to address the condition...

Mutter landed a prominent addition today for GNOME 42: the Wayland compositor now supports the recently introduced DMA-BUF feedback extension...

After the many years now that AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has been seeing relentless optimizations for GCN and now RDNA GPUs paired with the fact more Linux games targeting Vulkan (or going through Direct3D to Vulkan), one might think in 2022 that the OpenGL driver optimization efforts would let up... But that doesn't appear to be the case with well known AMD RadeonSI developer Marek Olšák pursuing yet more optimizations...

2022 will hopefully be the year that PipeWire becomes commonplace on desktop Linux distributions for managing both audio/video streams. New PipeWire releases come quick in working to address remaining gaps in this Red Hat led solution and ensuring it can fulfill the use-cases previously handled by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK...

The AMD P-State driver that has been available in patch form since September and stems from AMD's collaborations with Valve around the Steam Deck will be introduced to mainline with the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel...

NVIDIA Reflex is an SDK for game developers for measuring and reducing rendering latency. But now there is an alternative, open-source implementation of those APIs that can work across drivers/vendors while still helping to reduce rendering latency: meet LatencyFleX...

Merged into the mainline Linux kernel a decade ago was the CleanCache patch series but now it's set to be retired...

The RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan drivers within Mesa 22.0 have now added an override for controlling the number of enabled compute units (CUs) for the graphics processor...

Last year Google quietly open-sourced the Graphics Flight Recorder (GFR) for sorting out GPU hangs and crashes. GFR is implemented as an implicit Vulkan layer that works on both Windows and Linux...

After taking a roughly month-long holiday, Mike Blumenkrantz -- who has been leading the work on Mesa's Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation for Valve -- is back at the game...